Patriarch Kirill, the head of the Russian Orthodox Church, has been put on a criminal wanted list by Ukraine’s Interior Ministry. The document identified the Patriarch by his secular name and described him as “an individual hiding from the bodies of pre-trial investigation” and deemed him responsible for violating Ukraine’s territorial integrity and sovereignty.

The head of Russia's Investigative Committee, Alexander Bastrykin, said that a criminal case had been opened following the announcement and that measures will be taken to identify the Ukrainian special service officials who are seeking to prosecute the head of the Russian Orthodox Church.

Patriarch Kirill has repeatedly called on his parishioners to support the participants of Russia’s military operation against Ukraine, who were “sacrificing their lives to protect our Orthodox people in the Donbass.”

Reacting to the news of the Patriarch’s being put on the Ukrainian wanted list, Russian church spokesman Vladimir Legoida labeled the move “predictable and absurd.” The Ukrainian authorities are guilty of “lawlessness and attempting to intimidate parishioners,” he wrote in a Telegram post.

Even before the conflict escalated in 2022, the Patriarch had been accusing Kiev of suppressing and discriminating against the Ukrainian Orthodox church (UOC), which was “an integral” part of the Moscow Patriarchate, citing physical attacks on religious leaders, relics, and places of worship. Patriarch Kirill has repeatedly condemned those actions and appealed to religious leaders across the globe to stop the “mass violations of the religious rights of the followers of the UOC” in Ukraine.

READ MORE: https://www.rt.com/russia/589162-patriarch-kirill-wanted-ukraine/

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Juan Cole, a renowned history professor at the University of Michigan and expert on the Middle East and South Asia, joins host Robert Scheer on this episode of the Scheer Intelligence podcast to tackle inconvenient truths ignored by the media in the history of Israel and Palestine. This includes the conflation that criticizing the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians is somehow a form of Holocaust denial. This view of history distorts and whitewashes the deep antisemitic history of Western European culture, Scheer and Cole argue.

Cole describes the history of what came to be the current state of affairs in Israel and Palestine as a sort of Rube Goldberg machine where the European-spawned-Holocaust fueled the migration of European Jews to Palestine and the ouster of the inhabitants there who had nothing to do with the German-led barbarism against the Jewish people. 

Never fully confronted, the gravest barbarism in modern history that Europe had created came to be ignored in the postwar period. In one of the most bizarre moral distortions in human history, the West shifted responsibility for the horror of the annihilation of European Jews to the Palestinian olive farmers in what is now greater Israel. That is the deeply immoral, rhetorical scam that continues to define the West’s responsibility for this continuing tragedy.

“You have this exchange of populations, this ethnic cleansing: Jews sent to Israel and Palestinian sent out of Israel. But the Palestinians that were sent out of Israel didn’t have a stable framework for their lives, they became stateless people, for a while,” Cole said.

In terms of the Palestinians as victims of colonialism, Cole said, “The Palestinians are among the great unresolved problems created by the modern era of this industrial ethnic nationalism and settler colonialism that came together in Palestine in this very unfortunate way.”

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Robert Scheer

Joshua Scheer

Transcript

Scheer Hi, this is Robert Scheer with another edition of Scheer Intelligence, where the intelligence comes from my guests and in this case, it’s my privilege to talk to not only one of the more intelligent people I’ve ever met, but certainly somebody I would regard as the most important, most reliable expert on what is largely the Middle East/Mideast. And he’s written over 20 books, he’s a professor, Juan Cole. He’s a professor of history at the University of Michigan, more one of his more recent books was on the Prophet Muhammad. And in this whole atmosphere, charged atmosphere, my goodness, where anybody says anything critical one way or another. No, you’re disturbing everything and you can be fired, and particularly if you dare suggest something about the rights of Palestinians or what have you. I want to cut through all of that in a way, because there’s a mythology that dominates this discussion. And the more I think about it, it really can be summarized with the conceit that what we have here is a clash of civilizations, the title of one work on that sort. That somehow, there is this basically rational, reasonable Western civilization, that is productive, efficient, follows the rule of law and so forth, and that somehow the rest of the world keeps making a mess of it. And one extension of Western civilization is Israel, which is why we give unqualified support for it. And I just want to start out by exploring this because the reason for Israel, the justification was the Holocaust. And we have this irony right now that the very countries, Western countries that gave us the greatest barbarism of modern history, the Holocaust, authored by Germany and with Austria in support of Hungary and Italy and a good deal of anti-Semitism in other parts of Europe. And the irony is that somehow, if you dare talk critically about Israel, you end up being a Holocaust denier or something. And it occurred to me, it’s just the opposite. The fact of the matter is to look at what happened to the killing of millions of others, but yes, 6 million Jews is horrible. It couldn’t get any more horrible had nothing, basically nothing to do with the Muslim religion. Basically nothing to do with the history of people living in the Middle East, whether they were Christian, whether they were Muslim, whether they were Jewish, what have you. You’ve written about that. You even go back to the Prophet Muhammad being involved in trade in that area. I found that a very powerful book for clearing my own mind about this region that we know nothing about, but somehow the horror of Western civilization, which was a Holocaust and one of the most enlightened, presumably countries in terms of education, productivity, engineering, Germany, authored it, staffed it, created the camps, killed people and with a lot of other support. And I find this now it’s kind of a form of Holocaust denial. It’s ironic if you dare say something about the Holocaust in Germany, they’ll throw the book at you. But the fact of the matter is to shift a consideration of the Holocaust to now what’s happening to Palestinians and they are somehow reminded it is Holocaust denial. It is not really examining how that great, incredible tragedy was permitted to happen. And it’s a cop out, for these countries, particularly Germany, to now take the high road that. Oh, yeah, well, just support Israel in smashing Palestinians in Gaza. And that somehow we’ll make amends. So I want to throw that first to you and then let me already tip off my second question, because you’re really a big expert on this. The other thing I think we’re denying is colonialism. And the fact that the problems involved in this region and where the national territories are drawn, what are the competing nationalisms are actually, again, the wastage, the destruction of colonialism, which really control the area, we drew the map and so forth, and that’s what we’re dealing with. So I’ll just throw those two points to you, and now you take me and our listeners to school on this and take as much time as you want to explore this. 

Cole Well, let me take your second point first. Certainly the world we live in was very powerfully shaped by several hundred years of European colonialism. There were different kinds of colonialism within that long era. There was mercantile colonialism. The Portuguese, initially, didn’t settle. They would make forts and they would impose their maritime monopoly on people. But there were relatively few Portuguese who went to India to go to settle, and then there’s settler colonialism, which is a very distinct form of the phenomenon. Of course, North America was peopled by settler colonialism. It’s a very powerful part of US history. And, you have the Afrikaners in Africa, and in Zimbabwe used to be known as Rhodesia. To some extent, there were enough British in places like Kenya, that you could talk about settlers. And settler colonialism set a tone for the 20th century. The big struggle in the 20th century was over whether peoples in the global South who were mainly had been organized by indigenous states, empires or petty principalities, and lived in villages of 250 people, weren’t very literate, weren’t very connected with each other, were easy to conquer, and easy to prey upon. By having all European settlers come in and take over their land and use it for producing cash crops for the world market. That changed in the course of the 20th century. People in the global South became much more literate. They got access to communication technologies, newspapers, initially, ultimately transistor radio. They became connected with one another. They could organize demonstrations. They founded political parties, as with the Congress party in India. And by the 1950s, much of the Global South had had thrown off colonial domination, and in some cases, as in French Algeria, which had about a million settler colonialists out of a population of 11 million. When Algeria became independent in 1962, within three years, most of the colonists decided that they didn’t want to live there anymore. Some had been born there, some of them had multi generational families there. But they left rather than live in an independent Algeria. So the settler populations were often very deeply tied to a metropolitan empire. And as the age of empires passed, as you know, nowadays it’s hard to imagine these things as the Dutch, as an empire. It’s a small European country of 17 million, that we think of the Dutch as having a relatively rational foreign policy and I think they largely do. But in 1910, 15% of their economy was stolen, Indonesian oil. They were an empire. They had a colony in the East Indies, and they set up all kinds of racist rules for who could intermarry in Indonesia. How these social relations would be conducted if there was a, settler colonialism had a very strong white nationalist element to it. So many of the problems that we see in the contemporary world are left over from the age of Empire. And we’re not settled. So the settler colonial era bequeathed us the problem in South Africa between the Afrikaners and the Bantu and Zulu, Black Africans. The problem in Kashmir between Pakistan and India, and, the problem in Israel-Palestine. All of these, are problems that came about because the colonial empire didn’t and cleanly that towards the end, the British just pulled out and let the cards fall where they may. And so, there are now attempts to deny that there was such a thing as settler colonialism. There was an Atlantic article, trying to make this pitiful case. But we historians who’ve been in archives can attest as many hours as you like, to the phenomenon and to its long lasting, impact. And the Palestine Israel instance of settler colonialism is, however, distinctive in some ways. Each of these cases is distinctive, in the sense that, when the British conquered, what they called Palestine, away from the Ottoman Empire in World War I, and at the Versailles Peace Treaty were awarded Palestine as a class A mandate. They didn’t settle it with British, but during World War I, they had promised the Zionist movement, which was this tiny little movement in London, which had nevertheless good contacts with the British cabinet, they had promised them what they called a national home in Palestine. It wasn’t clear that they were promising them a country or a state. I think in some ways it was envisaged that would be a community center for them. At the time, it should be remembered in 1917, nobody could imagine the Jews of Berlin and Paris wanting to live in dusty Jaffa, in Palestine. And so it was this movement of romantic nationalism among some Jews, who wanted to make the Jewish religion a platform for a new kind of Jewish nationalism that were pushing this program and they were avowedly settler colonialists. In their early literature, they talked about the need to to colonize Palestine. And so in most of the mandates that were awarded at Versailles after World War I, there was a kind of paternalistic language that the French would have Syria and the British would have Iraq. There were some mandates as well in Africa, although they were not class-A mandate. The idea of the mandate was that the Europeans were adults and they were superior and that they were being given a group of adolescent nations. And their purpose was to raise them up, to adulthood and ultimately give them their freedom. And so the mandates were always thought to be temporary, unlike the old colonies, which Churchill thought would be forever, and there was a kind of, ethical obligation to turn them into a nation state that could stand on its own feet. So it was envisaged that the Syrians would be a nation after the French mandate ended, that the Iraqis would become a nation. And, however, in Palestine, the language of the mandatory charter didn’t even mention the Palestinians. The British wanted to pretend that they had no obligations to over a million Palestinians who lived in Palestine. All the obligations were to a few tens of thousands of Jews, most of them recent immigrants, probably the population of Palestine from the Crusades until World War I was on the order of 2% of the population was Jewish. So, Jews in both large and in geographical Palestine, until the late 19th, early 20th century, when the Zionist movement encouraged some settlement there, but even then it was tiny. And but the British project for the Mandate of Palestine was all centered on these immigrant Jews and the Zionist movement and its aims. And ultimately, I think it wasn’t anybody’s plan, but the rise of the fascist anti-Semites in the 1930s, in particular, throughout Europe and especially in Germany. These fascist movements had an irrational obsession with Jews, and, ultimately tried to kill them all. It was with using industrial methods. It was the most efficient killing machine that the world had ever seen, directed at innocent civilians who had no committed, no crime, except because of their ancestry as Jews. 

Scheer Let me just say, by the way, because I haven’t heard it put quite that way, but that feeds into this original idea was raising with you about the clash of civilizations. Because the killing of 6 million Jews and millions of other people, even with the systematic killing of this group, was a technological achievement of German engineering. It was an example of their so-called civilization. It can’t be separated. And when and when people talk about this kind of madness, this killing frenzy, it’s like the carpet bombing of Vietnam in Southeast Asia, where anywhere from three and a half, which was McNamara’s figure, to 5 or 6 million people died, because of the use of over killing technology that was incredibly effective and making whole areas unlivable. I want to get back to that idea because there’s a lot of moralizing around here now. These Palestinians, they just couldn’t accept what they could have had. There could have been peace and so forth. And all the moralizing by the particularly European countries and the United States, which, after all, the killing machine was fully in place in 1942 before the US was even committed to getting involved in defeating Hitler. There’s something about the whole tone of discussion now, the self-righteousness and it pervades universities. If you dare examine the history of this and question it, you know yourself, you were on your way to Princeton to have a professorship, and somehow you were challenged.

Cole It was at Yale, Bob. 

Scheer Oh, Yale, okay. But the fact is if you even dare raise questions, Oh, you’re insensitive to the Holocaust. My whole point here is I’m very sensitive to the Holocaust. I was alive at the time. Half of my family were Germans who were involved. The other half were all killed in Lithuania, every one of them. And so I find it actually deeply offensive, as well as anti-intellectual, to say that somehow that if you care at all about people being bombed in Gaza, somehow you’re indifferent to the Holocaust. My point is quite the opposite. This is all an exercise in getting rid of the guilt about what really happened out of this Christian civilization. 

Cole Well, Christian civilization and nationalist civilization because it’s all entangled in this idea of the modern nation state, conceived as an ethnic vehicle. And so when, the Germans started taking away citizenship from their Jews and firing them from the universities. The philosopher Martin Heidegger, who was very popular when I was an undergraduate, it turns out so he was a horrible Nazi and was was the chancellor at Freiburg University who fired the Jews from the faculty. I don’t think they study Heidegger as much now, after he was outed, but this intersected, however, with colonial history in ways that I think if you’re Europe-centric, you don’t see. So in the 1930s, probably on the order of 300,000 Jews went to the British Mandate Palestine because the British had announced that they would let them in. That it was a refuge for them. And the British had done this for colonial purposes. It’s hard to rule another country, as they did in the colonial era without local allies. So they thought if they let the Jews in, they would be their local allies and in conducting the affairs of the of the colony. But they nobody expected hundreds of thousands of Jews to take them up on this offer. And so after World War II was over, you had half a million Jews in, British Mandate Palestine. You had 1.2 million Palestinians whose families had been there for millennia. And, the Jews amongst them decided that they wanted a state. And, they even took on the British about this and did some terrorism against British interests. And the British threw up their hands. The Labor Party got elected. And in 1947-48, a civil war broke out in Palestine, in which the well organized Jews, some of whom had been in the anti-Nazi resistance in Europe, some of whom served in the British Army in the Middle East, organized themselves and were able, handily, to defeat the local Palestinian villagers and to expel over half of them from their homes and then to take them over. And, so they were not settler colonialists in the classical sense of being sent in by the Empire from its own citizens to make a claim on territory in the global South. Most of them were refugees from the Nazis, or the other fascists, and many of them would just have been as happy to go to the United States or someplace else. But they weren’t let in because anti-Semitism was kind of so prevalent, and it was a policy in so many countries. And because it was the Great Depression, when there would have been riots in the streets, if you had led in large numbers of foreigners, the workers would have said they would take their jobs. So, the Jews were locked out of the United States, so they were sent back. One group of them came on a ship and could see the lights in Miami and were just sent back to France and about a third of them were killed in the Holocaust. The U.S. wouldn’t let them in Britain, wouldn’t let them in, Brazil wouldn’t let them. And so they could only go to Palestine. So this, this colonial, policy that the British had established of trying to make Palestine more, manageable by having a settler colonial Jewish population backfired on the British because of the rise of all the fascists and Nazis and so many Jews went there, that it turned into a civil war, that the British didn’t want to put the resources into resolving themselves. They just picked up stakes and left, and left the Jews and the Palestinians to settle things. Well, the Jews got their state, they got Israel. They had expelled so many Palestinians that they had a lot of nice new farms that they could take over, people’s houses that they could live in. They wouldn’t let them back in. There was no right of return. And then this is like a Rube Goldberg machine, but the fact that this happened in the Palestinians, where so many of them were displaced or killed, angered the populations in the Middle East against their Jews who had nothing to do with it. The Jews in Baghdad were Iraqis, they were not interested in moving to Palestine or being Zionist. Jews in Tunisia and Morocco were very well integrated into the state, but mobs formed and blame them for what the European Zionists had done to the Palestinians. And they came to their gates, their houses, and were going to attack them. And so people packed up and left in their millions. So you got the second wave of immigration to Israel, this time not from Europe, but from the Middle East of Jews who were, essentially ethnically cleansed as a revenge by mobs, and throughout the Middle East. What Zionists had done to the Palestinians. And so q Egypt and Jordan said they were looking after their interests, but they weren’t, and they were looking after Jordanian and Egyptian interests. And, the Palestinians were left as an unresolved problem. You know, they’re not the only one in the world, you have Taiwan, you have maybe the Kurds, but the Palestinians are among the great unresolved problems created by the modern era of this industrial ethnic nationalism and settler colonialism that came together in Palestine in this very unfortunate way. 

Scheer Well, let me pick up your book about Mohammed and in Haaretz, one of the, I guess the most, independent publication or used to be associated with I think the Labor Party, they reported on a conference just today in today’s issue of scholars, both Jewish and some Palestinian, about life at the beginning, what happened in the ’30s and what happened in the ’40s. And they made the point that the Jews that were already there or came from Syria or Iraq because now it had gotten unsettled and so forth. Well, first of all, and obviously if they were in Iran, they spoke Farsi, but there, they spoke Arabic and, and they actually were not hostile to their fellow Arab speakers, but they were used as translators or propagandists or so forth. But they weren’t particularly given at first to driving anybody out. They were used to living with these people. And this thing that we somehow blame the Muslim religion or we blame Islamic fanaticism. In your book, you have Muhammad himself doing business, trading with other people, right, in this region. And that was kind of the norm. They were not swept up in the kind of anti-Semitism that characterized, say, France or even the United States. 

Cole Oh, no. There’s a lot in the Koran that’s unusually tolerant for its era. Muslim men can marry Jewish and Christian women, for instance. No rabbis and no priests would ever have allowed, a Jew or Christian to marry a Muslim. And, in fact, they actually talked about themselves as races. There was a Jewish race and there was a Christian race, and Islam was not a race. It was kind of a rainbow. And the Koran talks about Jews and Christians, the righteous lives believing the one God and the resurrection, going to heaven. And again, at the time, no Jews or Christians thought that anybody outside their faith was going to heaven. There were some Jewish rabbis who admitted that Gentiles might have a portion of Paradise, but, on the whole and by and large, salvation was inside your religion. Marriage was inside your religion. There’s a treaty, an early treaty that we think is authentic, that Muhammad made with the Jews of Medina. And he said, we’re all one ummah, which means something like a community or nation. And it says we have our religion and they have theirs. The Jews and the Muslims in the early period, were one nation with two religions. Again, this seems to me very remarkable, and not a kind of thinking you would have found in the Byzantine Empire of the day. 

Scheer So this is a critical point because we’re talking about public consciousness of politics and thinking about it and and what is happening with, it began way before the war on terror is somehow the identification of Islam with with terror, with chaos, with violence, and primarily here with anti-Semitism. And that is really, grand misinformation. That is a total distortion of thousands of years of history. And it is a way of whitewashing the pogroms of Europe. The life that Jews were reduced to in the pale, they couldn’t even do agriculture. They were forced into ghettoization and, at a time when they could live far more normal lives, in Iran or Iraq or Syria or what have you. How does this get so distorted? I mean, we have all been brainwashed into an idea that Islam is that the fault here, when actually, I get back to my original point, this is really a Holocaust denial. It’s a denial that the horror of visited upon the Jewish people, the greatest horror, I think, in modern history for any people was visited upon them by Western civilization and a high point of Western civilization, which of course, was, as you say, the German universities and the German science. Right. 

Cole Sure. 

Scheer So how does he get denied? How does history get so distorted that if you go into any American university now, and you even suggest such a thing, you could probably get fired? 

Cole Well, you can probably couldn’t get fired, but people might stop inviting you to dinner. I tried to do some figuring about this, issue. And, in the 20th century, I think the European Christians probably polished off on the order of 100 million people. Including your Vietnamese victims. If you take the European colonialism in places like the Belgian Congo, where half the people died, and or were killed, and. The two world wars, which mainly were European wars, although there were you have to subtract the casualties in East Asia. But I think if you if you total it all up, European Christians in the course of the 20th century probably killed about 100 million people. Muslims were responsible for the, Armenian Genocide. And then you had the Afghanistan war. The Iran-Iraq War. Well, I would say maybe 3 million people were killed by the Muslims. And mind you, the Muslims are not that much less numerous than the Europeans. So, 100 million to 3, I think is is the scorecard. Who is the more barbaric? Who is the more likely to kill people? Now, a somewhat one would. Some people would reply and say, well, the Europeans didn’t kill people because of Christianity. Well the Muslims aren’t killing people because of Islam either. For instance, the Armenian Genocide was was committed by the by secularists in the Ottoman state, that had nothing to do with Islam. It had to do with politics in eastern Anatolia and with Russia. And likewise the Iran-Iraq War, the Iraqis were secular Baathist who were fighting for Islam. So, it’s always the case that that, people find all kinds of reasons to attack, an outgroup. And religious markers of their identity can be invoked as well as any others. But the fact is that a lot of the killing was done by Christians. So the self avowedly Christian colonialists in the global South, killed a lot of people and, thought they had done very well to do so. And, you know, you look at, some of the, the deaths in the Balkans, were carried out by explicitly Christian groups associated with Roman Catholics and with Eastern Orthodoxy. So, that I don’t accept that reply. So, sure, Islam, there all kinds of Muslims in the world is a very diverse set of people. You have Senegalese and Africa and you have Bangladeshis in Asia. And you have, 8% of Russians are Muslim. It’s very hard to generalize about them, but the thesis that their religion makes them more violent than other people can be easily disproved to be wrong. And, by the way, the reason that the Europeans killed so many people in the 20th century also is not related to them being Christian or European. It was because they were the first ones to industrialize warfare. So, if you have a Gatling gun and artillery, you can kill a lot more people. And, the Muslim warcraft was, less developed through the 20th century. And often they were colonized and not in a position to launch a war because it was their European, colonial, rulers that would make those decisions. But the thesis that Muslims are peculiarly violent is historically simply untrue. 

Scheer Yeah. And it also, it’s true that people within the bigger rubric of a religion, for instance, in case of the Middle East, you know, Shiite and Sunni, Iraq, Iranian war, but also in England, Ireland, Christian and, Protestant and Catholic, managing to find a lot of reasons to kill each other. So it gets quite sectarian. I’m not saying people don’t find reasons to have war even within their own tribal distinctions and so forth. But I do think what is at issue here is, again, this notion of Western innocence and enlightenment. And that doesn’t mean there haven’t been great traditions and great achievements of Western society. I’m not here to condemn every aspect of it, but I find that pervades our universities are mass media and so forth. The other whatever they are, maybe, some mostly because of skin color or religion or the over the history. Now we have a towards China. My God, we deny any complexity in the Chinese experience. We would want to go to war with them because they don’t modernize in a way that we find conducive to our prosperity or whatever it is. We just don’t have any respect for anybody else’s history or culture. And, and and at the heart of it is I get back to that clash of civilizations that this notion. And in fact, much of Western education was based on the singular significance and enlightenment of Western society. And that gives them a pass to really create great harm because they, yes, they make mistakes. Yes, we make mistakes, but we somehow we are the advanced force of civilization, and that has just been exposed as utter nonsense. A very dangerous idea, no? 

Cole I agree that there’s a lot of chauvinism. And, Bob Vitalis, a political scientist at the University of Pennsylvania, argues that implicit to a lot of American political science all through the last century, is a kind of white nationalist, set of assumptions, and that you can… If you go back and read the political scientists, letters and get into their archives, they use this white nationalist, discourse and  it very much frames the way they see the world. By the way, Samuel Huntington was at Harvard and has a lot of prominent and powerful students. And so it’s difficult to, win an argument about him. But, I think he showed signs of being a horrible racist. And, his last book was about the dangers of Latino immigration in the United States to essentially to white civilization. And, I’m surprised the way he’s lionized and, and this book he wrote about the clash of civilizations is silly. The United States has alliances with other countries of various sorts. We have the NATO alliance, one of the countries in NATO is Turkey, it’s a muslim country. 99% of the people in Turkey are Muslim. They are NATO allies. And the article five of the NATO treaty says the attack on one is an attack on all. So Turkey sent troops to fight alongside Americans in Afghanistan because NATO felt that the U.S. had been attacked on 9/11 and sent a NATO contingent to to Afghanistan for years. Turkey played a role in that. We also have what are designated as, non-NATO allies. And those get special access to U.S. military equipment. They do, military joint exercises, naval and, inland. Who are our non NATO allies? Morocco. Egypt. Bahrain, Pakistan. The Muslim majority countries. And I don’t think any are in Latin American, or East Asia. The idea that the Muslim world is and to pathetic in general to the United States or that there’s this clash of civilizations doesn’t make any sense of how the world actually operates, how the United States foreign policy actually operates. 

Scheer No, but it’s a great rationalization for plunder, for having your way, for absolving your society of any responsibility for mayhem or what have you. And it’s a way of minimizing the significance of the carnage you visit upon others because you make mistakes, but your intentions are basically civilizing. That was the treachery as an intellectual of Huntington. Yes, it’s a rationalization for barbarism. But I want to end this because I know I can’t take too much of your time, but I want to figure out where we’re going now, because it seems to me the already now there’s some backing off that, hey, maybe this unqualified, this blank check to Israel that Biden gave, and probably Trump would have done worse. So maybe you need nukes in there to help you out or, I don’t know, I don’t want to, trivialize this, but, the fact of the matter is, now they’re having all these second thoughts. We can’t alienate all these other people, and we are shifting alliances in the world somehow. Now we’ve got Saudi Arabia cooperating with Russia, cooperating with China, maybe even cooperating with India. This BRICs thing, I mean, people who couldn’t get along under the banner of communism before, are now coming together under the banner of, hey, let’s stop this hegemon of the United States from messing up the world. And and, I just wanted to ask you, looking at it now, because you know, these countries. I mean, they were about to make peace with Saudi Arabia, Israel was. There was about to be a new, welcoming of the new world order and then somehow isolate China. There was all this plan. How do you put it back together? What is the U.S. going to do now? What’s going to happen? 

Cole You know, I think the United States has for all these decades, had a very unfortunate foreign policy towards the Middle East. That depends on, not doing anything practical to resolve the Palestine issue. The US talks a good game. If you ask Matthew Miller at the State Department what about a two state solution? He’ll say, yes, we’re all for that. We’re working towards a there’s a peace process. There isn’t any peace process, and there isn’t any two state solution to be had. And there hasn’t been for decades. It’s all lies. It’s it’s just a mantra. In the world of politics, if people ask you a hard question, you have to have something to tell them. So this is what they tell us, that the US wants a two state solution. But you know what would make us two state solution impossible would be 800,000 Israeli squatter settlers on Palestinian land, and in East Jerusalem, the West Bank, and so forth. That’s been going on, even after the Oslo Accords, the Israeli right doubled the number of Israeli squatter settlers on the West Bank, when they were supposed to be withdrawing. And Clinton did nothing about that. Nobody since has done anything about it. The colonization, is is increasing. And now you have people in the Israeli government who are essentially fascist, who, are all about trying to ethnically cleanse the Palestinians out of the West Bank and replace them with Jewish settlers. And the Jewish settlers have been given a blank check now to go into Palestinian hamlets and go wilding, just shoot them up. It’s like something from the old West. And the governmental ministers are doing things like handing out guns to them, and ordering the Israeli army not to intervene. So, the United States doesn’t do anything practical to stop this from happening. 

Scheer Today, the White House announced that they’re putting some kind of sanctions on four individual settlers. Anyway, just a move that happened. 

Cole Yeah. You know, this kind of, symbolic, statement about a small number of people is ridiculous, frankly. I mean, if you watch the performance of, John Kirby or Matthew Miller, this spokesman for the U.S government, and you know what is actually happening on the ground, you don’t know whether to cry or laugh. I mean, it’s tragicomic, and of course, there’s the Palestinians. There’s an ancient Greek saying that the boys throw stones at frogs and play and the frogs die in earnest. The United States government is doing that. It’s playing around with Middle East policy, and Palestinians are dying in earnest and Washington doesn’t care. We’re going towards 30,000 Palestinian deaths, the vast majority of them women, minor children, noncombatant men. And, Biden says that’s fine. He doesn’t believe the statistics. You know, you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs. Too bad. There’s no hunger in the in Gaza. There’s, children who are not getting a meal a day. There’s no potable water. The Israelis broke the water pipes, and they cut off the water for a while. The clean water, the aquifer water, and Gaza’s polluted and full of bacteria. Imagine how many toddlers and infants are dying of diarrhea and dehydration. I figure probably, hundreds of people a day are dying of starvation already in Gaza. And, these are simply denied by the by the U.S. government doesn’t accept this, so they have to look into it or it’s not clear. Whatever. So the, the, the brutality, and the industrialized brutality, because the Israelis have dropped these 2,000 pound bombs on, on densely populated residential complexes. And yes, maybe there were, you know, some Hamas operatives living in them, but they didn’t care if they’re also going to kill all the other people living there. And, you know, Hamas is, a civil political party, and it has their militia, wing, their, their party members who didn’t know anything about October 7th. And the, you know, the higher ups planned it secretly. Are they supposed to be executed because they’re members of the Hamas party? And then a lot of people in Gaza are not party members. Are they all supposed to be executed because their government is? Hamas is kind of a taboo, you know, it’s so, is somebody that’s. If you if you live in Hamas ruled territory, you’re fair game for genocide. So the US government is hopeless. And I don’t see any evidence of it ever amounting to anything in the region, because everybody knows what it is. It’s, you know, people will take advantage of it to try to make money. But, and that’s the character of these plans that they had to have the Saudis and some of the rich countries in the Arab world, make peace with Israel. There’s the throw the Palestinians under the bus to kind of sweep away the problem and pretend it doesn’t exist. And then they have these, Arab potentates, do direct foreign investment in Israeli startups. Everybody gets rich. Everybody’s well off except the common people in, in a place like Saudi Arabia are not fully participating in, the oil wealth. And then the Palestinians are being royally screwed over. So the America creates, abroad, just as it creates here, haves and have nots, people who are doing very well and people whose ox is being gored. And, it just causes trouble. This is why we have all these problems in the Middle East is mainly U.S. policy. The U.S. unilaterally decided to invade Iraq. Nobody made them do that. Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11. The Washington just wanted to do it. And God knows why. They just unilaterally, support Israel to the hilt and throw the Palestinians on the, trash heap. They they unilaterally do this, that and the other thing. Now they’re bombing downtown center. They do whatever they want through the superpower, and nobody can stop them from doing it. But it doesn’t make them wise, and it doesn’t mean that they’re crafting a sustainable order in the region. They are not. And, that’s why we keep having these outbreaks of problems. 

Scheer But the fiction, I mean, this issue, I just read a story in the New York Times, I don’t know, an hour ago that with the, controlled bombing, with these 2,000 pound bombs, takes out whole neighborhoods. Whole neighborhoods as means it does mean everyone, their children. You know, you’re holding a two year old accountable for Hamas or something, but you’re, you know, with two older guys. I’m. I’m older than you, but we’ve come to somehow accept this insanity. I wonder whether the world accepts it. And I see I think this time it is very different. It is truly excessive. I mean, I’m talking to somebody who was in Gaza at the end of the six day war, and there were illusions Israel had to do it. They were under attack by other Arab governments. It was a, yes, a preemptive war, but necessary. And then even the Israeli leadership that I would interview and other people, they would say, we will be better than the Egyptians in the Jordan. And none of that happened, of course. But I think there is a stain on this, and it also is on an America. And it says, first, what lowers the world standard. I mean, I, I think there are things Russia is doing in Ukraine that should be criticized. Yes. And, making whatever your justification, killing civilians should be a war crime anywhere. Okay. But how is the U.S. going to bring this up when we, in fact, as you say, have given a blank check here, we give you all this equipment, kill anybody you want, anytime you want, and so forth. And then the irony is, even people like Netanyahu say, yeah, no, don’t criticize us. Because what did you do in Vietnam? They actually throw it back at us. You know what I mean? Who are you kidding? And so I get back to my original point, of actually Holocaust denial, you know, because people who are critical and they say, wait a minute, what’s happening here? You’re following, actually, this heinous example of of destroying people. And that’s, after all, what the UN is considering now is this genocide? Well, you know, as a Jewish person, I wonder, how could a state that supposed to speak in my name now be being considered as a source of genocide when the whole lesson of a World War two to any, certainly any Jewish people should be to the rest of the world. Don’t you ever get into eliminating people? Don’t you ever get into ethnic cleansing? You know, and I just wonder whether you’re being a I’m just a bit too cynical about, getting away with it. I think there’s going to be accountability this time. 

Cole You know, I have to see it. I, you know, states don’t have ethics. And, capitalist states have fewer ethics, so than some other. So, you know, I think the question for these state leaders is, you know, what’s in it for me? Can I make money out of it? I don’t, you know, even in the Arab world who has stood up for the Palestinians. I mean, you and I are horrified at the tactics. You know, you can make a case for Israel having, a military necessity to take on Hamas, but the the indiscriminate bombing and even Biden admitted that it’s indiscriminate, which is a work on, indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations, the use of water and food and and so forth as weapons of war. All of this is horrific. But what has, what has president, Abdel Fattah El-Sisi of Egypt said about it? What what what have the Saudi rulers said about it? What have they done? Practically speaking, even Turkey. Where where the the president, Erdogan, has full throated they denounced the Israelis for what they’re doing in Gaza, and called Netanyahu a Hitler figure and promised him he would be tried at The Hague eventually. So the Turks have been among the more vociferous, critics of the way the Israelis have proceeded. The Turks, do daily trade with, with Israel. They have full diplomatic and economic relationships, including weapons sales. So Erdogan is fulminating against Netanyahu as a kind of Hitler. But the Turks are selling the Israelis military equipment as we speak. So I I’m sorry to sound cynical, but I’m just describing the world that I see, which is the Palestinians. I have no, significant champions. And, and the great powers Russia, the United States, Germany, France, Britain, are sitting with folded hands. While, what this World Court has said is plausibly a genocide unfolds at the hands of the Netanyahu government. 

Scheer So the Palestinians, the Jews. 

Cole Yeah. 

Scheer Yeah, right. And the world is going to do what they did with the Jews. It’s going to look the other way. When Roosevelt turned away the refugees, you know, when there were even prominent Americans who thought, well, maybe Hitler has the right idea. After all, we welcomed the Germans right after the war. I remember I went back to them, a decade later. But, I mean, I went back and I found my German relatives, and they were working at the American Air Force base. They were, you know, and German scientists and everything would welcome them to, you know, okay, I’m going to end this, but, you know, I came to you for enlightenment. I didn’t come to be cheered up or have false optimism. And, you know, it’s really a horrifying. Example of the inadequacies of all of our talk about the world order and democracy and respect for the individual. That now the Holocaust comes up. You know, as a slogan. Don’t you dare use it. Oh, I have to use it. How in the world. People looking for security. Jewish people would end up being in a position where there is a trial now to figure out whether a so-called Jewish state. Because I don’t know that any state has the right to speak for everybody. But can be being judged of committing genocide. I it’s just to my mind, it’s absolutely appalling and even more so that you say basically people of power in the world, whatever they call their ideology, whatever they call their religion, whatever they call their government, really don’t give a damn. Is that your as a historian? Is that you really I you’re. 

Cole Sure it’s very transactional out there. The one thing that I do agree with you, however, about is that some chickens could have come home to roost about this. The latest work of international law, the Geneva Conventions, the, the Rome Statute, the Genocide Convention, all of these, attempts to restrain government actions in wartime, have never really had a big effect. But they are used diplomatically. And the United States certainly deployed them against Russia over the Ukraine issue. But, you know, you’re always arguing to an audience. The United States would very much like India and other, global South countries to join in a boycott of Russia on the grounds that it’s, committing war crimes in Ukraine. Well, if you announce that you’re all right with Israel creating a war, committing war crimes, then when you go to Brazil or India or any of these other countries that you have to take an economic hit and boycott Russia because. The principles of the postwar. International humanitarian law are more important than your import export. Bottom line will laugh at you. Let’s say you’re not you’re not doing that with regard to Israel. So why should we take a hit and boycott Russia? So I think you know it in kind of subtle ways or in long term ways. U.S. foreign policy will suffer from this to some extent, but not in an immediate way and not in a dramatic way. And, you know, Harry Truman used to say, if you want a friend in Washington, buy a dog. 

Scheer Okay on that? No on call. And people should read your book. I think they should begin by reading your book. I’m Mohammed. What is the the title again? 

Cole It’s Muhammad, prophet of peace amid the clash of empires. 

Scheer There you go. I actually I have great respect for your work on all these different areas, but that book really I did a podcast with you after I read it. That book really got to me. Talk about fake news the way you used Muhammad. As you know, the whipping boy. And hold him, the image of a mom or anybody who cares about Islam is somehow that the barbarian. When every other culture. Certainly he has. And. Well, so I’m not going to go into it. But the irony, I still can’t get over the irony of Germany now telling everybody, I’ll tell Russia till after all, they kill 50 million Russians. They, I mean their culture. At one point they’re out of technology and now they, you know, they’re going to actually, arrest people for daring to talk about, you know, the genocide. Maybe that’s happening in the Middle East. It’s shameful. It means means ideas are so malleable. They don’t have a significant sister. Malaysia is a democracy. Okay. That’s it. We’ve kept to an hour. So let me end, I want to thank, first of all, one call. I want to thank Laura Konda Rajan and Christopher Holloway, KCR w the excellent Abramson, NPR station and Santa Monica for hosting these shows. I want to thank Joshua Scheer, our executive producer, who said, you better go talk to one Cole right now. I did. I want to thank Diego Ramos for, writing the introduction. I want to thank Max Jones for putting it on video. And I want to particularly thank the J. KW Foundation in the memory of Jean Stein, a major, Jewish from a Jewish family, a major who who, was very outspoken in talking about the rights of Palestinians and particularly influenced by her close friend Edward Said, another person that is deserving of respect. So on that note, that’s it for this edition of Scheer Intelligence. See you next week with another one. And hopefully the world will be slightly better next week, I doubt it. Okay. 

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