Scheer interviews Blumenthal:
"the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which is this right-wing racket "
"maybe a majority of secular Jewish Americans, progressive Jews, who have completely turned their back on the whole Zionist project. "
"Netanyahu is really kind of an American figure ... he’s a Republican figure. He’s like a card-carrying neoconservative Republican."
"Israeli occupation as the byproduct of a system of apartheid which has been in place from the beginning, since 1948, which was a product of a settler colonial movement."
"a figure in Israel in Netanyahu, who is, very clearly embodies a racialized view, a jingoistic view of the other"
"Moshe Dayan ... was absolutely opposed to a viable Palestinian state. He even said that we cannot have a Palestinian state because it will connect psychologically, in the minds of the Palestinian public who are citizens of Israel — that 20% of Israel who are indigenous Palestinians — it will connect them to Nablus in the West Bank, and it will provide them with a basis for rebelling against the Israeli state to expand the Palestinian state."
"he state that they were proposed was what Yitzhak Rabin, in his final address before the Israeli Knesset, the Israeli parliament, called “less than a state.” He promised Israel that at Oslo, he would deliver the Palestinians less than a state. And if you look at the actual plan that the Palestinians were handed at Oslo ... the map was not that different from the map that Donald Trump has offered with the “ultimate deal.” "
" Ehud Barak of the Labor Party, Yitzhak Rabin’s successor, who moved more settlers into the West Bank, by a landslide, than Netanyahu did."
"a contradiction in the Jewish experience, because Jews ... understand what settler colonialism does. They understand what oppression does, they’ve been under the thumb of oppressors."
"Bernie Sanders, the one Jewish candidate, is the one who dared to bring up the Palestinians — that they have rights also, that they’re human beings. He’s being attacked for it as ... a self-hating Jew"
"I said, you know, here are photos of Elie Wiesel palling around with fascists. And the kind of Netanyahu-Adelson network activated to attack me. And ultimately it led ... to Hillary Clinton’s campaign officially denouncing me and demanding that I cease and desist. ... it was clear Elie Wiesel, this person who was supposed to be a saint, was actually no longer seen as stainless"
"The Democratic Party is not democratic on Israel, but it’s no longer a third-rail issue. You can talk about it"
"Hillary Clinton has really represented a kind of loathsome, interventionist, aggressive, America-first politics that in some ways is even more offensive than Trump"
" that Washington culture. And where there’s a certain arrogance in it, that they are always, even when they do the wrong things, they’re just always accidents. They’re always mistakes. You know, it never comes out of their ideology, their aggression"
"how does it work with the Clintons? They were — they set up a machine that was really a juggernaut with all this corporate money they brought in through the DLC, the Democratic Leadership Committee. It was a very different structure than we’d seen with previous Democratic candidates who built — who relied heavily on unions and, you know, the civil rights coalition. And that machine never went away."
"the machine grew into the Clinton Global Initiative, which was this giant influence-peddling scam that just cashed in on disasters in Haiti, brought in tons of money, tens of millions of dollars from Gulf monarchies, and big oil and the arms industry — everything that funds all the repulsive think tanks on K Street through the Clinton Foundation."
" entire countries were destroyed under the direct watch of Hillary Clinton. "
" Hillary Clinton said we can’t be negotiating with the Syrian government; the hard men with guns will solve this problem"
"She [Chelsea Clinton] just basically inherited the reign of the Clinton Foundation and Clinton Global Initiative. She does paid talks for Israel. Her husband Marc Mezvinsky, he gambled on Greece’s debt along with Lloyd Blankfein, the CEO of Goldman Sachs ... it just absolutely disgusts me."
"Hillary Clinton is still there! She won’t go away! She’s not only helped fuel this Russiagate hysteria that’s plunged us into a new Cold War, but she’s trying to destroy the hopes and dreams of millions of young people who are saddled with endless debt by destroying Bernie Sanders. And it’s because she sees her own legacy being smashed to pieces, not by any right-wing, vast conspiracy, but by the electorate, the new electorate of the Democratic Party. And I absolutely welcome that. "
"one of the takeaways is this will be the end of Clintonism. It’s time to move on and hand things over to a new generation. They had their chance, and they not only failed, they caused disasters across the world."
" what the Clinton revolution did was it made class warfare for the rich fashionable ... it said these thieves on Wall Street, these people who are going to rip you off 20 different ways to Sunday — they’re good people, and they support good causes ... the whole thing of unleashing Wall Street and getting, destroying the New Deal — that was a serious program to basically betray the average American and betray their interest. And that’s why we’ve had this growing income inequality since that time. That’s the Clinton legacy in this world, really, is the billionaire coup, the billionaire culture."
"that’s what we saw through the Obama administration. Obama presided over the biggest decline in black home ownership in the United States since, I think, prior to World War II. You mentioned Glass-Steagall; this set the stage for the financial crisis; NAFTA, destroyed the unions, shipped American jobs first to Mexico and then to China, and destabilized northern Mexico along with the drug war that Clinton put on overdriv"
"there was just this desire to just beat the Republicans and out-triangulate them. Now that we’ve seen the effects on them and so many people have felt the effects, you have an entire generation that sees no future, that realizes they’re living in an oligarchy, realizes that the alternative to Bernie Sanders is a literal oligarch, this miniature Scrooge McDuck in Mike Bloomberg, and they’re just not having it."
" But the people that you’ve been talking about, that–you know, and I voted for all of them, and I’ve supported them — are they really the lesser evil? You know, or are they a more effective form of evil?"
"to understand Trump, we just have to see him as the apotheosis of an oligarchy. In its most unsheathed, unvarnished form, he’s just lifted the mask off the corruption, "
" in a lot of ways, Donald Trump does share more in common with the Democratic Party elite ... the Beltway blob and the Beltway bandits — than they do with Bernie Sanders."
" there will be an effort to McGovern him. To just kind of turn him — turn this whole process into McGovern ’72, hope that Bernie Sanders gets destroyed by Donald Trump, and then wag their fingers at the left for the next 20 years until they get another Bill Clinton ... they don’t know how to stop him at this point, but they’re willing to let him be the nominee and go down to Donald Trump, because Bernie Sanders threatens their interests, and the movement behind him particularly, more than Donald Trump does."
"who is the lesser evil"
"the mainstream media has actually taken a very moderate figure, Bernie Sanders, and demonized him as some kind of hopeless ideologue"
" you can’t let these greed merchants control everything, you have to worry about some compensation for ordinary people. That’s what Bernie Sanders is all about. "
"I’ve voted for all sorts of evil people because they were lesser ... I think we have to get that idea out of our head."
" they’ve made warmongering liberal and fashionable ... they’ve made the CIA now a wonderful institution, the FBI a wonderful institution ... Bolton a wonderful hero. ... what’s called a lesser evil can’t be given a pass. Because in fact, maybe in some ways, or in many ways, it’s a more effective evil. "
"Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton ...represented this embrace of the Wall Street center — they were much more effective in redistributing income to the rich. You know, you can talk about Trump’s tax break, but the real redistribution came with letting Wall Street do its collateralized debt obligations and credit default swaps that caused the destruction of 70% of black wealth in America, 60% of brown wealth in America ... in this election, people have to think — you know, yes, I’ll hold my nose and I’ll vote for the lesser evil. But what’s that going to get us? Does it get us a more effective evil, a better-packaged evil? "
" Look at who’s been sold to us as the lesser evil that we had to support ... and they’ve subjected Americans to the same evil the Republican Party has"
" Bernie Sanders does nothing, and proposes nothing, outside the framework of the New Deal and LBJ’s Great Society ... he is someone who at least offers a change from the consensus where the government actually starts to intervene to prevent people from dying excess deaths across the country, from the opioid crisis, from poverty, from homelessness"
"the American public and the western public are sick of being lied into war, and they’re sick of being pushed into lesser evilism"
https://www.truthdig.com/articles/the-clinton-machine-will-do-anything-to-stop-bernie-sanders/sidd
