"We have gone down into the mud with Israel and I don't think we're going to get out." Former US Ambassador Chas Freeman talking to Pascal Lottaz

A very interesting talk on Neutrality Studies. All the talks on Neutrality Studies that I have heard are. 

The message: the USA is behaving like a rogue state and the West has lost its moral standing. 

I could not agree more.

Mr Freeman says the Zimmerman Telegram was an MI6 forgery to lure USA into war with Germany. 

Is this true? I doubt it.

What would the world have been like had the USA stayed neutral in the First World War?

A.peace between the two sides and no remaking of Central and Eastern Europe or even perhaps the Middle East?

Britain did not enforce its claims against Venezuela in the late 1890s because the USA would have gone to war with us and we feared we would end up losing Canada if we did. 

This says Freeman was a case of good appeasement.

'This all worked very well because appeasement is sometimes a successful diplomatic strategy. that is if the country being appeased is fairly limited in its ambitions unlike Hitler who was unlimited in his
ambitions. and it had a lot to do with the United States entering World War I on the side of the British rather than the Germans because there was no sympathy in the United States then for Great Britain. The British were widely disliked."

[Were Hitler's ambitions unlimited? We don't know but if Mein Kampf is a guide his ambitions lay in conquering Russia or what are now Ukraine, Belarus and Russia]  

More quotations from Mr Freeman.

"The Israelis and their cohort their fifth column basically in the western world whether in France or Germany or the United States or Britain respond to any criticism of Israel by denouncing whoever said it as anti-semitic and basically they have cheapened the term to such it's - anti-semitism is a horror and it deserves to be regarded as such but they have cheapened the term to such an extent that anti-semitism which used to mean someone who hated Jews now means someone that some Jews hate and want to silence. "

"So it's reversed and we've seen the same thing with other terms. Terrorist now means an opponent of the Israeli occupation and genocide. 

So if you demonstrate in London.... I mistook the other day I mistook an anti-immigration Islamophobic demonstration for a pro Palestinian one. 

Palestine Action, a group that is committed to the human rights of Palestinians, has been branded a terrorist organization. 

And so there are now hundreds of thousands of English people who are technically legally branded as terrorists because they oppose genocide. 

"I mean, you can't you couldn't make this stuff up really."

"We came up with an argument about the so-called rules bound order which had nothing to do with Bretton Woods and the NATO and the post World War II Pax Americana. It was we make the rules, we decide who they apply to. They don't apply to us, but you better obey. ... 

"We have gone down into the mud with Israel and I don't think we're going to get out.... 

"We were once an enabler of Israeli human rights abuses. Now we're a participant in them."

"Europeans in my view constitute the what I call the coalition of the deluded. That is to say they have no wherewithal with which to actually enable Ukraine to even defend itself effectively, let alone take back the territories it's lost. Their motive is anti-Russian, not pro- Ukrainian.

"They have put forward absolutely no peace proposal at all. Every proposal they put forward uh is a proposal to continue the war or escalate it. 

And now the United States has very cleverly handed off the Ukraine war to the Europeans. that is to say Trump says, "Well, this wasn't my war, it's your war and but if you want to buy weapons from us that enrich our arms manufacturers, that's fine. We'll sell you the weapons and you can give them to Ukraine."