Dr. Barrett, your thoughts on resistance factions’ efforts to try to change the equation of the Israeli atrocities we’re witnessing in the besieged Gaza Strip, with the Yemenis now not just sending drones and missiles towards Israel, but what they’re doing on the high seas to draw attention to Gaza’s plight.

Well, it’s something that people all over the world are cheering for and have been demanding since this genocidal mass murder campaign by the Israelis started two months ago. Everybody is asking, why can’t any governments stand up and do something about this? And here we have a country that’s actually doing something, Yemen, taking the lead.

And this naturally raises the stakes and puts pressure on the international community in general and of course the self-declared global imperial hegemon, the United States in particular, that things easily can get out of hand if something isn’t done.

I think the U.S. knows full well that its national interests, its imperial interests, are not served by this genocidal massacre of Palestinians. In fact, I think a lot of the American Jews who support the genocidal Zionist entity in general recognize that what’s going on right now is discrediting it and in fact robbing it of any future in the region. And so the Zionists around the Biden administration probably would like to find a way to back off the track that they’re on right now.

So we obviously need a lot more of this kind of action and I think that it will put pressure on the relevant parties to back off from this militarily useless ongoing massacre of innocent Palestinian civilians, especially women and children.

On that escalation of regional tensions, Iran’s Foreign Minister Hossein Amir Abdullahi said that we’re just steps away from this thing completely blowing up into something completely out of hand in the region. What would that look like, an escalation of this thing? Because we’ve seen Hezbollah involved along the Lebanese border, we’ve seen attacks on U.S. bases in Syria and Iraq, we’re seeing the activity by the resistance out of Yemen on the high seas…Now the US wants to put together a coalition against Yemen’s attacking Israeli-bound ships. If we see that coalition put together, if we see them face-to-face with resistance factions in the region, we could very well see the kind of escalation that you alluded to. What would that look like? And is the US willing to take it there?

I don’t think the US wants that, and most of the regional parties don’t want it either. Netanyahu and the crazies around them may dream of some kind of apocalypse from which Israel will crawl out of the radioactive rubble and somehow rule the world with a Messiah that the rest of the world would call the Antichrist, but I don’t think the more practical strategists involved in running the world from their perches atop the various countries really want to roll the dice with something like that. The suffering would be enormous. And the suffering that we’re witnessing now has already damaged the US and its soft power. The more death and destruction that ultimately gets laid at the door of the genocidal Zionist entity and its sponsor in Washington, D.C., the worse things are for the future of that entity and its sponsor, that is, the U.S. empire, which is really scrambling now to try to maintain its number one position in the world as decades of mismanagement of that position have led it to the precipice.

It’s losing in Ukraine. It’s in a standoff with China that cannot end well for the U.S. And now it’s losing the entire East Asia region, the entire Muslim world. Two billion people are going to absolutely hate the United States because of what’s been going on in Gaza. And so if it escalates, I think it would probably be a gradual escalation. I don’t think we’d go straight to all-out nuclear war in 24 hours. But we would see a lot more images showing that the world is being grossly mismanaged by the people in charge now, namely the United States, which just vetoed a UN resolution, supported essentially by the entire world, for a ceasefire. So the US is the one powerful country standing against a peaceful resolution of this thing. And it spins out of hand, the U.S. is going to look even worse, and ultimately that will be the end of the American empire.

And that’s the thing, Dr. Barrett, because it seems like the White House, along with Joe Biden’s cabinet, are getting increasingly more frustrated with Netanyahu, with Israel, what it’s doing in Gaza, not allowing in humanitarian aid, even if they don’t want to respect a ceasefire, which you just mentioned the U.S. helped them avoid that Security Council resolution. So my question to you, at the ultimate zenith of tensions between the two, at the height of frustration, what would America’s ultimate frustration with the Israeli regime look like?

Well, in the past, there have been times when America presidents stood up to the Zionists to some extent. You have to go back pretty far to see any of them seriously standing against Israel. With Eisenhower, for example, back in the Suez Crisis. At that point the U.S. was not yet fully Zionist-occupied. Since then, there have been mild moments of pushback, where Nixon and Kissinger didn’t quite give the Zionists everything they wanted in the 1973 war. And Jimmy Carter was pushing a little harder for peace than the Zionists wanted, so they made him a one-term president. George H. W. Bush insisted on selling AWACS to Saudi Arabia. And the Zionists didn’t like that so they made him a one-term president. Since then American presidents have pretty much got the message. When the Zionists blew up the World Trade Center and blamed it on Muslims, Bush and Cheney were basically forced to go along with that and back up the ludicrous cover story that al-Qaeda was responsible for 9/11, which of course it wasn’t. Israel was. So Israel has tremendous power in the United States. And the Biden Administration is run by Zionists. They’re just Zionists with a slightly different outlook than the ones in Tel Aviv.

…The Republican party has gone all in for ultra-genocidal Likudnik Zionism and can raise a lot of money from the stupid, hardcore Zionists, who are even stupider than the ones around Biden, who somehow think that all this slaughter and genocide is good for Israel. And so those people will be throwing vast amounts of money against Biden in his re-election campaign if Biden and his people set themselves up as being opposed to Israel.

So they (the Biden Administration) have to find some way to apply pressure—mostly behind the scenes, I think. But so far they’re not doing that. So far what they’re doing is saying these mealy-mouthed things out of both sides of their mouth, and meanwhile just giving all the support that Israel wants, handing them weapons to slaughter women and children with, throwing money at them, and even saying a lot of ridiculously pro-genocide things that really should get them all tried, convicted, and executed in the Hague.

Before you go, even if they don’t push the Israelis into a permanent ceasefire, why not push for the opening of the corridors to allow in humanitarian aid? Where is the justification?Why not push harder to at least get aid because there’s no justification and it’s against rules of engagement and war to deny people food, water and fuel?

Right. So far, clearly the Biden administration has not made any kind of decision to actually interfere with the genocide. They’re still supporting it. They haven’t decided to make a real move against it yet. And so they’re not even giving strong rhetorical support for stopping this blockade of food, water and medical supplies.

By Kevin Barrett