For almost 30 years, the Leahy Law has prohibited the United States from funding foreign security forces that violate human rights. Yet for decades, the United States has consistently ignored persistent and widespread abuses by the security forces of one country, Israel. [00:00:17] Dawn is taking action. We are filing a lawsuit against the State Department to force it to finally enforce the Leahy Law and end military aid to abusive units of the Israeli Defense Forces. It appears that there is at least one group that is attempting to fight back [00:00:37] and get the United States government, particularly the State Department, to reconsider its refusal to follow a federal law in regard to supplying weapons to a country that has been carrying out war crimes and [00:00:53] essentially ignoring international laws. And in this particular case, it's Israel. Now Palestinian families are officially suing Anthony Blinken and the State Department over the United States unconditional support for Israel's [00:01:08] brutal military campaign in Gaza, which has now killed over 45,000 people. And there's been some more recent analysis showing the insane numbers of airstrikes that didn't even kill a single Hamas militant, [00:01:25] but sure did kill a lot of civilians. Now, the video that you just watched was made by a legal nonprofit called democracy for the Arab World, or Dawn, which helped bring the lawsuit forward. And it's a human rights advocacy group that was actually founded [00:01:42] by Jamal Khashoggi. And if you're not familiar with him, or maybe you forgot who he was, he was the Washington Post journalist who was murdered by the Saudi government. Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, had ordered for his killing. [00:01:57] And unfortunately, that happened when he visited, you know, Istanbul, Turkey. But the suit was filed in the US District Court for the District of Columbia on Tuesday of this week. And in it, here's what the plaintiffs accuse. [00:02:13] They accuse Anthony Blinken and the state Department of essentially breaking the United States's own law by continuing to supply Israel with these weapons. And so what they focus on specifically is a 1997 law known as the Leahy Law. [00:02:28] It was named after the former Vermont Senator Patrick Leahy. And the text of the. The law goes as follows. No assistance shall be furnished under this act or the Arms Export Control Act to any unit of the security forces of a foreign country. [00:02:47] If the Secretary of State has credible information that such unit has committed a gross violation of human rights. Now there's a former State Department official by the name of Charles Blaha, who actually worked at the department for 30 years and served as the director [00:03:05] of Human Rights or for the director of Human Rights Office. But now he's advising the group bringing this lawsuit forward, and here he is explaining the Leahy Law and exactly why it's being cited in this particular case. Take a look. [00:03:22] The Leahy Law, as you said, prohibits United States assistance to security force units that have committed gross violations of human rights. It's actually very surgical, and it prohibits U.S. Assistance to the specific units that have committed the violations. [00:03:40] The State Department has for years, in its own human rights reports, including the 2023 reports for Israel and for Gaza and the West Bank, set forth gross violations of human rights [00:03:56] by Israeli security forces. Things like torture, extrajudicial killings, rape under color of law, enforced disappearances. These are allegations and credible reports set forth in the State Department's [00:04:12] own human rights reports, and they go back years. Despite all that, the State Department has never once held any Israeli unit ineligible for assistance under the Leahy Law. [00:04:27] I want to elaborate on what he said for a little bit, because the the story in the Middle East right now is so horrific that I can understand people wanting to memory hole certain news stories that we've done in certain, you know, elements of that war that we've brought up [00:04:44] and covered with a lot of depth. And one of the things that I think a lot of people have forgotten is not too long ago, just a few months ago, there were stories involving Palestinian detainees who were being sexually tortured [00:05:01] and raped by Israeli prison guards. And when there was going to be consequences for the guards who carried out those rapes, there was a group of unhinged settlers who were viciously protesting [00:05:16] the notion that those guards would face any consequences for what they were doing. I mean, take a look at what's happening in Syria and the land that Israel is now just openly admitting they're going to double settlements in the Golan Heights. [00:05:35] That land doesn't belong to them. It is not internationally recognized as Israeli land. It is land that they have taken over. They're illegally occupying. And now they're planning on building double the amount of settlements in another country's land. And we are supplying the bombs that Israel has been dropping, not only [00:05:54] in Gaza, but also previously in Lebanon. Right. Not too long ago, before there was a cease fire. That's very fragile, by the way. And they used the same bombs against Syria. So with that in mind, let's get back to the lawsuit, [00:06:11] because it says the lawsuit was filed under the Administrative Procedures Act, and it comes after a State Department report in May found that it was reasonable to assess that Israel had violated international law in Gaza using [00:06:27] weapons provided by the United States, but that it hadn't violated the terms of American weapons agreements. But Blaha cites the IDF's murder of Eisenhower II, who we covered on the show, [00:06:43] you know, in depth as proof that, no, there have been violations of international laws, there have been violations of the terms that have been specified in the Leahy Act. So she was an American Turkish activist. This was literally an American citizen who was actually shot in the head while taking [00:07:00] part in demonstrations, not in Gaza, but in the West Bank, because since the beginning of this war, there has been this sense of entitlement, right? Some of these very far right Israeli settlers have felt quite emboldened [00:07:16] to go into the West Bank and essentially terrorize Palestinians in their own homes, drive them out of their own homes. People have died as a result of this. I mean, it has been absolutely brutal. And so there had been some demonstrations and in this particular case, having [00:07:33] to do with this American Turkish activist. She ended up getting shot in the head. And you know, what's amazing about that is even though we're talking about an American citizen here, the Biden administration couldn't be bothered to give a damn about it at all, [00:07:49] couldn't be bothered to go to her funeral, couldn't be bothered to at least show a single ounce of empathy for what had happened. But there are other examples as well, which include Israel blocking the flow of humanitarian aid into Gaza, something that our own government, [00:08:06] by the way, has acknowledged. In fact, you guys remember that 30 day, deadline that Biden had implemented against Israel, essentially saying, if you don't allow more aid into Gaza within 30 days, there will be consequences. [00:08:25] Okay. Well, the 30 days came and went. There were no consequences, and no one paying attention to this story was delusional enough to think that the Biden administration would actually carry out any consequences. Additional examples of Israel breaking international laws and committing war crimes. [00:08:41] Killing of journalists and doctors, humanitarian aid workers, also forcibly displacing literally millions of Palestinians. So with Dawn's help, this lawsuit was filed by five Palestinians in Gaza, [00:08:57] the West Bank and the United States. The lead plaintiff was Gaza, was a Gaza math teacher who has been displaced Seven different times in this current war and has lost 20 family members. And so Ahmed More, who is a Palestinian-American writer, is also [00:09:16] a plaintiff and says this my my surviving family members in Gaza have been forcibly displaced four times since October, living in constant fear of indiscriminate Israeli attacks carried out with American weapons. [00:09:32] The US government's military assistance to these abusive Israeli forces, which our own laws prohibit, is enabling these Israeli harms to me and my family. Now, Secretary of State Anthony Blinken absurdly denies that the department [00:09:48] has made unlawful exceptions for Israel. Here's what he had to say in April. Do we have a double standard? The answer is no. Okay, but how are you going to say the answer is no when clearly there are much stricter, [00:10:05] way more strict standards being implemented on other countries that we provide arms to, including Ukraine, by the way. So why is that? Is Ukraine not our ally? Why is Ukraine different from Israel? Why is Israel special? [00:10:21] Where this Leahy Act doesn't at all apply to the weapons that we are funneling over to a country that is very clearly committing war crimes? And by the way, I mean, Biden himself was caught saying that Israel was doing indiscriminate bombings. [00:10:38] So they lie to you, to your face and behind closed doors they say something entirely different, but they still carry out what the Israeli government wants, which is endless supplies of the very bombs that are brutalizing people, wiping out entire Israeli families. [00:10:56] I'm sorry, Palestinian families. It's just sick. And so a Guardian investigation published in January found that top U.S. Officials had quietly reviewed more than a dozen incidents of alleged gross violations of human rights by Israeli security forces since 2020, [00:11:12] but implemented special bureaucratic measures that have ultimately preserved access to US weapons for the allegedly responsible units. Again, that was by the Guardian. And there's more in April. [00:11:27] A coalition of 185 lawyers in both the Biden administration and private sector argued that they believe Israel's military actions likely violate U.S. Humanitarian laws, a claim later repeated by 20 white House staffers who dissented in November. [00:11:45] And yet, despite widespread evidence of human rights violations, we continue funding Israel's military. The United States remains Israel's biggest arms supplier, with Washington spending at least $17.9 billion on [00:12:01] military aid for Israel in the first year of the country's offensive in Gaza, according to a report for Brown University's Costs of War project. Right now, as we speak, there is a battle going on in the House of Representatives [00:12:16] in regard to a government funding bill. If they don't get a government funding bill passed, government starts to shut down beginning this upcoming weekend. Okay. And what you're hearing from some lawmakers, you know, [00:12:33] members of Doge, including Elon Musk and Donald Trump himself is no, no, no, this, this government funding bill, it spends too much money, too much money. Because when it comes to Americans, right, when it comes to keeping government agencies funded and functioning, it's too much money. [00:12:53] It's just too much money. But no one ever asks any questions about whether funding, weapons of death, destruction, weapons of war on behalf of Israel so they can carry out human rights abuses, whether maybe, maybe that's too much money. [00:13:10] Now, of course, we asked that question here all the time, but there's very little debate guys in Congress when it comes to defense funding and when it comes to funding, anything that Israel needs in its offensive wars against the Palestinians. [00:13:30] Now, there's a difference between offensive weaponry and defensive weaponry. And I've said in the past, and I've gotten a lot of heat for this, that I actually don't have a problem funding defensive weaponry, you know, things like the Iron Dome. But at this point, after more than a year [00:13:49] of this brutal military campaign in Gaza, after Israel has already halved that tiny strip of land Gaza and essentially pushed out Palestinians, you know, to the southern end of the Gaza Strip and basically said, well, [00:14:07] Israel is now going to be in full control of the entirety of the strip of land. But Palestinians aren't even allowed to go back to northern Gaza. We control that now. We own that now. That's what Israel is saying. They're just openly saying it. And we're all supposed to pretend like that's okay. [00:14:25] And when there's retaliation against Americans, whether it's American troops in the Middle East, whether it's an attempted terrorist attack against Americans on our own soil, what is the discourse? What can we expect? Oh, these these dirty, terrible Muslims. [00:14:45] It's because they're evil and they hate our freedoms. Or could it be that our actions on behalf of defense contractors, weapons manufacturers, and yes, lobbies like AIPAC? Our actions have caused so much pain, [00:15:02] so much death, so many human humanitarian rights violations in the Middle East. Do we deserve that hostility? We as the American people? I don't think we do. What's frustrating is it feels like we have no control over our own government [00:15:20] when it comes to this issue. Now, every year, we, give them a lump sum of $3 billion to use however they please, which, as Blaha explains here, is massively problematic. [00:15:36] So take a look. We don't know all the places it goes, we don't know the units it goes to. And that's a problem because the Leahy Law requires vetting units in that situation where we can't trace the units to which the assistance is going. [00:15:53] The law requires the State Department to give the countries in question, and Israel is one of those. There are a few others to give the countries in question a list, a list of ineligible units. The State Department has never done that. [00:16:08] That has been the law since 2019, and in five years, five years, the State Department has never given Israel a list of ineligible units. It's given lists to the other countries that this law applies to, but not to Israel. [00:16:27] And I really appreciate him highlighting that double standard, because we lose the moral high ground as a country, as a government, especially when you hear the US government justify actions against an adversary [00:16:42] because they're carrying out humanitarian rights violations. I don't believe for a second that the majority of individuals who make up our federal government give a damn about human rights violations, about, you know, [00:16:59] the lack of humanitarian aid going into. I don't think they care at all. They don't care about any of it. They don't care about which country is doing it. They just care about making arguments and tying it to situations that are convenient for them, right? Human rights abuses is the go to line when [00:17:17] our lawmakers want to justify going after a country or providing military support for a country against one of our enemies. But when push comes to shove, if you really ask them what they genuinely have concerns about, [00:17:32] it's never human rights abuses because you can't support what the current Israeli government and the current Israeli military is carrying out. You can't justify that and say that you care about protecting people from human rights abuses. We are aiding it. We're abetting it. [00:17:49] And as we nickel and dime our own American people, there's no end in sight when it comes to the billions of dollars that will send over to Israel. It's unacceptable. And I love that there's finally a group that's fighting back against it. We'll see if it goes anywhere, but at least there's a glimmer of hope that, [00:18:07] you know, there's some cop on the beat. There's one organization that's trying to fight back.