“It’s a joke!” Vijay Prashad on Trump’s Venezuela Drug “Bust”

Click here for the full interview with Vijay Prashad and the Freedom Flotilla's Greg Stoker: https://www.usefulidiotspodcast.com/p/its-a-joke-vijay-prashad-laughs-at?r=je5va&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=false

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Useful Idiots takes to the High Seas this week.

We’re looking at two ships: the Venezuelan boat that was bombed by the Trump Administration which they claimed carried drug-smuggling terrorists, and the US Veterans Flotilla attempting to sail to Gaza to break Israel’s deadly blockade.

Calling in from that Flotilla, which took off from shores in Spain during our conversation, is former Army Ranger Greg Stoker. His ship of veterans is bravely leading the charge to Gaza, with the hope that even Israel won’t face the PR battle of keeping a group of US war veterans hostage in torture prisons.

But, as drones fly over the boat and the crew sails closer and closer to Israeli waters, Stoker explains how what he’s seeing in Gaza is different than anything he saw as a soldier.

“I did four combat deployments in the Seventy-Fifth Ranger Regiment, which is the U.S. Special Operations Unit to Afghanistan,” he tells us. “I was there in tactical operations centers watching Obama's drone strike campaign play out and kind of got radicalized into an anti-imperialist position.

There was just no standard of proof for who we were killing. Basically if a guy ended up in the wrong contact list on someone's phone, could have been a Taliban sublieutenant's baker, he was probably going to eat a hellfire missile.

And I thought that was bad enough. I just have never seen anything like what Israel's done. As horrible as what we did during the global war on terror, kill millions of people in five different countries, this is completely beyond the pale. And the entire world is less safe because of the precedent set in Gaza over the past two years, a complete disregard for international law and humanity.”

The louder we amplify the voices on the Freedom Flotilla, the better chance they’ll have of breaking the siege. Greg explains:

I hope everybody watching this supports us because we don't have any diplomatic, economic, or military support. We are a humanitarian effort and we will be confronted by a rogue genocidal actor. The only cover that we get is global engagement.

What we're going to try to do is wage an information war against Israeli military propaganda to call out different actions that they will take in the global forum and try to make them politically non-viable. So we appreciate your support and engagement over the next two weeks as we try to break the siege. Because y'all's engagement is the only cover we're getting.

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We also talk to historian and journalist Vijay Prashad after the White House posted a video this week allegedly attacking a ship in what they’r