Read the full transcript of a conversation between Judge Andrew Napolitano and British politician, broadcaster, George Galloway on Judging Freedom Podcast titled “The World as I See It!” premiered March 26, 2025.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
Introduction
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Hi everyone, Judge Andrew Napolitano here for Judging Freedom. Today is Wednesday, March 26th, 2025. We are joined by a man who has been described as the most articulate defender of personal liberty and peace on the planet. He is of course the famous, to the warmongers, the infamous former member of the House of Commons and I hope future, George Galloway. George, it’s a pleasure, my dear friend, thank you for taking the time to join us.
GEORGE GALLOWAY: It’s an honor for me. Nobody is anybody until they’ve appeared before the judge.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Oh, you’re very kind, very kind, George. That praise, by the way, was articulated on this program just about 20 hours ago by Max Blumenthal, who I think will be a guest of yours along with our colleague Scott Ritter later today. You do marvelous work. Any comparison that I have to you is graciously received by me. I titled this segment, The World As I See It, by George Galloway, because I really want to go around the world and I’m going to start with a big picture. Why do we have these endless wars, no matter the ideology of the head of state, whether it’s a conservative or labor in Great Britain, whether it’s a Republican or a Democrat, a liberal or a conservative here in the U.S., they all want perpetual war. How do you get your hands around that, George?
The System of Perpetual War
GEORGE GALLOWAY: Well, I think it’s partly systemic. I’ve just been reading the what’s said to be the full transcript of the WhatsApp group or Signal group of the Yemen bombers, and it struck me that there was no difference of tone, whatever, between the exaltation over the collapsing of an entire apartment block. There was no difference, whatever, between the exaltation of someone like Tulsi Gabbard, revealed in that chat, and Hillary Clinton, her one-time nemesis. It was chilling, and it struck me, as you have just adumbrated, the extent to which it doesn’t really matter who’s in power, because the system will mold whomsoever is in power into the same gung-ho, cold-hearted, cold-blooded and reckless warmongering, because nobody knows who was in that apartment block.
Nobody knows if the top ballistic guy, as he’s described, they don’t even give him a name, girlfriend, if he really had a girlfriend, and if he really lived there, and if she was in, and how many other people were in their houses, and who were killed as part of that, and they are waving flags and cheering at the collapsing of it. Just as Hillary Clinton said, on the sodomizing and murder on camera of the Libyan Gaddafi, we came, we saw, he died, ha ha ha, he laughed, oh how they laughed.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Right. Our mutual friend, Pepe Escobar, as you may know, is in Sana’a, Yemen, this week. He graciously gave us his first interview. This may have been the first interview of an English-speaking journalist on the ground after the bombing. He showed us pictures of the bombing. George, it’s a residential, there he is in the middle of what was a residential neighborhood. Your observations are quite correct. This could have been Jake Sullivan laughing at the deaths of a thousand innocent Palestinians. It could have been Hillary Clinton laughing at the torture and butchering of Muammar Gaddafi. Instead, it was Chelsea Gabbard and Pete Hegseth laughing at the deaths of innocents in Sana’a. Is America any safer today, George, because the Pentagon demolished an apartment building in a residential neighborhood in downtown Sana’a, Yemen?
The Cycle of Violence and Revenge
GEORGE GALLOWAY: Well, plainly not, and they’ve already forgotten the name of the top ballistic guy, if they ever knew it, and his girlfriend, if she exists. Sounds unlikely to me that a commander of the Ansar Allah has a girlfriend whom he visits of an evening, but of course, it could be true, but if any of it is true, then nothing has changed for the better. Everything has changed for the worse, and we’ve lived through it, without divulging our advancing years, Your Honor. We’ve lived through so many of these, just one more commie, just one more commander, just one more terrorist, quote unquote, and we’ll be going forward, but we’re never going forward.
We are constantly plunging ourselves into a maelstrom of greater and greater hatred, desire for revenge. I mean, at its most prosaic, the eldest son of every person that was killed in that apartment block yesterday will definitely be dedicated to revenge of one form or another. Now, most of them will never be able to quench their thirst on that, but some of them might. So, making more and more people hate you, going to war in more and more places, it seems to me self-evident that none of that makes us safer.
The pursuit of amity, the exercise of diplomacy, you were recently, and I envy you, in the presence of the master of diplomacy, Mr. Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister. If every foreign minister in the world had the wisdom, sagacity of Mr. Lavrov, then the world would be a safer place. As long as it’s filled with Pete Heskeths and their British and other equivalents, I’m afraid our societies will continue to spiral downwards.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: I’m sorry to say that I must agree with you. I’m going to play a clip right now, one of your most famous and well-received around the world brief clips of your speaking on the floor of the House of Commons when you were a parliamentarian. And my question to you will be, nothing’s changed. It almost doesn’t matter who the prime minister is.
What you said was true then, and it’s true today. Chris?
GEORGE GALLOWAY: Mr. Speaker, I knew your father well for a very long time. He was a fine man, and I am sincerely sorry for your loss. There was not one single word in the prime minister’s statement of condemnation of the Israeli destruction of the Iranian consulate in Damascus, which is the proximate reason for the event everyone is here in concert condemning. He was not even asked to do so by the front bench opposite. Kate Burley is the only person so far to demand that of a government minister. We have no treaty with Israel, at least not one that parliament has been shown. And the Iranians are not likely to listen to him when Britain occupied Iran, looted its wealth, and overthrew its one democratic socialist government in my own lifetime.
UNIDENTIFIED SPEAKER: Well, Mr. Speaker, whatever may have happened a few weeks ago, it is absolutely no justification for launching more than 300 drones and missiles from one sovereign state towards Israel. It’s as simple as that. And in the honourable gentleman’s question, not once did he condemn that action, or indeed the actions of Hamas in the region. There is no equivalence between these things whatsoever, and to suggest otherwise is simply wrong.]
The Illusion of Political Difference
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: So I would suggest that it doesn’t matter who the prime minister is, it doesn’t matter if this was the American House of Representatives and in the gallery was Joe Biden or Donald Trump. Everything is the same. Israel can kill all at once. They’ll still send money to the Ukrainians in a losing war. We talk peace with one side of our mouths, we pay for war with our pocketbooks.
GEORGE GALLOWAY: Well, as I think famously opined some decades ago, these people are two cheeks of the same backside, or ass, I think you call it, in the United States. They really are.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Yes, I did say that. We have that clip, but we’ll spare the audience. I think it was on your election night.
GEORGE GALLOWAY: I used it again then, but I’ve been using it for 20 years. If the lines work, keep using them. The truth is, some things never change. That is one of them, that tweedle-dee, tweedle-dum makes no difference. And if you think about it, in a way, as another of my former colleagues once said, the former mayor of London, Ken Livingstone, if voting changed anything, they’d abolish it. And that appears to be the case.
It’s hard. You’d have to go back a long, long ways, certainly in your case, to Jack Kennedy, and maybe farther, to find a political leader who made a difference on the big issues. They’ll argue over Tupin’s hate name on the tax, or off the tax. They’ll argue about the color of the corridors of power. The essential prevailing orthodoxy, which is, as Dr. Johnson called it, the grimmest dictatorship of them all, the dictatorship of the prevailing orthodoxy.
When it comes to that prevailing orthodoxy, nothing must change, and if you look like you might just be prepared to change it, they’ll ensure that you never come to power, never have the opportunity to do so. So the, we’re back to your first question, it’s systemic. The system requires this kind of bipartisan devotion to war, and to a certain type of economic system, and if you are not prepared to play ball with that, then you’ll either have to be powerful enough to overturn the system, or you’ll have to be flexible enough to cut your cloth accordingly, and so far that’s where we are.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Let’s look at Ukraine for a few minutes. Donald Trump famously campaigned and said he could end the war in 24 hours, of course that hasn’t happened. Donald Trump famously said to Vladimir Putin in two phone calls that he’s interested in peace. What President Putin said in return, if I’d advised him I would have said, well then why don’t you shut off the spigot of arms that are still flowing to Kiev, because as long as they flow, Ukrainian boys are going to their graves, and the government is weaker and weaker because the military has nothing to stand on.
I guess this is just more support for your argument that this is systemic, that it doesn’t matter who the American President is. Donald Trump says he wants to win the Nobel Peace Prize, we haven’t even talked about Gaza, we will in a minute. He’s certainly not going to win the Nobel Peace Prize by continuing to send billions and billions in ammunition and military hardware to Kiev, especially knowing that it’s in a losing cause.
GEORGE GALLOWAY: And don’t forget, Your Honour, that it’s not only the weapons that’s bad enough, but without the intelligence cooperation that the US very temporarily, supposedly turned off, but has now turned back on, because without that, the Ukrainian side would be fighting blind and would end up very quickly not being able to fight at all. I don’t know quite why he did that. We have a saying, you probably have it too, in dollars and cents, in for a penny, in for a pound.
Donald Trump is already getting the stick from the usual suspects for dragging his heels about the war in the first place. He might well have come into office and said this is Joe Biden’s war, and moreover, one that he fought for corrupt purposes, for his own personal corruption, the Biden crime family corruption, and we’re going to have nothing more to do with it. Therefore, henceforth, there will be no weapons and no intelligence supply of the vital coordinates and intelligence that the army has to fight with. So he could have done that. He would have still got the same stick from the same people. He would have lost whatever votes there are to lose in any case, but he would actually have stopped the war. The thing that he promised to do, I’m consciously told by people he’s only been in a couple of months. Let’s go on.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Well, that’s true. But you can often get a feel for how a game is going to go in the first minutes of that game. And I’m not encouraged. I’ll be perfectly frank. I’m one of those who wanted Trump to defeat Harris on the principle that in the land of the blind, the one-eyed man is the king. And he was indicating that he had one eye. But since coming to office, there’s precious little sign of any foresight that might take us into calmer waters. Quite the contrary. The aircraft carriers are gathering in the Persian Gulf. The extraordinary long range and potentially nuclear bombers are gathering in Diego Garcia. We’re sailing into more troubled waters, not less. And so I don’t know quite why he didn’t do that. It was open to him to do it. I think within the bounds of the prevailing orthodoxy, he could have done it.
GEORGE GALLOWAY: Yes. But he chose not to. And we don’t even have John Bolton to blame anymore.
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Right. Right. Your guest later on on your show today, who is not only a regular guest here, but a longtime friend of mine, Scott Ritter, is of the view that the war would be over in a matter of weeks, certainly shorter than a month, if Trump had closed off that spigot or just closed off Intel, as you pointed out.
Boris Johnson and Ukraine
Before we transition over to Gaza, where you have been at your articulate best, I have to play for you a clip from the crown prince of clowns who was once the prime minister of Great Britain. And what he had to say, remember, he has blood on his hands. He’s the one who talked President Zelensky out of signing a treaty that Zelensky’s people had negotiated with the Russians. They agreed to it. It was one hundred and twenty six pages long. They initialed every page. Joe Biden said to Bojo, go talk him out of it and tell him we’ll we’ll back him up. That was seven hundred thousand dead Ukrainian soldiers ago. Here’s the clown prince of British modern prime ministers.
[Video clip:
BORIS JOHNSON: As for the role the Ukrainians could themselves play in stability and security in the Euro-Atlantic area, it’s obvious. You know, thanks to the heroism of the Ukrainian forces, they’ve been fighting for more than two years, almost three years. They are the most accomplished armed forces in the whole continent. And it’s easy to see how they could play a very, very important role in peace and stability on the European continent. Some of the arguments I think we should make to our American friends is if they want to take back some U.S. troops from the European theatre and save a few billion, a lot of billion, Mike, then I’m sure the Ukrainians, having defeated the Russians and there’s nobody more effective at defeating the Russians and the Ukrainians, I’m sure the Ukrainians would be only too happy to backfill in Europe. Anyway, those are some of the things, some of the ways in which I think Ukraine can be a force for stability.]
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Your comments on this foolish man.
GEORGE GALLOWAY: A pound shop Winston Churchill. I don’t know if you have pound shops, they’re where everything is reduced to a bargain basement. They come ten a penny and I’m afraid that Boris Johnson is just the latest in a line of pound shop Winston Churchills. They think that by inserting some gravel into their voice and giving themselves ever fatter bottoms that they can be Winston Churchill, but they cannot. Churchill himself said, “Jaw, jaw is better than war, war.” That was his principle and they have obviously forgotten it.
It’s hard to exaggerate the gravity of the crime of which Boris Johnson is guilty. If he was still in Parliament and I was still in Parliament, I’d never be tired reminding him of that. You say blood on his hands, Your Honour, he’s got blood all the way up to his armpits. The hundreds of thousands, maybe a million of dead Ukrainians are his direct responsibility because this war could have ended when scarcely any of those had been killed and by not ending it, by his decisive role in stopping the ending of it, then the deaths of all these young men, many of them kidnapped from the streets in the presence of their parents, the presence of their children, their sweethearts, dragged off, rifles stuck in their hands and sent to the front, ill-clad, ill-armed, ill-trained, all for the madness of this civil war, for that is what it is, and Boris Johnson still swanning around, accepting very fat fees, by the way, his fees are as fat as his bottom, and playing the celebrity role of the clown.
The Gaza Situation
JUDGE NAPOLITANO: Flying over to Gaza before we conclude, I think you can make the argument that Donald Trump is worse than Joe Biden because of the level and amount and consistency of heavy, heavy bombs and the planes from which to drop them that he has sent to the Netanyahu regime because Trump seems to be in lockstep under the thumb of the Zionist donor class here and seems to say yes to whatever Netanyahu wants to do.
GEORGE GALLOWAY: Well the only exculpation of Joe Biden I could give is that it was his auto-pen that did it, whoever was wielding the auto-pen is the one we should excoriate, but I’m afraid on this question there is no difference, you couldn’t slip sixpence between Biden, Harris and Trump on this. They are all, and you know, my children ask me why, and it’s one of the few questions, even existential ones, that I’m simply unable to answer. I cannot give you an answer as to why both your country and mine are ready to bend their entire shape to the demands of a country of seven millions of people, thousands of miles away from both of us, on the Mediterranean, who don’t like us. I’m a Roman Catholic, I think you are too, our priests are spat upon literally as a matter of routine in…
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: The streets of Holy Jerusalem, I’ve seen it with my own eyes, and when you tax the spitter, he says it is our tradition to spit at Christian priests and pilgrims in the alleyways of the old city of Jerusalem. They don’t like us, they feel that they are the superior race. In any case, even if none of that was true, how can it be that we are ready to pay any price, and we’ve paid a considerable one, pay any price to do anything that this small country of seven million people asks of us? And it makes no difference whether it’s Golda Meir or Benjamin Netanyahu, and it makes no difference whether it is Lyndon Johnson or whether it is Donald Trump.
Now in your country, it’s partly explicable by the huge amounts of campaign funding that swill around in your political system. We don’t even have that excuse, Judge. The maximum you can spend on an election in any contest in Britain is just a little over $25,000. I could raise that going door to door with a hat stretched out in my hand. I have no need of the big donors of the Israel lobby. How do you explain the Israeli influence over the British governments, no matter who the Prime Minister is?
GEORGE GALLOWAY: In a way, that’s what makes it even more inexplicable. I can explain it in America because you get millions of dollars. People who are not even household names in America are in the industry of 2, 3, 4, 5 millions and more from the Israel lobby. Well if you didn’t have any principles, if you didn’t have any morals, 2, 3, 4, 5 millions would probably turn your head. But in Britain we don’t even have that excuse.
So when my children ask me, why do we do all this for Israel, why do we allow them to blow the heads of children in tents, bomb 2,000 pound bombs on top of tents, why do we allow them to massacre people in hospitals? And they’ve been doing it all of my lifetime and I’m not young. They have been doing it for 76 years and there’s no sign of them stopping.
I know why they do it, because they have to erase every last vestige of the people from whom they stole the houses, stole the fields, stole the land. They have to do that, it’s either or for them, it’s either us, the settlers or them, the original people, but why the rest of the world continues to pay for it.
The Greater Danger to Peace in the Middle East
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Which is the greater danger, you spoke earlier about the battleships circling toward Iran, which is the greater danger toward peace in the Middle East, Iran or Israel?
GEORGE GALLOWAY: I mean the answer to that is a no-brainer. It is a no-brainer and if you asked the people of the Middle East from the Atlantic to the Gulf, from Marrakesh to Bahrain, there would only be one answer. Even from the slaves of the United States, they would tell you in private but not in public that Israel is the problem. It’s unending, unyielding determination to eradicate, I mean I’ve got to use words like that, though they are words read of the Holocaust and of the great crimes against the Jewish people in Europe in the 1930s and 40s, but they simply do want to eradicate, to extirpate, to annihilate the original people whose land they stole.
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: It’s almost biblical in character when you state it like that. George, I wish there were more people with your eloquence and with your reach. This little show does the best it can, we have many colleagues who run programs similar to this, but your voice is so well-recognized and well-respected internationally, please keep it up.
Thank you very much for the time you gave us today, it is a treat for all of my international viewers to be able to see you. This will be posted immediately and I’m sure it will draw an enormous number. God love you George, I hope we see you again soon. God bless you George.
Conclusion
JUDGE ANDREW NAPOLITANO: Thank you, a great human being and a privilege for me that he gave us this time. Coming up later today, 1 o’clock this afternoon, Professor Glenn Deason, at 2 o’clock Aaron Maté, at 3 o’clock Phil Giraldi, Judging the Politano for Judging Freedom. Thank you. Thank you.
