Former Israeli amb. to US: Hamas is 'not just a terrorist organization, they are a genocidal organization'
Ron Dermer joins 'Life, Liberty & Levin' to discuss the deadly Israel-Gaza conflict
This is a rush transcript from "Life, Liberty & Levin," May 16, 2021. This copy may not be in its final form and may be updated.
MARK LEVIN, FOX NEWS HOST: Hello, America. I'm Mark Levin and this is LIFE, LIBERTY & LEVIN.
We have two great guests tonight, two great topics, very important. The war against Israel in the Middle East, as well as the war against our energy grid in the United States. We want to cover both topics thoroughly.
But before we do, I want to comment on what is taking place in Israel. I want you to imagine if you live in Dallas, Texas, or Houston, if you live in Los Angeles, or New York, or Washington, D.C., if you live in any of our major cities and we have forces right on our border, on the border with Mexico, and quite frankly on the border with Canada, firing thousands of missiles, many of which have been provided to these terrorists by the Iranian regime, from Hamas and Islamic Jihad, attempting to reach our cities and in fact, reaching some of our cities.
And imagine if there were individuals within our country who were involved in pogroms, much like Kristallnacht, that is people trying to target the Jewish citizens of this country, or other citizens of this country, just because of their faith.
Imagine they were burning down our synagogues. Imagine they were going door-to-door looking for the Jews to attack and so forth.
This is what has been going on in the State of Israel. Israel didn't fire missiles into the Gaza Strip. Israel didn't fire missiles into Jerusalem. Israel didn't fire missiles at anybody.
Israel is under attack, and the terrorist forces that are attacking Israel, they are the same old terrorist forces backed by the same old terrorist states and that's what Israel is dealing with.
What was the provocation? There was no provocation. Abbas, who was elected to one term in the Palestinian Authority, he is said to be the moderate. He is actually a terrorist. He was elected in 2006 for a four-year term that's gone on into 17 years. There was supposed to be another election, but it looked like Hamas was going to defeat him.
So he looked for a pretext to call off the election, which is exactly what he did. He lied. He said that the Israelis were destroying parts of the Al- Aqsa mosque on the Temple Mount, which they were not, so riots broke out there.
Hamas decided to join in, and what did they do? They start firing missiles at the Israelis.
Now, when our President says -- President Biden says, "The Israelis have a right to defend themselves," I think to myself, yes, they do have a right to defend themselves. They are a sovereign country and you're not in a position to tell them whether they can defend themselves or not. The Jewish people are defending themselves for 4,000 years without advice from Joe Biden. That's number one.
But what really bothers me about the Biden administration is, he has all these Israel haters throughout the State Department starting at the Secretary of State level, he's got them in the National Security Council, starting with the National Security adviser. He's got them all populated throughout his government and they are talking about the Palestinian terrorists and the Israeli government and the Israeli people in relative terms, they both need to tamp it down. They both need to respect the law.
You've got terrorists attacking our closest ally. That's not how you treat an ally. And by the way, I'll say it, in September -- what -- seven or eight months ago, peace was breaking out all over the Middle East with Israel. We had five Arab states, as I count, signed peace deals with Israel.
On the South Lawn of the White House when President Trump was in office, you had signing ceremonies with the Prime Minister of Israel. Now, what do you have in the first hundred - hundred twenty days of the Biden administration? You have war against the State of Israel, and Biden does not have clean hands.
Like everything else he has done to this country, he has attempted to reverse the Trump policies and in doing so, he is ruining our country and he is destroying our foreign policy. What am I talking about?
Caroline Glick has a great piece in "Israel Hayom," a publication in Israel and she points out three main things that the Biden administration did to reverse Trump administration policy.
Among other things: "Restored U.S. funding to the Palestinian Authority, despite its support for terrorism, without any requirements; reinstated U.S. funding of the United Nations agencies such as UNWRA, that work with Hamas to disseminate Nazi like anti-Semitism, and he announced that the U.S. intends to rejoin the U.N. Human Rights Council."
Now what does the U.N. Human Rights Council does? It spends its every working day trashing the State of Israel. And on top of that, they talk about a two-state solution over and over again, while missiles are flying into the State of Israel. I would say you might want to put that off a little while, while we're talking about what's taking place in the State of Israel.
This is a thumbnail sketch as I see it and I spoke with the former Ambassador to the United States from Israel, Ron Dermer, who's also a close confidante of the Prime Minister of Israel. Mr. Ambassador, how are you, sir?
RON DERMER, FORMER ISRAELI AMBASSADOR TO THE UNITED STATES: All things considered, I'm okay. But our country is under attack by Hamas terrorists who are firing rockets from Gaza and trying to wreak havoc throughout the country.
LEVIN: You know, Mr. Ambassador, this isn't the first time Hamas has done this. In the past four years, you've had relative peace in the Middle East. You have a breakout of violence in Jerusalem, then you have Hamas firing missiles, missiles, they probably got -- most of them -- from the Iranian regime that has been funneling them into the Gaza Strip.
Is Israel -- if I hear the Prime Minister correctly, the Prime Minister says, look, we can't put up with this. We can't just have ceasefire, maybe we will, maybe we won't. But I have got to put an end to this and we need to target who is involved in this. Is that the position of the Israeli government now?
DERMER: Well, Israel is determined as any country to restore security to our population. We have hundreds, well over 1,500 rockets that have already been fired and that number is increasing by the hour. No government would tolerate such attacks against its civilian population.
So we have to do whatever we have to do to protect our civilians and Israel, the people of Israel demand that. There you've got millions of Israelis who have had to run to bomb shelters, and many of them have had to sleep in bomb shelters because they are being bombarded by these missile attacks.
What Israel's policy is, is to restore security, and we also have to restore deterrence. And what that means, Mark, is we have to exact such a high price from Hamas, that they understand that they made a big mistake by launching these rockets at Israel, and that they will think twice, three times, four times and 10 times before they launch such an attack in the future. That's how we can get a long term period of calm, and we intend to do it. It doesn't matter how much pressure is being brought to bear on Israel, Israel is going to go ahead, move forward, restore security and restore deterrence,
LEVIN: You know, the reporting here in the United States, and I guess the rest of the world is par for the course. That is that Israeli is increasing attacks on the Gaza, that both sides are increasing their military actions. They treat Hamas and Islamic Jihad, these terrorist groups on an equivalency with Israel.
Israel is trying to hit as best as it can, military targets in very dense areas, and the terrorists are obviously aiming heavily at population centers. What do you say to the media out there in this -- they do this constantly -- that treats Israel like it treats the terrorists who are attacking Israel?
DERMER: I think it's downright shameful. I'd ask the American people how would they like it if foreign governments or the international media drew a moral equivalency between the United States of America and Al-Qaeda, or the United States of America and ISIS.
I think people in Israel are disgusted by it because there is no moral equivalence between a terrorist organization and the Democratic State of Israel. And not only that, there is something even worse about the media's attitude, most of the media's attitude. In fact, I would say about 98 percent of the international media's attitude.
They are actually endangering Palestinian civilians because the game that the terrorists play is they not only target our civilians by hurling these missiles into Israeli population areas, and they're trying to kill as many Israeli civilians, women, children, it doesn't matter to them, they want to kill as many Israelis as possible. But they also embed their arsenals of rockets and missiles and weapons and bombs and drones, they embed it in civilian areas, so they use their civilians as human shields.
And what they rely on is a gullible, or even worse, international media that when we respond to their attacks, and even if we do surgical strikes, there will always be unintended casualties among the civilian population.
We are not trying to harm them. We're doing everything to keep the civilians among the Palestinians out of harm's way. Hamas does everything to put them in harm's way. But Hamas is relying on an international media that will then put all the blame on Israel; that would pressure the international community to move against Israel and to stop Israel to try to pressure us to stop us from doing what we have to do to fight terrorism.
If the international media in the United States or elsewhere around the world wants to help peace, wants to keep civilians out of harm's way, it is not that they shouldn't show all the pictures, it's that they should blame Hamas. If terror organizations can't get away with it, they'll stop doing it. If they can get away with it, they'll continue to do it. It's just that simple.
LEVIN: It's really so strange, isn't it, Mr. Ambassador that everybody knows Hamas is a terrorist organization supported by Hezbollah in Iran and the Muslim Brotherhood, everybody knows that they are there for the purpose of committing acts of terrorism and war against the Israeli people, same with Islamic Jihad, and everybody knows that the missiles were fired from the Gaza Strip into population areas and other areas in the State of Israel, and yet we have a media that reverses roles. Why do you think that is?
Is it because Israel is now capable of defending itself? It's not like 60 or 70 years ago? And Hamas is made to look like a victim -- what do you think -- what is the psychology, do you think?
DERMER: It's a very interesting question. Look, it could be laziness, that it's an easy story to tell, to run to where innocents are harmed, to not make any moral distinction between a country that is doing everything to prevent innocence from being harmed to a terror organization that is actually trying to harm innocents, both Israeli innocents and Palestinians.
Look, Mark, if Israel were trying to kill Palestinian civilians, you would have not hundreds dead, you'd not have thousands, you'd have tens of thousands, or hundreds of thousands with the firepower we have, and with the amount of munitions that we have dropped on Gaza, even up to this point, if we were trying to target Palestinian civilians, you'd have tens of thousands of people dead.
The reason why you don't is we don't want to do that. But the media is very lazy about telling the story. They want to paint Israel as some sort of Goliath, paint the Palestinians as David, and I think it's shameful. Beyond that, I don't know if it's in the United States, but it's certainly in parts of the world, they don't like when Jews defend themselves.
You know, in Europe, they're used to Jews being defenseless and powerless, and the days when the Jewish people are going to be defenseless against our enemies, those days are over. And a lot of people are not used to that. We are a proud sovereign country, and we're going to defend ourselves just like any other sovereign country would.
Imagine if you had thousands of missiles flying into American cities, I'd ask the American people, what would you want your government to do? Now, mind you, America has fought wars, difficult wars thousands of miles away, but we are fighting this war when our own people are being rocketed back home, when we have millions of Israelis in bomb shelters.
I think if you put -- if the American people put themselves in the shoes of the people of Israel, then I think they will understand that we are acting with enormous restraint, and hopefully they will back us as we do what we have to do to fight the terror organizations and fight this terror network.
And beyond that, I want to say something about Hamas. You said everybody knows that Islamic Jihad is backed by Iran. I don't know. Most people's sense of history goes back to breakfast. But Islamic Jihad is a wholly owned subsidiary of the Islamic Republic of Iran. Hamas is backed by Iran.
But beyond that, Mark, Hamas is not just a terrorist organization, they are a genocidal organization. They call for the murder of Jews worldwide. That is in their charter.
It is shameful for any self-respecting government in the world, certainly any democratic government in the world to draw any moral equivalence between the State of Israel and Hamas.
LEVIN: All right, we'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
LEVIN: Welcome back, America. Ambassador Ron Dermer, I've been reading reports and seeing some video of horrific things that have happened in towns like Lod where you have Jews living next to Arabs, all Israelis; in other towns in Israel, where they are -- it's almost like Kristallnacht, the mayor said. It was out of control. You had synagogues put on fire. You had people removing their mezuzahs from the door because they don't want to be identified by Jews because you had gangs roaming the streets here.
Is this new since the founding of Israel? And if it is, this looks to me like it's a big problem.
DERMER: Well, it's certainly something that has had not happened for many decades and it is very disturbing to the people of Israel. Twenty percent of our citizens in our country are Israeli-Arabs and we work very hard in order to ensure coexistence between Jews and Arabs within Israel.
What happened a few nights ago, Mark, is that in one Israeli town, the town of Lod, which is very close to the airport in Israel, we had basically an Arab gang that went and burned cars, attacked Jews, vandalized property, and many of the residents of Lod were extremely frightened by what they saw because there was very little police, if no police presence in Israel.
And then what happened the next day and the subsequent evenings were that Jews came from different parts of Israel in order to protect that population, and you had two different types of groups. You had Jews who were coming to essentially supplement the police force and defend those families because there were not enough police to do that job, but you had other Jews -- gangs -- also a few young people, I can't tell you if it was dozens or a couple of hundred. But they started attacking Arabs, not only in that city, but in other cities throughout Israel.
So it's a very terrible thing that happened. The Prime Minister of Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, made it clear that this was totally unacceptable. All vigilantism, anyone who tries to take the law into their own hands, it's completely unacceptable, whether it's a Jew against an Arab or an Arab against a Jew, and he called for calm. He is going to put in many more police forces in order to ensure that we have calm.
But I can tell you something, there is a fundamental difference between what you're hearing from the Jewish leadership in the country and the Arab leadership of the country and that is very disturbing.
All the Jewish leadership in the country, the religious leadership, and the political leadership across the political spectrum has not only not supported these attacks of Jews against Arabs, but have condemned them in the most forceful terms.
Most of the Arab political leaders, or virtually all of them have been silent on this. You have had a few religious leaders in the Arab sector that have come out and it's very important to hear their voice because we have to have leaders, speaking clearly and forcefully condemning this act.
You can have radicals and fanatics in any society, in any population. The test of a society is how do you respond to those fanatics? In Israel, we spit them out. We spit out those Jews that would perpetrate these acts. That is not happening among the Arabs and it is very disturbing for people in Israel, as disturbing as these attacks are coming from Gaza.
And I want one other thing that's important to realize, in the last year, we've actually seen an increase of coexistence, a dramatic increase, I would say, of coexistence between Jews and Arabs in Israel. It's hard to believe that when you see the pictures coming out of Israel, but we signed the Abraham Accords. You saw a coming together of Jews and Arabs across the political spectrum in Israel.
You also saw during the COVID crisis, the corona crisis in Israel, as we were trying to treat these patients, that you had Arabs and Jews working together as doctors and nurses in hospitals, paramedics, pictures that were shown throughout the world and there was a very good feeling about the possibilities of coexistence.
And what has happened in the last few days has really set that back, and I think there's hope among all the people of Israel that we will get back very quickly to the path of coexistence.
Why we stand together to confront the terrorists in Gaza who are attacking not just the Jews of Israel, but attacking the Arabs of Israel. We had an Arab father and a daughter from the same city, Lod, who was killed in a rocket attack because Hamas doesn't discriminate between Jews and Arabs. They're trying to kill all people of Israel, and we have to stand together and confront them.
LEVIN: Is the goal of the Israeli government right now, you said to really punish Hamas -- the Hamas-Islamic Jihad leadership and so forth -- is the goal here to really crush them in a way where they cannot stand up again? Is that even possible?
DERMER: Well, it's certainly possible for us to do that. I mean, Israel has the power to go in and conquer Gaza and fully destroy Hamas. That's a decision that the political leaders would have to make and to decide what is the price of such an operation? And what do we do the day after?
That's one of the reasons why Israel hasn't done it up into this point. We have no desire to attack Gaza. We have no desire to have any military operations in Gaza, in fact, we left Gaza, if you will recall; in 2005, Israel pulled out all its military forces. We actually pulled out all the settlements in Gaza, uprooted Jews who lived in Jewish communities in Gaza.
We disinterred people from cemeteries in Gaza and we left Gaza and handed the keys over to the Palestinian leadership. Hamas quickly took over, this terror organization, and they have used that as a base to attack Israel and it is a base that is backed by Iran and Iran is sitting back watching this and they are trying to stir the pot and they hope for as much violence as possible.
And those people, I would say in the international community that are drawing a moral equivalence between Hamas and Israel, they are actually benefiting Iran. It is very dangerous and what needs to be done now is all the responsible governments in the world should be backing Israel's right to defend itself, and should push through all the political pressures that always come year after year every time there's rounds of violence, people call for the international community to come in and to stop it.
We don't need to be stopped. We are a country that values life. We are facing an enemy that glorifies death. What we need is the full backing of the international community for our right to defend ourselves.
If Hamas sees that, if other Palestinian terror groups and other countries throughout the world like Iran see that, they will lose this battle and they will be very, very careful about starting a new round of violence in the future.
LEVIN: When we come back, Mr. Ambassador, you brought it up. I want to ask you about Iran. Iran's role in this and Iran's role, period.
We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
JON SCOTT, FOX NEWS CHANNEL ANCHOR: Welcome to "FOX News Live." I'm Jon Scott.
Another round of violence in the Middle East as Israel unleashes heavy airstrikes on several locations in Gaza City. In a televised address, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu saying the attacks against Hamas would continue at quote, "full force."
And just within the last hour, President Biden releasing a short message to celebrate the end of Ramadan. He also had this to say --
(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)
JOE BIDEN (D), PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: We also believe Palestinians and Israelis equally deserve to live in safety and security and enjoy equal measure of freedom, prosperity and democracy. And my administration is going to continue to engage Palestinians and Israelis and other regional partners to work towards sustained calm.
(END VIDEO CLIP)
SCOTT: I'm Jon Scott. Now back to LIFE, LIBERTY, & LEVIN.
LEVIN: Welcome back, Ambassador Ron Dermer, former Ambassador to the United States from Israel and confidante of the Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
I brought up Iran. What is Iran's role? And even bigger than that, you can see their efforts to get back into this Iran deal, efforts to pour billions of dollars into the Iranian economy. President Trump and his administration took a completely different position, it was to choke them off economically, allow the people of Iran who want to be free to have an opportunity to be free.
It seems that we've taken a completely different path. What's your opinion?
DERMER: Well, Iran is a major source -- the major source of instability and insecurity throughout the Middle East. They're in Iraq, in Syria, in Lebanon, in Yemen and Gaza. Virtually anywhere you look in the Middle East where there is terrorism and instability, Iran is behind it.
Israel believes it would be extremely dangerous to return to the nuclear deal with Iran. We were very grateful that the previous administration made the decision to withdraw from the deal and to restore sanctions.
A lot of people in Washington are running around saying that the reason why we're returning to the nuclear deal with Iran is we have to prevent Iran from developing a bomb and they're closer today than they were then.
So I'd ask those people, is there any country on the planet that has a greater interest in Israel to prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon? Obviously none. Iran is a regime that vows to destroy the State of Israel and works every day to destroy the State of Israel.
So if there were a deal that was on the table that would actually prevent a regime that vows to destroy the State of Israel and works every day to destroy the State of Israel. So, if there were a deal that was on the table that would actually prevent Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, Israel would be the first country to support it.
But the reason why we opposed the deal in 2015 and why we oppose a return to the deal in 2021 is the deal doesn't do that, Mark. What it does is actually paves Iran's path to a nuclear arsenal, because all the restrictions the deal puts in place will be automatically removed in a few years.
So it makes absolutely no sense to return to a nuclear deal because it doesn't actually solve the problem of Iran's nuclear weapons program.
Beyond that, when the -- in 2015, when the international community removed all the sanctions against Iran, money poured into Iran's coffers. I'm talking about hundreds of billions of dollars. People talked, if you remember, whether it was $50 billion or $100 billion or $150 billion that would go to Iran, that's the small money of the deal. The big deal was the ability of Iran to sell oil on the financial markets.
And at some point, about two and a half years ago, Iran was selling about 2.8 million barrels a day. And because of the policies of the previous administration, because they took a very strong stance against Iran, because they ratcheted up all those pressures in the sanctions.
Iran, last year, was already selling about a few hundred thousand barrels a day, that's about a two and a half million barrels a day difference. And at a price of $60.00 to $70.00 a barrel. That means, it starved the Iranian regime of about $150 million a day, about $4.5 billion a month, about $50 billion a year.
And I'd love to tell you that when Iran was getting all that money, they were establishing a GI bill for returning members of the Revolutionary Guard. But what they were doing was fueling their war machine throughout the Middle East, in Iraq, in Lebanon, in Syria, in Yemen, fighting against Americans, against America's Arab allies, and against the State of Israel.
So it would be a huge, huge mistake and a great danger for Israel's security for the current administration, the Biden administration to go back to the Iran Nuclear Deal. They are saying they're going to go back to get a longer and stronger deal. Mark, that's not going to happen.
They were dealt a set of cards, a full house by the previous administration, and you don't trade in your cards and end up with like a five high and think you're going to negotiate a better deal.
All the pressure is on Iran today. The maximum pressure campaign was working, and those in Washington who say it wasn't working don't know what they are talking about. That maximum pressure campaign is working and it has -- it wasn't in place fully until 2019 because it took President Trump about a year and a half to withdraw from the deal. It was another year before America ended the waivers on the sale of Iranian oil.
And Iran was facing massive pressure for 18 months that was collapsing their economy. It was starving them of all those foreign reserves in their banking system, but they had one hope and they had a hope that pretty soon that a change in U.S. policy would save them.
What I would implore the Biden administration to do is to keep their foot on the gas, keep the pressure on Iran. It has worked, it will continue to work, and if they do that, they will make the Middle East safer.
We had peace a few months ago with four Arab states. One of the reasons we were able to reach those peace deals was because the U.S. administration was forcefully confronting Iran and embracing the State of Israel. If the Biden administration continues that policy, you will see the expansion of peace in the Middle East.
LEVIN: I think you're a hundred percent correct. But I also think that the Biden administration, which is a hundred percent incorrect is ideologically driven and committed to this. Many of the same people who are involved in the initial negotiations are back in the Biden administration and they are wedded to this deal, for reasons that are incomprehensible to me.
But you're right, the people in the Middle East, the Israelis, the Gulf Arab states, they want nothing to do with this.
And yet, it seems our State Department of National Security Council does.
DERMER: And we know a little something about this. We live in the region. Israel and the Arab States, we were the guinea pigs of this failed experiment in 2015. And the difference now between 2021 and 2015 is in 2015, there were question marks. What would happen with this deal? Would Iran change its spots or its stripes? And they did it. They just actually made the problem much worse.
And the decision to withdraw from the nuclear deal and restore sanctions, and I said this many times when I was a sitting Ambassador in Washington, that decision by President Trump was the single most important decision any American President has made for the security of the State of Israel.
A decision to go back into the nuclear deal with Iran would be terrible for Israel, bad for the Arab states in the region, and really, really bad for the chances of peace.
LEVIN: Well, my best to you and your family, the people of Israel, and I will say this, the American people stand behind Israel, whether or not our government does.
God bless you, Ambassador Ron Dermer and be well.
DERMER: And you've got a friend in Israel, in the heart of a very dangerous region, and we're proud to be America's ally and we'll continue to stand strong.
LEVIN: God bless you.
We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
LEVIN: Welcome back, ladies and gentlemen. I have with us Peter Pry, a man that we need to speak to. The number one expert, in my view, on the electromagnetic pulse, the EMP Task Force Executive Director, also U.S. Nuclear Strategy Forum Director.
You've been warning now like Paul Revere for years that the electrical grid is open to cyberattack and other forms of attack. We just saw what happened to the Colonial Oil Pipeline, which has shut down an enormous amount of energy availability to the people all along the East Coast and in the southeast.
And so it got me thinking, Peter, we have an electrical grid that is vulnerable. Please explain to the American people concisely what is the electrical grid and how does it work?
DR. PETER PRY, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, EMP TASKFORCE Well, the electrical grid comprises three major components, there's an Eastern grid, which is the most important part, 75 percent of the electricity United States is generated in the eastern grid, and it supports most of our population. Then there's the western grid, and then Texas has its own independent grid.
You know, and the way it works is we have generators that generate electricity from hydroelectric plants, from natural gas power plants, from nuclear power plants. These are transmitted over what's called the bulk power system that carries very high voltage power lines, and these are stepped down into a distribution system by a series of transformers. You know, big, extra high voltage transformers that can carry 500,000 volts, for example, and that it is stepped down and stepped down through a series of smaller transformers.
And you can see some of them on telephone poles outside of your house until it's finally down to 120 volts, so it can be used in your house. And that's basically how the electric grid is established.
It's a great big, enormous machine. And it can be it -- it is controlled by things called SCADAS, Supervisory Control and Data Acquisition Systems. And a cyberattack can attack those SCADAS, Manipulate the SCADAS, so they possibly can destroy transformers, generators, cause the grid to collapse for a protracted period, and you could end up having a nationwide blackout from a sophisticated actor like Russia or China using the equivalent of a cyber nuclear bomb, as it were that could cause -- begin the cascading collapse.
And this isn't science fiction. In the great northeast blackout of 2003, that whole event was started by a tree branch coming in contact with the grid. And it cascaded failures through the whole northeastern grid, eventually putting 50 million Americans in the dark for better part of a day, including in New York City, where people had to walk back home across the Brooklyn Bridge.
Now that wasn't an intelligent actor, it was just the tree branch. And part of the vulnerability of our electric grid is because it hasn't kept pace with demand. It is constantly operating on the verge of failure. So it wouldn't take much to start the dominoes falling to cause a massive nationwide blackout that would be catastrophic for the United States.
And our adversaries have this in their military plans to do exactly the sort of thing in the event of a war, they think they could win a war by means of attacking our critical infrastructures, particularly the electric grid and then they wouldn't have to do battle with the U.S. Army, Navy or Marines, because even our military depends upon the civilian electric grid in order to project power for their energy, so they can project power and run the military bases.
LEVIN: And it seems like we're feeding right into this scenario, Dr. Pry because the Biden administration wants us to use almost exclusively electricity. They want to get away from fossil fuels. They apparently don't understand that in many respects, we need fossil fuels in order to create electricity.
But that said, they would make narrower and narrower and narrower options for creating energy in this country. They will put even more demand on the electrical grid.
And so I want to ask you this, trillions and trillions of dollars in the first hundred days of the Biden administration have been spent. They want to spend $4 trillion more. The effects on inflation and prices, all of that enormous, but putting that aside, are you aware whether any of that money is actually going to go to protecting the electrical grid from our enemies.
PRY: Out of all of those hundreds of -- out of all of those trillions of dollars, only in a very small fraction, about $100 billion is being dedicated to modernizing the electric grid infrastructure. And most of that is going to go into combating climate change by building windmills and solar, those sorts of technology.
I'm not aware that any of that money is earmarked for cybersecurity, or for EMP -- or for protecting the country against EMP attack or physical sabotage. You know, small numbers of Special Forces teams can also attack transformers with high powered rifles and take them out.
It wouldn't take that much money, you know, in order to protect ourselves against this threat. But, to my knowledge, the Biden administration has not dedicated any moneys to EMP or cyber protection and the modernization plan yet. I and my colleagues have been urging them to do so publicly and privately.
LEVIN: When we come back, Dr. Pry, I want to ask you, so what? They knock out a few transformers? Can we just replace them? I mean, we've been through Mother Nature and certain things have happened and we lose electricity for three or four days and they send out the trucks and they get the wires back up.
And what does happen if there is a successful attack on our electrical grid, what would happen to the people in this country?
We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
LEVIN: Welcome back. So Peter Pry, why not just replace transformers and what would happen if they knock out the electrical grid in this country?
PRY: Well, we don't have enough transformers to replace. It takes 18 months to build one of them and we don't manufacture them in this country. They have to be brought over from overseas.
So if we lost even a few transformers, you know, it would take a long time to recover. And if we had a nationwide blackout that lasted a year, the Congressional EMP Commission which I serve estimated that we could lose up to 90 percent of our population through starvation, disease and societal collapse because we couldn't figure out how to keep 330 million Americans alive with no food and water for a year because everything depends directly or indirectly on electricity, including water.
I mean, immediately if you have a nationwide blackout, the water stops. So this is the problem. This is an existential threat. There's a real existential threat unlike the allegations about climate change.
LEVIN: And this attack on the Colonial Pipeline, it seems very strange to me that we're basically saying, there's this group of marauders inside Russia that are doing that. Now, we all know that Putin knows what's going on inside Russia. What do you make of this?
PRY: All of these alleged criminal groups work either for Russia's military intelligence organization, the GRU or for the SVR, which is the successor to the KGB, the Russian mafia is a tool of Russia.
So the Kremlin is doing this, and basically three weeks ago, they as much as told us they were going to do something like this. In the midst of the Ukrainian crisis, Margarita Simonyan, who is an unofficial spokesman for the Kremlin, but an intimate of Putin and she runs the media giants RT and Sputnik, you know, had a TV interview where she announced that a war, a cyber-war between the United States and Russia was inevitable.
That Russia was much better prepared to win such a war, that they could black -- and she gave examples that they could blackout the whole United States, they could blackout Florida, they could blackout Harlem, so they could do things selectively if they wanted, and warned the United States to back off when it came to Ukraine and get out of their way.
We've all have been expecting Russia, China, North Korea to test the Biden administration. Well, this is the test. It's an amazing coincidence that just a few weeks after this threat, about a cyber-war against the United States, now they've shut down the Colonial Pipeline.
I think this is a demonstration by Russia that they can do it. And that because cyber-attacks are hard to attribute that they can get away with it. And the Biden administration doesn't want to admit it, you know, because they don't want to admit this profound strategic vulnerability.
LEVIN: And I see a few problems in dealing with this in our own country, there are pro-Putin or pro-Russian forces in our country in both parties for some strange reason. There are others who accuse the United States of looking to commit acts of war that were colonialists and imperialists. There are still others that don't believe that we should have a strong military spend money like this. They call them neocons or hawks or what have you.
I mean, the idea that we can't protect the electrical grid after seeing what just happened to the Colonial Pipeline, the idea that we have to pretend that Putin doesn't know what's going on in his own country, when he has an iron fist with brass knuckles and could determine whatever he wants in his own country is truly bizarre to me.
But here's my concern. You just said something that is crucially important, my prior guest, the Ambassador-- former Ambassador from Israel to the United States is pointing out what's going on in Israel and I'm thinking we're not standing behind the State of Israel and the Chinese see this, the Russian see this, all of our enemies see this. We're not taking serious steps to protect the electrical grid or to call out the country that's behind this.
And so all of our enemies see this kind of behavior from the Biden administration, and I think it just provokes more dangerous circumstances. Quickly, your thoughts?
PRY: Yes, I agree. I think that the only reason why there hasn't been a major act of aggression, for example, Russia invading Ukraine, or China going for Taiwan, is because our adversaries are waiting to see how far we're going to fall. They're waiting for the United States hit rock bottom, you know, how deep is the Biden administration going to cut the defense budget? How long are we going to neglect our grid?
You know, our national security capabilities are in a downward direction. And some -- at some point in the Biden administration, we're going to hit rock bottom and that's when they will strike, I believe.
LEVIN: I want to thank you for your courageous voice over the years, Peter Pry and I wish you all the best and I hope people are listening to you. God bless you.
PRY: Thank you so much for having me, Mark.
LEVIN: We'll be right back.
(COMMERCIAL BREAK)
LEVIN: Welcome back, America. Joe Biden has been in office less than four months and he is a human pandemic. And this is what happens when you have a corrupt media that doesn't properly vet candidates. This is what happens when you have groups like the Never Trumpers who are more interested in settling scores than helping their country. This is what happens when you have a Democratic Party that has moved radical left.
This is what happens when you have an administration that doesn't follow the laws of economics and on and on and on and on.
So what do we have here? We have a hell of a mess.
Now what are we going to do about this? Well, we better change the House of Representatives in two years. That might be our only chance in the short run, and maybe take the Senate in two years that would certainly help.
Joe Biden throughout his career has been considered, and I say this, with all due respect a relatively dumb man with a massive ego who is willing to say and do anything to promote himself and to promote the legend of Joe Biden.
This is what we're living through today. We have perhaps the weakest President in certainly modern American history. We have a leader of the Senate in Chuck Schumer, who is one of the most partisan, vicious politicians to ever walk the planet. And over there in the House of Representatives, we have a Speaker of the House who is a nasty lady. That's the bottom line and she will do anything, anything, to promote her party.
It's time we had some politics who care about this country and look out for this country. Right now, that triumvirate of Democrats, they only care about power in their own party and in doing so are undermining the country, both internally and externally.
See you next time on LIFE, LIBERTY & LEVIN.
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