America Needs New Allies for Future Ai Wars | Judge Roy Altman

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0:37I'm Dave Rubin and joining me today is a U.S. federal judge right here in the Southern District of Florida and author of the newly released book Israel on Trial, Examining the History, the Evidence, and the Law Judge Roy K. Altman, welcome to the Rubin Report That's a beautiful looking book, thanks for having me It is a nice looking book. Look how nice it looks. I feel before we get into the book, though, we have to do a little housekeeping here. First off, although we are going to fix a little of this in post-production, you kind of, the way I'm looking at you right now, look a little small. But you are a very, very tall person.

1:11I've met you many times in person. And that should be noted. It's just important. You sit behind a bench, a desk all day. Jewish man is above six foot four and weighs 220 pounds. It should be noted. And not only that, but we met in the strangest of all places. This is right, I don't know, a few months after October 7th. I was taking a tour of southern Israel and had went to the site of the Nova Festival and to some of the kibbutz down there to see the devastation. And I'm at a gas station having a schnitzel. The war is in full bloom. I mean, there are bombs going off. You can hear explosions constantly.

1:46And I see this tall guy, something, something, babbling about Florida. You came, said hi, and it turns out we're not going to exactly reveal everything about ourselves, but we live basically within walking distance of each other, and you're a federal judge right down here in the Miami area. So it is a small, strange world, I suppose. We had to go all the way to the Gaza envelope for that. I think I said, what are you doing here? And you said, I'm having a schnitzel. What are you doing here? I'm like, what, it's nine in the morning. Of course I'm having a schnitzel. That was the best schnitzel I ever had, honestly.

2:17I mean, it's not really nine in the morning for us Americans, because, you know, we're seven hours behind. So we're all super. All right. So before we, so anyway, it was a strange way to meet, but here we are. Let's start just with a little bit about being a judge in Florida because everyone knows my love of this great free state and that so much is so functional and wonderful down here. Talk a little bit about your history. What got you involved in that? And maybe a little bit about just the Florida situation and then we'll spend the rest of the time on the book. Yeah. I, when I was very little, knew that I wanted to be in public service my whole life.

2:53My family was from Venezuela. My grandparents escaped the Holocaust in Europe. And when I was in college, my junior, senior year, I played football and baseball at Colombia. And I came back to Venezuela to be with my grandfather the last time that I would see him. He was dying of cancer. and there was a huge protest in Venezuela because Hugo Chavez, the dictator, had requested the authority from the Supreme Court to run forever until the day he died. The Constitution said you could only run for one five-year term, but all the people that he packed onto the Supreme Court had said the Constitution lets you run until the end of your life, which is what he ended up doing.

3:34And so a million Venezuelans took to the streets to protest. By the way, when we Venezuelans say a million, we really mean like a hundred thousand. Okay. But it was a lot of people. And, uh, and that was actually the day that my father and I had come back to Venezuela to be with my grandfather for the last time. And we were out on the balcony. My grandfather and I, he were playing chess. He had taught me to play chess. And he said he was, he weighed like 80 pounds. You know, he was in a wheelchair, very weak, but he was a larger than life man. And he said to me, what kind of lawyer do you want to be?

4:07And I said, well, I really don't know, Abuelo. And he pointed out his very bony finger at the crowd. It took him a great deal of effort. And he said, always remember, this is what happens to a country when good people don't serve it. And then he died a week later. And so for me, it was always obvious that I would devote myself to life in the public service. And when the president's people went to nominate me during the first Trump term, when I was 34 years old, everybody said, well, that's crazy. You're way too young. You have a whole life of money making in front of you. You could do this when you're 50 or 60.

4:47For me, it was an easy call to serve my country and the community that's welcomed me with open arms. You mentioned Miami and Florida. We lived through the Holocaust. We came to Venezuela. My mother was held up at gunpoint twice. The second time she was pregnant with my sister, she said to my dad, we're going to America whether you like it or not. And so we came and we knew no one and had nothing. But in this country, we were always taught that we could be and do anything so long as we worked hard and treated people with respect. And that's what we've done since we've been here. And so when I was given the opportunity during the first Trump term to put my hat in the ring to be a federal judge and to serve this community, I considered it a tremendous blessing and have never looked back.

5:30Yeah. And there are so many stories down here like yours, maybe not with the outcome of becoming a federal judge, but people that fled Venezuela or Cuba, particularly that come here and just want to fully embrace everything that is America. It's really, it's really incredible. Well, why don't we just quickly talk about Venezuela then? You know, obviously a lot has changed there in the last couple of months from my Venezuelan friends. And actually you and I were both at the, took my team to the World Baseball Classic to the Israel-Venezuela game. The Venezuelans seem pretty happy about this. Oh, that's an understatement.

6:03Well, first of all, that Israel-Venezuela game was funny in a lot of different ways. My dad, we were there. I bought 30 tickets because I coached a baseball team of kids and took all the kids and, of course, my dad, who's Venezuelan and Jewish. It was like a dance party, as you remember, and it was like 30 ,000 Venezuelans and 100 Jews, you know? But the Venezuelans could not have placed— Yeah. Yeah. Every time it was like 11 to nothing, but every time like an Israeli would hit like a single, you know, an infield single, all the Venezuelans would be like, good, very, very good, very nice. We were the JV team, but they were very friendly.

6:39But it's an understatement to say that we Venezuelans, both at home in the country and out in the diaspora, are elated by the transformation and the possibility of a new and better future for the country. It's easy to forget that Venezuela, before the dictatorship, was a country of 24 million people because one third of them, Now, 8 million people have been forced to flee their homes and are living not just in Miami, by the way, in Israel, in Argentina, in Colombia, in Panama, all over what they call the diaspora, common phrase to us Jews, and are desperate to return home and could never do so so long as the country was ruled by a corrupt and venal dictatorship, which hopefully is in the dustbin of history.

7:29and we're beginning to turn the page to the future. Now, of course, people say to me, oh, well, it's not a Jeffersonian democracy yet. You know, what are we waiting for? But I'd like to remind people, we weren't the Jeffersonian democracy right away either, right? It took a whole war and then a failed experiment with the Articles of Confederation. And it wasn't till 1787 that we ratified the Constitution. And then a few years after that, we had our first presidential election for George Washington. These things take time. And it's important to be patient. But as my friend Mike Pompeo once said, he said, it's like being at the eye doctor.

8:05Do you see it better here or do you see it better here? And for Venezuelans, both in Caracas and around the world, there's no doubt that we see it better today than we saw it just a year ago. And progress should always be a moral imperative here and in every other geopolitical situation, including, I'm guessing, the one we're about to discuss. Wait, man, you handled the segue yourself. I could do the show on my own. That's what a judge does, right? You got to move cases along, so you got to figure out the segue. You really nailed that one. Well, I thought maybe we'd start with this because, okay, so the title is Israel on Trial, but I thought the subtitle was quite good because you wrote examining the history, the evidence, and the law.

8:49And what's interesting to me, and obviously in limited time, there's only so much we can do here, is that so much of what Israel faces from the media, on social media, TikTok, the activists, now I would say almost the entire Democratic Party, from much of the international community, is just lies. It's just lies on the history, on the legality, on the morality, on all fronts. So to combat all of that, I don't know, I'm guessing you needed probably 10 ,000 more pages maybe? The problem is nobody's going to read a 10 ,000-page book. There are great books about the history of the Jews in Israel that are 1 ,000 pages long, and I've read a lot of them, like Paul Johnson's book.

9:34The problem is nobody's reading those books today, and everyone's forgotten the things that were taught in them a long time ago. So what happened to me was that after October 7th, a lot of us felt like we were very much alone at the very beginning. And how is it possible that all these organizations that were created, in many cases with Jewish money or in other cases, international organizations that were built in order to combat a true genocide, the ultimate genocide that happened in the wake of World War II. How is it possible that they've all turned their back on their root cause, on their root creation, on their root purpose?

10:10But then something amazing happened. And that was that we weren't alone. And I like to talk about that in the wake of Passover, actually, because I host a Seder in my chambers for all of our judges. And our rabbi said something interesting. He said, you know, when the Jews left Egypt, some of the Jews stayed behind. They didn't have faith. They didn't want to go along. They were fully assimilated into Egyptian society. But a lot of non-Jews, they left with their Jewish brothers and sisters. And actually, we see that that story is true through the ages and even today, right? A lot, not a lot, but some of our Jewish brothers and sisters have decided that assimilating into the zeitgeist, whatever it happens to be at the time, whether it's at the Warsaw Ghetto or in the camps as a capo, or now as putting on a terrorism scarf, which is the keffiyeh on Columbia's campus, we're going to leave our fellow Jewish brothers and sisters behind.

11:03But on the other hand, what we've seen is there are tens of millions of people around the world, but especially in this country, in America, which I think is the greatest force for good the world has ever known, who have stood shoulder to shoulder with the Jewish people and shoulder to shoulder with the one Jewish state in the world, which I think has been shown to be now beyond any peradventure, the greatest and most important ally that America has anywhere in the world. Put aside the spiritual home of Jews and Christians, put aside the national and religious implications, just pound for pound in the war that is coming in the future against our geopolitical adversaries.

11:42When they look at their, I was a football player, when they look at their side of the 50-yard line, they look around and they see, you know, they've got the Russians and the Chinese and the Iranians, or I guess they used to have the Iranians and the North Koreans. And that's, you know, they've got some pretty powerful armies there. So they look at the other side of the 50-yard line and they see America. Well, that's a big, bad animal. You know, we've got to be afraid of America. But then who's America with? You know, I don't think they're afraid of the Belgians. You know, I don't think they're afraid of the Dutch.

12:10And more and more, I think they're not that afraid of the English and the French. But I think they look around and they see that America is closely related to a people and an army who is willing to fight for the things they believe in, for the Judeo-Christian and Western civilizational values and heritage that have been bequeathed to us. And when they see Israel not just fighting but winning the wars of the future, I think they have perverse and very powerful incentives to peel America away from Israel. And so I think so much of the toxicity that you see online is a function of the fact that America's geostrategic enemies, put aside Israel, America's geostrategic enemies see Israel as the quantum computing ally, the AI ally, the cyber warfare ally, the intelligence gathering ally that America just cannot have if they're going to destroy us and defeat us in the war that's coming.

13:08And by the way, in my speeches around the country, I'm constantly amazed by the extent to which naval officers and army officers and people in tech and procurement for the Department of Defense are in the crowd. And they'll come up to me after and they'll say, everything you've said about Israel understates their value to us. People will say to me all the time, we give Israel a piece of technology that we will never test in real time because we're not at war all the time. We give it to them for a year. They give us up-to-the-minute data on how it's performing every single day in real life, battle-tested scenarios, and then a year later, guess what?

13:49They give it back to us, and it's 10 times better than it was when we first gave it to them. They are the testing ground, the beta center that we need in order to build the technologies that are going to win us the wars of the future. So I think that's how we have to combat these lies is recognize that our allies are out there and connect with them based on reason and common sense, not prejudice and bias and emotion and all those other things. And that's what I think the book does. So let's touch on each of those three parts in the subtitle for a moment. So first off, the history. People are very, very confused, either intentionally or accidentally, around the history of the land and all of that.

14:34Also, it's not the most fun part to talk about, obviously, because people's attention spans are short and, you know, all of these things. How do you feel the best way to demystify or to clarify, actually, some of the history? What do you think the best tack on that is? To me, there's a couple of propositions with the history. The first proposition is you care about a Palestinian state. You want a two-state solution. You want a Palestinian claim to sovereignty in Gaza or the West Bank, what we call Judea and Samaria. Well, guess what? Israel has never been the impediment to a Palestinian state.

15:11In fact, as the book lays out, Israel and the Western countries, including America and England, have offered the Palestinians their own state in precisely the lands they now claim they want to exercise sovereignty over it. Six different times from 1936 to 2005. And each of those six times, Israel and the international community accepted the offer and the Palestinians rejected the offer. It's worth noting they weren't even Palestinians for much of that time. That wasn't even a national identity or Palestinian meant anyone that lived in that area, including the Jews. I'm not teaching you anything, but it's worth mentioning.

15:49That's a really important point because for most of that history, the people we now know as Palestinians, they wanted to be part of Syria. They wanted to be part of the Syrian sovereign state because they had no self-identifying Palestinian national identity. In fact, there's never been Palestinian sovereignty anywhere in the Middle East. In fact, if you look at chapter one of my book, we go through three kinds of physical evidence. This is really important in the law, right? Because a guy can come in and say anything on TikTok or in the courtroom. He can say the guy is guilty. He did X, Y, and Z.

16:25But of course, we always have to have the defense lawyer come in and scrutinize his motives. Maybe he got immunity from the government. Maybe his wife was illegally here and got to stay with a visa. And that's why he's testifying for the government, right? We always scrutinize those incentives. But there are three kinds of evidence that really have no incentive structures, right? There's rocks in the ground, archaeological evidence that was created by people who have been dead for thousands of years and have absolutely no stake in this political dispute about modern Zionism. Second is blood in the veins, DNA testing of Jewish populations all over the world.

17:01And third is words on the page, is documents and scrolls and books and letters that have been written by non-Jews for thousands of years. And guess what? All three of those independent, neutral, objective pieces of evidence going back thousands of years prove one thing about this land. And that is that this land has always been Jewish land, governed by Jews and having Jews living in it in large numbers. Now, of course, there was a time in the 600s AD, thousands of years after the archaeological record shows that Jews were living in and governing this land, that Arab Muslims invaded most of the Middle East, including the land of Israel, and displaced its indigenous Jewish population.

17:46A couple things about that. First of all, it didn't just happen to the Jews, right? Arab Muslims conquered most of the Middle East and North Africa. They displaced the Persians, and they displaced the Zoroastrians, and they displaced the Amazings of Morocco that nobody talks about and the Kurds and the Yazzie, et cetera. Second thing is, as in baseball, by the way, baseball is always a good metric for life and the law, right? You don't get to be the shortstop, the guy's on second base. You push him off of second base, tag him out and have the umpire call him out, right? That's not how baseball works.

18:18And it's not how the law and life works either. You can't kick somebody out of their home. And then you're there for a year. The guy comes back with the sheriff and tries to get into the door and you say, hey, I'm here. You're not. It's my house. Of course not. You pushed me out of my home. So I don't think it's fair for Arab Muslims and I don't think it makes sense for Arab Muslims to say, hey, we're here now. We kicked you off the land and now you want to come back and reclaim sovereignty over the land. You can't have it. But the last thing to say about that is that the entire moral zeitgeist of the 21st century is decolonization.

18:53Right. We care. We say we profess to care about the rights of indigenous people all over the world. We want them to reclaim their ancient sovereignty, not just Palestinians. We want the Tibetans to reclaim their sovereignty. And we want the Bulgarians and the Irish and, of course, the Cherokees. We want them to have their land back in Georgia, et cetera, et cetera. Right. Well, if we care about the rights of indigenous people at all, then we've got to look at the rocks in the ground and the words on the page and the blood in the veins, all of which shows that when you go back 3 ,200 years ago and you analyze all the different peoples who existed in the world at that time, from China to South America, there is only one people anywhere in the world who still speaks the same language, who practices the same religion, and who lives and governs in the same land as they did 3 ,200 years ago, and that's the Jews who live and rule in modern day Israel.

19:50So if we care about decolonization, if we care about the rights of indigenous people, then we should recognize that Israel is the greatest example of 20th century decolonization anywhere in the world. So unfortunately, we only have a couple more minutes and we can definitely pick this up. And since we are close by, we'll do something in person as well. But what do you think? But then you're going to see how much taller I am. That's why I didn't want to do this one, because I have a feeling you're also a pretty good basketball player and I only bring in people I can beat. So just in the last couple of minutes, though.

20:22So let's say you can make the most compelling historical argument and you can make the most compelling moral and legal and all of those things. And yet there is still just there is an entire machine, I believe, designed to destroy the West. You sort of hit on this earlier. That is never going to stop. You can show them the coin of Palestine from the 1930s and it quite literally says Land of Israel in Hebrew on it. You can explain that Jesus was a Jew who lived in Bethlehem and that's in Judea and Samaria and that's the story of Hanukkah. And you can do all of those things. And in a certain way, these people will never stop no matter what.

20:58So what do you do in the face of that? That to me seems to me like the end game challenge here. So I've spent the last three years on almost every major college campus in the country talking about this issue. And I know you know that, Dave. I'm just mentioning it to answer your question. And here's what I found, not just in college campuses, but all over the country, at churches and community centers and high schools in almost all 50 states, which I have visited on a weekly basis over the last three years. here's basically the breakdown even at colombia the epicenter of the terror loving tentafata my own alma mater by the way i'm sad to say even at colombia but certainly all over the world the percentage of people who are totally brainwashed wear the terrorism scarves chant from the river to the sea it's not more than 10 usually it's less than that but let's call it 10 because i went to law school so i wouldn't have to do any math so that's going to make things easy for us.

21:56Let's call it 10%. Look, some of those people are going to be convinced, okay, by reason and common sense. I know it's hard to believe, not a lot. We shouldn't hold our breath, but I can't tell you how many times I've spoken on Ivy League campuses and only to have people call my chambers a few days later and say, hey, I was wearing a keffiyeh that day, or I post about Gaza, the supposed genocide, and I didn't know any of the things you talked about, to be honest, and I'm never going to do that again. Now, that's only one person at a time. Okay, I grant you that. But one person who posts, that's a thousand people who don't see that post.

22:31You know, that makes a difference. But here's the, there's still 90 % of the country. About 30 % of them are fully pro-Israel, pro-America, pro-Jewish. Who are they? They're not just Jews or Christian Zionists, although they are that. There's also a huge percentage of Americans who understand viscerally that societies that allow Jews to flourish are societies that are thriving themselves. America just being the greatest example of that. Look at what Lincoln said. He called us an almost chosen people. He never used words by accident. He chose those words purposefully because he understood what many Americans understand, which is that the American project is intimately tied in with the values of the Judeo-Christian civilization that's been passed down to us.

23:19Those are religious tolerance, freedom of speech, and above all else, meritocracy based on the rule of law. Those are the virtues of Judaism, and they're the virtues of America. That's why America is the city upon the hill, the chosen city among all the nations of the world, just like the Jewish people are the chosen people. These words aren't used by accident. And then there's the 60 % in the broad middle. You see, I'm using the math like that. We've got the 10 and the 30 and then there's the 60. Who are those people? You know what? They're good Americans. They're open-hearted. They're people of good faith.

23:56They love their country. But you know what? They're not super concerned with what's going on thousands of miles away. They want to put food on the table. They want to get promoted at work. If they're on campus, they want to get good grades and meet girls and have their football team win football games. So who are they? They're people who are open to being convinced by arguments that are based in reason and common sense because that's how they live their lives. And so the goal of this book and the goal of each and every one of us who cares about the inheritance we've been given, the inheritance that our forefathers fought for at Brandywine and at Antietam and on the beaches of Normandy, is that each of us has an obligation to go out and use reason and common sense to make sure that that 10 % doesn't bleed into 15 and 20 and 30, that the rest of the country is inoculated against the arguments of falsehood and hate and vindictiveness that are being spread by our geostrategic allies.

24:55So the last thing I'll say is if five years from now a person goes to a party who's in that broad 60 % or a dinner or a barbecue and someone uses one of those buzzwords about Israel, genocide, apartheid, colonialism, I hope that person can say, look, I don't really know that much about it. But there's this guy in Miami, seems to know what he's talking about. He wrote a pretty good book with a nice cover. Why don't you take it and read chapter three, and then we can talk about it and tell me what you think. If the book does that, then I think it'll be a tremendous success. There is the cover. There is the book.

25:27Roy Altman, we will pick this up on the basketball court. I thank you for your time. You're the man, Dave. Thanks. Thank you.