Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Josh vs the News: Bondi, Multiculturalism & Jew Hate

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Josh vs the News: Bondi, Multiculturalism & Jew Hate · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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G'day humans, it's Josh vs the News, a little weekly check-in about some of the stories that are being reported, perhaps in ways that we might find sub-optimal in the mainstream press, or stories that you haven't even paid any attention to.
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What's going on this week, ladies and gents?
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I'd like to hear your thoughts and chat with me in the comments.
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here in Sydney there isn't much else to talk about, which is somewhat strange because it's not like
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we were unaware that jihadist attacks or anti-semitic attacks were on the cards.
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It just sort of feels weird when your city and your community and your safe space is
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the lottery ball that gets picked out of the vast cosmic bucket
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and becomes the place that the rest of the world is going to be talking about
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because of some atrocity.
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I definitely have some thoughts about anti-Semitism,
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about the Australian government, about the Australian culture's response
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and what we could have done better and what we can do better moving forward.
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But I also don't want to overlook the big story of the week, which is on everyone's mind, which is the great snail theft in France, where shop owners say that thieves have stolen a half a ton of snails from a boutique snail breeding house.
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not quite the heist of the Louvre
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but in this little village in northeastern France
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more than 100,000 US dollars worth of escargot
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were stolen from a local farm
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just as the prime holiday snail eating season began
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so apparently the French eat about 20 million kilos
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37 million pounds of snails every year
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there are a lot of small snail farmers in France a lot of the consumption happens around Christmas
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and New Year there are lots of holiday escargot recipes in French magazines and now one of the
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biggest escargot farms in France has been knocked off you know an inside job I mean not from the
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farm themselves but obviously someone who knows the escargot industry because they're able to go in
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and pilfer both the breeding snails and also the frozen snails so thoughts and prayers
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with the snail eaters of France at this difficult time.
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The other big issue that a couple of people are already asking about
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in the comments is Rob Reiner's death.
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Yeah.
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Errol says, what does Josh think of the Knives Out movies?
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And in honor of Rob Reiner's passing,
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what would he say is Rob Reiner's favorite work?
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Loved Rob Reiner, a titan of Hollywood.
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I think probably
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I mean it's a toss up for me
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because Spinal Tap is obviously
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one of the great films
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of its genre and set the stage
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for the mockumentary
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comedy satire
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but I think When Harry Met Sally
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takes the cake as one of the great
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although there's also A Few Good Men
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which is one of the greatest
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kind of legal dramas
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ever but I think When Harry Met Sally
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the chemistry between the two of them
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It was absolute perfection.
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If you haven't seen it in five or more years, go back and watch it.
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I've been flip-flopping around about what I think about the causes of the Bondi attack.
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Obviously, my initial first draft was released on the pod the day after with barely fleshed out thoughts.
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and I have always felt that it's a little bit too neat to simply say that marches on behalf of
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Gazans and anti-Israel protests and pro-Palestinian activism has created a climate in which this sort
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of thing is possible because it's hard for me to imagine someone who was apparently on the radar
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of Australian intelligence six years ago when he was 18 years old.
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This is the surviving alleged shooter giving up his commitment to ISIS
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simply because people weren't quite as sympathetic to Garzons.
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But that's not really the question.
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The question has become for me, and which I think Australians should focus on
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more than they currently are because the conversation here
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seems to be turning quickly to gun control.
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It's interesting, actually, when people don't want to
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talk about the root causes of something, they change the subject to something else.
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And it's
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interesting that in the United States, when there's a mass shooting, because gun control is so
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controversial in the States, Americans quickly change the subject away from gun control to
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talking about mental health or talking about crime or talking about, you know, they don't want to
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touch gun control.
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Here, gun control is the easy, safe thing that politicians want to start talking
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about because they don't want to talk about the actual complicated and difficult and controversial
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and internally divisive thing, which is jihadism and anti-Semitism.
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We have lived in an environment
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in which it has been impossible for public figures to simply denounce Jew hatred without
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also going on to say, and Islamophobia and all forms of bigotry, as if there's some way in which
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it would be unseemly to point out an obvious fact about the community that is being uniquely
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targeted in the period over the course of the Gaza war.
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And it's not the case that people become
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committed to ISIS or that ISIS sympathizers become encouraged to pull off attacks simply
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because the Prime Minister doesn't speak out more fully against anti-Semitism.
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But it is plausible
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that it's the case that there's a whole set of subtle permission structures that exist that go
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into turning the dial towards action or inaction in the minds of extremists.
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That when people feel
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like there is broad latent support for their basic worldview that just ratchets things up a notch
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and makes it slightly more likely that they'll take their deranged fantasies from inside their
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head into the actual real world.
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And I think that's where the blame lies with the Australian
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government and the broader Australian community, where there's been a kind of a laziness, a
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sloppiness, a confusion, really, about differentiating cleanly between Australian
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policy and attitudes towards the war in Gaza and Israel's many failings, on the one hand,
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and on the other hand, how Jews and non-Jews, Muslims and Arabs and non-Muslims and non-Arabs
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should all get together and live with each other here in a multicultural country like Australia.
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and the past five days have clarified my thinking on that
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that it's not that hard actually
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to differentiate between what is free political speech
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and what is tacit intimidation or incitement
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saying that Palestine should be free
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is free political speech
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marching in protest against the Gaza war
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is free political speech.
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Criticizing Israel for its occupation and for the blockade of Gaza
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and for the settlements is free political speech.
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Why was it not possible to say those things
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without also gathering together very large numbers of people who were very agitated
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in a hostile environment and who also carried slogans, placards, and chants that had nothing
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to do with Israeli policy.
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Things like, globalize the Intifada, or from the river to the sea,
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by any means necessary.
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Things like, from the river to the sea, which might feel benign to
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people who aren't very in the weeds about this stuff, and which just seems like, well, that's
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what Palestinians want, so why shouldn't Palestinians have it?
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They are a dispossessed
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people.
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You do have to understand, and one ought to have been able to understand since October 2023,
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that for people who have friends, family, and co-religionists who were just slaughtered in a
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jihadist attack, whatever the underlying causes of that, even if Israeli misdeeds gave rise to
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the frustrations and the underlying conditions that led to October 7th, in the wake of the actual
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attack, which was horrendously bloodthirsty, and suffice it to say, not targeted towards Israeli
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military institutions, but towards the Jewish people, to go around saying, from the river to
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the sea by any means necessary, Palestine will be free, is to say that the little strip of land,
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one third the size of Tasmania, on which half the world's Jews live, that that entire area
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should be consumed by a new Arab Muslim state.
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And given the way that Jews, not to mention women
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and gays and entrepreneurs and dissidents, are treated in most Arab Muslim states,
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it's understandable that people who aren't super super super pro-palestinian and anti-zionist
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would find that to be something of a veiled threat is it just free political speech to say
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from the river to the sea by any means necessary palestine will be free or is it in the in the
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wake of a jihadist slaughter of Jews on October 7th, also a veiled form of intimidation by saying
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someday, as soon as possible, preferably, there will be no safe space for Jews.
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The one Jewish safe haven in the world will be overrun.
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Not to mention globalize the intifada,
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which, I mean, many people have said it in the past week,
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I don't need to reiterate it,
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but the Intifada has been globalized.
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So congratulations.
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If you were marching at protests
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alongside people waving banners
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that said globalize the Intifada,
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you have your wish.
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Well done.
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Many of the people who I think were involved
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in what Jews felt were anti-Semitic marches and protests
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and chants are not bad people and they didn't understand the context.
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They just saw the horrors
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that were going on in Gaza and were appalled, as was I, and they wanted to do something.
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The problem is, if you find yourself marching in lockstep with tens of thousands of people,
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all chanting the same thing, and those are things that you didn't write, whose implications you
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don't understand, about a subject on which you're not an expert, which you know a minority says it
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finds intimidating, it is possible that you're not elevating the discourse.
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It is possible that
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you should think twice.
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And if it's all a bit in the weeds and you can't be expected to know what
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the overtones of From the River to the Sea mean for Jewish Australians, you have two terrific
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options as an uninformed bystander.
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You can either shut up and stay home, or as well as talking to
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people who are outraged about Gaza, you could also talk to Jewish people and see how they feel,
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and then you could decide what to do.
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And we didn't do that on the whole as Australians.
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We saw the images.
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We wanted to perform the correct message on social media.
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We wanted to
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show solidarity.
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And we couldn't be bothered inquiring whether or not some of those protests
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were coordinated or funded by the Iranian intelligence services, which we subsequently
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found out from British police and US intelligence that they almost certainly were.
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They certainly
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were in other Western countries in the UK and in the US.
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There was an extraordinary level of
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coordination and logistical sophistication on those relentless protests week after week after week.
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more Australians attended them than there are Jews in Australia.
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Supposedly disparate protests all over the country
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had all the same kinds of signs and the same kinds of slogans.
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So it's entirely possible that they were not exclusively
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natural grassroots expressions of genuine Australian concern,
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but that well-meaning Australians were being played
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by theocrats and jihadists.
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now well-meaning Australians shouldn't be expected to know the difference about that
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we're not all experts but you know who should know the difference the Prime Minister
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and Australian intelligence well Australian intelligence does seem to have known the
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difference because the Australian Prime Minister booted the Iranian ambassador out of the country
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earlier this year when the intelligence services realized that a sequence of violent anti-semitic
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attacks, firebombings of schools and cafes and synagogues, which we thought were homegrown,
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presumably Arab Muslim terrorism, turned out to be Iranian, I don't want to say false flag
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operations, but they were proven to be the work of Iran.
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So once that becomes clear,
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you would expect people who are guiding the country who are supposed to be shepherding the
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country and keeping us all on the same page to be more courageous about standing up to
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noisy angry people in the community who vastly outnumber uh jewish australians and
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And to take a kind of a pastoral role, almost, and say, listen, I know things are hot right now, and it's okay to express these kinds of specific ideas against the state of Israel.
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It is not okay to ride a horse along the beach waving a Palestinian flag.
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like that is not really free political speech what point are you making exactly except to evoke
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sort of medieval arabian barbarism by riding a horse um that is going to land for jewish
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australians as an act of intimidation it obviously did because jewish australians were screaming from
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the rooftops for the past two years that there were whole chunks of their own cities that they
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felt too intimidated to pass through when there were the Gaza protests going on, because they
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would be heckled, and they did fear for their safety.
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Not irrationally, not that in fear
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microaggressions, they felt genuine fear of having a bottle thrown at their heads or being yelled at
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with demeaning anti-Semitic remarks, regardless of what their position on Israel might have been.
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It should have been obvious in hindsight that creating that kind of a climate where people who are on the much more extreme end of Jew hatred felt like the rest of the country was basically at their backs would be more likely to act.
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It's a counterfactual, so we don't know.
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And I certainly don't absolve the Netanyahu government of responsibility for putting a target on Jews' backs and for increasing anti-Semitism through the sheer callousness of the way that it conducted the war.
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but the rest of the population also has a role to play and should also be reflecting
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on the knee-jerk way that they lapped up every example of Garzen disaster porn
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without trying to contextualize how their behavior might land in a multi-ethnic,
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multicultural, pluralistic, cosmopolitan country like Australia,
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how it might fray the ties that our various communities share um it's interesting to look
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at the headlines i thought i always find it interesting to look at the headlines of the way
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that things are reported around the world when something like this happens um let's take a look
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at a few of them here there's uh there's one from uh that's the new york post uh family from
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Hell, 15 Murders, Father, Son, Gunman, Attack, Beach Festival.
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Then there's also the New York Times, Sydney Carnage, Targets, Jews.
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The London Times, Blood Bath at Bondi Beach.
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The Daily Express in the UK, The Hero of Bondi Beach.
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And this is where it becomes interesting because editors of newspapers basically had one of two options.
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They could either roll with the horrendousness of it or they could find the silver lining.
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and it tells you something about the attitudes of different publications
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and their assumed readership as to which one they chose.
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So quite a lot of the British press, especially the tabloids,
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went for the heroic angle.
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The hero of Bondi Beach, says the Daily Express,
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as at least 16 people die in a horrific terrorist attack on a Jewish festival,
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one brave bystander saves many lives.
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Then the Daily Mail also goes with the hero of the Bondi Beach massacre,
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incredible courage of shopkeeper who grabbed gun off terrorist
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in anti-semitic rampage that killed 15 and injured 42 the sun in the uk goes the negative
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angle bondi fiends dad and son but also with a subheading about hero tackled gunman firing a
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jewish event with the banner 15 murdered on oz beach the the independent an act of evil
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16 dead including child in anti-semitic bondi beach gun attack they devote the entire front
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page just to photos of um uh of the tragedy uh the daily mirror uh horror and heroism at bondi
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they try to have a bob each way going with both the hero and also the tragedy beach terror attack
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it says at the top gunman killed at least 15 during jewish festival as brave shopkeeper saves
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others by tackling one of the shooters uh the daily telegraph in the uk uh also does both hate
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and heroism on Bondi.
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The Metro in the UK says the hero of the Bondi Beach Massacre, focusing on
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the positive news story.
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Here in Australia, the newspapers were more aligned with obviously just
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articulating the tragedy of it all.
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The Australian saying Hanukkah terror attack on Bondi Beach,
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and then the big headline says Massacre of Jews.
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Daily Telegraph in Australia just says,
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you bastards as its main headline i love the daily telegraph's uh headline writers i think they do an
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amazing job you bastards is perfect uh attackers had explosives it says cops investigate third
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person astonishing acts of bravery the city morning herald which is the most read broadsheet
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in australia just says bondi terror as its headline multiple casualties peace people forced
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to flee to in custody uh the herald son which is the uh melbourne version of the daily telegraph
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says bondi terror massacre they need to get a better headline writer they need to get the guy
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from the telly down to melbourne to do the herald son uh because a bondi terror massacre is nowhere
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near as good a headline as just you bastards the adelaide advertiser which is the other offshoot
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slaughter of innocence but innocence is spelled innocence as in with a ce as in we no longer have
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our innocence um which i think is a clever pun because it articulates quite a lot of what
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australians are feeling at the moment it was certainly the main thing that i felt in the days
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after and it was what made me quite emotionally raw was not just the tragedy of the lives lost
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but the sense that this carefree playful hedonistic place by which i mean not only
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bondi beach but also australia as a whole is not immune that we we sort of feel like we're on the
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other side of the planet from all the big important scary things that are going on there's ukraine and
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there's trump and there's brexit and there's whatever it might be but we sort of sit here
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on the other side of the globe, eating our popcorn,
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watching it all go down.
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And Sunday was a moment when it was like,
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oh, okay, we are actually still part of the world.
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All of the vast forces of bigotry and jihadism
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and religious delusion and anti-Semitism
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and all of that still, we're in those currents.
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We may be an eddy in the river,
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but we're not outside the river.
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Yeah, I think those are the headlines,
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all the headlines that we need to go through.
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If you have any things that you want to say
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or that you feel like you need to be heard on,
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please do chat in the chat.
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I like seeing them
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and I like being able to hear what you think.
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Errol also says,
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what does Josh think of the Knives Out movies?
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Because we were talking about Rob Reiner.
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I think the first one was entertaining.
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I think the second one was pretty stupid, right?
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That was like a satire of big tech.
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And then the third one's really good.
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The third one is a good standalone movie.
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It's the best, I believe.
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And Crazy Elf says, regarding the French snail story,
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first they came for the Louvre and I said nothing.
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Then they came for the snails.
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Thank you very much.
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Good one.
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And also says, two political buttons could be pressed after Sunday's attack.
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You could either go for gun control or immigration.
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The ALP, meaning the governing Labor Party here in Australia,
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we're always going to press the gun control button.
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And the LNP, meaning the conservative coalition,
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the immigration one.
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Yeah, that is interesting.
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But I think it misses the fact that gun control
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is enormously popular in Australia.
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And talking in uncensored but nonetheless sensitive ways
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about the challenges of integrating migrant communities
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and how to have a clever immigration policy
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that weeds out religious extremists
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and how to have a policy on religious preachers
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that does not curtail people's freedom of religion
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but does clamp down on incitements to violence
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is much harder to do.
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So I'm not even sure that conservatives in Australia are good at it.
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And part of the problem is that liberals are, by sort of vacating the territory and having uncomfortable conversations about migration and jihadism and religious conservatism and liberalism, we have left the terrain to much worse actors.
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So you do have a rise in the popularity of far-right people in the Australian political context.
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You've got people who have been around for a very long time, like Pauline Hanson and Barnaby Joyce, who have always been fearless about making the case that there are reasons to worry about the complexion of the different communities that are coming into this country.
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and now you've got more right-wing people or rather more populist anti-immigrant forces
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including actual neo-nazis who for the first time are appearing on the australian
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scene at least the first time in my lifetime and if we as liberals can't
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wrestle openly with the challenges of religious extremism and religious conservatism in a way that
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is more sophisticated than simply saying say no to hate say no to extremism and bigotry we do not
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tolerate anti-semitism islamophobia or any like that's just not good enough it sounds pat and if
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we can't actually talk about okay well if there are imams in mosques who are persistently consistently
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reliably indoctrinating young australians young australian muslims into a worldview
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that is anti-enlightenment, that is demeaning to women,
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that is hysterically obsessed with Jews,
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that is totally antithetical to gays,
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and really is fundamentally opposed to the project of Western civilization,
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that is a problem.
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And anytime anyone has tried to talk about that,
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they're accused of being islamophobic bigots.
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So we've backed ourselves into something of a corner
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where the only people who are talking about it
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are people who are genuine anti-Muslim bigots
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instead of the rest of us who should have the stomach
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to be able to defend liberal democracy,
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defend pluralism, defend multiculturalism,
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whilst acknowledging the challenges
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that holding together a society like Australia
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like Australia's entails.
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We can talk about Venezuela as well.
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Is America going to go to war?
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I think so.
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But, you know, watch this space, I suppose.
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On the chat line, Jared says,
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I can't see how you can make Australian gun laws any better.
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The attack would have been way more deadly
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if they had assault weapons.
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Actually, there's a really interesting podcast
27:06
out this morning.
27:07
There's a podcast called If You're Listening,
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which is produced and hosted by, well, written and hosted by my friend Matt Bevan,
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who has been on this show before.
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It's one of the best, it's the best Australian podcast that's not an interview show.
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Like, it's about the news, it's about international politics mostly.
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But he looks at Australian gun laws today.
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And it's interesting because the gun law reforms that were introduced in the 1990s
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had to divide up guns in a somewhat arbitrary way between class A, class B, class C, and class D
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guns.
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So D was going to be totally outlawed unless you're law enforcement or the army,
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and A was going to be totally permitted if you had a gun license, and then there are various
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gradations of licenses in between.
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But the world of gun technology that existed 30 years ago when
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these laws came into place has changed enormously.
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So every time a new gun comes onto the market,
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it has to be assigned into one of these categories and the accusation is that governments successive
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governments have been asleep at the wheel on doing that and they've allowed gun companies to
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essentially uh assign the ratings themselves without much oversight and that the spot checks
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which gun enforcement the gun enforcement agency in australia was supposed to do about just coming
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in occasionally on people who have you know knocking on the door of people who have gun
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licenses and making sure that those guns are both still there and also kept properly and safely
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that those have massively declined so the fact that the shooters on sunday were able to have
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pump action rifles which you could reload incredibly quickly and you could shoot more
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than five rounds out of the rule was after the gun law reforms that you couldn't have semi-automatic
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weapons you can have r15s which is what the port arthur shooter used um and what so many
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american shooters use so you can't have a gun that reloads itself immediately after you fire it you
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have to reload it yourself but pump action shotguns were permitted as long as you couldn't shoot more
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than five rounds so you'd shoot and then you'd go and then you'd shoot and go and then shoot and
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you could do that five times but magazines that permit more there are amendments that you can make
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to these guns there are new things that gun manufacturers have released which you can attach
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to them and apparently it now seems like the shooters on sunday were firing a lot more than
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five uh in a row without having to load a new magazine so there is more that you can do if you
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want to go at that angle i'm sure that will be the easy thing for australia to do i'm sure australia
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will just make sure that that its classifications are up to date maybe you could require uh you know
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every two years or every year that there's a review from gun experts that the guns that are
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coming in are being properly classified according to the categories you could make enforcement more
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uh robust apparently there are 260 000 unregistered uh firearms in australia which is crazy i mean
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that means that what's that like one percent of the population of the country in guns which is
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quite a lot to be unregistered.
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Erol says on the question of how you talk about hate without sort
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of diffusing the specificity of anti-Semitism, here in the US after 10-7, there were PSA ads
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about stopping Jewish hate.
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10-7, 10-7, the 7th of October.
30:42
Okay, yes, right, around the wrong way.
30:44
I'm sorry, it's early.
30:45
Here in the US after October 7th, there were PSA ads about stopping
30:48
Jewish hate and had a blue square at the end.
30:51
After a few months, the ads changed to stop all
30:54
hate.
30:55
And I couldn't help but think that if that had ever happened during a Black Lives Matter
30:59
movement for all lives matter, what an uproar there would have been about it.
31:02
Yes, it's a good
31:03
analogy.
31:05
And Jared says that Sunday would have been more like a Christchurch incident if Australia
31:10
didn't already have such strict restrictions on guns.
31:14
That's right.
31:14
In fact, one of the tragedies
31:16
of the Christchurch massacre
31:19
where a far-right white supremacist
31:23
gunned down all of those Muslims in mosques
31:27
was that that would have been an Australian attack.
31:31
He was an Australian guy.
31:32
He had no connection to New Zealand.
31:35
It was an Australian who had been radicalized
31:38
in Europe and online.
31:40
He'd traveled a lot through Asia.
31:42
There's actually a really interesting episode
31:44
of this podcast of Uncomfortable Conversations
31:46
that is, about the background of the Christchurch shooter.
31:50
Joey Watson is a great young investigative journalist
31:53
who did a podcast series about it,
31:56
and it was basically challenging the idea
32:00
that the Christchurch shooter was a lone wolf,
32:03
which is the official narrative of the authorities.
32:06
And Joey's point is, yes, there was no direct logistical support
32:10
for the Christchurch terrorist,
32:13
but to say that he was acting alone
32:16
is to miss this entire soup of far-right white supremacy
32:22
that is exploding online.
32:23
It's to misunderstand the potency of 4chan and 8chan
32:27
and these message boards.
32:28
It's to miss the rise in far-right Islamophobia
32:33
and anti-Semitism across Europe.
32:36
I mean, this guy was radicalized online,
32:37
but then he literally went and met with multiple groups
32:42
in Europe on the eastern frontier of the European Union.
32:46
There are like migrant hunting groups where white nationalists police the border and, you know, try to catch people who are trying to, you know, asylum seekers who are trying to break into Europe, essentially, and places like Hungary.
33:01
And he was with them.
33:04
And he knew these people.
33:05
And he got funding.
33:07
No, he didn't get funding.
33:07
He funded because he was apparently independently wealthy through an inheritance.
33:11
He was funding right-wing people all over the world, like far, far, far right people.
33:17
And the reason why he went to New Zealand is because AR-15s were still legal in New Zealand.
33:22
So he was able to assemble an arsenal the likes of which he wouldn't have been able to acquire in Australia.
33:29
But had it not been for Australia's gun laws, then yes, what we saw on Sunday,
33:34
not only what we saw on Sunday would have been much, much, much, much worse if there were AR-15s involved.
33:41
but the Christchurch shooting itself would have taken place somewhere you know in Sydney or
33:48
Melbourne uh or elsewhere um so on many levels uh we should be grateful uh I'm certainly grateful
33:56
for living in a country that has decided that that's that having a lot of guns around is not
34:00
a price worth paying um Juan uh says I'm really concerned about the heavy focus on gun control
34:06
while anti-Semitism and radicalization in Australia are being largely ignored.
34:10
We already have laws intended to prevent this kind of attack,
34:12
including preventing people with extremist links from getting guns.
34:17
Yes.
34:18
And we also have very, I mean,
34:20
what's the point in having hate speech laws like Australia does
34:22
if you're not going to use them?
34:24
Like, this is what's weird.
34:27
I can understand a free speech argument
34:29
from libertarian American-style free speech absolutists
34:33
who say, don't go down the path of trying to impede people's ability to shriek about how,
34:41
you know, we should globalize the intifada.
34:45
You need to reason with them.
34:46
And, you know,
34:47
the best way to combat bad speech is with better speech.
34:52
But if you're not going to take that
34:53
approach, and Australia doesn't take that approach, Australia has some of the tightest
34:57
hate speech laws in the world, where things that, you know, can be perceived to denigrate
35:03
religious groups can get you in trouble, like legally.
35:08
We don't have a First Amendment.
35:09
We
35:09
decide what is allowed to be said and what is not allowed to be said.
35:13
And well-meaning bureaucrats
35:15
are often on the other end of deciding what does and doesn't constitute incitement to violence or
35:22
intimidation.
35:24
If the shoe was on the other foot, and it was another minority that had been being
35:29
demeaned and intimidated the way that Jews have been, just the sheer aggressiveness, scale,
35:36
intimidating tone, and kind of wild-eyed sloganeering that had nothing to do with
35:44
the actual actions of Israel, but sort of constantly, latently threatened the existence
35:51
of a Jewish homeland and things that Jewish people hold dear, if that had been transposed
35:58
to another minority.
35:59
It's hard to imagine that the well-meaning bureaucrats who enforce hate
36:02
speech laws in Australia wouldn't have noticed and wouldn't have done something.
36:07
This is sort of the
36:09
infuriating thing for Jewish people about the way that anti-Semitism expresses itself.
36:13
It's just
36:14
subtle enough that it's not obvious if you're not noticing it.
36:20
It's easy to wave away if you're not
36:23
sort of primed to notice it.
36:25
And there's probably some extent to which Jewish people are overly
36:28
paranoid and interpreting everything as anti-Semitism.
36:30
You know, you certainly hear it
36:31
being used as a disingenuous cudgel when pro-Israel people accuse anyone who's criticizing Israel
36:38
of being anti-Semitic.
36:40
That's ridiculous.
36:43
And certainly, as I've said, things like arguing
36:46
to free Palestine or arguing for a Palestinian state is not anti-Semitic.
36:49
A majority of Jews
36:50
wish that there was a Palestinian state, as long as it accepted the existence of Israel alongside it.
36:56
But once you notice the double standard, it's very hard to ignore.
37:02
You know, I mentioned on
37:03
the podcast that I did after the Bondi shooting, just some tiny example of how there was a
37:07
another podcast that one of the big center-left outlets did about anti-Semitism, and they had
37:13
three panelists talking about anti-Semitism, none of whom was Jewish.
37:18
And I said, can you imagine
37:19
them talking about anti-gay hate and homophobia and not a single panelist is gay or talking about
37:29
racism towards i don't know muslims islamophobia and not a single muslim is on the panel like
37:35
you wouldn't have that oversight and it's not that the producer is thinking oh i know let's get the
37:40
jews by not inviting them on the panel it's just that it doesn't occur to them as being necessary
37:45
because Jews don't count the same way that other minorities count.
37:48
And that's the way that anti-Semitism manifests itself in the 21st century.
37:52
No one is so gocious to talk about how terrible Jews are,
37:56
but they do talk about how terrible Zionism is,
37:58
and they do allow people to walk right up to the line and a little bit over it,
38:02
certainly in terms of their manner, if not their literal words,
38:06
in creating a climate of intimidation towards Jews
38:08
that they would not tolerate towards other people.
38:10
That's how anti-Semitism manifests itself in polite societies like Australia's.
38:16
There was another example of that this week, which was the ABC's reporting on Bondi.
38:21
And again, I don't want to bash the ABC because I think it's a cherished institution.
38:25
It does a lot of great work and it does great news.
38:28
But on this issue, I would say on the Jewish issue and on the transgender issue, it needs a root and branch clear out.
38:36
Like it needs someone at the top to be saying, OK, these are the new standards.
38:40
This is what we're talking about.
38:42
If you've got a real bee in your bonnet about Gaza and about the Palestinian issue, that's totally fine and you can stay with us.
38:48
You just can't write about anti-Semitism in Australia if you're going to allow that to bleed into the coverage.
38:53
You know, when we're talking about Australia, we're talking about Australia.
38:54
When we're talking about Jews and Muslims and Arabs and, you know, Christians in Australia, we have to be talking about that phenomenon.
39:01
And we have to do so in isolation of our concerns about foreign policy or foreign beefs.
39:08
because this article in the ABC
39:11
reported on the Bondi massacre
39:14
and this was long after it was clear
39:16
and it was almost instantly clear
39:18
that this was an anti-Semitic attack
39:19
everyone else was reporting
39:20
it was an anti-Semitic attack
39:22
the premier had already given a press conference
39:24
saying that this was an act of anti-Semitic terrorist violence
39:29
and the headline on the ABC
39:31
didn't say anything about Jews or anti-Semitism
39:34
or jihadism or anything
39:36
the sub headline didn't and it took 19 paragraphs i counted them 19 paragraphs to mention the fact
39:45
that oh there was a group of jews there and the shooters seem to be targeting this jewish
39:50
celebration the first 19 paragraphs were all about bondi beach we're all about the mayhem
39:54
we're all about the casualties we're all about now there's nothing wrong with that there's nothing
40:01
prima facie wrong with that focus if as a news organization you want to say the main thing we
40:06
care about is the fact that one of the most iconic places in australia has been terrorized
40:11
so let's talk about that then we'll get to the why but that's less important the problem is
40:18
can you imagine what the coverage would have been if a pair of neo-nazis had opened fire on a ramadan
40:29
celebration at Bondi Beach.
40:33
I can't imagine it would take them 19 paragraphs
40:37
to mention the fact that Muslims had been
40:42
executed in cold blood in Bondi.
40:46
Again, it's not because they're trying,
40:48
you know, they don't know they're doing this,
40:50
the people writing and publishing these articles.
40:52
They don't think of themselves as having any animosity
40:54
towards Jews at all.
40:56
it's just that in the broader culture jews don't count the same way other minorities count
41:01
and once you notice it you notice it and so for this crisis for this tragedy to take place in a
41:11
climate in which the jewish community has been saying over and over and over again there is a
41:16
double standard here we are not feeling like our security concerns are being sufficiently addressed
41:22
We believe that there is a spectrum between the lack of concern for Jews mattering, that's the easiest and sort of simplest and most gentle form of anti-Semitism, up to the disproportionate concern with Israel as the world's foremost boggy man.
41:44
while we don't care about what's going on to Muslims in the Democratic Republic of Congo,
41:48
we don't care about what's going on, you know, we don't care about a million ways from Sunday.
41:53
It's not a problem for us that South Asian Muslims have an ethno-state in Pakistan
42:02
or that, you know, Arab Muslims have an ethno-state in Saudi Arabia.
42:06
These are all kosher, but for Jews to have an ethno-state is uniquely barbarous and invalid.
42:13
so you go from the sort of well you know you don't really want to come you know we don't
42:18
want to talk about you don't want to put jews in the headline you know or you don't we don't need
42:22
to invite a jew and we're talking about anti-semitism and you you move up the scale of sort of
42:31
disregard i would say to this toleration of a relentless focus on a style of protest
42:41
during the Gaza war that many Jews found was insufficiently targeted
42:45
towards Israel's actual misdeeds and was too broadly focused on.
42:54
Basically that Jews don't have the same rights that other people do
42:58
to govern themselves.
43:01
And then you move up towards the more intimidating acts,
43:06
the drive-by firebombings of synagogues,
43:10
the security concerns that Jewish parents felt,
43:12
the fairly relentless attacks of spray-painting swastikas
43:18
or fuck Israel on members of parliament's offices,
43:23
which happened.
43:25
This steady drumbeat of, of course, not tolerated misdeeds
43:31
because the police and the government would always say
43:34
there's no place for hate and this is terrible but there was no proactive aggressive clear-headed
43:42
sense from the top in australia that this kind of behavior cannot go on and that the singling
43:49
out of this community because of a foreign war is unacceptable and then you move up towards actual
43:56
acts of violence and once you've got this large landscape of behavior it felt inevitable to a lot
44:07
of jewish australians that something much worse would happen not something as bad as this not
44:11
something as deadly as this or as visible as kind of cinematic as this but that something was going
44:18
to happen.
44:20
I'm still wrestling with how much I buy the sliding scale theory, because jihadists
44:27
are going to jihad regardless of what the conditions are.
44:30
But I do think that our inability
44:32
to talk frankly and openly about anti-Semitism in conservative Muslim communities and about
44:40
illiberalism in all religious extremist faiths is a problem that's going to come back to bite us in
44:48
the ass and i don't think that multiculturalism in australia or anywhere is sustainable unless
44:53
liberals can grow a spine and stop um kowtowing to the sensitivities of minority groups and feeling
44:59
like diversity and difference is our strength and the you know we should never talk about problems
45:04
that might exist in a traditionally disenfranchised community because that would be
45:08
punching down.
45:09
No, that's gone.
45:11
The whole thing will unravel if we remain as cowed as we are,
45:16
if we keep tiptoeing around and treading on eggshells.
45:20
It should not be rocket science,
45:22
morally, for small-L liberals in Australia, for progressives and also conservatives
45:32
who defend Western civilization and democracy and the Australian way of life,
45:37
to say that there is no place in Australia for an imam who preaches anti-Jewish, anti-gay,
45:46
anti-woman, anti-enlightenment, anti-Western values from the pulpit every single week,
45:56
and who churns out a steady stream of increasingly radicalized people.
46:02
that that's not if that's freedom of religion then we don't want freedom of religion here
46:07
not that kind um there have to be limits uh and at the when it becomes a security concern
46:16
it's probably too late you sort of have to get people somehow on board with the idea that we
46:22
are all in this together and that we're going to leave our foreign enmities at the water's edge
46:27
When we come to Australia, we come to Australia in order to swim and surf and have barbecues and drink beer.
46:35
We don't do it in order to hash out our ancient feuds and rail against the very values that made this place attractive for people to come to in the first place.
46:49
Lots of great comments coming in.
46:52
the uh yeah tightening firearms laws risks becoming a scapegoat for not dealing with
46:58
harder problems says uh one uh oh what did what did donald trump say about the rob reiner
47:07
uh okay as jeff says is it possible that even after 10 years of trump's atrocities his comments
47:11
on the rob reiner murder were still shocking um ivan says sydney resident here i've noticed that
47:18
my friends, colleagues, friends and colleagues are studiously avoiding mentioning what happened
47:22
on Sunday.
47:24
Understandable, I guess.
47:24
It points to how hard it is to tackle this as a society.
47:27
I've noticed that as well.
47:30
It's interesting, isn't it?
47:30
Quite a lot of,
47:33
I mean, quite a lot of non-Jewish people I've found are strangely silent.
47:40
Just in my
47:42
friendship groups and colleagues, you know, quite a lot of people have reached out,
47:47
but a surprising number have not.
47:50
And I think maybe, well, there are a few explanations.
47:53
Maybe they just think, well, maybe they're just sort of doing what we all do
47:57
and making it about themselves.
47:59
You know, this is an attack on Sydney, it's an attack on Bondi,
48:01
it's an attack on the Australian way of life,
48:03
and they're not really bothered by the bigotry element of it.
48:07
Maybe they feel somewhat conflicted or ashamed or equivocal
48:13
about their aggressive involvement in the movement
48:19
that will be perceived to have been part of the overall climate
48:26
that gave rise to this, if they're particularly reflective.
48:30
Or the worst case scenario is that some little part of them thinks,
48:34
well, of course this was going to happen.
48:36
I mean, the bloody Jews, or they don't think Jews,
48:39
they think the bloody Zionists,
48:41
because of course you can't think about
48:44
Jews as too pejorative for polite bigots
48:46
you know, you had bloody Zionists
48:48
of course this was going to happen
48:51
there's probably a lot of that
48:53
going around, honestly
48:57
Errol says
48:57
this is exactly why free speech rights are necessary
49:00
hate speech laws are whatever the country having them says it is
49:03
the hate speech laws are being enforced
49:04
they're just being enforced in the way the current government wants it to be
49:07
yeah, it's a good point, Errol
49:09
and that is the point that always gets missed
49:12
Georgina says
49:14
Josh you're a pleasure to listen to, thank you
49:15
have you read the book The War of Return by
49:17
Inat, I think you mean
49:19
Inat, she writes Inat but it's
49:21
Inat Wilf, it's great
49:23
for discussion, Georgina, Inat was on
49:25
this show and we had a great
49:28
debate about it
49:29
not debate, civil conversation
49:31
about it, I haven't
49:33
read the book but I
49:36
skimmed it before I spoke to her
49:37
but I think I got everything that I need from
49:40
out of our conversation, which people should listen to.
49:42
Einat's fascinating because her point is basically that,
49:46
and she was a parliamentarian in Israel.
49:49
She was a member of the Knesset.
49:50
She was in the Labor Party.
49:54
And, you know, she opposes settlements in the West Bank.
49:58
She's a hawk, but a pacifist hawk, if that makes sense.
50:02
Like she doesn't believe in like a greater Israel.
50:05
She thinks the occupation is bad
50:07
and she feels sympathy for Palestinians,
50:09
but she also doesn't think that the path forward
50:13
is by bending over and assuming that love
50:17
and kumbaya is going to save the day.
50:20
And her argument, I think I'll do it justice
50:22
by saying that it basically boils down
50:25
to the international community
50:29
and cynical Palestinian and other Arab leaders
50:32
have had a strategy that's been very successful,
50:36
I mean, it's ultimately been terrible for Palestinians, but it's been successful in isolating Israel, which has been that the right for Palestinian people to return to all of greater Palestine, all of Israel, in other words, and for all of their descendants to return to their quote-unquote homeland, which means like downtown Tel Aviv, is fundamental.
51:00
And that the only just resolution will be a Palestine from the river to the sea.
51:06
and her argument is had they been conciliatory from the start and understood that nobody gets
51:14
the whole enchilada um and you know israel wanted its little patch and then there was going to be
51:19
the arab side of things which is going to be palestine and then the arabs immediately invaded
51:23
and then you know back and forth and go over the history a million times but basically on
51:27
three major occasions um between the foundation of israel in the 40s and then up through to 1973
51:35
the Arab states on behalf of the Palestinians
51:39
whose national identity was only really forming
51:41
in the wake of the creation of Israel
51:45
as a subset of the broad Arab Muslim population of the region
51:50
had they agreed to at least rhetorically
51:56
the idea of a Palestinian state living alongside Israel
52:01
then there would never have been a problem
52:02
and there would be no occupation
52:03
and there would have been no blockade of Gaza
52:05
and there would be no Hamas
52:06
and Palestinians would have had a state long ago.
52:09
So that the framing of the whole thing as being like,
52:12
Jews came parachuting in and they dispossessed people
52:15
is so stuck in like the 1940s that it's just laughable.
52:22
There were lots of Jews there.
52:24
The majority of Jews in Israel are still from that region.
52:27
They're not people who came from Europe.
52:30
They were Middle Eastern Jews.
52:32
you can trace the lineage of the Jews back thousands of years.
52:36
The kingdom of King David was there.
52:39
If you dig up artifacts archaeologically in Israel,
52:42
you find ancient Jewish civilizations there.
52:46
That state got created, and yes, there was bloodshed and dispossession,
52:52
as there is with the creation of all states,
52:55
but there was also not just a willingness but an obvious acceptance
52:59
because Israel was not in possession of the West Bank or Gaza
53:02
when it was created.
53:03
And for decades, those things were occupied
53:06
by Jordan and Egypt, respectively.
53:09
And so Einat's point is,
53:12
if it were the case that there'd ever been
53:14
any rhetorical willingness on the Arab side
53:19
to accept that the Jews are not going anywhere,
53:23
then none of this would have happened.
53:25
And so all of the sort of misdeeds and calamities
53:28
that have happened ever since can be brought back to that.
53:33
I find that a little bit convenient for the Israeli side to say
53:39
because it absolves Israel of its responsibility
53:43
in failing to create conditions in Palestine
53:48
that make it possible for the green shoots of civil society to emerge
53:52
and for sane leaders to emerge.
53:54
It's not helpful to constantly keep building Israeli towns illegally
53:58
in the West Bank, it's not helpful to divide and conquer Palestinian leadership between Hamas and
54:07
the Palestinian Authority in order to keep them splintered.
54:11
But I think Aynat's broader worldview
54:14
is correct, which is that there's way too much focus globally and in opposition, you know, in
54:19
Gazan marches on the Israeli side of the responsibility here, as if Israel is always
54:27
supposed to have a perfect solution to the problem uh and no recognition of the intransigence of the
54:34
other side and the fact that the terrible situation which garzens are in is largely
54:38
of the i don't want to say their own creation because that sounds a bit cruel since most of
54:42
them are under 15 or whatever um but well not most of them a lot of them um but it is the creation
54:49
of Arab leaders, of Arab autocrats, of Hamas,
54:55
of international institutions which have pandered
54:58
to the Palestinian delusion that someday they will return
55:00
to Israel proper.
55:04
Josh writes, Mitch, as someone who's keen to dial down
55:07
the volume on identity, do you think the way the media
55:10
covers Jews should actually be the way they cover
55:12
other minorities, so the focus is on the universal
55:15
rather than the particular?
55:16
i'm not sure i quite understand that mitch i think yeah so if we're going to
55:25
right so in in the case of like a news organization like the public broadcaster
55:30
burying the lead on the anti-semitic on the anti-semitism angle and instead going full
55:36
bore on the uh massacre angle and then only getting to the fact that it was jews 19 paragraphs
55:42
later, would it be better for them to also do that if there was an attack, a Ramadan attack,
55:48
for example, by neo-Nazis on Muslims, or would it be better to headline both?
55:55
I think you headline
55:56
both.
55:57
I mean, I think you have to, I don't think that being against identity politics means that
56:02
you need to pretend that people who are motivated by identity politics, as racists and white
56:08
supremacists and jihadists are don't exist and aren't motivated by that but i do think that
56:15
it would be better if we could all replace our proximate identities at the top of our
56:23
hierarchy our ranking hierarchy with the identity of being human and then maybe australian and then
56:30
maybe jewish or muslim whereas at the moment the jewish or muslim seems to be at the top of the
56:37
pile and then comes australian and then somewhere else comes human i'm talking about for extremists
56:46
here obviously not for the majority of people i think the majority of people are appalled by what
56:51
happened and um don't want to play the identity politics game unless it's in a fulfilling way
56:58
um the issue of anti-semitism writes pretorian is a component of a larger conspiratorial way
57:03
of thinking of the world.
57:04
It doesn't conform to the left-wing frame of oppressor, oppressed.
57:09
Yeah, that's a good point.
57:11
Yes, the reason why it's difficult for people who aren't on the lookout
57:15
for anti-Semitism to recognize anti-Semitism when it subtly expresses itself in, you know,
57:21
overly intimidating Gaza marches that, you know, Jewish people find not to be merely a rational
57:29
critique of israeli policy but something darker or the way that the media covers um anti-semitism
57:37
by always insisting on also throwing into the to that grab bag all other kinds of bigotry those
57:43
kinds of phenomena are i think easier to propagate because of the sort of uh social justice worldview
57:53
where you want your minority to be really shat upon
57:57
in order to be worthy of your sympathy.
58:01
But the point that David Baddiel makes in his book Jews Don't Count,
58:04
which is a really important read and a great, really interesting read,
58:09
is simply that, okay, you could say, well, all right, Jews are powerful,
58:13
therefore they don't need our sympathy.
58:16
Okay, well, what does powerful mean?
58:19
You mean that they're rich, they're not poor?
58:20
Yeah, okay, Jews have money.
58:23
in Australia.
58:25
Well, okay, I mean, Indians have money in Australia.
58:31
Koreans have money in Australia.
58:33
You know, you would never say that a wealthy Indian doctor who is a victim of a racist attack,
58:39
or, you know, even if it's not an attack, if it's just racism, he's just, you know, he's parked at
58:44
the lights, and someone crosses the crosswalk in front of him, and says, you know, go eat some
58:52
curry, you bloody Indian bastard or something.
58:56
The fact that he's rich does not mean that that's
58:59
not racism.
59:01
And the fact that the Jewish population isn't poor doesn't mean that
59:05
hatred against them, even if it's thinly veiled, isn't anti-Semitism.
59:12
I'm not quite sure what,
59:15
you know, maybe there's something about the history of colonialism that makes Jewish people
59:19
seem like they're less worthy of status as a disenfranchised community.
59:25
I suppose they're
59:26
overrepresented in the arts and the media, so you can't say that they don't have a mouthpiece for
59:30
their worldview.
59:33
They're well-connected, so you can't say they don't have influence.
59:38
But in each
59:38
of these cases, you can find other minority communities, even if it's just people, you know,
59:43
like gay people, for example, who are also overrepresented in the arts and the media,
59:47
who are also well-connected and influential
59:48
in terms of being out and proud gays.
59:53
So there are lots of sub-communities
59:55
who we recognize can be victims of bigotry
59:58
and who deserve our attention and care,
1:00:02
who are not like the bottom of the barrel
1:00:05
of most disenfranchised and shat upon people
1:00:07
in the history of the universe.
1:00:09
It's only when it comes to Jews
1:00:11
that the relative privilege of Jews
1:00:13
is regarded as a reason for
1:00:16
they're not needing our concern.
1:00:18
And if any of that were the case, you know, if any such thinking
1:00:21
were valid prior to October 7th, surely the events of the past couple of years have proven to us
1:00:27
that whatever privileges we think Jewish people in Australia and around the world have, those do not
1:00:33
protect them from acts of intimidation, vandalism, graffiti, and violence.
1:00:40
I mean, you just have to
1:00:40
look at the amount of security that needs to be imposed around any Jewish place of worship,
1:00:47
or the lengths which Jewish people have to go to to hide themselves from the mainstream,
1:00:52
including taking off visible signs of their religion and so on,
1:00:56
to understand that they are not immune from prejudice.
1:01:01
I don't quite understand why this colonizer, colonized victim, oppressor,
1:01:09
privileged disadvantaged narrative um can be seen to trump the lived reality of what is happening
1:01:17
to jewish people on the ground but i think the point about that that commenter makes about
1:01:22
conspiracy thinking is also really interesting i mean the amount of conspiracy thinking is just
1:01:26
mind-boggling like especially you know at the risk of sounding like i'm singling out a community
1:01:34
like let's just say the radical muslim community is not great at uh resisting conspiracies especially
1:01:44
when it comes to the jews it was seconds after news of the attack broke that there was stuff
1:01:50
about how it was probably an israeli plot because you know it was a false flag operation and you
1:01:56
I mean, I've traveled through Egypt and Lebanon,
1:02:01
and I've met a lot, a lot of people who are just convinced
1:02:05
that 9-11 was an inside job, 9-11 was Mossad,
1:02:08
like the Jews are up to everything.
1:02:10
I mean, maybe this comes partly from living in either dysfunctional
1:02:15
or authoritarian states where you just sort of don't trust anything,
1:02:19
so you're much more conspiracy-minded.
1:02:22
but it is wild that something as patently obvious
1:02:29
as what happened on Sunday
1:02:30
can immediately get spun into insane conspiracy theories
1:02:35
and of course there's a whole sort of white nationalist
1:02:39
strain of conspiracy thinking on this as well
1:02:41
you only have to look at Pizzagate and all that nonsense
1:02:45
and certainly there have been right-wing websites
1:02:47
in the United States saying that this was a false flag operation as well
1:02:51
there was a photo going around of one of the victims of um the uh the attack on sunday he
1:02:58
survived but there's a there's a photo that he took a selfie of him of his face covered in blood
1:03:04
while he was lying on the grass and um then there was another photo of him and he's sitting
1:03:09
cross-legged on the ground and someone is applying something to his face his face is covered in blood
1:03:17
and he's laughing, he's smiling.
1:03:20
He survived, obviously.
1:03:21
And this person is applying something to his face
1:03:24
and this photo went around
1:03:28
and is being used as evidence
1:03:31
that the blood is being applied to his face
1:03:33
by a makeup artist.
1:03:35
And you can tell that it's him.
1:03:36
There's the photo of him on the ground,
1:03:39
the selfie, right after the attack,
1:03:41
covered in blood.
1:03:43
Then there's this other photo of him laughing
1:03:45
as the blood is being applied
1:03:47
by a makeup artist.
1:03:50
Now, what had happened was that after the attack,
1:03:53
he was being treated by a medic,
1:03:56
and he was relieved that it was over,
1:03:57
and they were having a joke in the trauma of the moment,
1:04:00
and the medic was wiping the blood off his face,
1:04:03
not putting blood on his face.
1:04:05
But you can see how we are just in a miasma now of nonsense.
1:04:11
I mean, photos can be taken out of context.
1:04:13
They can be generated by AI.
1:04:16
It's all the more reason to make sure that you're careful about not trusting anything that you see on social media and only getting your media from reputable sources like me.
1:04:29
Praetorian says, Wokeism takes the same fallacies and self-sealing hypotheses as anti-Semitism and applies them to a hierarchy of identities.
1:04:37
It's difficult to fight anti-Semitism as a leftist if you'd be fighting against the same arguments you've been making for years.
1:04:43
Yeah, there's probably a bit of cognitive dissonance there.
1:04:47
uh another person says people resent jews for being successful so people get schadenfreude
1:04:52
when bad things happen to them yeah there might be a bit of that there might be a bit of that
1:04:57
um and cheryl writes non-jewish australian here have lost friends over my outspoken concern about
1:05:04
growing anti-semitism over the past two years we'll probably lose more now i totally agree
1:05:08
with josh friedenberg thank you cheryl that's nice of you to say and it's nice to know there
1:05:13
and non-Jewish Australians who understand the crisis.
1:05:18
Josh Frydenberg, who, full disclosure, happens to be a friend of mine,
1:05:22
an old family friend, and I respect him greatly,
1:05:24
was the treasurer of Australia.
1:05:26
He's much more pro-Israel than I am.
1:05:29
That's fine.
1:05:31
And I think he's been speaking a lot of sense
1:05:34
over the course of the past two years
1:05:35
about the listlessness of the Australian leaders
1:05:39
in responding to anti-Semitism
1:05:41
in understanding how a lot of the messaging around opposition to the Gaza war was landing.
1:05:48
Again, nothing to do with specifics about brutality in Gaza
1:05:53
or about Israel's occupation or anything.
1:05:55
We're talking about a relentless barrage of extremely aggressive messaging from mobs
1:06:01
about essentially saying that it is inevitable and desirable
1:06:07
that Jews will be wiped out of the Middle East.
1:06:09
That is the way that things like globalize the Intifada and from the river to the sea by any means necessary.
1:06:15
That's what they mean in the context of the Palestinian-Israel conflict.
1:06:21
It may not be what the people who are marching across the harbor bridge intend them to mean or think that they mean,
1:06:26
but many of the people who were organizing that march and who were bringing the signs are fully aware of what they mean to Jewish people,
1:06:33
and they are fully comfortable with that level of confrontation.
1:06:36
so yeah I think I think that's about it there's we could look I don't want to go into we'll go
1:06:44
into Venezuela another time shall we do we want to talk about America going to war with Venezuela
1:06:49
I'm not sure that it's the most pressing of our concerns I'll leave you with an interesting
1:06:55
tidbit of information equally depressing from the Manhattan Institute which found that
1:07:02
the number of Republicans who, in America this is, who agree with the statement that the Holocaust
1:07:06
of Jews in Nazi Germany was greatly exaggerated or didn't happen, as historians describe, is 37%.
1:07:19
37%, more than a third of Republicans think the Holocaust was greatly exaggerated.
1:07:25
And the same report claims that this view was held by 77% of Hispanic Republican voters,
1:07:30
66% of black Republican voters and 54% of Republican men aged under 10.
1:07:35
So if you're a conservative in America over the age of 50, you're still on board with the Holocaust happened.
1:07:44
If you're under 50, a majority of Republicans under 50 think that it was greatly exaggerated.
1:07:52
Lastly, my apologies for forgetting Princess Bride.
1:07:54
My producer is very angry at me.
1:07:56
he wrote Princess Bride with two exclamation points and three question marks when I was saying
1:08:01
Rob Reiner's greatest movies I don't I mean okay maybe I have to go back and watch it I was a kid
1:08:06
I was a kid great film but I mean with Rob Reiner we're only picking from great films they're all
1:08:12
great but when Harry Met Sally is like it's gold it's uh it's total gold I hope you guys are okay
1:08:20
my love goes out to everybody out there take care of yourselves this week happy Hanukkah
1:08:25
Merry Christmas, and I'll see you shortly.
1:08:27
Thanks.