Latest / INSPIRE STORY / #0115 _STORY INSPIRE: Decisions that transforman, with Gad Saad

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#0115 _STORY INSPIRE: Decisions that transforman, with Gad Saad · INSPIRE STORY

0:03
Speaker 1: The Joe Rogan Experience. Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast
0:08
by night.
0:09
Speaker 2: All day. Good to see you, sir.
0:14
Speaker 1: Oh, so good to see you.
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Speaker 2: What's happening? How you been?
0:17
Speaker 1: Doing great. Got big news. Big? I'll talk big. Very big.
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Before I start with a.
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Speaker 2: Okay.
0:24
Speaker 1: Drops.
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Speaker 2: The book. Suicidal Empathy.
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Speaker 1: Suicidal Empathy.
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Speaker 2: The quote that we use all the time.
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Speaker 1: That's right.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, it is... It is a good quote, and it
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is a very accurate quote for the Times. I like this.
0:36
They're carrying the sign, free the wolves. The lamb is carrying.
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Speaker 1: Well, I wanted the cover to be as evocative as
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the concept, right?
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Speaker 2: Dying to be kind. There you go.
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Speaker 1: And just in the last two days, there have been
0:50
so many new cases of suicidal empathy that I regret
0:53
that I couldn't include them in the book.
0:56
Speaker 2: Like which ones?
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Speaker 1: So did you hear about the one where the– The
1:00
guy who tried to assassinate President Trump.
1:02
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.
1:03
Speaker 1: The judge then went and said, I am so sorry that,
1:06
you know, you're not being treated nicely. You have a
1:09
room without a window. This is just, it's mean.
1:13
Speaker 2: Oh, see, I don't think that that's suicidal empathy at all.
1:15
I think that's signaling. I think that's signaling that he
1:19
wishes that that man was successful and that he supports
1:22
his endeavor.
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Speaker 1: Fair enough. The second example, actually, today, Dave Rubin shared
1:28
it with me. It was the one where a felon
1:33
of color who had just been released ended up pushing, right?
1:38
And the previous person that he had been entangled with
1:41
didn't want to, whatever, press charges because she didn't want
1:45
another black man to be in prison.
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Speaker 2: Oh, boy. Boy, boy, boy, boy.
1:51
Speaker 1: So I hope to get into the book in a second.
1:53
But the other big news is that this past year
1:57
I've been a visiting scholar at Ole Miss, University of Mississippi.
2:03
I had taken a two-year leave from my school in Montreal.
2:07
Starting this summer, we are moving permanently to Oxford. So
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the Lebanese, Jews, Canadians are going down to Oxford, Mississippi,
2:17
and we're very excited.
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Speaker 2: Wow.
2:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah.
2:20
Speaker 2: So you're going to be there for two years? So
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how does that work? Three years. Three years. Do you
2:24
get a green card or a visa?
2:26
Speaker 1: Yeah. So the previous two years that I did, it
2:29
was a leave of absence. So I only had to
2:31
get a TN visa. But now that we're moving, I
2:35
applied for an EB1A visa, which gets you a green card.
2:39
They're called extraordinary visas. You have to pass certain criteria
2:43
to them.
2:44
Speaker 2: You are extraordinary, aren't you?
2:45
Speaker 1: And rather easy on the eyes.
2:46
Speaker 2: Yeah.
2:49
Speaker 1: And so that went through, thank God. And so, yeah.
2:54
So we're very excited.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
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Speaker 1: So hopefully this will be a fast track to my
3:00
inner spirit as American, but maybe we can legalize it
3:03
and turn the sads into Americans. Wow.
3:06
Speaker 2: Inshallah. You're going to join the team.
3:09
Speaker 1: If you'll have me.
3:10
Speaker 2: I will have you. Come on. Welcome aboard. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
3:13
We need more people that are thinking straight.
3:15
Speaker 1: So that's the big news.
3:16
Speaker 2: That's awesome, man. Congratulations. Thank you. That's a fantastic thing.
3:19
That's beautiful.
3:20
Speaker 1: Do you want to get into the book and then
3:22
we talk about other stuff?
3:23
Speaker 2: Sure, whatever.
3:24
Speaker 1: So I thought maybe I'd give you– because I know
3:26
that you know the parasitic mind really well. Yes. And
3:29
so I wanted to kind of contextualize this book in
3:32
relation to that book. So we are a thinking and
3:35
a feeling animal, right? Both our cognitive system is important
3:39
and our affective system is important. For example– advertisers recognize
3:45
that if I'm trying to sell you a mutual fund,
3:48
I need to engage your cognitive system. Here are the
3:51
seven reasons why you should buy my mutual fund. If
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I'm trying to sell you perfume, I don't tell you
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this is what Harvard physiologists think about the science of olfaction, right?
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I need to engage your affective system. So in that case,
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I will show you a pretty girl on a horse
4:09
with beautiful hair and the brand name will be Mystère, right?
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I'm just engaging your emotional system. Well, the parasitic mind
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was the story of what I need to do to
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hijack your cognitive system, your ability to think rationally. And hence,
4:26
there were all these parasitic ideas that destroyed your capacity
4:29
to think. But for me to completely zombify you and
4:33
hijack you, I also need to zombify your affective system.
4:38
That's where suicidal empathy comes in. So, If I can
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hijack both your cognitive and emotional systems, you become a
4:45
wood cricket, which we could talk about what that reference
4:47
is if you want.
4:48
Speaker 2: What's a wood cricket?
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Speaker 1: So the wood cricket is an insect that abhors water.
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It wants nothing to do with water. But when it
4:56
is parasitized by a neuroparasite called a brain– a hairworm.
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Speaker 2: Well, I've seen this.
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Speaker 1: Right? The hairworm needs the wood cricket to happily and
5:05
merrily commit suicide by jumping into the water– Because that's
5:09
the only way that the hair worm can complete its
5:12
reproductive cycle. So once the hair worm hijacks the wood
5:17
cricket's ability to think and to invoke its survival instinct,
5:21
it erases its survival instinct, then it is owned by
5:25
the hair worm. And so I use that principle to
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explain suicidal empathy.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, we've actually shown videos of that. It's very strange.
5:32
Speaker 1: It's amazing.
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Speaker 2: The cricket really commits suicide. It jumps in the water, drowns.
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And the worm wiggles out of its body.
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Speaker 1: Exactly.
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Speaker 2: And that's how it's born.
5:39
Speaker 1: Exactly.
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Speaker 2: There's so many cases of that in nature.
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Speaker 1: Indeed. Yeah. And so the way that I originally had
5:47
the epiphany to use the parasitological framework. So parasitology is
5:53
just a study of host-parasite interactions. So a tapeworm is
5:58
a parasite, but that parasitizes my intestinal tract. But a
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subfield of parasitology is neuroparasitology. Those are the parasites that
6:07
need to go into your brain, altering your circuitry to
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suit their interests.
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Speaker 2: Including ideas.
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Speaker 1: And that's how I came up with the parasitic ideas
6:15
and the parasitic mind. But in order to fully tell
6:19
the story, I then had to say, but a lot
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of the mechanisms by which people seem to be completely
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hijacked in terms of their ability to think critically, is
6:29
really coming from an affective place. And so how can
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I explain that? And so what I argue in the book,
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and then we can drill down to endless examples if
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you want, I'm not saying that empathy is a bad thing.
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Because even though the book is just dropping, there's already
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been maybe 10 articles that have been hit pieces against
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the book, which of course people, it means people haven't
6:50
read it yet, where they say, you know, here comes
6:52
the the dark Jew who is trying to promulgate the
6:56
idea that empathy is a bad thing. He's a neocon
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right-wing guy, an Elon guy, a Donald Trump guy. I'm
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not saying that empathy is bad. Empathy is actually a
7:09
very important virtue to have. In order for you and
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I to have a meaningful conversation, I need to put
7:14
myself in your mind and vice versa. That's called cognitive empathy, right?
7:20
theory of mind is something that typically autistic children fail
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on very early in life. That's how you diagnose them
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as being autistic. So there's nothing wrong with well-modulated empathy.
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The problem with empathy, like most things in life, is
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if there's too little or too much of it. Aristotle
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explained this to us thousands of years ago via his
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golden mean. If a soldier is not courageous enough, if
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he's cowardly, it's not good. If he's too courageous, he
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becomes a reckless martyr. That's not good. There's a sweet
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spot in the middle. I argue empathy follows exactly that rule.
7:54
Too little of it, you're a psychopath. Too much of it,
7:57
if it's hyperactive, if it is invoked in the wrong
8:00
situations toward the wrong targets, you end up with suicidal empathy.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, I don't even necessarily know if it's empathy at
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that point. It completely becomes illogical and ideological. You just
8:14
subscribe to whatever the ideology says and you ignore the reality.
8:21
Like this man that pushed that guy in front of
8:22
the train. Like this is a violent criminal and he
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had been arrested numerous times. I think more than a dozen.
8:29
And it was very clear there was something very wrong
8:31
with this person. He probably shouldn't be just running free,
8:34
victimizing people. There was another one where someone pushed this
8:39
old guy down a flight of stairs into the subway
8:41
and killed him. Same situation, same kind of person, person
8:45
that had been in and out of jail. Every one
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of these people starts off as a child. Every one
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of these people starts off as a baby. And I
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can only imagine what kind of household they developed in.
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I can only imagine what kind of abuse they suffered.
9:01
I can only imagine what happened to them. And that's horrible.
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But once they reach adulthood and they start victimizing other
9:09
people— We've got to do something as a society. Now,
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I don't know what the tools are to rehabilitate a
9:15
person like that, but I know that they're not being employed.
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There's not a whole lot of evidence of there's any
9:20
successful program where they're taking a person like that and
9:24
doing something with them that completely changes their personality and
9:27
the way they interact with humans and releases them out
9:30
in the world. They become a much better person than
9:32
they used to be.
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Speaker 1: So I call them– in the book, I call them
9:35
blank slate. felons, because if you remember the term blank slate,
9:41
so in the parasitic mind, I talk about social constructivism.
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Everything is a social construction. It's the tabula rasa premise.
9:48
We're born with empty minds, with no individual differences in
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our potentiality, and it's only our unique life trajectories and
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our unique patterns of social that end up making us
10:01
who we become, which in a small sense, that's true.
10:04
My life experience and yours is an indelible part of
10:07
who we are as individuals. But there are individual differences
10:11
that people are born with different proclivities eventually of committing
10:16
crimes or of being NBA players or of being the
10:19
next Einstein. It's a very hopeful message, though, to start
10:22
with the blank slate premise.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, it's just not accurate.
10:25
Speaker 1: Exactly. Because if you and I are both parents, I
10:28
would love to subscribe to the idea that if only
10:31
I knew the exact schedule of reinforcement of my how
10:34
to ensure that my child becomes the next Lionel Messi
10:38
or the next Albert Einstein, he too can become that.
10:41
That's a lot more hopeful than thinking, you know what,
10:44
I don't think my son has the morphological features that
10:47
are ever going to make him to be the next
10:49
NBA star. He's too short. He doesn't have the right
10:52
athletic tools. And so it's easy to understand why people
10:57
can be parasitized by these ideas. This person of color
11:02
was born into a white supremacist society, so he's already
11:05
been victimized by society. And for you to now punish
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him by having him in the penal system, you're doubly
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punishing him. So shouldn't you give him a second chance?
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And by second chance, we mean 186 chance. That's part
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of suicidal empathy. But suicidal empathy doesn't even apply to
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only that. The victims of rape are themselves, are suicidally
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empathetic towards their rapist. Can I share some of those
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incredible stories?
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Speaker 2: Sure.
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Speaker 1: So I start off in the book with an example
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from a Norwegian man who had been sodomized by a
11:39
Somali migrant. because the Norwegians are very kind and empathetic,
11:45
they don't believe in long sentences, he served maybe, I
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don't know, three years or four, like a pretty short
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sentence for a rape of another man. When he was
11:53
being released, he was going to be deported. The victim
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of that rape had this huge existential angst and guilt
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because now that, you know, Ahmed was going to be
12:06
released back to Mogadishu, he wouldn't end up being able
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to maximally flourish like he should be. Well, our emotional
12:14
system did not evolve to be empathetic toward our rapists.
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That would be an example of someone who's being suicidal empathetic.
12:21
Another great example.
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Speaker 2: Uh, what happened in that case?
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Speaker 1: Uh, what in terms of whether he was deported or not,
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I think, I don't want to misspeak, but I think
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he was deported to the screams and lamentations of his victim. Um,
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There is a woman who was raped in Germany, and
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when the authorities were trying to find out more about
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who the perpetrators were, she lied to them and said
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that they were speaking in German, even though they were
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speaking in Arabic and Farsi, because if she had truly
12:55
said what their language was, then those communities would have
12:59
been marginalized. So there's just an endless number of litany
13:03
of these examples. And therefore, suicidal empathy is really pervasive
13:08
once you recognize the mechanism.
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Speaker 2: When you look at the root of that, how is
13:13
it so common? Like what happens?
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Speaker 1: So I think that's a great question. I think, again,
13:17
it goes back to the one-two punch of parasitic mind
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and suicidal empathy. In order for the fertile grounds to
13:25
be available for suicidal empathy to barge in, I first
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have to have certain ideas that are implanted in your brain.
13:34
So let me give you That sounds very abstract. Let
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me give you a concrete example. Cultural relativism is a
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parasitic idea that I discuss in The Parasitic Mind. It
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basically says, who are you to judge the beliefs and
13:46
the practices of another culture? Shut up, racist, right? So
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there are honor killings. Shut up. There are child brides.
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Shut up. There are female genital mutilations. Shut up. Don't
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judge other cultures. Well, If you internalize that parasitic idea
14:02
that it is not appropriate to ever judge the cultural
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practices of another culture, then that renders you impotent when
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you're making judgments about who should be let into your country,
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about whether you want an increase of people who hold
14:17
those views or not. Therefore, that leads to the suicidally
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empathetic position that all immigrants are equally likely to assimilate
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within the American ethos or the Western ethos. So we
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started off with internalizing a parasitic idea called cultural relativism,
14:34
and that lays the foundation for then the suicidal empathy
14:38
of open borders.
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Speaker 2: Well, there's no pressure at all to assimilate. You're more
14:42
than welcome. That's one of the weird things. More than
14:46
welcome to establish a Somali community in Minnesota where no
14:49
one speaks English.
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Speaker 1: Exactly.
14:51
Speaker 2: It's very odd. It's very odd that people want to
14:54
come here, but when they come here, they want to
14:56
essentially turn it into a smaller version, at least their neighborhood,
15:00
of where they came from.
15:01
Speaker 1: Right. I mean, if it were only that you don't
15:04
speak English, I mean, to me, that's bad enough in
15:07
that you're not going to be part of the fabric
15:09
of the greater society. But fair enough. That's not an
15:12
existential threat. But if you're then going to be advocating
15:16
for many of the cultural beliefs— that are perfectly antithetical
15:21
to the whole society, then we have a problem.
15:23
Speaker 2: Yeah. And a lot of the cultural beliefs that are illogical,
15:27
they have to be based on something else. And generally
15:29
that's religion.
15:31
Speaker 1: Indeed.
15:31
Speaker 2: Yeah.
15:32
Speaker 1: And you and I have talked, you know, very often about,
15:36
you know, Islam and so on. Some people, I think,
15:39
I mean, I wonder what you think about this. Do
15:41
you think more Americans are willing to have a honest
15:44
and open conversation about this issue or are most still
15:47
sort of the proverbial ostrich And they think it's gauche
15:51
to talk about religion.
15:53
Speaker 2: Well, I think it's really divided in party lines. People
15:57
on the right are more than willing to talk about it.
15:59
There's very few people on the right who are empathetic
16:01
about some of the differences that these religions have and
16:08
hold and some of the rules that they would like
16:11
to apply like Sharia law. Whereas there's a lot of
16:15
people on the left that are terrified of being called racist.
16:18
terrified of being called Islamophobic or, you know, fill in
16:21
whatever phobia, transphobic, whatever it is. They're just terrified. They're
16:25
terrified of being labeled. And it's interesting because that side
16:30
of the political spectrum, the people on the left are
16:33
the quickest to pull the trigger and accuse someone of
16:37
being something, being racist, sexist, homophobic, whatever it is. They're
16:42
the quickest and the most vicious when it comes to
16:44
attacking people based on them not not going along with
16:51
whatever narrative that's been established, which is interesting because they're
16:55
the ones that also like to call people fascists. But
16:58
that is a form of fascism. It's not like– if
17:01
you look at fascism, it's essentially– most people think of
17:05
it as right-wing authoritarianism. But it is also– if you
17:09
look at the definition of it, it's also a complete
17:13
adherence to whatever narrative is being promoted.
17:18
Speaker 1: Yeah.
17:18
Speaker 2: And you don't think about that when it's left-wing, like
17:22
left-wing progressive– like left-wing progressive fascism sounds like an oxymoron.
17:27
But it's a mindset and it's– the problem is you're
17:31
hiding this mindset in an ideology that you think is righteous.
17:36
And this is– you could say the same thing about
17:39
religion because this is also what people do with religion
17:42
because it is the right thing. It's the right thing
17:44
to do. So throw the gay off the roof. It's
17:47
like– It's it's really kind of fascinating. Like when you
17:51
when you see like queers for Palestine, you're like, hold on.
17:56
Like it is a wonderful thing to empathize for the
18:00
Palestinian people and to think that they shouldn't be bombed
18:02
into oblivion. And I'm with you 100 percent. But when
18:06
you start supporting Hamas and saying, you know, we're queers
18:09
for Hamas, like and I've seen that I see trans
18:11
people for Hamas. And it's like, good Lord, what are
18:15
you saying?
18:15
Speaker 1: So I've got I've got out. a whole verbatim transcript
18:19
between a street interviewer. You know, these guys that just
18:23
take someone off the street and they tape it.
18:25
Speaker 2: Yes.
18:25
Speaker 1: Take his name. Yeah.
18:27
Speaker 2: So we were, we just had a little technical glitch.
18:29
So you were talking about one of those guys that
18:31
interviews people in the street.
18:32
Speaker 1: So he, he goes and intercepts this woman who's at a,
18:37
I guess like a, you know, free, free Palestine, you know, rally.
18:41
And he says, Oh, you're, you're for Palestine. She goes, yes.
18:45
She goes, well, what do you think about their positions
18:47
on queer people? She goes, well, I'm queer. He goes, oh,
18:50
you're queer? So what do you think about what they
18:53
would do to you? She goes, well, they would kill me.
18:55
She goes, but then you still support them. She goes, yes.
18:57
He goes, but it doesn't bother you that you're supporting
19:00
a group that would kill you for the way that
19:02
you are? She goes, no. The fact that they would
19:05
kill me doesn't mean that they don't deserve my support. Well,
19:08
that's the wood cricket, right? I mean, there is no
19:11
evolutionary mechanism that says I'm going to build an affiliation
19:16
with a group that I know would kill me. But
19:19
she is so kind. She's so empathetic. She so transcends
19:22
the earthly survival instincts that she has ascended to a
19:26
higher plane. So it literally is straight out of what
19:30
you said.
19:31
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20:14
But in that situation, what they're doing is they're being
20:18
motivated by what they see as a complete destruction of Gaza.
20:22
Speaker 1: Right.
20:23
Speaker 2: So it's a different situation because if like there was
20:28
no attacks on Gaza and Gaza was its own– autonomous
20:33
or completely separate state and it wasn't controlled by Israel
20:39
and there was no conflict. I doubt they would have
20:42
the same mindset. Like the mindset is coming out of
20:45
watching the destruction of Gaza. And so then instead of saying, hey,
20:51
we shouldn't just be bombing this city into oblivion and
20:54
supporting this. Instead, they go all the way and support
20:59
the ideology of the authoritarian rulers of this area, which
21:05
is kind of kooky. But it's like– but it's much
21:09
like a religion. It's like you can abandon all logic
21:14
as long as you adhere to– and you have to
21:17
in fact if you want to be accepted. And this
21:20
is one of the things about the left is like
21:22
there's never someone left enough. And when you think you're
21:27
left enough, they move the border and They move the
21:30
boundary lines. The goalposts are like a mile further to
21:32
the left. You're like, oh, God, I got to support
21:34
drag queens teaching kids now by themselves? No parental supervision? Twerking?
21:41
It's like it just keeps getting nuttier and nuttier to
21:44
where any protest of it is heresy. And that's where
21:49
it gets very strange and it behaves completely like a religion.
21:54
Speaker 1: Other examples of suicidal empathy. So I talk in the
21:58
book about something I introduce as cultural theory of mind, right?
22:03
So theory of mind is, as I discussed earlier, it's
22:05
at the individual level. For you and I to have
22:07
a meaningful conversation, I need to be in your mind
22:10
and vice versa. Cultural theory of mind is the same principle,
22:14
but it operates at the cultural level. So if culture
22:17
A has a set of values that it adheres to,
22:21
and if it presumes that those values are processed in
22:25
exactly the same way by the other culture, and that's
22:28
a wrong presumption, I argue that that culture then lacks
22:32
cultural theory of mind because it is assuming that its
22:36
values transcend in exactly the same way to other cultures. Now,
22:39
why is that related to suicidal empathy? So if you take,
22:42
for example, the values that we hold dear in the West, magnanimity, generosity, kindness, empathy,
22:52
they're interpreted in other societies as weakness, weakness, weakness, and weakness.
22:58
And this is why I I don't remember if I
23:00
mentioned this to you before on the show or not.
23:03
In Arabic, when people would speak to me, I mean,
23:05
many years ago before, I mean, now they recognize me,
23:07
so they're not going to be as forthright in their positions.
23:11
But 25 years ago, they would all tell me the
23:14
West is a woman to be mounted. Well, the reason
23:17
why they're saying that— Did.
23:18
Speaker 2: It all tell you that?
23:19
Speaker 1: I mean, not all.
23:20
Speaker 2: But it was very common?
23:21
Speaker 1: But it was a saying that is often, you know, intimated.
23:26
Speaker 2: Was this when you were living in Lebanon?
23:27
Speaker 1: No, no, no. In Montreal.
23:29
Speaker 2: Montreal.
23:29
Speaker 1: In Montreal.
23:29
Speaker 2: We should tell people just— My background? Yeah, because it's,
23:33
you know, it's very pertinent.
23:35
Speaker 1: Sure. So I was born in 1964 in Lebanon. My
23:40
family were part of the last remaining minuscule community of
23:45
Lebanese Jews. Historically, there was always a small but pretty
23:51
vibrant Jewish community. Most of the Jews had left prior
23:56
to the start of the Civil War, which happened in 75.
23:59
I was 11. Because they had already read the writing
24:03
on the wall. So most of my extended family, my aunts,
24:07
my uncles, my grandparents, had left to various places. Most
24:11
of them to Israel, but some of them to Montreal, Canada.
24:14
That's why we ended up going to Montreal ourselves. But
24:16
my parents had refused to leave because they were very
24:19
well entrenched within Lebanese society. They had nice business and
24:23
so on. My older sibling, I have three other siblings.
24:27
One is 14 years older. One is 12 years older.
24:30
And one is 10 years older. The one who's 10
24:32
years older is the Olympian Judoka that played in the,
24:36
that competed in the Montreal Olympics in 1976. So they
24:41
already had left Lebanon prior to the start of the
24:44
civil war because they had started facing some Jew hatred difficulties,
24:49
even in tolerant, progressive Lebanon. Unfortunately for me, being the
24:54
last 10 years younger than everybody else, I was still
24:56
a kid. We got caught up once the civil war
25:00
broke out. Some really bad things happened during that first year,
25:04
but then we were able, thank God, to escape to Montreal.
25:09
But then my parents kept returning to Lebanon because they
25:14
still had business interests. So they would go back to
25:17
Lebanon from 1975 to 1980. On one of their return
25:22
trips to Lebanon, they were kidnapped by Abu Nidal's group, Fatah.
25:29
And some really bad things happened during their captivity, very
25:33
much like the stuff that you hear about on October 7th.
25:36
But luckily, they weren't killed. They were able to be freed.
25:42
I mean, they weren't freed through a commando operation. They
25:45
were freed through the connections that my parents had. My
25:49
mother's best friend was a Syrian woman, Syrian Muslim woman,
25:54
who was the personal dresser of Hafez al-Assad, the father
26:01
of Bashir, the one who was recently deposed. And so
26:05
through him, my siblings were... reached out to this woman.
26:11
Her name was Ihsan. I think she's passed away now.
26:14
She got the father involved. He reached out to Yasser Arafat,
26:19
who was the head of the PLO back then. As
26:23
I understand the story, Yasser Arafat said, well, I don't
26:27
even know whether they're with one of our groups. Let
26:29
me make some calls. But at the time, there was
26:33
sort of a battle between Yasser Arafat and Abu Nidal.
26:36
And he said, if it's the Abu Nidal gang that
26:39
took him, You know, good luck. And it was the
26:41
Abu Nidda group. But I'm guessing there was some money
26:44
that was exchanged. My parents were freed. When my father returned,
26:49
he had a temporary facial paralysis akin to when you
26:56
have a really severe stroke and your face is completely
27:01
disfigured and asymmetric.
27:03
Speaker 2: Guillain-Barre.
27:04
Speaker 1: Is that what it's called? Yeah. But it was. It
27:06
got resolved. And so for about, I don't know how
27:08
long it was, maybe a month or two, his face
27:10
was completely asymmetric, probably due to the things that happened
27:15
to him. And actually, I mean, some of the stuff
27:18
I may have briefly mentioned on this show, but here's
27:21
a part that I'm almost certain I didn't mention. At
27:25
one point, the militia group was trying to get my
27:28
parents to sign a confession letter that they are Israeli spies,
27:34
which if you met my parents... you would know that
27:37
that's not a very likely reality because it turns out
27:41
that if they signed that, then they could legally execute them.
27:45
And the guy who had started this whole thing was
27:48
the owner of the building where my dad owned the store.
27:51
And if they could now get rid of them, the
27:54
store would. So it wasn't even like a religious thing.
27:57
It was for one of the seven deadly sins of greed,
28:01
at least as I understand it. And anyways, and so
28:03
at one point, They had separated my parents and they
28:06
were trying to put a lot of pressure on each
28:09
of them to sign this thing. And they go to
28:11
my mother and say, you know, admit that you're a spy, whatever,
28:16
Israeli agent. And she's like, are you crazy? I mean,
28:19
just go ask my husband, you know. And they kind
28:22
of mockingly say, oh, well, your husband has gone to
28:26
join his God, meaning that they've already killed him. So
28:29
then my mother is in her little cell and, you know,
28:32
they're doing bad things to them. And she hears my
28:35
dad late at night in some other part of wherever
28:39
they were keeping him. He had a very whooping kind
28:42
of cough, like a cough as if like, actually, I
28:45
have a similar cough. I used to be asthmatic, so
28:47
I have this very deep and loud cough. And so
28:51
she was hearing that cough, but she wasn't sure if
28:55
she's just hallucinating this in her thoughts or whether it
28:59
was real. Well, it turned out that they hadn't killed him,
29:02
but they were just trying to lean in on her.
29:04
And so that's the background that I come from. Yeah.
29:08
Speaker 2: So you are very tuned in to what could possibly
29:12
go wrong.
29:15
Speaker 1: Unfortunately, yes. And this is why, I mean, many times
29:18
when I've come on the show, I've talked about some
29:21
of those difficulties that all religions are not indistinguishable from
29:26
each other. I mean, religions have certain features that might
29:30
be transferable from one religion to the other.
29:32
Speaker 2: Right.
29:33
Speaker 1: But there are many elements that are very specific to
29:36
a given religion.
29:37
Speaker 2: Sure.
29:38
Speaker 1: If you're an extremist Jain, then you really take your,
29:45
using the sweeping thing, when they walk, they use a
29:50
broom so that they inadvertently don't step on an ant
29:55
and kill it. So an extremist, extremist in quotes, Jain,
29:59
someone who really takes his religion seriously, is someone who's
30:02
going to be extremist in his pacifism. Now, that religion
30:08
has very, very different edicts about how to conduct yourself,
30:12
even when you're walking on a sidewalk, than maybe will
30:15
an Abrahamic faith, whether it be Judaism or Christianity or Islam.
30:19
So the idea that ultimately all religions are simply preaching
30:23
the same indistinguishable thing in slightly different ways is simply
30:28
not true. But it feels good to think that, right?
30:31
It's empathetic for us to think that. We should never
30:34
speak amongst mixed company about politics and religion. So therefore,
30:38
if I start saying something that might be pejorative of
30:42
another religion, that feels icky. That feels gauche. And that's why,
30:47
by the way, earlier you mentioned that when we were
30:50
talking about this, when I asked you, are Americans more
30:53
likely now to talk openly about Islam, you said, well,
30:56
The Democrats are more terrified to do so than the Republicans.
30:59
Speaker 2: Yeah.
30:59
Speaker 1: But even the Republicans are to some extent suicidally empathetic
31:03
because if you watch even the ones who very forcefully
31:07
criticize Islam as being incongruent with American values, they'll always
31:14
use linguistic coverage to protect Islam. So it's Islamism.
31:19
Speaker 2: Yes.
31:20
Speaker 1: It's radical Islam.
31:22
Speaker 2: Don't you agree with that?
31:24
Speaker 1: No.
31:24
Speaker 2: No?
31:25
Speaker 1: No. Not at all. So political Islam and Islamism is
31:30
an indelible, inherent feature of Islam. Much of Islam is Islamism.
31:37
So if you do a content analysis of all of
31:40
the canonical texts of Islam, which are the Quran, the Hadith,
31:46
the deeds and the sayings of Muhammad, and the Sira,
31:49
which is the biography of Muhammad, You could do a
31:52
quantitative analysis of how often is it preaching brotherly love?
31:57
How often is it really concerned about the infidels? And
32:01
so Islam in its nature is political. Why? There are
32:05
many reasons why, but let me just give you one.
32:07
And then if you want to drill down, we can
32:09
do so. Islam is a fully proselytizing religion, meaning that
32:16
it is incumbent in an ideal world to turn the
32:21
entire world into the one true faith. It is a
32:25
peaceful religion if by peaceful it means the following. Eventually,
32:31
the entire globe, every millimeter of the globe, will be
32:35
united under the unifying flag of Allah. Now, let's take,
32:39
for example, Judaism. And it's not because I'm Jewish, but
32:42
it's just to compare. Judaism is precisely the opposite of
32:47
is it is an anti-proselytizing language. You're not allowed to proselytize.
32:53
As a matter of fact, if you proselytize, let's say
32:56
I try to convince you, Joe, you know, why don't
32:58
you join the tribe? And you say, you know what?
33:00
I think I'd like to.
33:00
Speaker 2: It's a grind.
33:02
Speaker 1: It's a grind.
33:02
Speaker 2: It's a long haul. My uncle did it.
33:04
Speaker 1: Well, there you go. Thank you. So it is literally
33:07
in the canons of Judaism to try to dissuade the
33:12
prospective convert to coming into the fold. Because The idea
33:17
is to have a costly signal of your commitment, your
33:22
religious piety to want to join the group. So it
33:25
is a grind. It's very hard. In Islam, you just
33:28
have to say the one proclamation, the Shahada, one sentence,
33:32
and you're in. Now, try to get out. There are
33:35
apostasy laws against you getting out. So the circuitry of
33:41
Islam is one that is expansionist. That's why you have
33:45
2 billion Muslims. One out of every four human beings
33:49
is Muslim. And it only took 1400 years for that.
33:52
So from a marketing perspective, as someone who studies consumer behavior,
33:56
Islam is a brilliant marketing religion. It has found a
34:02
way to get a lot of customers and adherents. Judaism
34:06
sucks at marketing because the entire circuitry of Judaism is
34:11
meant to keep it very, very small. And so Which
34:15
one is likely to lead to greater problems? The one
34:20
that is meant to ensure that all of us become
34:22
Muslim or the one that says, even if your uncle
34:25
wants to become Jewish, we're going to put the barrier
34:28
so high that nobody will ever become Jewish. So we
34:31
still have only 15 million Jews roughly in the world,
34:35
almost the same as we had before the Holocaust. So
34:37
Judaism sucks as a marketing religion, Islam incredibly successful.
34:42
Speaker 2: In this country, the concern with Judaism is the support
34:47
of the Israeli military.
34:49
Speaker 1: Right.
34:49
Speaker 2: That's the concern. The concern is the amount of influence
34:53
that it has on the United States government, how we
34:56
got into the Iran war, why we give them so
34:59
much influence over our military, over our decision-making, over our politicians.
35:07
I mean, AIPAC famously– promotes and supports a tremendous amount
35:13
of politicians in the United States. That's the big fear,
35:16
is that there's an inordinate amount of influence that Israel
35:20
has over foreign policy, our decisions, and even our political
35:26
structure in the country. Right.
35:29
Speaker 1: Several ways to tackle this. Say the Iran war. Take
35:33
Israel out of it. Do you think that the Do
35:36
you think there are multiple countries that would share in
35:41
the recognition that probably Iranian regime that has an eschatology
35:49
that basically says the end of times requires that there
35:52
is sort of death to everybody before the final, you know,
35:57
imam comes back? Would it be a good idea for
36:01
the Brits or the Romanians or the French to Or
36:05
some of the other, the Gulf countries, would they be
36:09
happy if Iran had a nuclear weapon? So to frame
36:13
the issue of the U.S. is attacking or is involved
36:17
in the attack on the Iranians as, you know, the
36:21
United States doesn't have personal agency. They're all wood crickets
36:25
that are being puppeteered by this incredibly powerful lobby called Israel.
36:30
That simply doesn't pass the smell test. Of course, Israel...
36:35
has shared interests with the United States, as most allies would,
36:38
where they both agree that probably an Iranian regime that
36:42
has nuclear weapons would not be a good thing for
36:45
world peace. And so because these two countries have maybe
36:49
greater testicular fortitude than the NATO countries, it seems as
36:53
though the Israelis are puppeteering the Americans. But do you
36:58
really think that Donald Trump is sitting and saying, you know,
37:02
Had I not been such a weak guy with no
37:04
personal agency, I wouldn't have fallen sway to the incredibly
37:09
influential Zionist lobby.
37:11
Speaker 2: Well, it's not just incredibly influential. It's the amount of
37:13
financial support they gave his candidacy and, again, all the
37:18
different politicians that are beholden to Israel. That's the concern
37:22
that a lot of people on the right and on
37:25
the left have here in America. Most people in America
37:29
do not support this war. It's the large percentage of
37:33
people think it was a bad idea.
37:35
Speaker 1: What are your thoughts?
37:36
Speaker 2: I don't think it's a good idea.
37:37
Speaker 1: Why?
37:38
Speaker 2: Well, because first of all, it doesn't seem to have
37:40
a clear resolution, right? It's like we went over there
37:45
because we were told that they were very close to
37:49
developing a nuclear weapon. But if you paid attention to
37:52
what Netanyahu has said over the last few decades, it's
37:55
always been they're a year away. They're two months away.
37:58
They're whatever it is. I mean he's been doing this forever.
38:01
Ever since he spoke at the UN and had that
38:03
giant cartoon bomb, remember the fucking Looney Tunes bomb?
38:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, yeah. With the percentage of.
38:10
Speaker 2: Enrichment of uranium. He's wanted this for a long time.
38:15
There's also a deep concern that he is only in
38:19
office because of the war and he has corruption charges
38:22
in Israel and that in order for him to stay
38:25
in power and for him to avoid going to trial,
38:28
he has to continue war.
38:32
Speaker 1: Can I comment on that?
38:33
Speaker 2: Sure.
38:34
Speaker 1: Yeah. Let's suppose you go to see your physician and
38:38
your physician says, hey, Joe, God forbid, it looks like
38:42
your blood sugar is very high and I'm going to
38:44
classify you as now, nevermind pre-diabetic, I think you're diabetic.
38:48
And if we don't manage your sugar levels, there will
38:52
come a day where I can tell you exactly what's
38:55
going to happen. We're going to have to amputate your extremities.
38:58
You're probably going to lose your eyesight. you're probably going
39:01
to have sexual dysfunction and you're probably going to have
39:03
some cardiovascular incident. That doesn't happen on day two of
39:08
you having been diagnosed with diabetes. Like there is a
39:11
trajectory and at some point there'll be a tipping point
39:15
where until then, none of the diabetes complications happened. Now,
39:20
why am I saying all this? Because I can't comment
39:24
as to whether he's been lying all the times when
39:26
he said there's two more years left or one more
39:29
year or six more months. But surely we can grant
39:33
the American government enough leeway to presume that if they
39:39
thought that at this point it's the right time and
39:41
it is now intolerable for them to go another day
39:45
with the current reality. that they probably had some intelligence
39:49
that suggests that they are close. So I can't comment
39:51
whether Netanyahu was pulling our eyes. But surely it can't
39:56
be that the Israelis are so manipulative in their puppeteering
40:00
that they've pulled the wool over the American eyes. And
40:03
really there's no danger that the Iranians were posing and
40:06
we've convinced the Americans to go to war. Do you
40:09
think that it is that?
40:10
Speaker 2: Well, I wouldn't say there's no danger, right? So here's
40:14
one thing that we do know. They had said that
40:17
their missiles could only reach a certain distance. That proved
40:22
to not be true because of the Diego Garcia missile launch.
40:27
So they have missiles that are capable of reaching Europe,
40:31
and that was not something they had said before. We
40:34
know that they have enriched their uranium beyond what they
40:38
need for nuclear power and that they're within striking distance
40:44
of of developing a nuclear weapon. But wasn't it true
40:48
that they had put, see, this is, it's hard to
40:52
know as me as a person sitting on a podcast
40:55
studio in Texas, exactly what their ruling had been, but
41:01
that they had only done this in order to avoid
41:06
the possibility of them being attacked, that they would get
41:09
close to a nuclear weapon. So at least it would
41:14
It would deter some potential attacks on them and that
41:18
they were doing this out of self-interest. There's a large
41:24
group of American politicians that did not want this war,
41:27
that did not think it was warranted to attack Iran
41:31
at this point.
41:32
Speaker 1: Can I?
41:33
Speaker 2: Yeah. Okay.
41:35
Speaker 1: So I think I've mentioned on the show before this
41:38
distinction between deontological ethics, absolute statements. It is never okay
41:43
to lie. Versus consequentialist ethics. It's okay to lie if
41:47
it is meant to spare someone's hurt feelings, right? So
41:50
if your wife says, do I look fat in those jeans?
41:53
You put on your consequentialist hat and you say, you've
41:55
never looked more beautiful because maybe she's put on a
41:58
bit of weight, but you don't want to hurt her feelings.
42:00
So you lie. And for most of us, we go
42:03
through life on most instances putting on a consequentialist hat. Okay.
42:08
I'm going to link it now to our discussion. To have,
42:11
for example, a deontological principle that says that I am
42:15
always an isolationist. Do you understand what I mean by here, deontological?
42:19
Meaning that it doesn't matter what the environment is out there. I,
42:24
as America, will never interfere in wars over there. That
42:29
can't be an optimal strategy, right? So, for example, if
42:33
you were a deontological pacifist, you say, under no circumstances...
42:39
Do I believe that violence is the solution? Well, what
42:43
would usually happen to a society if it adhered to
42:46
deontological pacifism?
42:47
Speaker 2: They'd be attacked.
42:48
Speaker 1: They'd be eradicated, right? So it can't be that for
42:53
some of these geopolitical issues, there is a rule that
42:57
in its nature is deontological. So many of the Americans
43:00
that are anti this war are very, very– staunchly steeped
43:07
in sort of a libertarian slash deontological isolationist perspective. Now,
43:12
in many cases, I would completely agree with that position
43:15
in that it's not the Americans' position to have to
43:19
go and be the policeman of everywhere in the world.
43:23
But let's contrast it, say, with when World War II
43:26
was about to happen, the appeasement strategy of Chamberlain, right?
43:31
This guy with the little mustache says, don't worry about it.
43:33
I absolutely have no design to do anything about it.
43:35
You swear, Adolf? It's all good? Yeah, yeah, don't worry. Promise?
43:39
You really don't? Even though you're moving all of your stuff,
43:41
you're a good guy, right? I can trust you. Yeah,
43:43
of course you can. So appeasement only works if the
43:47
other person is someone that can be fully trustworthy. It
43:51
is almost incontestable that if the Iranian regime in its
43:55
current form could ever cause great damage to everybody, not
43:59
only Israel, right? I mean, The Gulf countries are not
44:02
exactly putting up barriers against this war because they also
44:06
are the enemies of the Iranians. So it's undoubtable that,
44:11
of course, the Americans have the Israelis in their ear
44:15
pushing for their self-interest. But that's also called the reality
44:19
of every nation on Earth. Every entity fights for its
44:24
own interests. But that doesn't mean that the Americans are
44:28
so lacking in personal agency that are so gullible, are
44:32
so easy to puppeteer that there must be this Zionist
44:36
lobby that otherwise is pushing us into an unnecessary war.
44:40
Maybe another three years, maybe another five years, maybe another
44:43
10 years, it would have resulted in a disaster. So
44:48
if you are a universalist and you want the Iranian
44:51
people to maximally flourish, forget about Israel. Don't even mention
44:55
the word Israel. Do you not want these 90 million
44:58
people called Iranians who have a deeply rich historical heritage
45:05
to flourish? I've had many graduate students who are Iranians
45:09
in my classes and so on. They're some of the
45:11
most modern, secular, outward-looking Westerners that have been choked for
45:17
47 years by a really nasty regime. So maybe we
45:21
could celebrate that if all this goes well, 90 million
45:25
people are going to be freed. And I could say
45:27
that statement without ever invoking Israel. What do you think
45:30
of that?
45:31
Speaker 2: Well, I think the reason why they're in the situation
45:33
they're in in the first place is because the United States.
45:37
It's because the United States and the British Petroleum Company.
45:40
It's because they were trying to nationalize oil. That's what
45:43
happened in the first place.
45:44
Speaker 1: You mean the Islamic Revolution?
45:45
Speaker 2: Yes. This is how it started in the first place.
45:48
They realized that the British Petroleum Company was making a
45:51
ton of money and they wanted to nationalize oil. And
45:55
we got rid of them and they installed this Islamic regime.
45:59
And look, there's a lot of consequences for that down
46:04
the road. Obviously, the worst side of it was what
46:08
happened to the Iranian people. When you look at the
46:11
photos and the videos of Tehran from like the 1950s,
46:15
the 1960s. I mean, my God, it looks like a
46:18
Western society, women wearing skirts and everyone looks very modern
46:23
and Western. And then it became this fundamentalist religious country
46:30
that it is right now, this Islamic country that it
46:32
is right now. They're under a regime that murders protesters.
46:39
They famously murdered some high-level wrestlers. There was an Olympic
46:44
gold medalist at the United States. The UFC tried to
46:46
get involved and tried to keep him from getting murdered. Yeah,
46:51
they do horrible things. There's no doubt about it. It's
46:53
a terrible regime. But there's a really good argument that
46:56
that terrible regime is in place because of the CIA
47:00
and because of the United States government, because the British
47:02
Petroleum Company, because we intervened. And we've done that in
47:05
the past. We did that with Libya. right? This is
47:08
the reason why Muammar Gaddafi was out. We had Russell Crowe,
47:12
who's a brilliant guy on the podcast, was explaining the
47:17
history of Libya and how great it was for Libyan
47:20
people when Muammar Gaddafi was in power, that if anybody
47:25
wanted to get an education anywhere, they had some certain
47:29
skills or talent in some certain area, they would fully
47:31
pay for their education overseas. They gave everyone a house.
47:34
Everyone who lived there had a home. I mean, people
47:36
were educated. They And he was trying to set up
47:39
something akin to the United States but the United States
47:41
of Africa. And they were like, we can't have any
47:45
of that. And so they got rid of him and
47:49
Libya became a failed state. Like we have monkeyed in
47:53
other countries for our own interest for a long time
47:56
with horrible consequences for the people in those countries. And
47:59
I think Iran is an excellent example of that.
48:02
Speaker 1: So how much of the Islamic regime– coming into power
48:09
in 1975, if you have 100 points that you want
48:13
to allocate to either it's the U.S. that causes it
48:17
versus there's an Islamic regime with its theology that is
48:21
really nasty, how would you allocate the points in terms
48:24
of the cause of that reality?
48:29
Speaker 2: That's a good question. That's a question that would be
48:31
answered by historians rather than me. But I think there's
48:35
no doubt that we played a major factor in that.
48:38
Don't you agree with that?
48:40
Speaker 1: I mean yes and no. So let me explain why
48:41
I say yes and no. When you have a complicated
48:45
geopolitical system, you can always look– you remember the old
48:50
butterfly effect, right? There's a butterfly flaps its wings in
48:54
the Amazon and then how that reverberates into a cyclone
48:59
somewhere else, right?
49:00
Speaker 2: It's kind of bullshit though.
49:01
Speaker 1: No, but I mean the principle of– Right.
49:03
Speaker 2: It's great if you don't understand how the weather works.
49:06
Speaker 1: Fair enough. But the idea that there are causal networks
49:10
is such that in this complicated web of causal networks,
49:14
you can always find a particular entity that you can
49:19
try to link back all of the causes to that entity.
49:22
Speaker 2: But the overthrow of a foreign government and supporting an
49:26
Ayatollah to take their place, it's a pretty big factor.
49:30
Speaker 1: But that's why I asked you to allocate the 100 points.
49:34
Speaker 2: I wouldn't be the guy to answer that.
49:36
Speaker 1: I'm going to answer off the top of my head.
49:37
Speaker 2: Please.
49:38
Speaker 1: And it's completely speculative. So the numbers I'm going to
49:40
say are not. Let's ascribe 10 out of the 100
49:44
points to whatever power the U.S. wields in that region
49:51
to have allowed that regime to come in. But that
49:55
regime carries the other 90 points of the 100 points.
49:59
Because they are the ones who for the next 47
50:02
years implement the reality that the common Persian is going
50:07
to experience. Everything in the world can ultimately be linked
50:12
back to oxygen, to the United States, to the military complex,
50:18
to the Zionist lobby. Because in some very facile way,
50:22
all of those entities are connected in a meaningful way
50:26
in this causal network. But is Using Occam's razor, does
50:32
it really make sense to blame, for example, people say
50:36
ISIS is really due to whatever, Israel. I mean, in
50:41
some facile way, you could draw the causal link of
50:46
how there was a vacuum that was created by the U.S.
50:50
when they debathized Iraq that allowed an external. So do
50:54
we blame ISIS on American policy or the Zionist lobby?
51:00
Or does ISIS itself have any personal agency in terms
51:04
of what it then does for the next 10 years
51:07
that it's in power? Do you see what I'm saying?
51:09
Speaker 2: I do.
51:10
Speaker 1: So this is the old story. I'm going to butcher it,
51:13
but I quote it in the parasitic mind. For the
51:15
man who has a hammer, he only sees the world
51:19
as being made up of the nails, right? So this
51:21
is when you're, you're presuming that there is greater explanatory
51:26
power to a particular cause than there really is. Look,
51:31
I'll give you an example. Let's suppose that the night
51:36
before an eventual dictator that was going to become a dictator,
51:43
his parents felt particularly amorous that night. And what made
51:48
them amorous to then eventually conceive that guy who became
51:52
a dictator who killed 3 million people is that they
51:56
played Barry White music because Barry White music is baby
52:00
making music. So it is in a very silly way,
52:05
absolutely true that had Barry White not been such a
52:09
great singer with a deep voice that makes the ladies
52:12
drop the panties, then those two parents of the eventual
52:16
dictator would not have had sex that night.
52:19
Speaker 2: I will stop you right there because I don't think
52:21
there's sex that's ever been had because only of Barry White.
52:25
I think people have been having sex since the beginning
52:27
of time. I don't believe it. It's wonderful music. I
52:31
don't think it causes sex.
52:32
Speaker 1: Do not criticize Barry White.
52:34
Speaker 2: I'm not criticizing. I just say it's great music. I
52:37
don't believe it. I think people have been getting it
52:39
on from the beginning of time, and they probably would
52:42
have done the exact same thing that night if it
52:45
was Barry White or Barry Manilow. I don't think it matters.
52:47
Speaker 1: So let's not put Barry White. There was some facilitating
52:52
mechanism that rendered them amorous on that particular night. Whatever
52:57
that mechanism is, it is absolutely true that we can
53:01
lay the blame, some blame of that dictator eventually killing
53:06
3 million people. He would have never been born had
53:09
they not had sex exactly at that moment.
53:12
Speaker 2: I think that's a bit of a stretch. I think
53:14
it's a bit of a stretch when you actively work
53:17
to overthrow a democratically elected government.
53:21
Speaker 1: So this now we're talking about what?
53:23
Speaker 2: Well, not even democratically elected government because Libya wasn't a
53:26
democratically elected government, right? Like, not really. Like, let's be honest, right? Like,
53:31
Putin's not really a democratically elected president of Russia. You
53:35
know what I mean? But we 100% funded the rebels, 100%,
53:38
to kill Gaddafi. That's– it's our responsibility why Libya fell.
53:47
Speaker 1: OK. But if– OK. True.
53:49
Speaker 2: In that position.
53:50
Speaker 1: 100 percent. Gaddafi, the way you made him out to
53:53
be was– I mean he was Robin Hood, right? Gaddafi
53:55
was a pretty nasty guy.
53:56
Speaker 2: No, no, no, no, no. Good for the people in
53:58
many ways. Pretty nasty guy in other ways. There is
54:01
no egalitarian, beautiful leader out there. They've never existed because
54:08
the cold, hard reality– of running enormous groups of people
54:12
that are in conflict with other groups of people is
54:14
you're going to have to crack some eggs. You're going
54:16
to have to do some terrible things.
54:18
Speaker 1: Especially in those regions of the world where if you
54:21
don't have an incredibly strong armed guy, then religion comes
54:26
in and it becomes a strong guy. So you have
54:28
it in Egypt. You have it with Saddam Hussein, with
54:35
Hafez al-Assad and then his son. So those guys are–
54:40
If you're a universalist who wishes for individual liberties and
54:44
freedoms to flourish for everybody around the world, then you're
54:47
probably not supporting these guys.
54:49
Speaker 2: Right. Well, OK. We can use Saddam Hussein as an example.
54:51
Speaker 1: Sure.
54:52
Speaker 2: Look at what happened there. I mean it became a
54:55
complete and total disaster resulting in the death of at
54:58
least a million innocent people.
55:00
Speaker 1: Yes.
55:00
Speaker 2: And didn't do anything positive in terms of turning that
55:05
into a beautiful Western-style democracy.
55:08
Speaker 1: Yeah. But by the way, that last sentence, I would
55:12
argue that that's because of the Americans' lack of cultural
55:15
theory of mind. Because they presume that the desire to
55:19
have democracy around the world is exactly what everybody wants.
55:23
And therefore, they're culturally blind to the fact that other
55:27
places around the world may not share our own affinity
55:31
for democracy.
55:31
Speaker 2: Well, not just that, but culturally ignorant to the fact
55:34
that there's Sunni and Shia Muslims and they were going
55:36
to fight with each other.
55:37
Speaker 1: Right.
55:38
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.
55:40
Speaker 1: Okay, so the Americans come in, they create a bad
55:44
set of ecosystems that permits for ISIS to flourish. At
55:49
what point would you, in your causal link of explanations,
55:54
shift from the catalyst of the Americans having done something
55:58
that allowed ISIS to flourish to then saying, starting at
56:02
time T, my causal weaponry is going to be targeting
56:08
ISIS moving forward?
56:10
Speaker 2: Well, it's a good question because like, why did ISIS
56:12
flourish in the first place? Was it because of the
56:14
removal of Saddam Hussein? Was it because of the overthrowing
56:17
of the country? I mean, wasn't that? It was. Yeah.
56:20
So if that didn't take place, what would Iran and
56:24
Iraq look like right now?
56:26
Speaker 1: Right. So think about all of the people that have
56:30
suffered horrifyingly as a result of ISIS. If you are
56:36
a individual that's walking around who is the recipient of
56:41
that brutality. What would make more sense if you're engaging
56:45
in statistical inferencing? Would it be to say, you know,
56:48
the guy that's about to string me up because I
56:52
looked at a girl wrong and he's going to cut
56:54
off my penis and my arms because I touched a girl.
56:58
I really can't blame ISIS because really it's American foreign
57:01
policy that intervened in Iraq. That's not how people How
57:06
did you.
57:06
Speaker 2: Get to that? Meaning? The guy getting his penis chopped
57:10
off and his arms chopped off? How did you get there?
57:12
Speaker 1: You know how under Sharia law there are very strict
57:15
rules that govern the dynamics between men and women, right?
57:20
So I was just being hyperbolic. But let's say whatever
57:22
the punishment, you stole a loaf of bread under Sharia law,
57:25
we cut off your hand, right? So let's say you're
57:28
a 12-year-old kid who just stole a loaf of bread
57:31
from the souk and the ISIS commanders have caught you.
57:35
And they're about to institute Sharia law by cutting off
57:38
your hand because you're a thief. Would it be natural
57:42
for you or your parents, the parents of the 12-year-old
57:46
who are crying because they're about to see the hand
57:49
of their child cut off, would they say, I really
57:53
can't be upset at ISIS and their brutality because ultimately
57:57
ISIS only came in because of the geopolitical intervention of
58:00
the United States. Do you think that that would be
58:02
a reasonable?
58:03
Speaker 2: The whole idea sucks. Like the complete imprisonment of any
58:11
group of people under a totalitarian regime is terrible.
58:15
Speaker 1: But that's it. Full stop.
58:16
Speaker 2: The question is how were they funded? How did they
58:18
get into the position that they got into in the
58:20
first place? How did they rise to power?
58:22
Speaker 1: But nothing can happen.
58:23
Speaker 2: But how much of it is because of our meddling
58:26
that they rose to power in the first place?
58:28
Speaker 1: So let's suppose we hadn't meddled. So we meddled. We
58:31
meaning the United States, let's say. And I'm glad that
58:33
I'm now including myself.
58:35
Speaker 2: We? Almost. You're close. You're getting there.
58:38
Speaker 1: So we meddled because whatever calculus, some of it was incorrect.
58:42
Maybe there was no weapons of mass destruction. I mean,
58:45
Saddam Hussein was a horrifying guy. I think if you
58:48
ask me to rank all of them, maybe in terms
58:51
of pure evil, he might have been the biggest of
58:54
all the thugs, right?
58:56
Speaker 2: And the sons are a great example of that.
58:57
Speaker 1: And the sons are even worse, maybe, right?
59:00
Speaker 2: Horrific.
59:00
Speaker 1: You've heard of all the stories that they would do.
59:02
It's just really, it defies.
59:04
Speaker 2: Complete serial killers.
59:05
Speaker 1: Exactly. Yeah. Okay. So now if I am a typical
59:09
Iraqi who is going about my business, I really would
59:13
like to not live under Saddam Hussein's thumb. And I
59:18
probably don't want to live under ISIS thumb. In an
59:22
ideal world, I could live with complete dignity and liberty
59:27
and so on. The Americans, with all of their miscalculations,
59:31
maybe naively thought that we'll come in and then kumbaya,
59:35
we will create a new democracy in Iraq. They completely miscalculated.
59:41
But the root cause of the daily evil that the
59:45
Iraqis go through cannot be put on the broad shoulders
59:49
of the Americans because then that removes the personal agency
59:54
of the actors in their daily lives that are causing
59:57
them all the pain. But there is a reflex, and
1:00:00
dare I say, forgive me, a suicidally empathetic reflex that
1:00:03
renders you somehow progressively sophisticated if you always turn all
1:00:08
of the world's ills on your own society.
1:00:12
Speaker 2: I agree with you and what you're saying. But the
1:00:15
reason why we're there was not because we wanted to
1:00:18
help people. The whole reason why they came up with
1:00:21
this fake weapons of mass destruction narrative is because they
1:00:24
wanted to control the oil.
1:00:27
Speaker 1: I really can't speak to that. You could be right.
1:00:29
Speaker 2: Oh, 100 percent I'm right. Yeah. We're not doing that
1:00:34
to help people. We didn't go to Iraq to help people.
1:00:37
It didn't even make sense that we're in there. They
1:00:39
weren't involved in 9-11. The whole idea was nuts. Okay.
1:00:43
So let me– I think the whole weapons of mass
1:00:45
destruction narrative was complete bullshit that was cooked up to
1:00:48
give an excuse to go over there and take over Iraq.
1:00:50
Speaker 1: Willfully so. It's not they made an error. They knew
1:00:53
it was– Yes.
1:00:54
Speaker 2: I mean I think there's a lot of evidence to that.
1:00:56
There's no evidence that they had weapons of mass destruction
1:00:59
as described by everybody to give the motivation for us
1:01:02
to support the war.
1:01:04
Speaker 1: Okay. So let me– maybe as the– distinguished professor of
1:01:08
the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom.
1:01:11
I hope University of Mississippi will be happy that I'm
1:01:14
defending the United States as a Canadian, not yet American,
1:01:18
but inshallah soon. Is it not true that the default
1:01:26
reality of every unit, whether it be an individual, a grouping,
1:01:32
a country, will typically be all other things equal, try
1:01:37
to pursue policies that are in its best interest, right?
1:01:41
So when Trump says America first, MAGA and all this,
1:01:46
that's what he's appealing to, yes? So does the U.S.
1:01:50
ever do things that might be less than savory because
1:01:56
they're pursuing their selfish interests? 100%. And we can come up, right?
1:02:00
But that makes them a country made up of these
1:02:03
things called human beings. In other words, no society has
1:02:07
ever been created that is made up of these utopian
1:02:11
machines that as they navigate the world, they look to
1:02:15
the other for their– unless they are suicidally empathetic. So
1:02:19
the US is made up of real human beings endowed
1:02:22
with real brains whereby they might say, hey, maybe if
1:02:25
we take their oil and concoct a strategy– now, is
1:02:30
that– Good or bad, we can debate it. But in
1:02:33
the grand buffet of societies that have ever held power,
1:02:39
and never mind the power asymmetry that the U.S. has
1:02:43
vis-a-vis everybody else, is it the most restrained society ever?
1:02:48
If the United States today said, we need more beaches,
1:02:53
all the Caribbeans are becoming the 51st state. Could anybody
1:02:57
do anything about that?
1:02:58
Speaker 2: No.
1:02:59
Speaker 1: Yet they don't. So I think it would be good,
1:03:02
certainly for Americans and me as an honorary American, to say,
1:03:06
does America do sometimes things that are less than perfect
1:03:10
in a utopian world? 100%. Yes, you're right. I can
1:03:13
see that. Does it wield its power in the most
1:03:17
gentle ways compared to what it could do and compared
1:03:20
to what other societies, if they had that power, would do?
1:03:23
I think America does pretty well.
1:03:25
Speaker 2: No?
1:03:25
Speaker 1: No. Am I too rosy about my views of America?
1:03:29
Speaker 2: Well, that's an interesting question because China doesn't meddle in
1:03:33
other countries the way we do, and they have a
1:03:35
similar military might. Not quite commensurate, but pretty similar. Like,
1:03:41
you don't see them invading other countries and doing the
1:03:44
type of things that we do. And I don't know
1:03:45
if they threaten Taiwan, but they believe that Taiwan is
1:03:49
a part. They call it Chinese Taipei, right?
1:03:51
Speaker 1: So I'm going to use here some Arabic words, which
1:03:53
I'll try to explain in English, but maybe to your
1:03:56
Arabic listeners, they'll appreciate it. The Chinese have greater and
1:04:03
they are duplicitous in the way they do that stuff, right?
1:04:08
They caress you this way while they take, right? So yes,
1:04:13
they are using a different modality to wield their power
1:04:18
compared to the brash rah, rah, rah Americans. But let's
1:04:22
not sort of romanticize what the, Chinese could do, right?
1:04:26
Speaker 2: Well, they're taking advantage of the openness of American society.
1:04:30
They've infiltrated universities. They've infiltrated a lot of tech sectors.
1:04:35
They've sold American military a bunch of cell phone towers
1:04:40
that are surrounding military bases that may or may not
1:04:43
be transmitting data. We've had to kick Huawei out of
1:04:46
the country because it turns out that a lot of
1:04:48
their equipment could be used for spying. They buy farmland
1:04:52
all around military bases. They're doing a lot of things
1:04:55
to take advantage of our silliness, but that's because we
1:04:59
should have better laws to prevent what's essentially not our
1:05:05
friends from doing that. I mean you can call them
1:05:09
an enemy nation or whatever you want to call them,
1:05:10
but we shouldn't be allowing a foreign nation that we
1:05:15
are in conflict with to control land around military bases.
1:05:20
That's just stupid. But that's because of our capitalist society.
1:05:24
I mean you can't even– you can't own a business
1:05:28
in China. You can't go over there and buy stuff.
1:05:31
Like you can't do it. You can be in business
1:05:33
with them and then you know what they do? They
1:05:35
just kick you out and take over it. Change the
1:05:38
name of it and take over all the IP and
1:05:40
you're gone. Bye-bye. And there's not a fucking thing you
1:05:43
can do about it because they don't have an open
1:05:44
society like we do.
1:05:45
Speaker 1: Well, and think about– I mean if we're doing the
1:05:48
ledger of sort of cruelty and evil, we could talk
1:05:50
about how the US versus China wields power around the world.
1:05:54
But how about internally, domestically? We had a guy called
1:05:57
Mao Zedong that was kind of pretty brutal that if
1:06:00
we do the history of China in terms of how
1:06:02
many millions of people were killed by that regime versus
1:06:06
anything that's happened in the US– Has the U.S. been
1:06:09
perfect in the past 250 years? Absolutely not.
1:06:11
Speaker 2: No, there's never been a perfect regime.
1:06:13
Speaker 1: Exactly.
1:06:14
Speaker 2: There's no perfect regimes. And look at what they did
1:06:16
just with their one-child policy.
1:06:18
Speaker 1: There you go.
1:06:19
Speaker 2: I mean there's a lot wrong with the way China
1:06:21
does things.
1:06:23
Speaker 1: So to me, once I– maybe that's why University of
1:06:28
Mississippi was keen on having me come. I look at
1:06:31
the United States as someone who– thank you for your
1:06:35
earlier question about sort of where do you come from, Gad.
1:06:37
Tell us your story. Some of the biggest defenders of
1:06:40
the United States are typically, it might sound paradoxical, but
1:06:44
if you think about it, it's not, are usually immigrants
1:06:48
who have sampled from the wide variety of buffets of
1:06:52
societies out there. Therefore, we know that the anomaly called
1:06:57
the United States is truly an anomaly. Whereas the American
1:07:01
wakes up in his life and he thinks that the
1:07:05
liberties and freedoms that you have in the United States
1:07:07
are just the default value. That's just the way it is.
1:07:10
It isn't. That's what makes the United States great. So
1:07:13
for me, by the way, that also explains why people think,
1:07:18
for example, that I defend Israel because I'm Jewish. There
1:07:21
is an element to that. I mean, most of my
1:07:23
family's in Israel. But it's really I defend Israel because
1:07:28
many of its values are congruent with those that we
1:07:32
hold dear in the United States. So given the region
1:07:36
of the Middle East, if I'm going to send my
1:07:39
daughter or yours to some university to study, I would
1:07:43
much rather for her to be in a society in
1:07:46
Tel Aviv or Haifa than I would in many of
1:07:49
the other places. So it's in that sense that I'm pro-Israel.
1:07:53
So if you ask me to allocate 100 points to
1:07:56
how much of my support of Israel is due to
1:07:59
the fact that many of its foundational values are similar
1:08:02
to those of the United States, versus the fact that
1:08:04
I'm Jewish and Israel is a Jewish state, I would
1:08:08
say 80-20 for the latter, meaning that I am defending
1:08:14
the civilizational values of Israel in a very, very difficult
1:08:19
and belligerent neighborhood. Does Israel always do things perfectly?
1:08:23
Speaker 2: No.
1:08:24
Speaker 1: Do they have politicians that are corrupt?
1:08:27
Speaker 2: Yes.
1:08:29
Speaker 1: Have pedophiles who did bad things here try to go
1:08:33
there and have aliyah, meaning get residency there and run
1:08:38
away from the thing. Yes, but it could also be
1:08:41
the case that a bank robber or pedophile goes back
1:08:44
to Thailand if there are no extradition mechanisms to bring
1:08:48
them back to the United States. So my position of
1:08:51
defending the United States or Israel or whomever else really
1:08:56
stems from some foundational values of liberty and fraternity. There
1:09:01
is no conceivable place in the world where given the
1:09:05
neighborhood that Israel exists in, one would conceivably defend any
1:09:10
of those other societies instead of Israel if the metrics
1:09:14
that you care about are personal liberties and freedoms. We
1:09:17
could then debate specific policies, and you'd be completely in
1:09:21
your right to say, I don't like when the Israeli
1:09:24
government does this. But, well, let me ask you, and
1:09:27
forgive me for asking you a personal question. If, let's say,
1:09:29
your daughter today said, Dad, I'd like to go and
1:09:33
study one year abroad, and it's going to be somewhere
1:09:37
in the Middle East. You, Joe Rogan, how likely would
1:09:41
you be to support her going in the Middle East
1:09:45
to a university other than in Israel?
1:09:48
Speaker 2: That's interesting. When you say the Middle East, do you
1:09:51
mean like Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates? Because
1:09:55
I think it's pretty safe there. Okay.
1:09:56
Speaker 1: So you're right. That's true. And by the way, I'm
1:09:59
loving the openness that many of these countries are exhibiting.
1:10:03
And I'll tell you a quick personal story and then
1:10:06
I'd love to then hear your– I was approached by
1:10:10
Al Arabiya. Al Arabiya is the premier news network from–
1:10:16
they're Saudi. but they were actually located in Dubai. And
1:10:22
Riz Khan, who was the anchor that was flying from
1:10:25
Dubai to interview me in Montreal for Al-Harabiya, he used
1:10:29
to be the main anchor, I think, at BBC Global
1:10:33
or CNN Global. I said to Riz, are we going
1:10:38
to be talking about things like Islam and these kinds?
1:10:40
He goes, yeah, yeah, feel free to talk about whatever
1:10:42
you want. I said, well, I'm I'm not worried so
1:10:45
much about me, but you're going to have to go
1:10:46
back to that region. Are you comfortable? I mean, I'll
1:10:49
be very professorial and proper, but I will say some
1:10:52
difficult truths. He goes, say whatever you want. That aired.
1:10:57
It was a two-hour conversation where we talked about all
1:11:00
sorts of things, but we talked about Islam. And then
1:11:02
he said, they loved you. About a month or two later,
1:11:06
another show contacted me, and I went also on Al-Arabiya.
1:11:11
And then they even wanted to offer me a show. Now,
1:11:16
the Saudi group is offering the Lebanese Jew who's often
1:11:21
been critical of some of the tenets of Islam. So
1:11:24
I'm very optimistic about that. So I agree with you
1:11:26
that if your daughter wanted to perhaps go to some
1:11:28
places in the Gulf countries, you'd probably condone it and
1:11:31
support it.
1:11:32
Speaker 2: But.
1:11:33
Speaker 1: That would make it too easy. So let me choose
1:11:35
which country.
1:11:35
Speaker 2: That would be too easy. But that is the Middle
1:11:37
East and there are Islamic countries.
1:11:40
Speaker 1: Because those countries are having a revival of modernity. Right.
1:11:44
Speaker 2: Well, maybe that's what we should talk about. Because is
1:11:47
that possible with Islam that they could have a revival
1:11:49
of modernity across the entire country? Like imagine if Iraq, Iran,
1:11:54
all these countries were run like Saudi Arabia or run
1:11:57
like the United Arab Emirates. You would have a much
1:12:00
more peaceful environment, wouldn't you?
1:12:02
Speaker 1: Yeah. So. I'm going to be now very optimistic. There
1:12:06
is a package of cultural richness in the Middle East
1:12:11
like no other. And I come from the region, Arabic
1:12:14
is my mother tongue. The spirit of generosity, the spirit
1:12:19
of loyalty when you're in the group, the hospitality is
1:12:23
like no other. Actually, I recently was telling some folks
1:12:25
in Mississippi that the Mississippians remind me as though they
1:12:30
were honorary citizens. because it's that southern hospitality, really like
1:12:35
over the top wanting to make you feel good. So
1:12:37
there are elements of the Middle East that have such
1:12:41
a fabric of richness that if we can mine that
1:12:45
and quell all of the tribalism associated with religions, I
1:12:49
think it could be one of the most fertile and
1:12:53
rich places in the world. Now, it depends what we
1:12:56
do with Islam. If Islam is something that you practice
1:13:01
privately as part of a long historical narrative. So, for example,
1:13:06
I'm Jewish. I'm very wedded to my Jewish identity. But
1:13:10
I don't take many of the edicts of Judaism seriously
1:13:14
in the practice. I don't light the candle at 421
1:13:18
for Shabbat because if 422, God would be upset at me.
1:13:23
But if I went to the rabbi, he'd say it
1:13:25
has to be at 421. So I pick and choose
1:13:28
cafeteria Jew. I pick and choose the parts that I
1:13:32
wish to.
1:13:32
Speaker 2: Cafeteria Jews, I like that.
1:13:35
Speaker 1: I don't practice some soft version of Judaism that allows
1:13:40
for the eating of pork and shrimps. I simply say,
1:13:44
I'm a glutton that likes to eat well and shrimps
1:13:48
and some pork tastes really good. So I'm just going
1:13:50
to ignore those parts. Interesting. I think if Islam could
1:13:55
allow For that cafeteria, which, by the way, many Muslims
1:14:00
do now, right? Sure.
1:14:02
Speaker 2: I have friends that are Muslims.
1:14:03
Speaker 1: Exactly. Hundreds of millions of Muslims want to cause zero
1:14:09
harm to Jews.
1:14:10
Speaker 2: Right. So the problem is radical Islamism, like we were
1:14:14
talking about before. It's not radical.
1:14:17
Speaker 1: It's just Islam, and I choose to ignore the parts
1:14:21
that I don't like. You're putting an appellation on Islam
1:14:25
that is unnecessary. Islam is made up of many tenets.
1:14:29
It's not radical Islam. There is no book called radical Islam.
1:14:33
There's only Islam. I mean, Erdogan said there is no
1:14:36
moderate Islam. There's just Islam. So is he an Islamophobe?
1:14:40
So there is a bunch of tenets. There's the one
1:14:43
that says kill, kill, kill, kill, kill, take a break,
1:14:46
continue killing. Fuck that. I'm going to ignore it because
1:14:49
I'm a good person, right? Because there are mean Jews
1:14:51
and nice Jews. Mean Muslims, nice Muslims.
1:14:54
Speaker 2: Right. So many of the- So westernization of it.
1:14:56
Speaker 1: Right. So if there is a way to maintain the
1:15:01
Islamic heritage, there's Islamic architecture, there's Islamic poetry, there's Islamic philosophy.
1:15:08
There was a period under Islamic rule where many of
1:15:12
the ancient texts from Greek philosophy- were safeguarded by Islam, right?
1:15:18
So it's not as though that entire civilization is void
1:15:22
of incredibly rich things, but there are unfortunately elements of
1:15:27
the religion that are not congruent with Western values. If
1:15:31
there is a way for us from this side of
1:15:33
our mouth to honor Islamic architecture and poetry, and from
1:15:38
this side of our mouth, forget the parts that says kill, kill,
1:15:41
kill everyone, then I think you could have wonderful flourishing.
1:15:44
Speaker 2: Right. For it to evolve then.
1:15:46
Speaker 1: Exactly.
1:15:47
Speaker 2: Yeah. I see what you're saying. There's a really good
1:15:50
argument that the reason why ISIS and these various radical
1:15:57
organizations exist is because of the United States meddling in
1:16:01
all these countries for decades and decades. I don't know
1:16:05
if you ever saw it, but Glenn Greenwald was on
1:16:07
Bill Marshall and Glenn, he's a very brilliant guy and
1:16:12
he had a very balanced take on it and he
1:16:15
was arguing with Bill Maher versus why they behave the
1:16:21
way they do and making the argument that a lot
1:16:23
of it was because of the United States intervening in
1:16:26
their countries. Now, we've been over there and meddling in
1:16:29
their countries and meddling in their policies and their government
1:16:35
for so long that this is the reason why these
1:16:37
things happen in the first place. And I don't know
1:16:39
if you've ever seen it. We might do a good
1:16:42
thing to play it because it was kind of interesting
1:16:45
to watch Bill Maher kind of push back against it.
1:16:47
But Glenn Greenwald is very well read and really understands
1:16:53
the history of this region.
1:16:55
Speaker 1: I'm not a huge Glenn Greenwald fan. Many of the
1:16:58
positions he's taken I've really liked. He does seem to
1:17:01
have a bit of the self-flagellation reflex when it comes
1:17:04
to it all comes down to something that the U.S.
1:17:08
has done that's evil or something that Israel has done
1:17:10
is evil. So to our earlier conversation, there are features
1:17:15
that ISIS believes in that they believe in independently of
1:17:19
anything that the U.S. could have ever done or will
1:17:22
ever do.
1:17:23
Speaker 2: But if they were flourishing and we hadn't intervened in
1:17:26
their country, do you think it's possible– That the rest
1:17:29
of the Middle East could be in a similar– and
1:17:32
not to say that Saudi Arabia is perfect, right? The
1:17:35
Jamal Khashoggi thing is horrific. I mean just that alone.
1:17:39
This is a big criticism for a lot of the
1:17:41
American comedians that went over there and participated in the
1:17:44
Riyadh Comedy Festival. It's like do you not know what
1:17:47
this regime did to an American journalist? But is it
1:17:53
possible that– these countries could have evolved in a very
1:17:57
similar way. If it weren't for us? Yes.
1:18:02
Speaker 1: No.
1:18:02
Speaker 2: No? You don't think so?
1:18:04
Speaker 1: So Islam has existed for 1,400.
1:18:05
Speaker 2: Years, right? So why did these countries, why does the
1:18:09
United Arab Emirates, why do they have a much more
1:18:11
open society?
1:18:12
Speaker 1: Now, I mean, there are all sorts of reasons. Maybe
1:18:15
the rulers, I can't speak for them.
1:18:17
Speaker 2: It is a lot of the rulers.
1:18:18
Speaker 1: Exactly.
1:18:18
Speaker 2: They're much more progressive.
1:18:20
Speaker 1: Exactly. So they've taken a pill of pragmatism. that says
1:18:24
that we could still maintain our unique identity while turning
1:18:29
an open arms to the West. And it takes courageous
1:18:35
leaders to say, this is how we can have these
1:18:39
two things coexist. I could still be fully steeped in
1:18:42
my Muslim identity, but I'm not going to look at
1:18:45
the other as a dirty kuffar, right? The dirty non-Muslim.
1:18:50
Speaker 2: Right?
1:18:50
Speaker 1: And so good for them. That's great. But over the
1:18:53
1400 years, so we're going to, we, US is going
1:18:57
to celebrate the 250 year soon, right? Islam has existed
1:19:02
for 1400 years. So we could very easily temporarily just
1:19:06
go back 250 years prior to and remove anything that
1:19:11
could be due to the U.S. Is that true? I mean, empirically.
1:19:14
Speaker 2: Sure. Okay.
1:19:15
Speaker 1: And if we want to remove Israel from the story,
1:19:18
we just have to go to 1948. And so that's
1:19:22
70-something years. And then anything that Islam would have done
1:19:25
prior to 1948 could not be blamed on the Zionist entity. Oh,
1:19:30
for sure.
1:19:31
Speaker 2: Well, we could go back to the beginning of the
1:19:33
United States where the United States was being attacked.
1:19:37
Speaker 1: By the... By the Muslim– is that what you're talking about?
1:19:42
Speaker 2: Yes.
1:19:43
Speaker 1: Exactly.
1:19:43
Speaker 2: Yes, Thomas Jefferson.
1:19:44
Speaker 1: Exactly.
1:19:44
Speaker 2: Yes.
1:19:45
Speaker 1: So my point is– Tell everybody that story. I don't
1:19:48
know it too well, but Thomas Jefferson I think was
1:19:52
being belligerent to some incursions of Muslim piracy or something
1:19:57
like that.
1:19:58
Speaker 2: Where they said that it was their right to do
1:20:00
so because we were infidels.
1:20:01
Speaker 1: Exactly right. I mean Winston Churchill has some really savory
1:20:06
quotes about what he thought about his interactions with Islam.
1:20:10
And now he's British. He's got nothing to do with
1:20:12
the United States. This was well before the existence of
1:20:15
the Zionist entity. It is part of the playbook to
1:20:20
try to always blame some other agent other than our
1:20:24
canons for why we're doing what we're doing.
1:20:27
Speaker 2: I think that's why this is a good conversation. This
1:20:29
is very nuanced. We're kind of laying out both sides
1:20:32
of it.
1:20:32
Speaker 1: That's why I love coming on the show whenever you
1:20:35
have me on. So If you crack, I don't mean you,
1:20:40
but anybody who's listening to this, crack a book to say, okay,
1:20:44
let me look at the number of military conquests where
1:20:49
Islam was the offensive party, right? For example, people say, oh,
1:20:56
the Crusades. Well, the Crusades were a retaliation to hundreds
1:21:02
of years of Islamic aggression. It didn't come out of nowhere,
1:21:07
but there's always what I call the amnesia of causality.
1:21:10
People always forget what was the original starting point. Under Islam,
1:21:15
as I said, the primary canonical requirement of Islam is
1:21:21
to render the entire world Islamic. Now, again, that doesn't
1:21:25
mean that every Muslim believes this. That doesn't mean that
1:21:28
every Muslim leader believes this. But we're talking about what's
1:21:31
in the canons of the religion.
1:21:34
Speaker 2: Right.
1:21:34
Speaker 1: It is a violently expansionist ideology. I mean, nothing could
1:21:40
be clearer. I've explained this previously on the show, but
1:21:43
if you allow me, I'll explain it again. Islam has
1:21:46
dual logic. Everything in Islam is broken down into two camps.
1:21:52
There is Dar al-Harab and Dar al-Islam, the house of
1:21:56
Islam and the house of war. Any country that is
1:22:00
not yet under Islamic dominion is classified as under the
1:22:06
house of war. That's literally the words. Now, any country
1:22:12
that has ever become under Islamic dominion, ever, and then
1:22:17
Islam loses, canonically, it must revert back to Islam. So, Andalusia, right?
1:22:25
Andalusia in current Spain was at one point controlled by
1:22:30
the Moors, right? Muslims. Therefore, when now you hear a
1:22:34
lot of these Islamic extremist guys saying, inshallah, we will
1:22:39
get back al-Andalusia, it's because once it became ours, it
1:22:44
must always belong to us. The same argument applies for Israel.
1:22:49
Even though Israel has thousands of years of lineage of
1:22:55
the Jews to that land as the indigenous people, owners
1:22:58
of that land, the fact that then Islam took over
1:23:02
that region, that means it belongs to Muslims. Now, we
1:23:07
may tolerate the Jews to live there, but there can't
1:23:10
be a Jewish state there canonically in the religion. So
1:23:16
those are just facts. You could study the history of
1:23:19
Islam to count. Okay, there are currently 57, well, if
1:23:23
you include the Palestinian territories, In the Organization of Islamic Cooperation,
1:23:27
the OIC, there are 56 or 57 countries that are
1:23:32
part of that block that are Islamic. Each of those
1:23:36
countries once upon a time started with 0% Islam, right?
1:23:42
I mean, it wasn't magical. So Indonesia was not Islamic once, right?
1:23:46
Libya was not, right? Many of those countries were Christians,
1:23:50
by the way, right? Egypt was Coptic Christian. Syria was
1:23:54
tons of Christians. Lebanon, within my lifetime, I was born
1:23:59
in a Christian majority country. Today, within my lifetime and yours,
1:24:04
it has completely flipped to Muslim majority. So wherever Islam goes,
1:24:10
sometimes it might take five years to flip it. Sometimes
1:24:13
it might take 500 years. But as the Taliban explained
1:24:18
to us, the American soldiers have the watches we have
1:24:22
all the time in the world. So it's a long project.
1:24:26
So when Islam comes into the United States, it's not
1:24:30
as though suddenly the United States of America is going
1:24:33
to become under Sharia law tomorrow morning. But if you
1:24:36
have the imagination to extrapolate in two, three hundred years,
1:24:41
if you were to repeat Dearborn and Patterson, New Jersey
1:24:46
and Minneapolis into 20 more cities, 50 more cities, 100
1:24:50
more cities, Would you be living in the same United States?
1:24:54
Speaker 2: Right.
1:24:54
Speaker 1: And if not, is that a good thing or a
1:24:57
bad thing?
1:24:57
Speaker 2: Well, that's what people are– some people are very fearful
1:25:01
of what's going on in New York City with Mamdani. Yes, sir.
1:25:04
They think it's a Trojan horse and that under the
1:25:07
guise of progressivism and democratic socialism that you're going to
1:25:11
open up the door and eventually you're going to have
1:25:14
called a prayer in the middle of Times Square every day. Exactly.
1:25:18
Speaker 1: Well, listen. I'm wearing right now a Star of David.
1:25:21
Speaker 2: Be careful.
1:25:22
Speaker 1: Exactly. As soon as I'm in New York and I
1:25:25
go to one of those, I mean, I don't as
1:25:29
much anymore because my stomach's a bit more sensitive as
1:25:31
I get older, but let's say one of those street vendors,
1:25:35
I right away put away my Star of David because
1:25:38
I'd love to have my shawarma without spit in it.
1:25:41
The fact that I now even think of that and
1:25:45
that that's a reflex that I have today, that's not
1:25:48
a reflex I had 15 years ago. What changed? Well,
1:25:51
what changed is are the demographic realities that causes that
1:25:55
there's a greater number of people that are triggered by
1:25:58
the Star of David. Demography is indeed destiny. So you
1:26:02
and I could fully agree that most Muslims are perfectly lovely.
1:26:07
And I mean, I'm the first one to say this
1:26:09
because I come from that culture. No Muslim has ever
1:26:12
killed me. No Muslim has ever raped me. But I
1:26:15
do know that I've spoken to many Muslims before I
1:26:19
was known and they knew who I was, who say
1:26:22
things about the Jews that would make Hitler and Himmler go, look, guys,
1:26:27
we also hate the Jews, but I think this is
1:26:29
too much Jew hatred, even by our standards. So there
1:26:32
is an endemic feature of Islamic societies that renders the
1:26:37
Jew as the ultimate shaitan, the ultimate devil. He's demonic, right?
1:26:43
It's everywhere. It dictates every interaction. I'll just give you
1:26:47
a couple of examples. In Sharm el-Sheikh, which is a
1:26:52
Red Sea resort area in Egypt, and Jamie is welcome
1:26:58
to fact check me if he wants. And I think
1:27:01
in 2010, there was a spat of shark attacks on
1:27:06
tourists in Sharm el-Sheikh. Do you remember after the investigation
1:27:10
by the Egyptian authorities what they concluded?
1:27:13
Speaker 2: No.
1:27:13
Speaker 1: Want to take a guess?
1:27:15
Speaker 2: No.
1:27:15
Speaker 1: Okay. It was that there is very, very clear evidence
1:27:20
that those sharks were Zionist trained. What? Yes, sir. Because
1:27:26
the way that you can harm the Egyptian economy, certainly
1:27:29
in that region, is to render the tourism activity lesser
1:27:35
if you have many attacks. And so I'm not saying
1:27:38
every Egyptian thought this, but this was coming from the
1:27:41
authorities saying that there's really very clear evidence that those
1:27:44
sharks were Jewish assholes.
1:27:47
Speaker 2: Hold on a second. Wasn't there some evidence that there
1:27:50
was like illegal dumping of carcasses, of animal carcasses offshore?
1:27:58
Speaker 1: As specific to that?
1:27:59
Speaker 2: Yeah. I think that had something to do with the
1:28:02
shark activity. Israeli conspiracy theory. The attack sparked conspiracy theories
1:28:06
of possible Israeli involvement. Egyptian television broadcast claims from South
1:28:11
Sinai government, Mohammed Abdul Fadil, Shosha, that Israeli divers captured
1:28:17
a shark with a GPS unit planted on its back,
1:28:20
allegedly by Mossad. Describing the theory as sad, Professor Mohamed
1:28:25
Hanafi of Suiz Canal University pointed out that GPS devices
1:28:30
are used by marine biologists to track sharks, not control
1:28:33
them remotely. OK, but wasn't there something to do?
1:28:37
Speaker 1: Yeah, that's what the last sentence speaks to what you said. Yeah.
1:28:40
Speaker 2: Ultimately thought the dumping of sheep carcasses. There it is.
1:28:42
During the Islamic festival of. How do you say that?
1:28:47
How do you say the festival?
1:28:48
Speaker 1: On 16 November was most likely explanation that.
1:28:56
Speaker 2: Makes sense. That's why there was so much shark activity.
1:28:59
Speaker 1: But the fact that somebody somewhere said, I think this
1:29:03
got Jewish signature all over it.
1:29:04
Speaker 2: Right. But there's people in the United States that think
1:29:06
the world's flat. I mean, that doesn't mean it makes sense.
1:29:11
Speaker 1: The capacity to be parasitized is hardly restricted to Muslim minds.
1:29:16
Everybody has the capacity to believe stupidity.
1:29:18
Speaker 2: So I agree.
1:29:19
Speaker 1: Yes. But there is something– there is a unique feature
1:29:23
of the Muslim mind that tends to find causality in
1:29:26
all maladies in the Jew.
1:29:28
Speaker 2: So– Right.
1:29:30
Speaker 1: And by the way, I have a theory if I
1:29:31
can share it with you here.
1:29:32
Speaker 2: OK.
1:29:34
Speaker 1: As to– this is not just Islamic Jew hatred. Why
1:29:38
is it that so many societies end up turning their
1:29:44
animus towards the Jew? Can I share it with you?
1:29:46
Speaker 2: Yeah. Why do you think that is?
1:29:48
Speaker 1: So here I'm going to use some of my psychological background.
1:29:51
So in psychology, there's something called the self-serving bias. The
1:29:55
self-serving bias is how we attribute causality to the wins
1:30:01
and losses in our lives. So most of us will
1:30:04
attribute successes internally. I did well on the exam because
1:30:09
I'm smart and I studied hard. And, excuse me, we
1:30:12
will attribute failures externally. I did poorly on the exam
1:30:19
because Professor Saad is an asshole, right? And you can
1:30:23
understand why we would have evolved that rosy prism. Life
1:30:26
is tough. It's an ego defensive strategy. I do well
1:30:30
because of me. I do poorly because of the cruel
1:30:32
world out there. Now, imagine if we could find the
1:30:36
culprit and I'll explain why it is specifically the Jew.
1:30:39
Imagine if we could find a culprit, a universal culprit
1:30:43
for all of our individual and collective failures, right? And
1:30:48
it's the Jew. But why is it the Jew? Why
1:30:50
isn't it the Armenian? Why isn't it the whatever? Here
1:30:54
I'm going to use a term from Amy Chua. Do
1:30:57
you know Amy Chua?
1:30:58
Speaker 2: No.
1:30:59
Speaker 1: Okay. I thought that she might have been on your show.
1:31:01
Amy Chua is actually the mentor of J.D. Vance. She
1:31:05
was his professor of law at Yale. She's written several
1:31:09
popular books, including the book on how to raise children
1:31:13
as a tiger mom. Have you heard the.
1:31:15
Speaker 2: Tiger Mom book? Sure.
1:31:17
Speaker 1: You know, this kind of tough parental Asian excellence and
1:31:20
so on. So Amy Chua introduced the term, I mean,
1:31:24
the concept is not hers, but the term is hers,
1:31:27
market dominant minorities, meaning when you have a small minuscule
1:31:33
group of people in any cultural ecosystem that are boxing
1:31:39
well above their weight class. Now, in many cases, you'll have,
1:31:43
for example, you have Lebanese, non-Jews, Lebanese who are the
1:31:47
business owners all over West Africa. So they are fitting
1:31:51
that market dominant minority. They're a small minority, but they
1:31:54
carry all the business. So it's not as though it's
1:31:57
only the Jew that's the only market dominant minority. Wherever
1:32:01
you have market dominant minorities, you have animus towards that
1:32:05
group because the greater group, many of whom are not
1:32:08
being successful, look at that group with animus, with envy.
1:32:13
The Jews, wherever they are, are always, by definition, short
1:32:18
of Israel, are always a minuscule group that is always
1:32:23
boxing well above their weight class.
1:32:25
Speaker 2: Why is that?
1:32:26
Speaker 1: There are several reasons. I think predominantly it's really a
1:32:31
punishing cultural of excellence. And if you want, I can
1:32:34
share a story from my own personal background. And I
1:32:37
don't know if I've ever shared it on this show.
1:32:40
So I did my undergraduate in mathematics and computer science,
1:32:43
pretty serious stuff. Then I did an MBA, both at
1:32:46
top universities. Then I was going on to pursue my MS,
1:32:49
Master's of Science, and PhD. One of the places that
1:32:53
I had been accepted for my PhD was at UC Irvine.
1:32:56
I ended up going to Cornell. At the time, my brother,
1:32:59
the judo player, was living in Newport Beach, and he
1:33:02
was keen to try to convince me after my MBA
1:33:05
to work with him and put on hold going on
1:33:08
for my PhD. When my mother found out of his
1:33:12
design to try to convince me not to pursue my PhD,
1:33:15
when I returned to Montreal to their house, she says,
1:33:18
can I speak to you in this room? And I'm thinking, oh,
1:33:21
am I in trouble? She goes, I want to talk
1:33:23
to you. What's up, mom? She goes, I'm hearing that
1:33:25
you're thinking of maybe putting your studies on hold. I said, well,
1:33:29
she goes, well, I just, before you say anything, do
1:33:31
you want people to know you as somebody who dropped
1:33:34
out of school? So from now, that's a very powerful
1:33:37
story because in my mother's eye, having an MBA and
1:33:42
then taking a break before I pursue a PhD was
1:33:45
something that would bring shame to the family as someone
1:33:48
who had dropped out of school. Now, do you think
1:33:51
that if a group of people have internalized that level
1:33:56
of excellence, are they likely to be successful or not?
1:33:59
If another group of people thinks that getting good grades
1:34:02
is acting white, is that a recipe for success or not, right? So,
1:34:07
Cultural values matter. For whatever reason, whatever is in the
1:34:11
water of the Jewish home, they tend to excel. So now,
1:34:16
wherever they are, they're doing really well. Well, I wanted
1:34:19
to be an actor and play in the Avengers, and
1:34:22
I didn't get the part. Who controls Hollywood? The Jews.
1:34:26
I wanted to get a small business loan, and I
1:34:29
didn't get it because my numbers weren't quite correct. Who
1:34:32
controls the banks? It's the Jews. So it becomes very
1:34:36
easy to attribute or ascribe all of my individual and
1:34:40
collective failures on this minuscule group of people for all
1:34:46
of my failings. Thomas Sowell, whom I know you appreciate, yes,
1:34:51
gave arguably the greatest one-word answer that I've ever heard.
1:34:56
At one point, he was appearing on some show. This
1:34:58
is not too long ago, maybe 20 years ago. He's
1:35:00
now 95, and I think it's a travesty that he
1:35:02
hasn't won the Presidential Freedom Medal. And I pray that
1:35:07
President Trump gives it to him before he passes away
1:35:10
because he's deserving of it. He was asked once, Professor Sowell,
1:35:16
what do you think it will take for people to
1:35:20
stop hating the Jews? And he gave a one-word answer.
1:35:24
Do you want to take a guess what it is?
1:35:25
Speaker 2: No.
1:35:27
Speaker 1: Fail. How did Thomas Sowell get this? Because he's brilliant.
1:35:32
If the Jews were suddenly no longer succeeding in ways
1:35:37
that are anomalous to their per capita numbers, then maybe
1:35:44
they wouldn't be as hated.
1:35:45
Speaker 2: Okay, let me give you an argument against that.
1:35:46
Speaker 1: Please.
1:35:47
Speaker 2: Asians. Asians in this culture, in this society, also box
1:35:52
way above their weight. Extremely disciplined family environment. pushed incredibly
1:35:58
hard to succeed, but don't get nearly the kind of
1:36:02
hate that Jewish people do.
1:36:04
Speaker 1: So you're right, in the United States, that's the case.
1:36:07
But in some of the ecosystems in the Far East,
1:36:10
where they are a minority, I think it's the, I
1:36:13
don't know if it's the Malays, I can't remember the
1:36:15
exact grouping, you have almost the exact same animus for
1:36:19
that group that succeeds a lot. And actually, Thomas Sowell
1:36:23
has done those analyses. So in other words, the point is,
1:36:27
What I'm describing is not singularly relevant for the Jew,
1:36:32
but it is universally relevant for the Jew because there
1:36:37
is no other grouping of people that is as successful
1:36:41
in as many places and yet minuscule in all those places.
1:36:44
So the Armenians also get that treatment in some ecosystems.
1:36:49
The Lebanese get that treatment. Indians get that treatment in
1:36:53
some ecosystems. So it is not a unique feature of
1:36:56
only animus towards the Jews. But the fact that in
1:37:00
so many societies you turn to the Jew to blame
1:37:05
your problems I think stems from that.
1:37:08
Speaker 2: Don't you think you could also make that exact same
1:37:10
argument that those same people that are small in number
1:37:15
but hyper-motivated and hyper-successful would also be much better at
1:37:21
influencing policy in the country that they live in?
1:37:25
Speaker 1: Hence meaning that they're more likely to get the ears,
1:37:28
the lobby.
1:37:28
Speaker 2: Not just the ears, but donate money, fund campaigns, get
1:37:34
the ear of the president, donate money towards his campaign,
1:37:37
fund him.
1:37:39
Speaker 1: I suspect that the answer is you're right, yes.
1:37:42
Speaker 2: Most people would say that that is absolutely the case.
1:37:44
Speaker 1: But also we could say that if we look at
1:37:48
the philanthropy, Jewish philanthropy, compared to all other philanthropy, we'd
1:37:53
probably score... Very highly, if.
1:37:55
Speaker 2: Not number one. What kind of philanthropy were you talking about?
1:37:57
Speaker 1: Art philanthropy, hospital philanthropy, literary philanthropy for the art, right?
1:38:03
So in other words, look, so my family, we moved
1:38:08
to Montreal from Lebanon. We moved to Montreal for two reasons. Well,
1:38:11
three reasons. Number one, Montreal is also French. In Lebanon, France,
1:38:18
Lebanon used to be a French protectorate, so you already
1:38:20
spoke French in Lebanon in addition to Arabic. So that
1:38:24
was one. Number two, the immigration policy for war refugees
1:38:29
was maybe even... to navigate Canada was a more welcoming
1:38:33
country than say maybe United States but number three is
1:38:37
that my mother's sister had already emigrated to Montreal with
1:38:42
her husband and that husband became the director general of
1:38:48
the Jewish General Hospital in Montreal, which is the biggest
1:38:52
hospital in Montreal. It's the Jewish General, right? So in
1:38:57
other words, it is undoubtedly true, probably, I don't have
1:39:01
the empirical evidence, that probably the Jewish lobby does its
1:39:06
job really well and effectively. But let's look at all
1:39:09
of the other things that they also do well. They contribute. So,
1:39:13
for example– Well, that's wonderful.
1:39:14
Speaker 2: But that doesn't take away from the influence that it
1:39:17
has on our policies.
1:39:19
Speaker 1: Yes.
1:39:20
Speaker 2: On our political candidates. For instance, one of the reasons
1:39:25
why Mamdani won in New York City is because when
1:39:28
they had the mayoral debate, he was the only one
1:39:31
that said he's not immediately going to go to Israel.
1:39:34
Speaker 1: Right.
1:39:34
Speaker 2: And a lot of people were shocked by that. They
1:39:36
were like, why is everyone saying they're going to go
1:39:37
to Israel? When they win as the mayor in New
1:39:41
York City, it didn't make any sense. And people were
1:39:43
kind of just confused by it. New York City is
1:39:46
a mess. It's got a lot of problems. And this
1:39:49
one guy said, I think I can serve Jewish Americans
1:39:52
better by staying here in New York City. And I'm
1:39:55
not going to go to Israel. And everybody was like,
1:39:58
thank God someone said that. Because all the other candidates,
1:40:01
it seemed at least to me as an outsider, were
1:40:05
being heavily influenced by the Jewish lobby.
1:40:09
Speaker 1: Maybe. I really don't know enough.
1:40:11
Speaker 2: Why else would they do that? They're not saying I'm
1:40:12
going to go to England. They're not saying I'm going
1:40:14
to go to France. They're saying I'm going to go
1:40:16
to Israel. Right.
1:40:17
Speaker 1: I mean, is it surprising that if you have a
1:40:20
group of people who have been historically persecuted the way
1:40:24
that they have– by the way, I don't think– But.
1:40:27
Speaker 2: It's running for mayor of New York City and they're
1:40:31
saying I'm going to go to Israel.
1:40:33
Speaker 1: I think it's totally wrong if there is a conflict
1:40:37
between the– best interests of the country that you reside
1:40:42
in versus Israel, you should always side with the former.
1:40:46
Speaker 2: Understandably. I agree. But I think that the reason why
1:40:50
they were saying that is they were being influenced by
1:40:53
the people that were funding their campaigns. And I think
1:40:56
the people in New York City recognized that and said, hey,
1:41:01
there's something where they're not looking out for our best interests.
1:41:05
They're looking out for the best interests of the people
1:41:07
that are funding them. And those people have the best
1:41:09
interests of Israel in mind above the interests of the
1:41:12
United States. And this is the same sentiment that people
1:41:15
have for why we invaded Iran and why we funded Israel,
1:41:20
why they're bombing Gaza, the same sort of thing. And
1:41:23
I would say from October 7th on, first of all,
1:41:27
immediately afterwards, tremendous support for Israel. I mean it was
1:41:31
a horrific attack. But the response I think has created
1:41:35
a lot. of anti-Israel sentiment in the United States.
1:41:39
Speaker 1: Yes. Do you, do you think that other lobby groups
1:41:43
that very feverishly lobby for their self-interest would receive the
1:41:49
same animus as the pro-Israel lobby?
1:41:52
Speaker 2: So for example, they're not connected to a specific country.
1:41:55
That's the problem. This one group is connected to a
1:41:58
specific country.
1:41:59
Speaker 1: Okay. So let's do specific country.
1:42:01
Speaker 2: Okay.
1:42:02
Speaker 1: I'm, I've been a professor for 32 years, so I
1:42:05
care about the ideas, the bad ideas that flourish within
1:42:10
university's ecosystem, hence parasitic minds, suicidal empathy. If you do
1:42:15
a histogram of all of the nations that contribute to
1:42:22
try to alter the types of ideas that are promulgated
1:42:26
on American campuses, which lobby or which country scores higher?
1:42:33
way higher than anything you could ever hope for from Israel?
1:42:36
Speaker 2: That's a very good question. And I think that's a
1:42:37
different thing because I think what you're talking about is
1:42:40
influencing American education systems and that you could say China
1:42:45
and Russia.
1:42:46
Speaker 1: How about the Qataris?
1:42:47
Speaker 2: Sure.
1:42:48
Speaker 1: Yeah.
1:42:49
Speaker 2: Well, there's a lot of people that from other countries
1:42:53
specifically influencing our education system and doing it within their
1:42:58
best interest by donating a lot of money and By
1:43:02
funding programs, by having a lot of foreign exchange students.
1:43:07
So that's– There's a big impact by other countries for sure.
1:43:10
But they're not representing another country. Like no one is
1:43:14
saying I want to win New York City and then
1:43:16
go to Beijing.
1:43:18
Speaker 1: Right. Anybody who does that in the way you just
1:43:21
said it in my view is violating its most– Well, the.
1:43:25
Speaker 2: Crazy thing is they all did it. They all did
1:43:28
it except Mamdani. Cuomo did it. They all did it.
1:43:32
They all said, I'm going to Israel.
1:43:34
Speaker 1: So I can't speak to that. I really can't.
1:43:36
Speaker 2: But do you understand why people– Yeah, especially post-October 7th,
1:43:42
this negative sentiment because of the destruction of Gaza.
1:43:48
Speaker 1: Any lobby group vociferously fights for its self-interest. The tobacco
1:43:54
lobby spends all their time convincing doctors– I'm talking 40
1:44:00
years ago, that there is no evidence that smoking is
1:44:04
bad for your health.
1:44:05
Speaker 2: Pharmaceutical drug companies, Oxycontin and Oxycodone.
1:44:08
Speaker 1: Exactly. So the reflex for a group that has its
1:44:13
own interests to promulgate are going to do exactly that.
1:44:17
That's why they're called a lobby group. Right. So if
1:44:21
from this side of our mouth, we care about the
1:44:23
fact that there is a Zionist lobby that It cannot
1:44:27
be that from this side of our mouth, we don't
1:44:30
care about the fact that there are Islamic-based funding to
1:44:35
all of the American universities that have parasitized your daughters
1:44:42
and mine in ways that should be problematic because it's
1:44:45
your daughters.
1:44:45
Speaker 2: Well, please explain how they've done that.
1:44:47
Speaker 1: So any Near East Studies program, also known as political
1:44:52
science program, also known as as government programs. So at Harvard,
1:44:56
you call it the Department of Government, right? So all
1:45:01
those schools will then produce kids. All those kids are
1:45:06
called John Smith and Jethro Roscoe, but yet they are
1:45:12
on the front line after October 7th wearing their keffiyeh,
1:45:16
stopping Jews from going to class. And that happened at
1:45:20
UCLA and at Wellesley. and at everywhere, and at Concordia University,
1:45:24
my university. What caused that to happen? It's because there
1:45:29
is one particular viewpoint that becomes the norm on university
1:45:34
campuses when it comes to these geopolitical realities. So by
1:45:37
the same way that I can be frustrated if Mario
1:45:41
Cuomo is concerned about going to Israel when he is
1:45:44
running for mayor of New York, I should also be
1:45:47
very concerned that all of these Islamic countries are having
1:45:53
a free fall, free for all with all of our
1:45:56
children's things. But yet I don't see many people concerned
1:45:59
about that. It is that double standard that then makes
1:46:02
you go, hmm, why are you who lives in Iowa
1:46:06
so concerned about it? Maybe there are really valid reasons
1:46:11
for you to be concerned about the pro-Israel lobby. And
1:46:14
let's have a conversation about that. But then are you
1:46:16
honest enough? to have a similar discussion about other ways
1:46:21
by which we tilt our policies and our children's brains?
1:46:25
Probably not.
1:46:26
Speaker 2: Can you explain how this is done? Like, what do
1:46:28
you think is happening in the universities where they're tilting
1:46:30
people towards a pro-Palestinian perspective?
1:46:35
Speaker 1: Well, I mean, several ways. One, I mean, if it's
1:46:37
directly through funding, you fund a $ 30 million whatever, you're
1:46:43
probably not going to have faculty members who are going
1:46:47
to be incredibly vociferous in their anti-Islamic rhetoric if you
1:46:53
have that. I'll give you an example. When I was
1:46:56
potentially going to come, maybe they don't want me to
1:46:58
hear this, but so be it. When I was, one
1:47:01
of the places that I was being recruited at was
1:47:04
potentially University of Austin, right? And I came, I mean,
1:47:07
they were going to make me an offer. The University
1:47:09
of Austin doesn't have a tenure system. They have a constitution.
1:47:13
It's a different kind of system. Of course, what allowed
1:47:17
me to not be canceled, I would have been canceled
1:47:20
30 years ago for all the things that I say
1:47:22
and all the things that I write, is that I
1:47:23
was protected by tenure. And so I was very concerned
1:47:26
about whether the fact that they don't have tenure, what
1:47:29
happens if tomorrow, okay? And I remember having a conversation,
1:47:34
I won't mention his name, but you could probably guess
1:47:37
who it could be, where I said, what happens under
1:47:40
your constitution if tomorrow you get a $ 30 million donation
1:47:46
from Muhammad Biltilal, and he says, you know that little
1:47:51
Jewish professor who's going on Joe Rogan and talking about
1:47:55
bad things about Islam? That has to stop. His answer was,
1:47:59
the gentleman that I was, my interlocutor was, well, we're
1:48:02
on the same team. I fully support what you're saying. Well,
1:48:07
you support what I'm saying until money talks, right? I
1:48:10
can pick you a number, a donation number, where you
1:48:13
no longer support with equal alacrity my criticism of Islam.
1:48:19
Maybe it's 100 million. Maybe it's 200 million.
1:48:22
Speaker 2: Well, just given the people that I know that are
1:48:24
the founders of the University of Austin, I don't know
1:48:27
if that's likely.
1:48:28
Speaker 1: You mean there is no reservation price?
1:48:30
Speaker 2: It doesn't seem like they would be willing to go
1:48:33
against the idea of Israel.
1:48:37
Speaker 1: Well– Does that make sense to you though? I mean
1:48:41
it does, but it wasn't sufficiently– Reassuring. Reassuring.
1:48:48
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, I can understand. I mean if I was
1:48:51
offered tenure or no tenure, tenure is the way to go.
1:48:53
Speaker 1: Exactly.
1:48:54
Speaker 2: It's the only way you could have real intellectual freedom.
1:48:58
Speaker 1: And by the way, to that point, so when I
1:49:00
now got this beautiful position at University of Mississippi, I
1:49:04
don't have tenure there. I don't really care that much.
1:49:07
But they put a clause in the contract that says
1:49:10
that my rights to say, speak, and write whatever I
1:49:15
want will be protected with the same staunchness that the
1:49:19
First Amendment offers me and that tenure would offer me.
1:49:23
So even though I'm not officially there a tenured professor
1:49:26
at this stage of my career, I don't care, but
1:49:28
they enshrined it. So to our earlier point, I think
1:49:33
there is a way whereby I could put a load
1:49:35
of money in front of you and say, So how
1:49:37
much do you now support freedom of speech for Gadsad?
1:49:40
And I'm saying maybe you're right that the University of
1:49:42
Austin guys would never buckle to that. But Harvard government
1:49:46
department did buckle. Columbia University under Edward Said. Do you
1:49:51
know who that is, Edward Said? Edward Said was a
1:49:53
kind of very pro-Palestinian guy who was kind of a
1:49:56
big shot in their political science department. All of his
1:50:00
teachings at Columbia University were rather skewed in terms of
1:50:06
being anti-Israel. And so the students that come out are
1:50:09
going to be a product of what we taught them.
1:50:11
It's not surprising that they're all wearing keffiyeh.
1:50:14
Speaker 2: And you think that this is directly because of funding
1:50:16
and not because of what they've seen, the horrors of
1:50:19
what's happened in Gaza? Because I think that's what's turned
1:50:23
most people that have no affiliation with any university, because
1:50:27
it's not all university students that are reacting the way
1:50:29
they're reacting. They're reacting because of what you could see
1:50:33
when you see Gaza. I mean, it's obliterated.
1:50:37
Speaker 1: It's true, but we can go back to a time
1:50:41
before October 7th, and I can point you. The difficulties
1:50:45
that I faced at Concordia at not being able to
1:50:48
walk around on campus freely also held true before October 7th.
1:50:53
So we know that we could eliminate the retaliation.
1:50:57
Speaker 2: In that case.
1:50:58
Speaker 1: Right? So that goes to our earlier point. We can
1:51:01
blame ISIS for the U.S., but then I could take
1:51:04
you to a time where the U.S. didn't exist. which
1:51:07
is called 1776. Who are you going to blame now?
1:51:10
You can blame things in the Middle East on Israel,
1:51:13
but I could take you to 1948 when it's not that.
1:51:16
So it's a very facile reflex to always find that culprit.
1:51:21
The reality is that any lobby group, by definition of
1:51:26
the word lobby, is going to espouse positions that are
1:51:30
in their self-interest.
1:51:32
Speaker 2: I understand that.
1:51:32
Speaker 1: It doesn't surprise me that the pro-Israel lobby does that,
1:51:36
as do the Qataris, as do the Romanians, as do
1:51:39
the Haitians. Everybody does it for various dynamical reasons. Yes,
1:51:44
the Israelis are probably more in the ears of the things.
1:51:48
Is that because they're demonic? No, because they have more power.
1:51:51
Is that weird?
1:51:53
Speaker 2: Well, let me ask you this. Sure. Do you agree
1:51:56
that anti-Israel sentiment has ramped up? since the response to
1:52:00
October 7th?
1:52:02
Speaker 1: Absolutely. You may not like what I'm about to say.
1:52:06
I think most of the anti-Israel sentiments, ultimately, if you
1:52:12
scratch enough the onion and peel enough the stuff, is
1:52:16
rooted in Jew hatred.
1:52:18
Speaker 2: Really?
1:52:19
Speaker 1: I do.
1:52:19
Speaker 2: Really? So you don't think that it's a direct response
1:52:23
to people seeing what happened in Gaza?
1:52:25
Speaker 1: No.
1:52:25
Speaker 2: You don't think that has an impact on it?
1:52:27
Speaker 1: I've lived in the world. before October 7th and the
1:52:31
world that I lived in and the Jew hatred that
1:52:34
I face, right? I don't have Joe Rogan's platform size,
1:52:39
but certainly by the standards of most people, I have
1:52:41
a huge platform. The massive, the orgiastic, the Himmler level
1:52:47
Jew hatred that I have faced certainly precedes by countless years,
1:52:55
the October 7th. So then how would we explain why
1:52:57
I'm called a parasite, a pedophile, a child killer, a rat,
1:53:03
a vermin. Why am I called those things? I had
1:53:06
nothing to do with the Israeli war.
1:53:07
Speaker 2: Okay, but this is anecdotal, right? I mean, what we're
1:53:10
talking about is the general sentiment in the United States
1:53:13
has changed pretty radically since the response of October 7th.
1:53:17
I've experienced it. I've experienced it with people that I know.
1:53:20
I've experienced it online. People that never talked about Israel,
1:53:23
never had anything bad to say about Jewish people, and
1:53:26
now are just furious. When they see what's happening in
1:53:29
Gaza and now what they see what's happening in southern
1:53:31
Lebanon where their Christian villages are being bombed.
1:53:34
Speaker 1: Were those people also mad at what happened to the 600,000
1:53:38
Syrians who were killed?
1:53:40
Speaker 2: Which event is this?
1:53:42
Speaker 1: In the Syrian civil war. About 600,000 Syrians were killed. OK.
1:53:50
Speaker 2: I don't know if they knew about that, but I
1:53:53
think this is kind of a case of whataboutism, right?
1:53:55
And I just– we could go to that and we
1:53:57
could talk about that and maybe that should be publicized more.
1:54:00
But what I'm talking about is the people that I've
1:54:03
encountered in the United States that really generally didn't have
1:54:07
an opinion about Israel at all have had a very
1:54:11
negative opinion about Israel because of the response to October
1:54:15
7th and because of what they've done to Gaza.
1:54:18
Speaker 1: So let me address the whataboutism. By the way, I'm
1:54:21
loving today's conversation. It has a different timber to it,
1:54:24
but it's keeping us sharp. I like it. So thank
1:54:27
you for keeping me on my toes. Let's suppose that
1:54:33
I had a rule in my head that says I
1:54:37
only get incredibly irate and animated if an MMA fighter
1:54:45
commits a crime. But when I see the exact same
1:54:49
crime committed by anybody other than an MMA fighter, I
1:54:53
don't have the reflex to be upset. Would it be
1:54:57
whataboutism for you to say, how come you got upset
1:55:00
when the MMA fighter did this, but when the non-MMA?
1:55:03
That wouldn't be whataboutism. Because what you would be saying is,
1:55:06
I want cognitive consistency from you, Gad. That if you're
1:55:10
upset that an MMA fighter commits a crime, you'll be
1:55:13
as upset when a non-MMA fighter commits the exact same crime.
1:55:18
Speaker 2: Could you illuminate me on this Syrian thing?
1:55:22
Speaker 1: Yeah. So when the– But I'm.
1:55:25
Speaker 2: Only vaguely aware of what happened.
1:55:27
Speaker 1: So there was a civil war that was started in
1:55:30
Syria I think in 2011 that where the various Islamist
1:55:36
groups were trying to overthrow– Assad. And as a result
1:55:43
of that dynamic, innumerable people, Muslim on Muslim, were completely
1:55:50
ravaged to the tune of about 600,000. Okay. So let's
1:55:55
put that here. So let's not call that whataboutism because
1:55:58
you could easily say I am angry whenever.
1:56:02
Speaker 2: But it is whataboutism because we were specifically talking about
1:56:06
Jew hatred in this country being ramped up post October
1:56:10
11th or October 7th. I mean, it is whataboutism because
1:56:14
we could address that. Yes. But this is one particular thing,
1:56:20
one particular moment in history that has caused this extreme reaction,
1:56:25
this anti-Israel sentiment.
1:56:27
Speaker 1: The guy in Iowa who has never heard of the
1:56:31
Middle East, but got rightly upset at what he saw
1:56:36
in Gaza. Why wasn't that guy, if he is a
1:56:41
honest purveyor in his moral calculus of any innocents being killed,
1:56:48
I'm asking you, I pose that question to you. When
1:56:51
he sees the thousands and thousands of Yemenis that were killed,
1:56:56
the children, that were eradicated, much more than the tune
1:56:59
of whatever happened in Gaza. Every single individual, let me
1:57:02
go on record.
1:57:03
Speaker 2: You're talking about the drone bombing in Yemen?
1:57:05
Speaker 1: What are you talking about? There are many, many different
1:57:09
ways by which Yemenis have died as a result of
1:57:13
the conflicts in Yemen. There are a huge number of
1:57:16
people that were killed in the fight between Sudan and
1:57:19
the South Sudanese. I mean, really, in the many hundreds
1:57:23
of thousands, right? So if I am just an Iowa guy,
1:57:28
my moral calculus operates according to the following rule. Whenever
1:57:33
I see innocent people being killed, it drives me crazy.
1:57:39
I am outraged. Therefore, if that's the rule by which
1:57:42
I navigate through the world, I will look at the
1:57:45
October 7th victims and say, those Jews didn't deserve this.
1:57:49
I'm pissed. I will look at the Gazans that were
1:57:52
killed who were innocent and And I'd say those Gazans
1:57:56
did not deserve it. So far, so good?
1:57:58
Speaker 2: We agree?
1:57:59
Speaker 1: I will look at the Syrians and say, that is
1:58:02
not right. I will look at the Ukrainians that were
1:58:05
being butchered endlessly by Putin and say, that's pissing me off.
1:58:09
and on and on. But if it would appear that
1:58:14
my calculus is abiding by the no Jews, no news mechanism,
1:58:20
then I have a right to say, how come you're
1:58:23
focused only on when it seems that the mean Israelis
1:58:26
are are killing the beautifully peaceful Palestinians and your moral
1:58:32
outrage never gets invoked across all of the panoply of
1:58:37
much greater disasters around the world. Why is that?
1:58:40
Speaker 2: Well, I think initially in October 7th, people were very
1:58:44
outraged at the attack on the Israelis. They were horrified
1:58:49
at what happened. The videos that we saw were terrible.
1:58:54
videos of people cheering in the streets when they were
1:58:56
bringing the Israeli captives. But then the difference between the
1:59:02
capability of the Palestinians in Gaza versus the Israeli army,
1:59:07
which is one of the most ferocious and capable armies
1:59:09
in the world, and the devastation that they did to Gaza,
1:59:13
the city, just the city alone, where you see apartment buildings, hospital,
1:59:18
everything just blown to smithereens. There's a complete difference in
1:59:22
power What you're talking about in Syria, I'm assuming this
1:59:26
is a civil war between similarly armed people killing each other.
1:59:31
Speaker 1: Well, it's the government versus militia.
1:59:33
Speaker 2: Right. But similarly armed people. You're not seeing that with
1:59:38
Gaza and Israel. With Israel, you're seeing United States-funded Israeli military,
1:59:44
which is insanely capable, destroying an entire city.
1:59:49
Speaker 1: Fair enough. The images are very tough. There's no question.
1:59:53
Speaker 2: But the reality of the numbers is very tough too,
1:59:56
because we don't even know how many people are dead.
1:59:58
Speaker 1: We could talk about the numbers if you want in
2:00:00
a second, but let me ask you this. If October
2:00:04
7th hadn't happened, I'm not being flippant. I'm not playing games.
2:00:08
I'm really honestly asking you. If October 7th had not happened,
2:00:13
how many of the innocent Palestinians that tragically perished, would
2:00:19
have perished?
2:00:21
Speaker 2: That's a good question. Probably it would have never happened.
2:00:25
There probably would have been a bombing of Gaza. You know,
2:00:28
we could get really dark here because there's a lot
2:00:30
of people that believe that it was allowed to happen
2:00:33
so that they could have an excuse to attack Gaza.
2:00:37
Speaker 1: But that goes to our earlier point.
2:00:38
Speaker 2: I mean, it gets goofy and I'm not the person
2:00:41
to comment on that because I don't really know, but
2:00:43
there was stand down orders. We know that. We know
2:00:45
that some of, at least some of the army was
2:00:49
told to stand down.
2:00:50
Speaker 1: Well, I actually had the former director of the Mossad
2:00:54
on my show and his name is Yossi Cohen. And
2:00:58
I was like, Yossi, what the F how, how does, right?
2:01:01
Speaker 2: How did it happen?
2:01:02
Speaker 1: And the best of my understanding in terms of what
2:01:06
I've told is that, you know, shit happens and someone
2:01:10
falls asleep, metaphorically speaking. Right. And so it was a gigantic,
2:01:16
but anyways, we, the, Not you, but if someone is
2:01:19
of the conspiratorial mindset, there's nothing that I could share.
2:01:24
But speaking literally to the former director of Mossad, he
2:01:29
said it was a catastrophic failure of where everybody is
2:01:34
kind of asleep. But my point is this.
2:01:37
Speaker 2: Right. But let me stop you there. Please. Because if
2:01:39
I was the former head of Mossad, the last thing
2:01:42
I would tell you is that, well, we allowed it
2:01:45
to happen because we've been wanting to blow up Gaza
2:01:47
for a long time and take it over and turn
2:01:50
it into a big resort. You would never say that. Right. Right.
2:01:53
And we also know that on record, Netanyahu has said
2:01:56
that they fund Hamas so they can control the size
2:01:59
of the flame because they don't want the Democrat democratically
2:02:03
elected people to take over and turn Palestine into a state.
2:02:08
Speaker 1: So you don't think there's something... Isn't that true? Well,
2:02:12
Israel left, if I'm getting my history right, they left
2:02:15
Gaza in 2005, right? Is that the right number? Am
2:02:19
I getting that right? So from 2005 till 2023 or
2:02:24
maybe 2007, so someone will correct me in the comments section.
2:02:28
For many, many years, Israel left and there was no
2:02:31
problem in the region, right? Is that true?
2:02:35
Speaker 2: I don't know. You would know better than me.
2:02:36
Speaker 1: Well, there was no problem. Then there was a catalyst.
2:02:41
An event happened. Now, we can debate whether it was proportionate,
2:02:46
whether it could have been adjudicated differently. We can discuss
2:02:50
all that. And all that, you can discuss it without
2:02:53
ever worrying about being called anti-Semitic. It's totally within the
2:02:57
fair bounds of having those conversations. But what is true
2:03:01
is that if Israel wanted to eradicate palestinians it would
2:03:09
take them a lot less time than when you and
2:03:13
i have been talking on the show by orders of
2:03:15
magnitude it would take 15 seconds but they didn't do
2:03:19
that right they don't do that as a matter of
2:03:21
fact johnson.
2:03:22
Speaker 2: But they kind of have in gaza gaza is done
2:03:27
There's almost nothing left of it.
2:03:28
Speaker 1: So the numbers that I'm hearing– You've seen videos of it, right?
2:03:31
Speaker 2: You've seen what it looks like when they fly overhead.
2:03:33
We could show some videos. The most recent videos, they
2:03:37
show the drone videos of flying over Gaza. It looks
2:03:40
like a nuclear bomb hit it. They just– they did
2:03:43
it slowly. They did it over years, just consistent, constant bombing,
2:03:46
and there's almost nothing left of it.
2:03:48
Speaker 1: Right.
2:03:48
Speaker 2: And there's also been this crazy talk of putting resorts there.
2:03:53
You know, when Trump said, yeah, we say that we're
2:03:55
going to turn it into the, what did he say?
2:03:57
Something of the, you know.
2:04:01
Speaker 1: Like Monte Carlo.
2:04:02
Speaker 2: Yeah. Something crazy.
2:04:03
Speaker 1: Right. Again, it's totally fair to discuss what constitutes proportional
2:04:09
thing and so on. But I take a broader view,
2:04:12
which is Israel exists and you have two choices. You
2:04:18
can keep creating generations of your people. whose entire daily
2:04:26
animation in terms of their objectives is to eradicate that place.
2:04:31
Or you could recognize that every single millimeter on earth
2:04:35
has at some point been owned by someone else. Is
2:04:39
that not true? I mean, is the definition of history
2:04:42
not the accounting, ledgering of who owned what when? Now,
2:04:47
in every other conflict that has ever existed throughout all
2:04:52
of human history, There is a winner of that conflict
2:04:56
and a loser and people move on. Okay? Just hear
2:05:01
me out. I lived in Lebanon. I grew up in Lebanon.
2:05:05
We had to leave under imminent threat of execution. It's
2:05:09
very unfortunate. We lost everything. We moved on. We made
2:05:13
a life for ourselves. Our home was stolen by Palestinian people.
2:05:18
I never held any animus towards Palestinians. I moved on
2:05:22
with my life. One day, I was interesting enough to
2:05:25
have the privilege of appearing on Joe Rogan's show. My
2:05:28
daily animation is not to go and kill people for
2:05:32
things that were done to us. And very few people
2:05:35
have had things happen to them as what happened to us, right?
2:05:40
Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust. It didn't create an
2:05:44
endless litany of Jewish terrorists throughout the world trying to
2:05:48
get back. So in every part of the world, we
2:05:51
are now in Texas. That land was owned by someone
2:05:54
else before the United States came along. We are sitting, quote,
2:05:58
on stolen land. In Canada, we are sitting on stolen land.
2:06:01
It's called history. Most people are able to move on
2:06:05
and say, hey, the dice went this way or that way.
2:06:09
Let's hold hands and let's build a better future. You
2:06:13
can't do that if canonically the Jewish state should not exist.
2:06:20
Doesn't Hamas say in their charter, every Jew that is anywhere,
2:06:25
we will find him and get him? So did that
2:06:28
make sense that they would be the leaders of that region?
2:06:31
Wouldn't it have been much better for them to train
2:06:34
their kids to becoming neuroscientists and podcasters and classicists and physicians?
2:06:40
But that's not what they chose to do repeatedly for
2:06:43
nearly 80 years. The minute that that clicks... And they say,
2:06:48
you know what? You have this part. We have this part.
2:06:51
Let's shake hands and let's be one family. The problem
2:06:55
will go away. So I agree with you. The images
2:06:58
are very jarring, right? I'm also a very empathetic, loving guy.
2:07:05
But I also know the reality, which is I've never
2:07:08
heard Jews saying, let's kill all Muslims. I always hear
2:07:14
the opposite. Jews are an existential affront to Islam. Muhammad
2:07:21
on his deathbed said, promise me that you will rid
2:07:26
Arabia of Christians, but really the Jews. So how could
2:07:31
you have a coexistence between two people when one people
2:07:35
wants to eradicate the other? So did Israel overreact? I'll
2:07:41
leave future historians to decide that.
2:07:42
Speaker 2: What do you think?
2:07:45
Speaker 1: I think that given what they were trying to achieve,
2:07:49
they did the best that could possibly be.
2:07:51
Speaker 2: The best they could possibly be would be eliminate the
2:07:54
entire city? No. And turn it into rubble?
2:07:56
Speaker 1: There's been about 70,000 dead. Is that the right number?
2:07:58
Speaker 2: We don't even know.
2:07:59
Speaker 1: I mean, that's the number that I've seen.
2:08:01
Speaker 2: What's the accounting? Who's to know how many people are
2:08:03
dead under the rubble?
2:08:04
Speaker 1: Well, many of those numbers are coming from the Hamas.
2:08:06
Speaker 2: That's true, too. But if you just look at the destruction,
2:08:10
the buildings that have been leveled, the sheer volume of destruction.
2:08:15
Speaker 1: There were two cities called Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
2:08:19
Speaker 2: Okay.
2:08:20
Speaker 1: They were fully nice.
2:08:21
Speaker 2: Whataboutism.
2:08:21
Speaker 1: And then– But it isn't whataboutism.
2:08:24
Speaker 2: We didn't have to do that either. And you could
2:08:26
say that that was a horrific thing because Japan was
2:08:28
about to surrender. Well– And we were like– From the
2:08:31
American– Let's practice. Let's see how these things work. Again,
2:08:35
that's the least– Let's show you that we have nuclear bombs.
2:08:39
Speaker 1: That's the least generous interpretation of that.
2:08:41
Speaker 2: I think it's a pretty accurate interpretation. Because I've heard
2:08:44
something else. What have you heard?
2:08:46
Speaker 1: I've heard that they did the calculus of if– and
2:08:49
by the way, it could be a very cold, callous calculus.
2:08:53
But what I've heard is that there is a very
2:08:55
clear pro-con thing where if we do this, this many
2:09:00
people would die. If we go on in the war
2:09:03
and it takes that much more before they surrender, there
2:09:06
will be this many dead. Drop those bombs.
2:09:10
Speaker 2: That's possible.
2:09:10
Speaker 1: Yeah.
2:09:11
Speaker 2: It's possible. So do you think that if Israel didn't
2:09:14
kill 70,000 people and completely destroy Gaza, that more than 70,000
2:09:19
people would have died during the same time period?
2:09:20
Speaker 1: No, I'm not applying that same calculus of Japan. What
2:09:23
I'm saying is images of destruction are very vivid to
2:09:28
our brain, right?
2:09:28
Speaker 2: They should be, don't you think?
2:09:30
Speaker 1: But that doesn't mean that that's the information that I
2:09:35
use to establish what is morally righteous.
2:09:40
Speaker 2: What else can we use other than information?
2:09:43
Speaker 1: We can use what is the existential calculus that animates
2:09:47
each society. One society says, we'll even help you build
2:09:52
a better society. Just please don't spend all your time
2:09:56
screaming about eradicating every last one of us. The other
2:10:00
society says, I don't think so. If we're ever strong
2:10:04
enough to kill all, unfortunately, we were only strong enough
2:10:07
to kill 1,200 of you. And boy, that was orgiastically pleasing.
2:10:12
But if tomorrow, God willing, hey, maybe the Iranians have
2:10:15
nuclear bombs. We can eradicate all you assholes. My God,
2:10:19
the world will see.
2:10:20
Speaker 2: So this is Hamas saying that, right? And the people
2:10:23
that live in Palestine that were killed, the 70,000 plus people,
2:10:28
how many of them do you think were Hamas?
2:10:30
Speaker 1: Well, the numbers that I hear is that it was
2:10:32
one to one ratio, which apparently is a pretty good ratio.
2:10:36
Speaker 2: And where are those numbers coming from?
2:10:39
Speaker 1: I mean like you want me to give you the reference?
2:10:40
Speaker 2: No, no, no. I mean is it coming from Israel?
2:10:43
Is it coming from Hamas? Is it coming from Palestine?
2:10:46
Speaker 1: So the one I'm going to use is from John Spencer.
2:10:49
Do you know who that is?
2:10:51
Speaker 2: No.
2:10:51
Speaker 1: John Spencer is a war– urban war researcher. I think
2:10:57
he's at– what's the military– where they train the military?
2:11:03
West Point. He's a professor of urban warfare. He's come
2:11:06
on my show. and based on whatever analyses that he's done,
2:11:11
he's not Jewish, he's not uniquely pro-Zionist, is that he's saying,
2:11:17
and again, I see to whomever knows better about this
2:11:20
than I do, I don't know all the details, he
2:11:22
said that the ratio of civilian to fighters killed in
2:11:30
the Gaza war is better than most other comparable situations.
2:11:35
Speaker 2: So Hamas had 35,000- I think it's one-to-one. So Hamas
2:11:40
had 35,000 militants in Gaza?
2:11:43
Speaker 1: If the one-to-one number is right and 70, that's what.
2:11:47
Speaker 2: It would be. And so all those buildings needed to
2:11:50
be destroyed because at least one out of one was.
2:11:54
Speaker 1: So let me ask you this. Let's suppose, I think
2:11:57
it's totally reasonable that you'd be upset that All these
2:12:00
people died innocently.
2:12:02
Speaker 2: I think most people that see it would be upset, right?
2:12:04
Speaker 1: Fair enough. Give me the specific details of how you
2:12:10
would go about getting your hostages back given the reality.
2:12:16
How many hostages did they get back? In terms of
2:12:20
alive or dead? Yeah. I don't know the exact numbers,
2:12:23
but is it something in the order of like 30,
2:12:25
40 alive and all the other ones were dead? Does
2:12:27
that sound like the right number?
2:12:29
Speaker 2: I don't know.
2:12:30
Speaker 1: Whatever it is, it could be 50, it could be 100,
2:12:33
it could be 200. So I am representative of Israel.
2:12:38
I need to get those people out. Let's suppose that
2:12:42
Hamas had said, here are all the people that we
2:12:45
have kidnapped and we are returning them to you and
2:12:49
putting down our arms. Would Israel have caused the destruction
2:12:52
that they would have caused? That they did cause?
2:12:55
Speaker 2: I don't know.
2:12:55
Speaker 1: But what do you think?
2:12:56
Speaker 2: Probably not if they did that.
2:12:59
Speaker 1: So nothing happens in a vacuum, right? There isn't something... But.
2:13:03
Speaker 2: Does that, just because they wouldn't have done that, does
2:13:06
it justify what they did? What does it say here?
2:13:09
Final release. Total returns, 168 hostages were returned alive, including
2:13:14
eight rescued by the IDF. The bodies of 85 hostages
2:13:17
were repatriated after they were killed during their captivity. U.S.
2:13:23
deal broker that landed a ceasefire of and a swap
2:13:27
for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners. So they swapped some of them.
2:13:31
Speaker 1: Well, let me actually speak about the swap issue. I
2:13:33
discussed this in Suicidal Empathy. Sinwar, who was the architect
2:13:38
of October 7th, do you know his background, his story?
2:13:42
Sinwar was an ardent militant whose entire life has been
2:13:47
animated with eradicating Jews, not Israel, all Jews from the world.
2:13:51
Because there's a hadith that says in Islam, the world
2:13:55
will not stop until every Jew that is hiding behind
2:13:59
the tree is found and killed. And they refer to
2:14:02
that hadith from Islam, not radical Islam, Islam. He was
2:14:08
taken in one of those sweeps of Palestinian militants to prison.
2:14:14
He was diagnosed with a brain tumor, a deadly terminal
2:14:18
brain tumor. The Israelis, you know, the mean Israelis who
2:14:22
are killing everybody, because the Hippocratic Oath, in their view,
2:14:28
supersedes any other calculus, the Israeli neurosurgeon doesn't say, F
2:14:34
this guy, he's killed, you know, tons of my fellow co-religionists,
2:14:40
screw him, let him die. They operate on him and
2:14:44
they save his life, right? So let me ask you this, Joe.
2:14:48
If you and I, let's put ourselves in the mind of, right?
2:14:51
I was saved by the hands of the Jewish Israeli neurosurgeon.
2:14:57
Otherwise I would have died. Then he was let go
2:15:01
in one of those swaps. Would that have not bought
2:15:05
you sufficient existential empathy to say, probably I shouldn't then
2:15:11
spend the rest of my life being the architect and
2:15:15
repay the largesse of the Israeli neurosurgeon by doing October 7th.
2:15:20
Yet it didn't buy him that empathy, right?
2:15:23
Speaker 2: So he was swapped in an earlier deal?
2:15:25
Speaker 1: He was swapped in an earlier deal. Jamie could look
2:15:28
it up. You could do SINWAR, S-I-N-W-A-R. He was one
2:15:32
of the guys who you saw him in one of
2:15:34
those rubbles and a drone comes in and he's covered
2:15:38
in rubble and then they take him out, right? Well,
2:15:42
if you and I, if I could put myself in
2:15:44
your mind, if we had been ardent haters of a
2:15:48
group and then that group had shown us tremendous compassion
2:15:52
and generosity by literally saving our lives, that might have
2:15:57
shut off my hatred to that group. For example, Bridget Gabriel,
2:16:02
the Lebanese Christian woman who grew up in the Lebanese
2:16:05
Civil War like I did, had always been taught as
2:16:09
a Lebanese Christian that the Israelis are terrible and evil.
2:16:12
They're the problem for the whole region. But then she
2:16:17
escaped to Israel, was welcomed in Israel. She completely flipped
2:16:21
because she saw that there were nice human beings that
2:16:24
treated her well. And then her brainwashing was no longer there. Well,
2:16:29
if I've literally taken a brain tumor out of your brain,
2:16:33
in that brain of yours, could I have not bought
2:16:36
a bit of existential empathy for the Jews? It didn't.
2:16:40
What do you think of that?
2:16:41
Speaker 2: Well, I think that person was probably deeply radicalized to
2:16:46
whatever their ideology was. And that wasn't enough. Like saving
2:16:50
them wasn't enough. It gave them– it was probably Allah
2:16:54
giving them another opportunity to kill more Jews.
2:16:57
Speaker 1: So don't you think that's– But that's.
2:16:59
Speaker 2: Just– that's one person and one person saved them. I
2:17:02
don't think it necessarily changes the relationship between Israel and Palestine,
2:17:07
particularly because Palestine was denied statehood. It's not a country
2:17:12
of its own. It can't. do things that other countries
2:17:14
can do.
2:17:15
Speaker 1: Do you know what Bill Clinton, who's not a Republican,
2:17:18
said regarding Palestinian statehood?
2:17:21
Speaker 2: What?
2:17:22
Speaker 1: He said, I'm paraphrasing him, I killed myself, bent myself
2:17:26
backwards to give them almost everything that they wanted. This
2:17:31
is sort of the Oslo Accord. And Yasser Arafat was
2:17:36
not interested in a two-state solution.
2:17:38
Speaker 2: Let me ask you this. If you were the head
2:17:40
of Israel, how would you handle it?
2:17:43
Speaker 1: You mean moving forward?
2:17:44
Speaker 2: Yeah.
2:17:47
Speaker 1: In my utopia, it would be to... try to catch
2:17:52
the brainwashing that happens straight out of the womb where
2:17:57
the type of animus that is shared regarding the Jews
2:18:02
is so outlandish that it would make Hitler and Himmler
2:18:07
squirm in unease. If you can get rid of that brainwashing,
2:18:12
you will learn to see the other as an equal
2:18:15
human being.
2:18:16
Speaker 2: Could I interject there? Please. Do you think that the
2:18:19
bombing of Gaza and the destruction that's so clearly visible
2:18:24
to everyone would actually stop that? Do you think that
2:18:31
the bombing of Gaza would maybe make more people that
2:18:37
would make more people want to attack Israel. 100%.
2:18:42
Speaker 1: You're right that you are creating a new generation of terrorists.
2:18:46
But again, you're choosing to decide where to place the
2:18:52
causal point. Gaza existed fully peacefully for 20 plus years
2:19:00
without anybody dying. The day that they decided to do
2:19:04
what they did, resulted in a retaliation, which we can
2:19:08
discuss whether it's good or not enough or too much.
2:19:12
That is true. At the root of the problem is
2:19:15
an open society that allows for the expression of all religions.
2:19:21
When I was in Israel two months ago, I was in, well,
2:19:26
all over Israel. I gave a talk in Tel Aviv
2:19:29
and I gave a talk in Jerusalem. I spoke more
2:19:32
Arabic in Jerusalem than I did English or Hebrew or
2:19:35
anything else.
2:19:36
Speaker 2: To your point, I think Israel is only 73% Jewish.
2:19:42
Speaker 1: Exactly.
2:19:43
Speaker 2: Look that up, please.
2:19:44
Speaker 1: I thought it was maybe 80%, but your number would
2:19:48
even prove my.
2:19:48
Speaker 2: Point even better. Yeah, I think I might be wrong,
2:19:52
but it's not 100%. That's for sure.
2:19:53
Speaker 1: Okay.
2:19:55
Speaker 2: And there are Arab and Muslim communities in Israel that
2:20:00
are tolerated versus having a Jewish community in Palestine.
2:20:04
Speaker 1: Not tolerated, fully embraced. So I can show you the valedictorians.
2:20:09
Speaker 2: Let's see. Jewish population is larger than the world. 78.
2:20:13
Speaker 1: See, I said 80. 73.
2:20:14
Speaker 2: What?
2:20:14
Speaker 1: 73% of the population is Jewish, including, look, right there.
2:20:21
Speaker 2: Israel Bureau of Statistics. So I was right. 73% of
2:20:24
the population is Jewish. 503,000 people living in the West
2:20:25
Bank beyond Israel's self-defined borders. Recent updates, December 2025, show
2:20:28
total population at 10,148,000 with Jews and others at 7,758,000.
2:20:29
Speaker 1: Right.
2:20:29
Speaker 2: So let's do a few analyses. Many, many valedictorians of
2:20:31
universities graduate. They're Muslims.
2:20:51
Speaker 1: Some of them are in hijab. That's happening in Israel.
2:20:54
You go to medical school, the valedictorian that's chosen is
2:20:59
a woman in hijab. Does that seem like it's animus?
2:21:02
In the Knesset, in the parliament of Israel, there are
2:21:06
tons of Muslims that serve, right? As I was walking
2:21:10
around all over Jerusalem, everybody that I was interacting with
2:21:15
was in Arabic. They were fully Israelis who were Muslim, right?
2:21:21
I have tons of pictures with all of them. Some
2:21:23
of them recognize me. There was no animus. Why? Because
2:21:26
they've internalized the reality that I am part of a
2:21:30
country that is made up of, it's a Jewish majority country,
2:21:34
but it's a place where everybody has equal rights, right?
2:21:38
There are people who serve in the highest judiciary that
2:21:42
are Muslim. Is there an Islamic country where the opposite
2:21:46
could be said?
2:21:47
Speaker 2: No, of course not. It's also interesting when you look
2:21:51
at the statistics of the polling statistics of people that
2:21:55
support the war with Iran in Israel versus the United States.
2:22:01
And it's way more people support the war. And obviously
2:22:08
I live in America and I'm immune to the effects
2:22:12
of being surrounded by people that hate me and want
2:22:14
to blow me up. I could only imagine– what that's
2:22:19
like for the national psyche of living in a place
2:22:22
like Israel, being surrounded by.
2:22:25
Speaker 1: Paradoxically, though, forgive me for interrupting you, Israelis score as
2:22:29
one of the highest on the happiness scales. So in
2:22:34
a sense, it goes against what you're saying. And I
2:22:36
think I've got an explanation. Tell me what you think
2:22:40
of it. When I am spending my entire existence, to
2:22:45
your point, possibly being eradicated tomorrow, I don't have the
2:22:49
luxury to debate what constitutes male or female. It creates
2:22:54
a laser focus about what's important in my life.
2:22:58
Speaker 2: My kickboxing coach, my old kickboxing coach, Shuki, he's from Israel.
2:23:02
And I went over his house once for dinner. And
2:23:05
it was crazy. Like they're dancing and playing bongo drums.
2:23:09
And I was, you know, obviously I'm American. I'm saying
2:23:12
to him, I go, why?
2:23:13
Speaker 1: I go, why?
2:23:13
Speaker 2: Why are you guys so happy? I was like trying
2:23:15
to figure it out. I go, is this just uniquely you?
2:23:17
He goes, it's in Israel. Everybody's happy because you know
2:23:22
you could die any day. So just party, party, party.
2:23:25
Have a good time.
2:23:26
Speaker 1: And so you go there.
2:23:27
Speaker 2: That was his mentality, and I never forgot that because
2:23:30
I remember thinking that. And he went back to Israel.
2:23:33
He's there right now.
2:23:34
Speaker 1: Have you been to Israel? No. You know what I
2:23:37
suggest you do?
2:23:37
Speaker 2: It doesn't seem like a good time to go. Seems
2:23:39
like it's a little dangerous.
2:23:40
Speaker 1: I mean, in that sense, yes. But go there and
2:23:43
live out the vibe. Look, it's an incredibly gay-tolerant place, right?
2:23:49
Tel Aviv, short of San Francisco, New York, Montreal. It's
2:23:53
one of the most queer-friendly places. It's very bohemian. It's
2:23:58
reggae music playing. Israelis are, in French you say, bon vivant,
2:24:02
good livers.
2:24:03
Speaker 2: But it's also, Israeli society doesn't, universally support the war either.
2:24:09
Speaker 1: Exactly. But that speaks to the fact that there is
2:24:12
a multiplicity of realities. It's an open society, right? I mean,
2:24:16
there are Muslim guys who will go in front of
2:24:20
this Knesset and will say things that would never be
2:24:25
tolerated in any other society. So is Israeli society perfect? No.
2:24:29
but is it the beast and the monster and the
2:24:32
demon that you see as a caricature? I mean, nothing
2:24:35
could be further from the truth.
2:24:36
Speaker 2: But do you think that perhaps the more right-wing authoritarian
2:24:42
aspect of the Israeli government is a problem in how
2:24:46
Israel is perceived in the rest of the world? And
2:24:48
this over-response in Gaza, the way they're bombing southern Lebanon,
2:24:53
that this is feeding into this?
2:24:56
Speaker 1: Look, there have been governments in Israel covering the whole
2:25:01
gamut of political orientations. And while, to your point, I
2:25:05
think there is greater animus towards Israel today than maybe
2:25:08
in the past, I've always known there to be Israeli
2:25:12
animus in many places. For example, at my own university, well,
2:25:17
which I will be leaving shortly, Concordia has been colloquially
2:25:22
referred to as Gaza University for 25 plus years. Benjamin
2:25:26
Netanyahu in 2002 was not able to speak there. They
2:25:31
shut him down and they cancel him. And this is
2:25:33
when he was then a private citizen. Now this is
2:25:37
in 2002.
2:25:38
Speaker 2: So why did they say they were shutting him down?
2:25:40
Speaker 1: Well, because it's the Zionist entity and the same talking points, right?
2:25:45
You just change what is the culprit. So now we
2:25:48
say it's the devastating images of Gaza, but 20 years ago,
2:25:53
it would have been an other story. So the reality, that's.
2:25:56
Speaker 2: That university, uh, I don't necessarily think that was universally
2:26:02
thought of in terms of like if you went to
2:26:04
all the other different schools.
2:26:06
Speaker 1: No, you're absolutely right. But now that I think comes
2:26:09
from two sources. The first source was when I told
2:26:11
you earlier that the brainwashing that's going on American campuses
2:26:15
where Jethro is now also wearing the keffiyeh. But the
2:26:19
demographic realities of the West in general, including the United States,
2:26:25
are such that we've let in people from those societies
2:26:29
at a much greater number than in the past, right? So,
2:26:32
I mean, you know the Pew survey, do you know Pew, P-E-W, right?
2:26:37
So they're a nonpartisan survey company that, if anything, tends
2:26:43
to lean more towards progressive. They did a survey, global survey,
2:26:49
of animus towards Jews, not Israel, Jews. This was, I think, 2010.
2:26:56
And they had a whole bunch of Islamic countries that
2:26:59
were polled. Now, let's suppose I told you that we
2:27:03
polled people in Indonesia or in Libya or in Jordan,
2:27:07
and 10% expressed, you know, very serious Jew hatred. That
2:27:12
would be an arresting number. You'd be, wow, one out
2:27:15
of 10 hates the Jews. That's a lot. Do you
2:27:17
know what the average numbers were? Just pick a number.
2:27:20
Speaker 2: In which countries?
2:27:21
Speaker 1: So in many, but I'm talking now mainly the Middle
2:27:25
Eastern countries. So not not Indonesia or Malaysia, which also
2:27:29
we're not loving the Jews, but we're not nearly as
2:27:31
hostile towards the Jews. I'm talking Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria,
2:27:36
those kinds of countries. What was the average number? And
2:27:40
Jamie can pull it up.
2:27:41
Speaker 2: And when the question was asked, how was it phrased?
2:27:44
Speaker 1: I don't remember the exact words.
2:27:46
Speaker 2: But it was like, do you hate Jews?
2:27:47
Speaker 1: Not do you hate Jews, but do you hold favorable
2:27:51
or disfavorable? It's enough that there's animus, but I don't
2:27:56
think the word hate was used.
2:27:57
Speaker 2: And is it Israel or is it Jews? Just Jews
2:28:00
in general?
2:28:01
Speaker 1: Guess what the percentage was. Like, just give me a
2:28:03
not like. 70%. It's 95 and up. Whoa.
2:28:13
Speaker 2: Right.
2:28:14
Speaker 1: So if we sampled a thousand people from Syria.
2:28:16
Speaker 2: And it's hate. They hate Jews.
2:28:20
Speaker 1: I don't remember because it's 2010. Negative opinion, disfavorable, dislike,
2:28:25
whatever it is. It's a measure of your either proclivity, affinity,
2:28:32
or disdain for the Jew, whatever the wording is. If
2:28:36
you get 95, 97, 98% of polled people saying that
2:28:43
they don't like the Jews, and now you let into
2:28:46
your country, your host country, Hundreds of thousands, if not
2:28:50
millions of those people. Do you think that Jew hatred
2:28:55
is going to go up or go down? So in Quebec,
2:28:58
for example, as I may have mentioned previously on the show,
2:29:02
Quebec had a very open policy towards Islamic immigration. And
2:29:07
the reason that in Quebec it was so is because
2:29:11
the most important sense of personhood in Quebec is that
2:29:14
you maintain your linguistic identity. We are French. We don't
2:29:18
want to be subsumed by the mean English language.
2:29:21
Speaker 2: Yes?
2:29:22
Speaker 1: So therefore, since many of the immigrants coming from Islamic
2:29:27
countries were also Francophone, in their infinite wisdom, the Quebec
2:29:32
government said, hey, you know, here's a great idea. There
2:29:35
was a 1997 civil war between the Algerian government and
2:29:39
hardcore extremist Muslims. The latter lost. So they were fleeing
2:29:45
from getting killed by the Algerian government. why don't you
2:29:48
open the borders for them to Quebec? The decapitations will
2:29:53
happen only when they say bonjour to you. So given
2:29:57
that they will address you in French before they behead you,
2:30:00
don't worry about it, let them all in. I'm obviously
2:30:02
being facetious, but the point is that hundreds of thousands
2:30:06
of Islamic immigrants came to Quebec. I started seeing the changes,
2:30:12
a lot more women in hijab, a lot more dangerous
2:30:15
to go to campus. A lot more requirements for accommodations,
2:30:20
prayer rooms, public prayer.
2:30:22
Speaker 2: When you say dangerous, in what way?
2:30:25
Speaker 1: Specifically to me?
2:30:26
Speaker 2: Dangerous going to campus. In what way?
2:30:28
Speaker 1: Well, I'm somewhat of a known entity who doesn't mince words.
2:30:33
And so I started getting a lot of death threats.
2:30:36
The first set of death threats I got were in 2017.
2:30:40
Where for that semester, I had to follow a protocol
2:30:44
to walk on campus with security. They would lock the
2:30:48
door so that the students could leave but not come
2:30:50
back in. So I had to check in with the security.
2:30:54
That lasted for about a semester. And I mean, literally,
2:30:57
I would lecture and then I would be ushered out.
2:31:00
My wife would be waiting for me and I would
2:31:02
sort of let out a deep, like sigh that, thank God,
2:31:06
I survived another week.
2:31:08
Speaker 2: Did you ever experience like people trying to get at you?
2:31:13
Speaker 1: So all of those threats were online. But then we
2:31:17
had to file with Concordia, a Montreal police report, so on.
2:31:22
In 2022, I had in-person threat. So a guy came
2:31:28
up to me. I was walking with my den to 2022.
2:31:31
So four years ago, he must have been nine. I
2:31:33
was walking with my nine-year-old, 10-year-old son. And this guy
2:31:37
looks at me, he goes, are you Gadsad? I said, yes.
2:31:41
Then he kind of composes himself to kind of deal
2:31:44
with the hatred he feels. And he goes, I'm not
2:31:47
going to do anything to you out of respect for
2:31:50
your son today. And so then the detectives got the
2:31:55
footage of that, you know, because it was outside.
2:31:58
Speaker 2: Of the building. Yeah, I remember you telling me about this.
2:32:00
Speaker 1: And then, by the way, I couldn't, they didn't want
2:32:03
to show me a lineup of things of, possible thing
2:32:08
because it would be racist to do so. So the
2:32:11
process of a police lineup, which is the most fundamental
2:32:14
mechanism of identifying a perpetrator, was viewed as racist because
2:32:18
the guy who levied the death threat to me was black.
2:32:21
I think he was maybe Somali. He looked Somali. So
2:32:25
I took a two-year leave from Concordia University and I'm
2:32:28
now leaving in large part because it became difficult for me,
2:32:33
if not impossible, to be a high-profile Jewish professor who
2:32:37
supports the right of Israel to exist.
2:32:39
Speaker 2: What do you think happens in the future to Concordia
2:32:43
and just to Montreal in general with this influx of people?
2:32:48
Speaker 1: It's a slow death. You have to have the imagination
2:32:52
to extrapolate into a distant future. So if you today
2:32:56
go to your friend who's got that steakhouse on that street,
2:33:00
I don't know if you want to mention it, in Montreal, right?
2:33:03
Would you walk around and think that it's all Islamic?
2:33:06
Of course not. But it's a drip, drip, drip. It changes, right?
2:33:10
So for example, until very recently, the Quebec government was
2:33:14
fully tolerating the public prayers, Islamic public prayers all over
2:33:20
the place.
2:33:21
Speaker 2: Until recently?
2:33:22
Speaker 1: And now they passed a law banning it. Well, Why
2:33:25
did you need to wait till then? Why didn't you
2:33:28
listen to me when I was standing on top of
2:33:30
the mountain screaming into the void saying, this is what's
2:33:33
going to transpire?
2:33:34
Speaker 2: But do you understand that you have more of an
2:33:38
understanding of these things, more knowledge about these things, and
2:33:42
to these people that are trying to get elected and
2:33:45
that are dealing with their constituents, that this is a
2:33:48
politically dangerous thing to bring up?
2:33:50
Speaker 1: I get it. But then you're engaging in suicidal empathy.
2:33:53
Speaker 2: Yeah. Well, it's also they're just– They have their own
2:33:56
personal interest.
2:33:56
Speaker 1: They're pragmatic. I get it. But, you know, the reason
2:34:00
why I love, I mean, and I'm going to get
2:34:02
threats for this. The reason why I appreciate Trump is
2:34:06
precisely because he implements things that most politicians wouldn't have
2:34:11
the testicular fortitude to do. But that's what you want
2:34:14
in a great leader, right? Most people come in, do
2:34:17
their time, parasitize the system, and then leave having accomplished nothing.
2:34:22
The reason why Donald Trump has had not one, not two,
2:34:26
but three assassination attempts, that is a testament to the
2:34:30
fact that he is a danger to the status quo. Why?
2:34:34
Because he does things. Whether you agree with him or not,
2:34:37
he's bold. He's fearless. He doesn't give a shit. To
2:34:41
your point, most politicians would rather go, la, la, la,
2:34:44
I don't want to hear it, until it's too late.
2:34:47
The playbook is very clear. Depending on the number of
2:34:52
Muslims in a society, you can exactly predict the level
2:34:56
of conflict. And that statement that I just said holds true,
2:35:01
notwithstanding the fact that most Muslims are perfectly lovely. Both
2:35:05
those statements are both veridical. So when you are 0-2%,
2:35:10
you're just a quiet, exotic minority. When you're 3-5%, you
2:35:15
become a lot more engaged politically. When you become 6%
2:35:19
to 10%, you start creating Sharia no-go zones. We don't
2:35:23
want your dogs here. This is not tolerated in our zone.
2:35:27
Look at Britain. Look at France. So in the same
2:35:31
way that I can predict the trajectory of diabetes, and no,
2:35:35
I'm not saying that Muslims are– I'm drawing an analogy.
2:35:38
Speaker 2: In no sense. Okay?
2:35:40
Speaker 1: I am explaining a trajectory. Okay. If you wish to
2:35:44
protect the liberties that make the United States so uniquely
2:35:48
wonderful in the full range of societies that have ever existed,
2:35:53
recognize that all religions are not equally likely to be
2:35:58
congruent with the American experience. If you do, you'll survive.
2:36:02
If you won't, your future descendants will rue the day
2:36:06
you were born. All right.
2:36:08
Speaker 2: Should we end on that?
2:36:10
Speaker 1: Love being with you.
2:36:11
Speaker 2: Love being with you, too.
2:36:12
Speaker 1: It was a great conversation.
2:36:13
Speaker 2: It was very lively.
2:36:14
Speaker 1: Thank you, sir.
2:36:15
Speaker 2: Suicide of Empathy is available now. Did you read the
2:36:19
audio book? I did. Yes.
2:36:21
Speaker 1: And I constantly said that Joe Rogan would beat the
2:36:25
shit out of me if I didn't do it.
2:36:27
Speaker 2: I would not do that, but I would berate you slightly.
2:36:30
But I'm happy. I'm happy that you did that. Thank you, sir.
2:36:32
Always good to see you, brother. You too. All right. Bye, everybody.