Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / JUST JOSH: Conspiracies & FlyDubai, Oh My

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JUST JOSH: Conspiracies & FlyDubai, Oh My · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

0:03
G'day humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
0:07
If you haven't been online very much lately, you're missing a real treat.
0:12
There's a lot of conspiracy theories going on with the fly Dubai hijacking, or was it
0:18
And lots of wondering about whether or not Bibi Netanyahu has, whether he's playing us off a dupes.
0:24
This is some kind of a false flag operation.
0:26
But before we get to all that, before we start digging into how to feel like you're drinking from a cool stream of rationality instead of the madness of Internet nonsense, a little update about yours truly.
0:39
I'm in the United States on vacation, which is fabulous, yesterday.
0:44
I went to a Texas rodeo.
0:47
And let me tell you, if you haven't been to a rodeo in Texas, you haven't been to a rodeo, my friend.
0:53
I thought that they were just going to play the national anthem before the rodeo started.
0:59
So when we stood up, I was all ready for the Star Spangled Banner
1:03
But instead they sang, not America the Beautiful, but what's the one about this free, I live in a free land.
1:11
This free land is my land and your land and the hills of, I think it was that one.
1:15
I can't remember.
1:15
I wasn't paying a lot of attention.
1:17
And a huge jumbotron over the rodeo arena.
1:22
And there's a guy there waving American flags and they got the drone shots of the wheat fields and the purple mountains majesty.
1:31
And then the guy comes over the announcer thing and he goes, ladies and gentlemen.
1:38
Now, please be standing.
1:41
And we're already standing.
1:42
And remove your hats.
1:44
And everyone's already got their cowboy hats off.
1:46
I'm the only person in the place not wearing a cowboy hat.
1:48
Much to my, I mean, I felt, talk about feeling out of place.
1:51
It's like I was wearing a tuxedo to the beach or something.
1:54
I'm the only naked man there.
1:57
Or maybe a beach wear to a funeral.
1:59
I don't know.
2:00
Pick your metaphor.
2:01
Yeah.
2:02
And so the guy comes on, he says, please be upstanding for the greatest song ever written, the Star Spangled Banner.
2:14
Now, I don't want to be blasphemous.
2:17
because there are a lot of great songs about how great America is.
2:21
And in my opinion, the greatest, which they didn't even sing at the rodeo in Texas, is America the Beautiful.
2:29
America the Beautiful is a beautiful song.
2:31
It's lovely.
2:31
It's delightful.
2:33
It really should be the national anthem.
2:36
I don't think the guy at the announcer booth really believed that the greatest song ever written is the Star Spangled Banner.
2:47
Because here's the thought experiment.
2:50
If, instead of Star Spangled Banner, the American national anthem was, in fact, America the Beautiful...
2:58
would this guy still believe that the Star Spangled Banner is the best, is the greatest song ever written?
3:03
Or would he now bestow that honor on America the Beautiful?
3:08
I leave it up to you, ladies and gentlepersons, to decide that one for yourselves.
3:12
So this kid comes out and he does a great rendition of the Star Spangled Banner and I'm about to sit down and put back on my non-existent cowboy hat when he says, please remain upstanding now for the national anthem.
3:27
fine.
3:28
Okay.
3:28
I forgot about that one.
3:29
We've already done a song.
3:30
Then we've done that.
3:31
Sorry.
3:31
No, not from the national anthem.
3:33
What did he have?
3:33
He had, there was some other, there was a third thing anyway.
3:36
I can't remember what the song was now, but he said, and it's brought to you by the American hat company, the American hat company and big and the, the U S flag on the jumbotron gets replaced with an ad for the American hat company.
3:52
And I thought to myself,
3:54
if anything speaks more to the character of these great United States, it's that you would sponsor your nationalist jingoism with a capitalist hat company advertisement.
4:08
So that was great.
4:09
We saw the rodeo and we saw the little heifers being hauled around in rather cruel ways with ropes and things.
4:20
And my son got a photo sitting on the back of a cow.
4:23
In fact, he actually went on.
4:25
They let the kids get on.
4:26
They chase a little calf around the stadium at like halftime.
4:29
It's a lot of fun.
4:30
It's very weird if you're a cosmopolitan, urbane simpleton like me.
4:36
Anyway, down to business.
4:37
I hope you've all been well, and I'm delighted to be speaking to you actually live on the Subject Live now if you're listening to this after the fact.
4:46
Thank you.
4:47
Because one thing's been bothering me and I've been trying to keep off the news.
4:52
I've been trying to be a good creator slash father slash human being.
4:59
When I'm on holiday, just be on holiday.
5:02
I haven't been constantly pawing at my phone.
5:06
I have to write my column, which keeps on chugging along.
5:10
And I have to bring you fine content.
5:13
But I've tried to do so without being reactive to the news of the day.
5:17
until in my WhatsApp chat with some friends,
5:23
I kept seeing people joking, kind of joking, not joking, about how suspicious they were about the incident on the fly Dubai passenger plane.
5:36
I'm sure you know the story.
5:37
There was a flight from Dubai to Tel Aviv, 150 Israelis or something on it.
5:45
The co-pilot pulls out a big knife and apparently stabs the pilot.
5:49
The pilot comes staggering, bleeding out of the cockpit.
5:52
The...
5:53
Passengers restrain the violent co-pilot and they tie him up with a headphone wire or something.
6:01
And a couple of pilots who are passengers on the plane then land the plane in Saudi Arabia and all is well and good.
6:10
Now, a lot of people in Israel are saying, how come there was this pilot on this plane and he hadn't been cleared and apparently he was an Omani guy and apparently Omani pilots aren't allowed to fly to Israel?
6:21
So there's a whole legitimate kind of chorus of questions that are arising inside Israel and in the intelligence establishment throughout the West about how this happened, how this security breach happened.
6:32
But then there's this parallel kind of cornucopia of concentric rings of suspicion that are rippling out from the event, like the ripples from a pebble on a swamp.
6:49
And these people are talking about how it's a false flag operation, essentially.
6:56
And the reason this came to my attention is because I was trying not to pay attention to it.
6:59
But in my friend's WhatsApp chat, my phone dings.
7:04
And then there's a very reasonable person saying there's something very fishy about this Fly Dubai, quote-unquote, hijacking situation.
7:11
Then another person says, yeah, two pilots just happened to be sitting down the back and were able to land the plane?
7:17
Question mark, question mark, question mark, question mark, question mark.
7:20
And an Israeli passenger apparently took the controls and pulled up and corrected the plane, which was nose diving.
7:28
And then people start sharing videos from social media.
7:33
Why are we doing this to ourselves?
7:35
Why are we contaminating and polluting our information landscape by looking at whatever videos the algorithm pushes to us on TikTok or Instagram Reels or Facebook if you're particularly old?
7:49
Um, and, uh, you know, some people saying, oh, surely it's obviously a ruse.
7:53
These are my friends, by the way, you know, my friends, uh, and saying, surely, you know, the G force of plummeting means that you're stuck in your seat and you can't get up and, you know, that's the whole thing doesn't make any sense.
8:04
Why, how would you save the plane if you're plummeting towards the, the ground?
8:06
And in the links that were being shared, which I looked at only reluctantly because I didn't want to be a bad sport.
8:09
Um, and, uh, you know, some people saying, oh, surely it's obviously a ruse.
8:11
These are my friends, by the way, you know, my friends, uh, and, you know, the G force and, you know, the G force of plummeting means that you're stuck in your seat and you're
8:17
There were some reasonable posts, like one person linked to a post from a friend and colleague of mine, Ahmed Shehab Eldin, who I worked with on Half Post Live, who made the point that Israel called this attack jihadi terrorism before anyone had even questioned the pilot.
8:39
And given the pattern of untrustworthiness of the Netanyahu government, we should be more prudent than that.
8:46
And we shouldn't take things at face value until we know all the facts.
8:50
That's, I think, totally fair.
8:52
The airline was calling it an altercation at the same time as the defense minister of Israel was calling it an attempted jihadist terror attack.
9:01
they didn't know at the time whether it was motivated by jihadism.
9:04
They didn't know at the time whether or not it was a psychopathic person like the German wings pilot who flew a plane into the Alps for no reason, except that he was nuts.
9:13
And, you know, a lot of people were saying, well, apparently Netanyahu went to the United Arab Emirates the day before
9:22
the flight from the United Arab Emirates to Israel was hijacked and apparently said that there was going to be, we should expect terrorist attacks in the lead up to the Israeli elections, which are imminent.
9:34
And then the next day, there's a terrorist attack.
9:38
And then other videos and posts that were being shared became more and more conspiratorial.
9:46
And as always, it's hard to get, you don't want to be a downer.
9:49
Because most people are playing in this space just because it's kind of fun, right?
9:54
It's like, ooh, and what about this?
9:57
And what about this?
9:58
And what about this?
10:00
So one of the links was the Daily Rumble, which had reposted a video from a user saying that the whole thing was a false flag.
10:09
A false flag, meaning a staged event, which is intended in order to, you know, demonize a particular group or whip up sympathy for another particular group.
10:22
But, you know, an operation, a psyop, an intelligence operation.
10:25
Yeah.
10:26
And the caption to this particular post on X, the platform from which all great things come, X, was, it's not Hollywood, it's not Bollywood, it's Israeliwood with an Israeli flag.
10:41
The fly Dubai story is faker than the moon landing, exclamation point.
10:45
And this guy in this video that went viral thanks to the Daily Rumble is looking at the camera and he's got images of the planes, of the interior of the plane behind him and of all the passenger footage and so on.
10:58
And he points out, he makes several points.
11:02
The in-flight seatback television screens are all black.
11:08
Well, if the plane was in flight, why would all the screens be off?
11:12
He says.
11:14
And look at the ceiling of the plane.
11:17
There are no oxygen masks hanging down.
11:21
If it was a plane that was plummeting towards the earth, why weren't the oxygen masks hanging down?
11:26
Also, if it had been plummeting, where's the debris?
11:29
Where are all the drinks scattered all over the place?
11:33
Where are the half-eaten packets of crisps, you know, on people's heads?
11:38
There was none of that, he says.
11:41
And then he shows a video of the plane apparently after it's landed and the passengers are celebrating.
11:46
And a guy's walking up the aisle of the plane carrying a boom box.
11:52
And the passengers are all happy.
11:54
And he says, hang on a second.
11:56
Hang on.
11:58
It's a different aircraft interior.
12:01
Look at the shape of the headrests on the seats.
12:04
Those aren't the kind of headrests that have in-flight screens installed on the back of them.
12:09
And look at the ceiling of the plane.
12:11
It's subtly different where the overhead luggage compartment connects to the roof of the plane.
12:17
And the lighting is different.
12:18
So they've staged a celebration video after they've landed on a different plane, or they've pre-shot it, and now they're trying to make you believe that this actually happened.
12:31
And then he talks about the supposed guy who wrestled the terrorist to the ground.
12:36
He shows footage of him meeting with Benjamin Netanyahu.
12:40
He's like, how did this noodle-armed guy wrestle a terrorist out of his seat?
12:44
And why is there a boombox on the...
12:46
It doesn't make any sense.
12:49
It just doesn't add up.
12:52
Then there was a link in my WhatsApp chat.
12:55
Lovely people.
12:56
I got to say, my friends.
12:58
See, this is why I'm not sitting here on my high horse saying, you know, oh, I'm Mr.
13:04
Rational and I know how to deal with all this stuff and everybody else is silly idiots for using the social media.
13:10
Well, maybe the bit about using the social media, I am saying.
13:13
But these are – this is –
13:17
Absolutely predictable and understandable cognitive biases that we all have when we kind of smell the catnip of things that titillate us and don't seem to quite make sense and seem like they're fun playthings.
13:30
But I want to explain in just a moment why you should not think of them as fun playthings.
13:36
So it escalates to a George Galloway video.
13:39
Do you know George Galloway?
13:40
George Galloway was a British MP, Scottish, I believe.
13:45
He was a Labour Party member of Parliament, and he founded the Workers' Party of Britain, very left-wing.
13:53
He now, you know, opines, pontificates on your social medias, and he has nearly a million subscribers on YouTube.
14:02
So he posted a video that has, as of the moment that I'm talking, apparently 80,000, more than 80,000 likes, millions of views.
14:12
And he's saying, he's making it sound ridiculous that 150 Israelis would even be on a flight from the United Arab Emirates.
14:23
And she says, oh, is a completely routine thing to happen?
14:26
That 150 Israelis would have been holidaying in an Arabian country and flying an airline like Fly Dubai?
14:36
Yeah.
14:37
And they're on this plane, and then initially, apparently, the pilot was said to be Russian, but George Galloway informs us there are no Russian pilots employed by Fly Dubai.
14:53
So then, he says, the story changed and said, oh, the pilot was actually Ukrainian.
14:58
But, he informs us, there are no Ukrainian pilots employed by Fly Dubai.
15:06
And then he says that we're told by the intelligence services that passengers broke down the cockpit door
15:14
But that's impossible, he says, because since September 11th, cockpit doors have been reinforced and they can't be broken down.
15:19
But apparently, miraculously, these passengers did.
15:24
And the plane was landed, says George Galloway, by two passenger pilots who turned out to be, believe it or not, Russian and Ukrainian themselves.
15:34
But they helpfully cooperated in a spirit of Slavic comity, he says, as if that is just so implausible.
15:45
I mean, Georgie Porgie, Georgie boy, old Georgie boy, hey, Georgie, you might want to wait three seconds, maybe three seconds after the event, you know, in the fog of war while everyone's still trying to figure out what to do before you...
16:03
characterize initial claims as being the gospel of the story that we're being fed because the pilot was not Russian or Ukrainian and almost none of those things were true.
16:13
And the people didn't get into the cockpit door because the pilot says that he exited the cockpit voluntarily.
16:20
Anyway, all of that's by the by.
16:23
The point is, at least 25,000 posts on Twitter, X, pushing conspiracy theories about the incident, flooded social media in the first 48 hours.
16:34
25,000 in 48 hours.
16:37
On Rumble, which is a podcast distribution platform slash content creation swamp,
16:45
Nick Fuentes told his audience that this was a false flag.
16:48
This was false flag terrorism.
16:50
Hassan Piker, the left-wing commentator, he didn't call it a false flag to his credit, but he said it's, quote, unbelievably beneficial.
16:59
Unbelievably fortuitous, he said, for Benjamin Netanyahu.
17:04
So, you know, hinting at something but not explicitly saying it.
17:08
On The Young Turks, which has 7 million followers, Anna Kasparian said, I do find this story super fishy, super fishy.
17:17
Kim Iverson, who's a right-wing YouTube star with over 800,000 subscribers and spends a lot of time on Israeli conspiracies, doubted that a badly wounded pilot would be able to work the unlock switch mid-dive to get out of the cockpit.
17:34
Apparently, she's an expert in cockpit safety and finds it statistically implausible.
17:41
Those are the words, statistically implausible that two pilots would be on one plane.
17:48
There's an anti-Israel account called Power to the People, which has nearly half a million followers, and it posted, the false flags are way too easy to spot.
17:59
A lot of these outlets, a lot of these posts, a lot of this viral stuff, which also made its way into my own private WhatsApp chats being shared, included a clip from CNN.
18:11
where a Canadian pilot by the name of Aaron Murphy said that the early figures about the plane's behavior, which were derived from tracking the plane, not from the plane's black box itself, were just implausible.
18:28
I mean, he said he couldn't believe it.
18:30
He said, I can't, you know, there's something wrong with these figures.
18:34
And that claim then gets circulated online as if it's an insider or a pilot who knows this sort of stuff, who knows that it must be a hoax because those numbers just couldn't happen.
18:44
The plane would break apart.
18:47
Those particular posts did not, of course, reveal that Aaron Murphy, the Canadian pilot, went on to say that the numbers would surely shift once data from the plane itself came in, because it must just be the tracking or the aircraft must have been wrong.
19:03
And he said, you can't believe that it actually happens in real life.
19:06
And then a lot of the clips end there.
19:08
But what he actually said was, you can't believe that it actually happens in real life, but it did.
19:13
So...
19:16
Where do we go from here?
19:18
I mean, the first thing to say is the Israeli government and Bibi Netanyahu and the defense minister were wildly premature in declaring this to be a jihadist terrorist attack before we fully understood what had gone on in the cockpit.
19:34
However, don't be as premature and silly and manipulative as Benjamin Netanyahu.
19:42
Being incredibly suspicious is the same as being incredibly credulous.
19:48
I mean, it's a form of credulity to constantly believe a whole bunch of conspiratorial question marks that are floated in front of your face.
20:00
I'm fully prepared to accept that Israel is run by a corrupt man who is – and a government that is guilty of war crimes that contains some people from the far right who want nothing more than to see an authoritarian, theocratic, greater Israel.
20:22
That's not the majority of people in Israeli parliament, certainly not the majority of Israelis, but it's a contingent and it's a very noisy one.
20:29
It's very, very damaging to Israel.
20:32
I wouldn't put it past Benjamin Netanyahu to corruptly try to capitalize on every security incident that takes place between now and election day.
20:43
But the problem with getting sort of curious about conspiracies and just having a bit of fun playing around in this, oh, isn't there something that doesn't add up about this, is that you're essentially training yourself into taking an irrational response to the data that the world provides you with.
21:08
which makes it systematically harder, cognitively, to separate fact from fiction and to know what you actually believe and thus to make sense to other people and to come together about some of the biggest challenges that the century is going to throw at us.
21:25
You sort of do have to, like, rationality and clear-headed thinking is a muscle that you practice.
21:34
You can't expect to engage every day in a bit of playful conspiracy theorizing.
21:41
And then the following day, when you need to figure out what to do to shore up democracy or solve the climate crisis or deal with AI...
21:50
that your ability to contextualize things, to be proportionate, to be reasonable, will have been quarantined or safeguarded in a lockbox in your brain and unsullied by all of the shit that you've been playfully throwing around.
22:07
Like...
22:09
Why are some of these conspiracy theories wrong?
22:12
Let's just sort of get back to basics here about the way that we integrate information and what a good way of trying to assess a situation is and what a bad way is.
22:23
The problem with getting curious about conspiracies is that often they'll be presenting you, the conspiracy theorists will be presenting you with something that doesn't add up, but it's something that's being debunked that you don't even know needed to be justified in the first place.
22:39
What do I mean?
22:40
Take, for example, the party on the plane, right?
22:44
You see the video of the guy saying, hang on, the celebration on the plane with the boombox, that's like different aircraft.
22:53
And your instinct is to go, holy shit,
22:56
Why is there a different aircraft?
22:59
But hang on a second.
23:00
You didn't previously even know that there was video of a celebration after the plane landed.
23:07
He's just given you video of the plane landing and said, this isn't video of that plane.
23:15
Well, okay.
23:17
It fell to me to then be the boring person who goes and does the research and tries to figure out what that video was.
23:23
It turns out that that video was from 2025.
23:26
It was published by the Israeli sports channel Sport5.
23:29
It showed members of Israel's men's basketball team traveling for the Eurobasket tournament.
23:37
And it resurfaced after the fly Dubai emergency with a caption presenting it as passengers celebrating after surviving the incident intentionally in order to be debunked.
23:50
So you've been shown something that you hadn't even seen before that did not require an explanation.
23:56
And then you're told, ah, the actual explanation for this thing that doesn't make sense that you've never seen until I've shoved it in front of your face is misleading.
24:07
Well, okay, but I didn't even know that that thing was a thing until you just told me that it was misleading.
24:11
You're misleading me by saying that it was misleading in the first place when I hadn't even consumed it until you were trying to debunk the debunk.
24:19
It's like, I don't know if you remember in 2017, a thing went viral of The Simpsons, of a frame from The Simpsons, where Donald Trump is standing next to a glowing orb alongside like the Saudi king and the Egyptian president.
24:37
Do you remember this?
24:38
Yeah.
24:39
It went viral on Facebook because the caption said that the cartoon had aired 15 years earlier in 2002.
24:47
And how could you possibly explain how prescient the Simpsons writers were for producing this?
24:54
mysterious image that so resembled something that had just happened in the news because of an actual photo from a Trump visit to Saudi Arabia.
25:03
They were at the opening of the Global Center for Combating Extremist Ideology in Riyadh and it was Trump and King Salman and Egypt's el-Sisi and they were all standing next to this glowing orb and the Simpsons satirized it.
25:19
And even people very close to me sent it to me going, this is absolutely incredible.
25:23
I mean, how could it be that The Simpsons did that in 2002 and it looks so similar to something that happened in 2017?
25:31
Well, because you haven't fact-checked that it wasn't 2002.
25:35
The Simpsons did it in response to that thing.
25:38
So it's like...
25:39
you're explaining this thing that never needed explaining in the first place.
25:44
The video of the Israeli basketballers celebrating on the plane didn't need explaining until you presented it as something that had been attributed to the Fly Dubai flight, but it was only attributed to the Fly Dubai flight by people who were trying to debunk the theory, the mainstream theory of the Fly Dubai flight.
26:04
It's a snake eating its tail.
26:06
So I don't know if I'm doing a very good job of explaining that particular cognitive kind of challenge, but I guess the rule of thumb would be you should pre-announce what the inconsistencies are.
26:20
And then figure out whether or not a false flag operation is the best answer for the inconsistencies that you spot.
26:28
Don't start with the false flag explanation and then hunt around for things that it would explain if you needed it to.
26:37
But you didn't need it to explain those things until you started cherry picking them.
26:43
The other thing I would say is important to bear in mind in moments like this is
26:48
Real events have more anomalies than fake ones.
26:56
Real events have more anomalies than fake events.
27:02
There are no oxygen masks hanging from the plane, from the ceiling.
27:09
Well, I don't know.
27:09
I mean, if you were going to try to make a false flag, wouldn't you want to make it seem dramatic and have oxygen masks hanging down?
27:16
There was no debris all over the place.
27:18
Well, I mean, come on.
27:19
If it's not Hollywood and it's not Bollywood, it's Israeli wood, wouldn't you have a whole stuff scattered all over the cabin?
27:27
How did that noodle-armed guy manage to wrestle the terrorist down?
27:32
Well, I don't know.
27:33
If you were casting it, wouldn't you have it be a tough guy?
27:37
How did they break down the cockpit door?
27:39
I don't know.
27:39
I mean, if you were faking it, wouldn't you have some heroes break down the cockpit door?
27:44
Like...
27:46
A lot of people are even saying, well, why didn't the plane break up?
27:49
Like that, you know, the Canadian guy who was on CNN, the pilot, who was saying those numbers just don't make any sense to me.
27:55
Well, come on, if you were faking it, you'd make sure the numbers make sense.
27:59
I mean, right?
28:00
Like, real events have all kinds of things that are difficult to explain.
28:05
Occam's Razor has to kick in here and go like, is the most parsimonious explanation for the inconsistencies that real life is messy and often things don't look like a Hollywood film?
28:16
Or is it to say it's probably fake and perfectly manicured, even though the grounds on which I'm suspecting that it's true is because it doesn't look manicured.
28:27
It does look a bit weird.
28:29
It does look a bit off.
28:30
Well, guess what?
28:31
Real life does look a bit weird and a bit off.
28:35
Yeah.
28:37
The way to get back to sort of some sense here and sort of to, we're not obviously not going to put, we're not going to put an end to conspiracy theories on the internet.
28:48
This reminds me of the great New Yorker cartoon where the guy's tapping away on the computer late at night and his wife is like, darling, come to bed.
28:55
And he says, I can't, somebody's wrong on the internet.
29:01
So at the risk of being that guy,
29:04
there are some things that we can do to let it wash over us and not engage and not be, not have our even keels disrupted.
29:12
Yeah.
29:13
My intellectual sort of mentor on this, well, not mentor because I never met the guy, is Carl Sagan, my intellectual inspiration, shall we say, who has an amazing book called The Demon Haunted World, which is such a prescient prognostication.
29:31
I mean, you think The Simpsons nailed it with Trump and the Saudi king?
29:35
Sagan nailed it, writing in the 80s, I believe.
29:40
before his death about what civilization could become if we just become besotted with pseudoscience and pageantry instead of reason.
29:50
And one of the things that he talks about in Demon Haunted World is that science is not just a body of knowledge.
29:57
It's not a set of facts.
29:58
It's a way of thinking.
29:59
It's a way of approaching the world.
30:01
It's
30:01
actually quite imaginative and it's quite disciplined and it's a way of bringing humans to an understanding of how the universe actually is rather than how they wish it were.
30:12
And a lot of this conspiracy stuff just is a game of how we wish the universe were.
30:17
It's not that we want the Israeli government to be staging false flag hijackings.
30:23
It's that that is a more exciting world that reinforces our suspicions if we think Israel is a fascist, genocidal state.
30:33
And so there is a certain comfort and intrigue in that that is not satisfied by the conventional explanation.
30:42
So it is a form of wishful thinking, even if the wish fulfillment isn't something that is obviously pleasant.
30:49
And that scientific thinking or rational thinking or reasonable thinking, Carl Sagan argues, is it works because it has a built-in error correcting machine.
30:58
It has some principles that we can use to help guide us through life and make us happy and well-adjusted instead of delusional and incoherent and crazy.
31:10
So a few of the fallacies that I inherit from Sagan.
31:14
Oh, another great person on this actually is Richard Dawkins, who has a lovely book.
31:17
In fact, his loveliest of books, which I told him, and he was very flattered by it because it's his sort of personal most poetic book and his most creative book.
31:27
It's called Unweaving the Rainbow, and it's about the criticism that non-scientific people, and particularly religious people, sometimes make of the scientific way of thinking that it's a bit cold and austere and it lacks majesty and wonder.
31:44
It's his attempt to inject wonder and majesty into the understanding of science.
31:49
Well, maybe inject is the wrong way of putting it, to reveal the inherent majesty and wonder that exists in science and to portray alternatives to that way of thinking as actually a bit boring and mediocre.
32:02
So...
32:04
some of the flaws in thinking, some of the logical fallacies that we're likely to notice ourselves doing in moments like this.
32:14
The first that I would flag is that we're likely to ignore whatever doesn't affirm the prior belief.
32:20
Sorry, you know, and...
32:22
Yeah, basically, we'll just cherry pick.
32:24
We'll cherry pick things.
32:25
And Carl Sagan had a great analogy about this called the dragon in my garage.
32:30
He gave a thought experiment in the Demon Hornet world where he said, imagine a person says to you, I have a fire-breathing dragon in my garage.
32:41
And so you come over and you can't see anything in the garage.
32:46
And the person says, well, actually, I forgot to mention it's an invisible dragon.
32:50
dragon, fire-breathing dragon.
32:54
And so you say, I know what we can do.
32:56
We can put some flour all over the floor.
33:01
We'll sprinkle flour on the floor and then we'll see the dragon's footsteps.
33:06
And the person says, well, actually, I not only neglected to mention that it's invisible, but it is a floating dragon floating in the air and breathing fire, invisible fire.
33:19
And you say, okay, well, okay, right, the flower is out.
33:21
What about we get an infrared camera, and that way we'll see the heat from the invisible fire, from the invisible floating dragon.
33:29
The person says, ah, sorry, forgot to mention, the invisible floating dragon breathing fire, the fire is actually heatless fire.
33:38
It's heatless.
33:38
It's a heatless dragon breathing heatless fire invisibly while floating.
33:43
And...
33:45
Carl Sagan says, well, what is the difference actually between an invisible, incorporeal, floating dragon who breathes heatless fire and no dragon?
34:01
Like, if there's no way to disprove the contention, if there's no conceivable experiment that would count against
34:09
your fire-breathing dragon in your garage, what does it actually mean to say that it exists?
34:17
You can't just come up with a hypothesis and then other people's inability to invalidate the hypothesis proves that the hypothesis is real.
34:26
And there's a lot of that going on.
34:27
There's a lot of like, you know, every witness and every data point and everything about the interior of the plane and the tracking of the plane and the height of the plane and the nationality of the pilot
34:39
They're all just reclassified as part of the plot.
34:43
It's an unfalsifiable claim.
34:45
No matter what you throw at it, it's going to be evidence.
34:48
It's like, so Netanyahu was in the United Arab Emirates the day before.
34:53
I haven't even fact-checked that, but let's suppose that that's true.
34:57
That could just as much be an argument for why it's implausible that he would have a false flag, fake terrorist operation from the UAE the following day.
35:09
Suppose he did say that we should expect terrorist attacks in the lead up to the election the day before.
35:14
Well, that could just as easily be made as evidence that you wouldn't say that the day before you knew that you were about to do the thing, right?
35:22
Right.
35:23
If it hadn't happened, imagine he hadn't said anything about the imminence of a terrorist attack.
35:31
People who believe that this is a false flag operation would say, you know, he's been awfully quiet about terrorism, hasn't he?
35:38
Suppose he'd come out the day before and said, we don't expect there to be any terrorist attacks before the election.
35:44
Then they'd be like, well, see, he said there were going to be no terrorist attacks, and now there is one.
35:48
It's a bit fishy.
35:49
Everything's a bit fishy once you're starting with the conclusion and working backwards instead of building facts up into a rational understanding of the world.
36:02
It's like the old gag that the complete lack of evidence is the surest sign that the conspiracy is working.
36:09
Part of this also is that we remember hits and we forget misses.
36:13
This always happens, right?
36:15
This is just a natural cognitive bias.
36:16
People who believe that they have psychic visions or premonitions of bad events that are about to happen.
36:24
often when you dig into it, they have not actually systematically written down their predictions about the bad events and then tried to see whether they come true.
36:33
What happens is they have lots and lots and lots and lots and lots of different feelings about bad things may be happening.
36:38
And when the bad thing doesn't happen, they write it off.
36:41
Don't count that one.
36:42
And when the bad thing does happen, they go, see, I knew it.
36:46
But if you make 100 predictions and only two of them come right, and you only remember the two that came right and you discount the other 98, then you have a 100% accuracy rate if you're only counting the two.
36:56
You only have a 2% accuracy rate if you were counting all of them.
37:00
We find it very hard to count all of them.
37:04
Another cognitive problem that we have here is that we credit our own personal incredulity too much.
37:12
So just because we can't believe something, we think that that counts for something.
37:17
It doesn't count for something.
37:17
There's lots of things that you don't know about that you can't believe that don't seem to make sense to you.
37:21
Do you understand quantum physics?
37:24
I don't.
37:26
So like, you know, how could the pilot unlock the door from the inside?
37:29
This was the Kim Iverson or whatever her name was.
37:31
Like, it's just, I can't believe that a person that injured would be able to operate that mechanism and get the door open.
37:37
Okay.
37:38
You can't believe it.
37:40
Brilliant.
37:41
What is that worth exactly as a piece of evidence, the fact that you can't believe it?
37:46
I can't believe that those passengers would overpower the terrorists.
37:49
I can't believe that noodle-armed guy would overpower a terrorist.
37:54
I don't believe that.
37:56
Well, on what basis are you not believing it?
37:57
And what credence should I give your disbelief?
38:01
What evidence is that?
38:03
How could the plane not fall apart?
38:04
How could a plane that's falling that fast not fall apart?
38:08
Well, I don't know.
38:08
Are you an aeronautical engineer?
38:11
Have you seen the latest data from the black box itself?
38:13
Is there an actual debate?
38:14
There's an actual debate amongst aeronautical engineers after they analyzed the black box data about why the plane held together.
38:22
then okay, great.
38:23
Let's have a conversation about that.
38:25
Your disbelief, your finding it baffling, is not, you can't take that to the bank.
38:33
It's like that, what was the other thing about, oh, there are two pilots on the plane.
38:37
I can't remember who, which of the jackasses I just quoted were saying, it's implausibly, like statistically implausible that there will be two pilots amongst the passengers.
38:48
Sounds a bit fishy.
38:51
Does it?
38:54
The same with George Galloway and the 150 Israelis.
38:57
Oh, it's a bit rich.
39:00
Is it?
39:02
The United Arab Emirates only recently established diplomatic relations with Israel.
39:08
Only recently in the past few years do they have direct flights.
39:12
It's quite hard to get out of Israel, especially heading in the direction that is not going towards the United States and Europe.
39:21
because so few airlines fly there, and Fly Dubai is the carrier that goes to Dubai.
39:26
So lots of people will have been connecting onto other places.
39:30
The UAE has become quite a popular destination for Israelis.
39:34
They're proactively trying to foster that relationship.
39:37
So some of those passengers will have been connecting.
39:39
As for two pilots on a plane, you know how many Israelis went through the Air Force
39:45
I mean, everyone does mandatory military service over there.
39:47
So there's that cohort of people.
39:48
Then there's the cohort of people who have to, when pilots ride as passengers to reposition themselves, there's the possibility of having a second crew who may have been needed for the return leg of the flight.
39:59
I mean, I don't know.
39:59
I'm just making all this stuff up.
40:03
What we do know is that some of the passengers who weren't pilots rushed the cockpit before the spare pilots did, which is not exactly how a team that was forewarned about the attack would have behaved, presumably.
40:17
So yeah, the fact that things don't add up in your little primate brain, good for you.
40:23
Great.
40:24
You know, what do you want?
40:25
A prize that has no bearing on the facts of the matter.
40:29
And again, I'm not saying that we should immediately believe the Israeli story.
40:34
I don't trust the Israeli government one bit.
40:37
Netanyahu is a corrupt little hack, as I've said before.
40:49
you know, he obviously had insane personal motivations for prolonging the Gaza war, such as he didn't want to go to prison for the corruption that he has been convicted of.
41:02
So you're not going to hear anything kind from me about Netanyahu or about the cynical way in which he will manipulate events like this for personal political gain.
41:12
But
41:14
It's a long bow to go from there.
41:17
I mean, the logical place to go from there is we should reserve judgment until we know what is going on.
41:23
Not this.
41:25
I am fairly certain that the conventional narratives about this have to be untrue.
41:30
And therefore, the Jews did it.
41:36
Very quickly, before we leave Carl Sagan and get to the final bigger point.
41:42
he has in his book 20 logical fallacies that he lists that you should look out for when considering any new claim.
41:50
And I'm going to give you eight of them because I was just reading them on the plane and I thought they were great, but I'm not going to bore you with all 20 because they don't all apply in this case.
41:59
One logical fallacy, the ad hominem argument.
42:02
where you attack the opposing arguer or you attack a person instead of the actual argument.
42:08
In this case, the obnoxiousness and cynicism of Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right allies are easy to construct an ad hominem argument around.
42:20
Another is number two.
42:22
Number two.
42:22
I'll do this like a Letterman top ten list, even though it's eight.
42:26
Number two, the appeal to ignorance.
42:29
This is what I was just talking about.
42:31
The fact that you... No, that's not... How does Sagan put that?
42:38
He says, you argue a claim in that whatever has not been proved false must be true and vice versa.
42:46
Okay.
42:47
Yes.
42:48
Whatever has not been proved false must be true and vice versa.
42:51
Yes.
42:52
Number three, observational selection.
42:54
Someone talks about how great something is by explaining all the positive aspects of it while purposely not mentioning any of the negative aspects.
43:01
Yes, that's self-explanatory.
43:03
Number four, the non sequitur, right?
43:06
A claim is made that just doesn't make much sense.
43:09
The example that Carl Sagan gives is, our nation will prevail because God is great.
43:14
Yes.
43:15
Those are two completely unrelated things.
43:19
In this case, I would say that the non sequitur is that the hijacking is a false flag because Israel is guilty of genocide.
43:28
That, to me, seems to be the thinking in most of the people who are prosecuting this.
43:32
Israel is guilty of genocide, therefore, this is a false flag operation.
43:36
Two completely unrelated claims have nothing to do with each other.
43:40
The logical fallacy number five of the eight is,
43:44
Post hoc, proctor hoc, it happened afterwards, therefore it was caused by.
43:50
Very common logical fallacy.
43:53
You know, something happened because of a past event, when in reality it probably wasn't causally related.
43:58
So here, Benjamin Netanyahu's visit to the United Arab Emirates and his prediction of an attack, which, as I said, could go the other way.
44:06
You could switch him out.
44:07
You could say, oh, Bibi hasn't been to the UAE for a very long time.
44:10
Hmm.
44:11
Hmm.
44:13
Number six, the logical fallacy that we fall into when we're prosecuting conspiratorial claims or any new claim that we're not thinking through very carefully.
44:23
The excluded middle, Carl Sagan calls it.
44:26
The excluded middle is when you're only considering or mentioning two opposite extremes of a conversation and you exclude the aspects in between those two extremes altogether.
44:36
Yes, here I would say either everything that Benjamin Netanyahu said about the attack the instant after it was reported is true, or it was a false flag operation.
44:48
The obvious middle ground would be he's a jackass for speaking up about it too soon, and it's probably not a false flag operation, and we'll know what it was in the course of time.
45:05
something could be good for Benjamin Netanyahu's election.
45:08
Having a terrorist attack could be good for him because it distracts attention from his failings before October 7th and his failings in the Gaza War.
45:16
And it could also be true that it's not a false flag, that he didn't do it.
45:22
Whereas we seem, especially on social media, to...
45:25
required to be required to sort of fall into one camp or the other uh the seventh of carl sagan's uh logical fallacies in no particular order and i'm not giving you all 20 is the straw man argument so caricaturing a position to make it easier to attack uh george galloway did this in his video viral video where he says oh it's
45:50
Is it, it's perfectly normal, is it, for 150 Israelis to be holidaying in the United Arab Emirates?
45:56
It's perfectly normal.
45:57
And it's perfectly normal, perfectly normal for there to be two pilots on the plane.
46:03
And perfectly normal, well, hang on a second, Georgie, Georgie boy, who's saying it's perfectly normal?
46:13
What does that have to do with anything?
46:14
Okay.
46:16
It's a bit of a straw man because suppose it were the case that it's not perfectly normal that 150 Israelis go holidaying in the UAE.
46:23
Suppose that these are the first 150 Israelis who've ever been to the United Arab Emirates.
46:27
Would that change the facts about whether it's a false flag operation?
46:32
Again, to come back to the question of like what would be an unfalsifying piece of information here –
46:39
If you were going to construct a false flag operation, would you not want to choose the narrative that is the most easy to swallow?
46:47
You would have the Israeli, if you're Netanyahu, you're evil villain, Satan Netanyahu, and you're concocting a false flag operation, a fake terrorist attack.
46:56
Wouldn't you make it be an LL flight from the United States, from New York, so that you can curry as much favor amongst as many Americans, amongst Trump and everything?
47:05
You'd make it the most routine thing.
47:08
You wouldn't pick something that is going to raise people's eyebrows for all of the wrong reasons.
47:13
So it's a straw man to say, oh, we're being told that it's perfectly normal for there to be 150.
47:18
That's A, you're not being told that it's perfectly normal.
47:21
And B, even if it weren't perfectly normal, that wouldn't be salient in any way about trying to evaluate whether or not this was staged.
47:31
And lastly, the last of the eight that I will pluck from Sagan's 20 is the half-truth or suppressed evidence.
47:38
Make sure that you're actually getting all of the thing that is being claimed.
47:43
So the party on the plane where the interior of the plane didn't align with the...
47:48
Yeah, you're only being shown... That's only a... Like, that's a non-truth.
47:55
It's being elevated precisely in order to confuse you.
47:58
And similarly, the Canadian pilot who said that, you know, the initial numbers just didn't look right about the plane...
48:05
That's a half truth.
48:06
He then went on to say, you know, but it did happen and I'm sure that the data will be corrected in good time.
48:14
Don't assume that the things that you're seeing on social media are the whole story.
48:18
They're probably cherry-picked to go viral.
48:21
They're probably cherry-picked to bamboozle or to reinforce your worldview.
48:26
Yeah.
48:28
I also find it useful as the last point on this particular part of it to think about what else would need to be true in the world for the theory that is being floated to be correct.
48:40
So take, for example, the person who believes that they have psychic visions of impending catastrophe and that this is true.
48:52
The person who thinks that they know that tomorrow night, you know, one of their loved ones is going to get into terrible trouble.
49:00
They're basically saying that the future is ordained, right?
49:04
Right.
49:05
that what happens tomorrow night is already cast in stone, that perhaps that means that quantum uncertainty is wrong and that physics is sort of Newtonian because everything is set in motion at the moment of the Big Bang.
49:21
There's no ifs or buts about it.
49:24
They also believe that there's an unseen wave that transmits data back from the future, which I suppose means that time travel is real in a sense, because something's coming back from tomorrow into their head.
49:35
Like, there's just a lot.
49:37
Don't think that the thing that you're seeing is curious and interesting, and therefore it just might be true.
49:44
Also, require it to carry all of the baggage that it implies.
49:49
The 9-11 conspiracy theories do this all the time, where...
49:52
Yeah, there are some very weird things.
49:54
Like I said, like real life has a lot more anomalies than fake things.
49:58
So Building 7 and this and that and all these weird things about 9-11.
50:03
Okay.
50:04
But for 9-11 to be an inside job, let alone for it not to have actually been planes but to have been a missile that was fired into the Pentagon or whatever people believe, requires you to believe that the American government is capable of an extraordinary level of institutional effectiveness.
50:23
and that everyone involved was able to keep the secret.
50:27
There wasn't one whistleblower who came out and spoke up.
50:32
So what in the history of the American government gives you faith that the Bush administration, a few months into its first term, was so effective that it was able to pull off that massive conspiracy and never have a leak in a quarter of a century?
50:48
Not a single one.
50:50
And they hid all of those hundreds of people who got on those planes who have families, right, who are still grieving.
50:57
And they managed to do it all without a hitch.
51:02
Like, make sure that you actually carry the implausibility of all of the consequences of all of the logical things that are entailed in the thing that you believe.
51:13
You don't get to live in your rational world and then also just staple onto your worldview 9-11 being an inside job.
51:21
No, no, no, no.
51:23
9-11 being an inside job, you then have to also carry along with it the capability of the US administration to execute things flawlessly, massive operations flawlessly.
51:33
If they couldn't do it with the Iraq war and they couldn't do it with Afghanistan, they couldn't do it with Obamacare, they couldn't do it with so many things, they
51:40
You have to believe that there was one time when they absolutely nailed it.
51:44
And what evidence do you have for that?
51:46
Very, very little.
51:47
Do you have enough evidence to overcome the hurdle of how high a bar all of that baggage demands?
51:57
No, you don't.
52:00
So when I speak in ways like this, the main response is, oh, you're being a bit of a party pooper.
52:08
Isn't it all just a bit of fun?
52:10
Why can't you just relax?
52:11
Stop being such a killjoy.
52:12
This is the response that people who believe in astrology give you and people who dabble in witchcraft and whatever.
52:21
All I would say to that is that we do sort of need to understand the world.
52:31
We do need to...
52:33
solve problems collaboratively by being, by sort of standing on the same footing of a shared reality
52:41
We need to, if we don't want to understand the world ourselves, if we don't want to figure the world out ourselves, that's fine.
52:48
We don't all have to be scientists or rationalists, but we should understand other people who are trying to figure out the world and the means with which they do so.
52:57
And we should want to collaborate with those people.
53:00
And we should want to have a common ground with which to collaborate with them.
53:04
And we should be able to figure out what problems matter.
53:08
It's very hard to know what problems matter and how to collaborate with people who disagree with you from very different walks of life on fixing those problems if you're constantly practicing the art of thinking badly.
53:27
The specific question about Israel comes in here as well.
53:38
was not just the indulgence of conspiracy thinking and the sort of reckless, joyful playfulness with being irrational, but the fact that we were doing so, so hastily on an issue that risks playing into a stereotype about an ethnic minority.
54:06
Now...
54:07
As I've said, criticizing the Israeli government, totally kosher.
54:11
I've written multiple op-eds about the piece.
54:14
I've done hours and hours of pontificating on this podcast about the shortcomings of the Netanyahu government.
54:22
So if the claim is the one that Ahmed Shah al-Din made, which is don't immediately swallow Netanyahu's explanation for this, wait until the facts come in because this is an untrustworthy government, absolutely, I'm signing off on that 100%.
54:38
But that is not what's being said.
54:41
That is not the game that's really being played.
54:46
There is a stereotype of the Jew, which is the Jew is fundamentally untrustworthy.
54:53
That is the basic characteristic of the Jew.
54:56
There might be a racist stereotype about black people, that black people have low IQs, or that they're governed by their emotions or whatever.
55:04
There might be stereotypes about Asian people, they're bad drivers or something, I don't know.
55:10
The stereotype of the Jew is that Jews are conniving, they're sniveling, they're untrustworthy, they're just, you know, they're other.
55:19
And imagine if there was another minority
55:24
about whom whenever there was a news event, we sort of playfully engaged in speculative theories because it's fun that characterize that minority along the axis of its most traditional and most hurtful stereotype.
55:46
I mean, we do do this, but we frown upon it.
55:49
So suppose the racist stereotype about black people is that they're not as smart.
55:54
They have lower IQs or something.
55:55
Well, imagine if every time there was an incident in Africa, some tragedy, we sort of playfully attributed it to being a result of incompetence or stupidity.
56:07
And when I say we did this, like literally Boeing, when the 737 MAX was dropping out of the sky, was guilty of this.
56:17
And members of the U.S. administration, I think, were guilty of it initially, although I might be being unfair to the politicians here.
56:24
Because the two first incidents of the 737 MAX, which was a terrible travesty of corporate failure in allowing that thing to go into the air, knowing that, you know, many people inside Boeing knowing that it had problems and it had been rushed.
56:41
The caricature of those first two crashes was that the pilots probably didn't know what they were doing.
56:48
Now, the airlines that crashed were an Indonesian airline and Ethiopian airlines.
56:54
So the crashes were in Indonesia and Ethiopia.
56:57
And the initial racist response, and I think it's fair to say that it is racist, was to say, well, probably down to pilot error, if you know what I mean.
57:08
We frown on that.
57:11
And we don't really culturally frown on doing the same thing
57:19
I'll just say Israelis or Zionists.
57:24
But it's messy, isn't it?
57:27
The boundary between Israelis, Zionists and Jews.
57:32
Suspicion of Jews as manipulative puppet masters who can't be trusted, who are always up to something, who are always trying to pull one over on you for their own gain, is a mind virus that is thousands of years old.
57:48
I don't understand how it propagates, but it does.
57:52
I mean, you know, anyone who knows anything about the history of hatred of Jews and stereotypes about Jews cannot deny it.
57:59
I mean, in the 1100s, rumors that Jews murdered Christian children ritually were widespread, and they propagated using exactly the same cognitive problems that I've been describing.
58:19
cherry-picking of evidence.
58:21
Did you hear that the child, that Christian child who disappeared in the neighboring town, it was last seen with a hook-nosed Jew, not fact-checking, getting swept up,
58:34
in how much of a good story it all is.
58:36
Well, for 800 years, that story justified massacres and executions of Jewish people.
58:41
And in the 1300s, there were rumors that Jews were poisoning the drinking wells in order to spread the Black Death around Europe.
58:48
And attacks on Jews got so bad, believe it or not, that the Pope at the time had to issue a correction, like the Pope Clement VI.
58:57
Literally, he said, hang on, hang on, hang on.
59:00
He was like, Jews die of the plague as well, and the plague strikes places where there are no Jews, so we can't pin the plague entirely on Jews poisoning water wells.
59:08
No one listened to him.
59:09
They continued murdering the Jews.
59:13
You know, Tsarist Russia in the 1800s.
59:14
The Tsar was assassinated, Alexander II.
59:20
And conspiracy theories...
59:22
swirled that it was the Jews and there were pogroms all across southern Russia and Ukraine.
59:28
And ultimately, there were discriminatory laws passed against Jews because there were so many conspiracy theories.
59:36
I mean, the classic one that everyone knows about is the Protocol of the Elders of Zion, which in the 1900s was a conspiracy theory.
59:42
A lot of people believed based on a forged plan for Jewish world domination.
59:51
Henry Ford, great American industrialist, circulated hundreds of thousands of copies of this thing.
59:57
I wonder if Henry Ford advertised at the Texas Rodeo at the time or if only the American Hat Company advertised.
1:00:06
Would that be an interesting thing to check out?
1:00:09
The Nazis taught about the Protocol of the Elders of Zion in schools.
1:00:14
Hamas references it in its charter, in its 1988 charter.
1:00:18
It's widely believed across the Arab world to this day.
1:00:22
Same kind of cognitive biases, same kind of logical fallacies.
1:00:26
Has anyone actually checked the provenance of this thing?
1:00:29
Or are we just believing it because it's a good story and it reinforces our prior preconceptions about what Jews are like or what, you know, in the version of the polite 21st century Westerner, what Israelis or Zios are like?
1:00:44
And it continued on and on and on.
1:00:46
After World War I, there were conspiracy theories in Germany about how Germany lost World War I because Jews and leftists stabbed it in the back.
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And there was a conspiracy that Jews actually didn't serve in World War I in the German army.
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That wasn't true.
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Ultimately, they went back and Jews served in the same proportion as you would expect them to for their proportion of the population in Germany.
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But a lot of Germans believed
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Conspiracy theories about how the Jews didn't serve.
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This reminds me a little bit of the conspiracy theories about how 4,000 Jews stayed home on 9-11.
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Jews didn't go into those towers.
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That was a quote-unquote fact, also not true, that was announced on the official Hezbollah television station after 9-11.
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And is, again, still believed across much of the Arab world and amongst conspiracy theorists in the West.
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And in the Soviet Union in the 1950s, Stalin also accused Jewish doctors of plotting to murder Soviet leaders for their Zionist masters and their American masters.
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In 1968, Poland did the same thing.
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They blamed – the Polish government blamed Zionists for student protests and they pushed 13,000 Jews out of Poland.
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And Zionists, of course, then as now was a code for – a code word for Jew.
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In the 1980s in America, American white supremacists started a conspiracy theory that gained quite a lot of traction about a Zionist-occupied government, Z-O-G, which secretly ran the United States.
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And one of those groups murdered a Jewish radio host, Alan Berg, in 1984.
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And most recently, I suppose, in Pittsburgh in 2018, the Tree of Life synagogue gunman.
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believed a conspiracy theory that a Jewish refugee charity was orchestrating an immigrant invasion of America and he murdered 11 worshippers in the deadliest anti-Semitic attack in U.S. history.
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So it's a well-known pattern.
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Okay?
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You know, there's a hidden hand that is blamed for chaos, for the Black Death or plague or for a military defeat or for a revolution or for immigration or for a hijacking.
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Okay?
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And in most of these cases, some form of violence follows.
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This is not to say that criticizing the Israeli government or being suspicious of the Israeli government is anti-Semitism.
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But it is to say that playfully engaging in maniacal theories that always point to one country at the expense of all others and that play into caricatures about
1:03:28
the ethnicity of that country's inhabitants disproportionately is unconstructive and we should feel more uneasy about it than we do.
1:03:42
I know it might be fun, but find better ways to have fun.
1:03:51
I know I will because I'm on holiday.
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Thanks for watching.
1:03:54
Thanks for listening.
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I'll see you shortly.