Latest / Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps / Free speech, hate speech, and the limits of Liberal tolerance with Sami Shah

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Free speech, hate speech, and the limits of Liberal tolerance with Sami Shah · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

• 0:03
  G'day humans, welcome to the safe space for dangerous ideas.
• 0:07
  Is it a dangerous idea or a potentially criminal insult to tweet this?
• 0:15
  Pack your bags and piss off back to Pakistan.
• 0:18
  That is a verbatim tweet by the Australian politician Paulina Hanson, who is sort of our Nigel Farage, I suppose, a person who's been on the political scene for decades, arguing for lower rates of immigration and traditional, I suppose, white Australian values.
• 0:36
  She tweeted that at one of her colleagues, a fellow senator who's a Pakistani Muslim woman, and I mean, Australian as well,
• 0:45
  because she didn't like the way that this other senator had poo-pooed British colonialism and Australian history in the wake of Queen Elizabeth II's death.
• 0:57
  As a result, that senator sued Pauline Hanson under Australia's fairly unfriendly to free speech laws, which make it an offence to, well...
• 1:09
  It's not really clear what they make it an offence to do, which is part of one of the reasons why I wanted to talk to Sami Shah about it.
• 1:16
  Anyway, Pauline Hanson lost that case and it turns out that it was an offence for her to tweet, pack your bags and piss off back to Pakistan.
• 1:23
  Sami Shah is also from Pakistan.
• 1:26
  He was also born a Muslim.
• 1:28
  He, unlike the Muslim Pakistani Australian senator, has lost his faith.
• 1:34
  And unlike her, he now thinks in quite sophisticated ways about the intersection of Islam, Islamism, anti-Semitism, liberalism, multiculturalism, and how they can all fit together in this rambunctious society.
• 1:49
  He's originally a stand-up comedian.
• 1:51
  That didn't work out so well for him in Pakistan, where he was essentially subjected to...
• 1:57
  a kind of a fatwa, if you want.
• 2:00
  He, in 2012, wrote satirical columns mocking suicide bombers and religious extremism, and he ended up facing death threats.
• 2:08
  One of his friends was actually killed.
• 2:10
  There was a wider climate of violence against blasphemy in Pakistan.
• 2:15
  And he ended up in Australia, which he hoped was somewhat more amenable to free speech.
• 2:21
  And he became a radio presenter, an actor, a writer, a podcaster.
• 2:25
  He has a podcast called News Weekly, and weekly is spelled W-E-A-K-L-Y, News Weekly.
• 2:32
  He's also a columnist for Crikey, which is an online magazine, an online newspaper in Australia.
• 2:38
  And I wanted to get him back on the show because of this article, which he wrote, which is entitled, Pauline Hanson's racist tweet should still have been legal.
• 2:47
  Okay.
• 2:49
  He joined me to talk about the Bondi terrorist attacks, the anti-Semitism Royal Commission being conducted in Australia, anti-Semitism versus anti-Zionism, free speech versus hate speech.
• 2:59
  It's a fabulous chat and I hope you enjoy as much as I did the one, the only Sami Shah.
• 3:12
  What did you disagree with Peter Barnard about?
• 3:15
  I think some of his, I think it was the same thing that I found when you interviewed, what's the Australian journalist?
• 3:23
  Anthony Lowenstein?
• 3:24
  Yes, Lowenstein.
• 3:25
  There's a real misunderstanding of just what life is like in a lot of the Middle Eastern countries.
• 3:32
  which I don't understand it.
• 3:34
  Like, I remember Loan Seen had said something which I was like, really?
• 3:37
  Where he was like, well, I think the point you raised with him had been, you know, is it, you'd rather be gay in Israel at the end of the day than gay in a Middle Eastern country.
• 3:47
  And he was like, no, it's fine in Middle Eastern countries.
• 3:49
  And I was like,
• 3:50
  Come on, dude.
• 3:52
  Like, I understand you have problems with Israel.
• 3:54
  Like, I get that.
• 3:54
  But let's not gloss over the problems in the Middle Eastern countries that much.
• 3:59
  And same with Binot, where he's like, you know, Morocco loves Israeli Jews now coming in for tourism.
• 4:05
  Like, I know a lot of Moroccans and Jews who have been to Morocco and not had fun times when they found out that they were Jewish.
• 4:10
  Like, you know, there is...
• 4:13
  Even the Saudi stuff where the difference between Saudi street and Saudi government seems to be missing in a lot of their equations.
• 4:21
  I think that what they are motivated by is a laudable desire to not caricature cultures.
• 4:28
  And so they don't want to play into this idea that there's anything inevitable about a single Palestinian state from the river to the sea being retrograde or regressive or illiberal.
• 4:41
  And so they want to complicate our ideas about the Arab Muslim world.
• 4:46
  But, yeah, I also share your frustration somewhat with, like, you don't have to be reductive about...
• 4:54
  Islam or Arab culture to nonetheless notice that you would want to have a certain level of caution before subjecting yourself to any new hypothetical Arab Muslim majority state.
• 5:10
  Yeah.
• 5:10
  I do find it's like I think I've messaged you about this before.
• 5:13
  The comparison between the ex-Muslim community and the anti-Zionist Jewish community is really, really interesting to me.
• 5:24
  Because I'm an ex-Muslim, but I'm also a lot of the ex-Muslims tend to go right or far right because that's who supports them in their anti-Muslimness or anti-Islamness.
• 5:33
  Whereas the anti-Zionist Jews tend to go far left because that's what supports them in their thing.
• 5:40
  But their motivations and then their, I suppose, cognitive dissonances are very, very similar to me.
• 5:47
  And then the anger towards the previous institution in which they were a part of and now have finally broken away from and the brainwashing they've kind of been able to get rid of.
• 5:56
  It really is telling how similar those are.
• 5:58
  I keep thinking I need to write something on it, but it's also like where.
• 6:03
  These days, it's just a thing of like, it's such a topic that's been done to death that I just feel like... Yeah, but you would have something new to say about it.
• 6:11
  I mean, you could go to Quillette.
• 6:14
  Or you can publish it on my Substack, feel free.
• 6:16
  So to tease that out, what are the similarities between the anti-Zionist Jew and the ex-Jew?
• 6:23
  Muslim?
• 6:23
  So, okay.
• 6:24
  So, like, just to tell you the ex-Muslim perspective, and I think you might see the similarities then, is there are people who grew up with a certain belief system in a certain community where that belief system is a dogma and an all-pervasive culture and practice and tradition and, you know, every aspect of their life.
• 6:43
  And then at some point, for a variety of reasons, there's never one single reason, they break with it.
• 6:49
  You know, in my case, it wasn't a single thing that happened.
• 6:52
  It was just over time, I saw it less and less as a thing that made sense to me that there's an all-powerful God who makes religions.
• 7:00
  And I found that just not believable.
• 7:02
  And for many Muslim, ex-Muslims then, who suddenly find themselves in that situation, they're looking for support and allyship.
• 7:10
  Like anyone, they're looking for a community.
• 7:12
  The ex-Muslim community tends to be fairly hidden a lot of times.
• 7:16
  And the only people who are saying, hey, you know, there's problems with Islam, there's problems with the Muslim community other than them tends to be your far right groups, your right wing anti-Muslim, anti-immigrant groups and all that.
• 7:28
  And so you see a lot of them kind of finding shelter there and then becoming parts of those groups on an unquestioning level.
• 7:36
  And I think the same thing happens from what I've seen from the outside, from Jewish people who stop buying into or like even believing the Zionist thing.
• 7:44
  I'm not saying that Zionism is a is a terrible idea in and of itself or anything.
• 7:48
  I'm not drawing those judgments.
• 7:50
  I'm just saying some Jews then say I'm no longer Zionist.
• 7:53
  And who else is no longer Zionist?
• 7:55
  Oh, the far left.
• 7:57
  And then they find the same shelter there.
• 7:59
  And then they use the exact same kind of anger, outrage, and frustrations with the Zionist Jewish community.
• 8:08
  And they exhibit the same kind of dislike of them the way the ex-Muslim community does with their Muslim cohort.
• 8:16
  Yeah.
• 8:16
  I mean, that's my theory.
• 8:18
  Yeah.
• 8:18
  I mean, nobody likes to be homeless.
• 8:21
  Yeah, exactly.
• 8:22
  It is that thing.
• 8:23
  At the end, everyone wants community.
• 8:25
  And sometimes you find community in places that might not be the right place for you or unsavory or whatever.
• 8:30
  But over time, the cognitive dissonance kicks in, you're able to reconcile your disagreements with them because you start buying into those beliefs.
• 8:39
  You know, there's a theory, I don't know.
• 8:42
  You heard that Andrew Bolt only used to be left-wing journalists and then suddenly he realized there's a lot of money in being right-wing.
• 8:51
  For non-Australian listeners, this is a television, a right-wing television talk show.
• 8:58
  And for me, I was like, that's irrelevant because I don't for a second believe that he doesn't believe the things he says.
• 9:04
  So the saying is calling him a person who's pretending to be is doing disservice to the things he's saying.
• 9:11
  Yes.
• 9:11
  I think at some point, everyone believes the things they're saying.
• 9:13
  And to him and to all of us.
• 9:15
  actually.
• 9:16
  I've always felt that, I mean, people ask me a lot about, you know, Joe Rogan, who I know, or Donald Trump, who I don't know, but who I analyze a lot about, like, do they believe the things they're saying or are they in it for the money or, you know, whatever?
• 9:29
  Are they just lying and,
• 9:31
  And I just don't think that that's the metric along which human psychology normally works.
• 9:35
  Yeah, at all.
• 9:36
  We normally – we say things that function for us.
• 9:41
  Like very few of us have a true fidelity to objective truth.
• 9:46
  We bump around and as things are –
• 9:50
  you know, positively reinforced or negatively reinforced, we tend to lean into them.
• 9:55
  And so certainly in the case of someone like Donald Trump, I just think that the question of whether or not it is technically true that he won the largest, that, you know, a larger number of people wrote him on the ballot in 2020 versus Joe Biden is not really...
• 10:14
  The point is that insisting that he won that election is a self-reinforcing claim that proves advantageous and ultimately helped get him elected a second time.
• 10:30
  So it's sort of functionally true.
• 10:32
  It almost reminds me of Jordan Peterson's take on religion, which is that it's meaningless to say, is it...
• 10:38
  is it literally true that Jesus rose bodily to heaven?
• 10:42
  Like the point is that it's true enough to have been propagated and to build all kinds of things that are super useful for civilization.
• 10:50
  And in that sense, by definition, it's true because it has utility.
• 10:54
  You know what I mean?
• 10:54
  It's kind of a cynical idea, but it's also just a natural human psychological precept.
• 10:59
  Well, it just gets back to that frustration sometimes where when we have discussions, and particularly the Israel –
• 11:08
  Jewish discussion, for me, seems constantly falling in that same trap.
• 11:12
  I'm saying this all as an outsider.
• 11:13
  I have no stake in this game.
• 11:15
  My partner is Jewish, but I'm not, and nor am I a Gazan or Palestinian.
• 11:20
  I have an understanding of this in the same way that I see the humanity of people, and that's all I care about.
• 11:24
  But, you know, and you had the conversation, Peter Barnard, recently where...
• 11:28
  You both ended up doing the same thing where, and it always happens with everyone, you end up debating the foundation of the country, the creation of the country, the history of the country, you know, when was it created, why was it created, all of those things.
• 11:40
  And I did an episode on my podcast, News Weekly, where I was trying to say...
• 11:46
  I'm trying to draw a comparison between Israel's creation and Pakistan and India's creation 1947.
• 11:53
  It's something that David Baddiel had done on his podcast as well, but I felt like that one hadn't done it well, much as I love Baddiel.
• 12:02
  And I think the frustration for me is no one, when we talk about India and Pakistan, we talk about Bangladesh created in 1971, we no longer talk about should they have been created, you know,
• 12:13
  Do they have a right to exist?
• 12:15
  None of that is relevant.
• 12:16
  We talk about the politics today, the issues today, whatever.
• 12:20
  Why in Israel's conversation do we always end up back circling the same?
• 12:24
  But what about that war?
• 12:26
  And then what about the Nakba?
• 12:27
  And it's because the one thing that's missing is Palestinian statehood.
• 12:32
  if it had been given or granted at any point, the conversation would move to the present as opposed to constantly just debating unprovable things about the past.
• 12:41
  Yeah, this is the point that I was trying to make to Bayonard as well, which he doesn't really want to take on because the question...
• 12:49
  for the true anti-Zionist is whether or not it makes any sense for there to be an ethnostate.
• 12:57
  Right.
• 12:58
  My argument is that that question would be just so much less salient if the region had figured out how to create a Palestinian state
• 13:07
  Exactly.
• 13:08
  You know, we wouldn't be arguing about whether or not there are, you know, the differences between marriage law that might discriminate against non-Jews in Israel, because on the global scale, it would just vanish into, pale into insignificance in comparison to the wrongdoings of other countries.
• 13:27
  Now, the Jew who sees anti-Semitism under every rock will deny that too by saying Israel is always going to be singled out because it's the...
• 13:34
  It's the Jew among nations.
• 13:35
  It's the Jew state.
• 13:36
  And people will just hate it disproportionately regardless.
• 13:39
  So we might as well blast as many gazans to smithereens as necessary because, you know, the tut tutters of the United Nations are going to condemn us even for the mildest of transgressions, which I also think is silly.
• 13:52
  Which is what that Dara Horn podcast was largely saying.
• 13:55
  So that's why it was interesting to me that honestly, like if you listen to that one and you're a talker with Bynart together, you're going to get the entire spectrum of debate about this entire issue from all points of view in one.
• 14:07
  I'm glad to have offered one poll.
• 14:10
  Yeah, if not all of them.
• 14:12
  I think your contribution to that conversation, though, is really useful, Sammy, and I appreciate it.
• 14:17
  I mean, you wrote a great piece about anti-Semitism and the Royal Commission in the wake of the Bondi attack.
• 14:26
  Do you want to just summarize?
• 14:28
  I won't put words in your mouth.
• 14:29
  Do you want to just summarize your point?
• 14:32
  I mean, there were two pieces.
• 14:33
  One, thank you so much for calling great means of heart coming from you.
• 14:37
  There was one which is right after the Bondi attack, which I noted, where I wrote about how the people that give condolences are on the left, on my side of politics, are constantly giving these conditional condolences, which I found very frustrating, where it was...
• 14:54
  Right after Bondi, this isn't like months after, this is in the days after Bondi, they're saying, oh my God, what happened is terrible.
• 15:01
  Anti-Semitism is terrible, as is Islamophobia, racism, anti-Indigenous treatment, anti-trans.
• 15:07
  And I was like, hang on, can we just focus, even in your condolence, can you just focus on the dead people for two seconds?
• 15:14
  Like it is as ridiculous to me as saying after Christchurch.
• 15:20
  Oh, what happened in Christ is terrible.
• 15:22
  Islamophobia in all forms should be condemned, as should misogyny and as should littering.
• 15:28
  And what are you doing?
• 15:29
  You know, that was a very frustrating thing.
• 15:31
  Or even if you just limit it to the narrow case of Islamophobia versus anti-Semitism.
• 15:36
  You know, nobody after the Christchurch massacre of Muslims was saying Islamophobia is, you know, as terrible as is anti-Semitism.
• 15:46
  Well, yeah, anti-Semitism, as we've now, this is the thing that I do agree with Dara Horn with.
• 15:50
  It is particularly unique.
• 15:52
  Out of all the hatreds, I've found more and more.
• 15:55
  I didn't believe it.
• 15:56
  I was very skeptical of David Baddiel's thesis with his book.
• 16:01
  Jews Don't Count.
• 16:02
  Jews Don't Count.
• 16:02
  Thank you.
• 16:03
  I remember the German translation news title, which was the hilarious one, which was, and the Jews?
• 16:08
  And you're like, that sounds way worse.
• 16:09
  That's right.
• 16:10
  Oh, yeah.
• 16:11
  I forgot he said that.
• 16:12
  Yeah.
• 16:12
  That when Jews Don't Count was translated into German, it was like, and what about the Jews?
• 16:18
  What about the Jews?
• 16:18
  He's like, that sounds way worse.
• 16:20
  And what will we do with the Jews?
• 16:21
  Yeah.
• 16:22
  Yeah.
• 16:24
  And just to summarize, in case people aren't following the thread of all of this, Baddiel, and people should go back and listen to him on this podcast.
• 16:32
  I think he's been on twice, but his, and you should read the book, it's fabulous, is basically just the normal accommodations that social justice leftists make towards minorities in terms of
• 16:45
  giving credence to their claims of feeling besieged or violated or oppressed or offended do not count in the case of Jews.
• 16:55
  Jews just don't count as a minority in the thinking of people when we're thinking about how we should treat racism and bigotry.
• 17:04
  It's a more complicated argument than that, but basically that... That's the right thesis.
• 17:10
  What was your quibble with that initially?
• 17:12
  Yeah.
• 17:12
  Well, I just didn't know if it was true.
• 17:14
  I felt like, oh, no, like, I think he's exaggerating.
• 17:16
  I don't see that in my own life.
• 17:19
  I also am in Australia and, you know, everyone's so open and considerate.
• 17:24
  And I just at the time, I was not informed enough to have critiqued it as blatantly as I did.
• 17:31
  I thought, oh, but he's funny and he's clever.
• 17:35
  And I just don't know if that's true.
• 17:37
  And then after October 7th, seeing the way it kind of played out the conversations nationally and globally,
• 17:43
  really brought me back to going, oh, I was 100% wrong.
• 17:46
  He was quite correct in all this, and he predicted a lot of this in ways that I should have been far less skeptical about, was my basic reaction to that.
• 17:55
  So that was the first column.
• 17:55
  The second column was about the anti-Semitism Royal Commission.
• 17:59
  I don't know where you sit on it.
• 18:00
  My personal belief had been, I agreed with Albanese initially.
• 18:03
  I don't think the Royal Commission into anti-Semitism was the right response to Bondi as an effective tool.
• 18:09
  And my concerns had been
• 18:11
  The same thing I think Albanese even had articulated, which is it will become about other things too quickly.
• 18:18
  And you see it now.
• 18:19
  You know, it has become a Rorschach plot.
• 18:22
  The pro-Palestinian side sees it as a Zionist conspiracy to undermine Australia and make it subservient to Israel's whims and fancies because they see everything that way.
• 18:30
  The...
• 18:33
  the pro-Zionist Jewish community in Australia sees it as something that's constantly undermining Jewish voices, constantly platforming pro-Palestinian voices, constantly limiting Jewish experiences of racism, et cetera.
• 18:46
  So, and it seems to have made the conversation around antisemitism, as far as I can tell, worse.
• 18:54
  And I think part of the responsibility for that falls on media outlets, the mainstream ones, who look at that and pick and choose which stories they want to amplify.
• 19:03
  You know, so if you're a left-wing media outlet, you'll amplify the one where the person says, oh, there was a watermelon sticker on a student's laptop and that was racist towards me.
• 19:13
  And so they'll amplify that as the headline because then you go, what is this person ridiculous?
• 19:16
  And then the Australian will amplify the one of someone being doxxed or harassed on the streets, etc.
• 19:21
  The Australian is Rupert Murdoch.
• 19:25
  Is a right wing.
• 19:26
  They're very pro-Israel in their...
• 19:29
  Right, exactly.
• 19:29
  I don't know, right wing is the conservative newspaper outlet in their editorial bent.
• 19:35
  And so you have this situation now where I think everyone's using the Royal Commission for their own purposes.
• 19:42
  And the goal of the Royal Commission would have been to explore how severe is anti-Semitism and how will we tackle that problem.
• 19:49
  I don't think anti-Semitism, I don't think Royal Commissions are skilled, have the capability to do that.
• 19:55
  It's like having a Royal Commission into racism or misogyny or something, you know, so large,
• 20:02
  Although it's like having a royal commission to the weather.
• 20:05
  It's just too large a concept for a royal commission to solve.
• 20:09
  And so I always thought that was a problem.
• 20:11
  For American listeners, they're basically like a special commission, like you might have into the 9-11 commission report.
• 20:18
  But yes, you're right that if you're going to do an investigation into a terrorist attack, you should make it about the terrorist attack and how the intelligence failures led to it and how they were able to get those guns and why there wasn't a red flag when the people were in the southern Philippines, which is a known area for Islamist extremists and so on and so forth, rather than what the feelings were of people who felt... Yeah, I mean, the problem with the framing of...
• 20:44
  the whole inquiry is that it does rely a lot on people's subjective experiences of their own feelings.
• 20:50
  And that's quite easy to dismiss if people are coming from a place of having no empathy towards that community anyway.
• 20:57
  It's like, well, so you feel nervous when you're walking down the street wearing your Jewish skullcap?
• 21:02
  That doesn't mean that you live in an anti-Semitic society.
• 21:04
  That means that you're paranoid.
• 21:06
  Yeah.
• 21:07
  And you see that a lot.
• 21:08
  You see, like, I've read a lot of the commission reports because I just wanted to write a column about it.
• 21:12
  So I read a lot of the results, the reports and submissions people had made.
• 21:15
  I've also got friends who have made submissions and shared them with me beforehand.
• 21:20
  And there's some horrific experiences of outright blatant anti-Semitism in its purest, most unfiltered form.
• 21:27
  And yet you've got...
• 21:29
  Can I curse on this podcast?
• 21:30
  I don't know.
• 21:31
  Yes, please.
• 21:31
  You've got fucksplats like that half-wit moron and her husband, Caitlin Johnstone, who is basically using every opportunity to just, I mean, you know, I guess Israel derangement syndrome or whatever you want to call it.
• 21:45
  Then on the other side, you've got the shot, which has Joel Jenkins writing, who I think did a thing in the Royal Commission into the genocidal feelings of whatever, whatever.
• 21:55
  Just picking and choosing the absolute mildest, lightest example someone gave a Royal Commission and presenting it as the only experience Jews in Australia are having, because for them, showing empathy towards anyone other than their own point of view and promoting their own brand out of that is just impossible.
• 22:14
  So you've got those people who are completely using this Royal Commission for their own purposes.
• 22:19
  And their purposes are fairly anti-Semitic.
• 22:22
  I mean, you could just take everything the shots published about the Royal Commission and submit it to the Royal Commission as an example of anti-Semitism, in my opinion.
• 22:30
  I publicly call them out for this quite a bit, so it's okay.
• 22:34
  But yeah, there is this entire... And again, for your American listeners, I keep forgetting you have a wider audience than my 12 podcast listeners.
• 22:42
  But for your American listeners, The Shot is a satirical in italics website that does polemics.
• 22:50
  And Caitlin Johnstone is a rock with sentience or something.
• 22:55
  I don't know what it is.
• 22:57
  And the...
• 22:57
  I mean, the interesting...
• 22:59
  It is – I'm not even sure that anti-Semitism is the right – I think anti-Semitism, like Zionism, is one of those words that means so many different things to so many different people and it's probably best retired.
• 23:10
  I mean, the fact is that there is a –
• 23:14
  strain of attitude towards Jewish people and a strain of thinking about Jewish conspiring and divided loyalties to Israel and meddling in powerful ways that are antithetical to the interests of the upstanding common man that is not quite...
• 23:38
  captured by the anti-Semitism tropes of, like, the 19th century of the hook-nosed Jewish banker, you know, counting his gold coins.
• 23:48
  I mean, some of that is still there.
• 23:50
  Some of that is, and you can call that anti-Semitism, but I think it's alienating to use that term.
• 23:56
  I sort of just...
• 23:58
  I mean, Jew hatred is sometimes better, you know, double standard, you know, discrimination or prejudice is sometimes better or double standards.
• 24:07
  It should fall under the category of racism.
• 24:09
  It's just, it is racism, right?
• 24:11
  Like that is what it is.
• 24:13
  And you're right.
• 24:13
  Like some of the terminology again becomes very useful to people who want to parse it to make their side seem to have the best intentions and the opposing side to have the worst intentions.
• 24:24
  And so,
• 24:25
  You know, when someone goes, I'm anti-Zionist, or someone says, I'm Zionist, what does Zionism actually mean to each person?
• 24:32
  It has to be passed and clarified before the debate should even progress at all.
• 24:36
  Yeah, yeah.
• 24:38
  I saw an amazing example of this, Sammy, on Facebook, which I try not to ever look at, but someone had sent me a link to something, and it was about Zionists.
• 24:46
  It was by an anti-Zionist Australian group, and there were all these...
• 24:51
  what I would regard as being comments that were full of Jew hatred, but they were limiting themselves, of course.
• 24:57
  They don't use the J word.
• 24:58
  They use the Z or Z word instead.
• 25:02
  But they're talking about Zionists, and they're talking about Zionists in Australia crying their white tears and pretending that they're a minority when they're actually the biggest white supremacists of all.
• 25:14
  And I'm like, what are you talking about?
• 25:17
  You're not talking about people who have an ideological affection for the existence of the State of Israel.
• 25:24
  You're talking about an ethnic group.
• 25:26
  You're talking about their whiteness and stuff, right?
• 25:28
  Yeah, yeah.
• 25:30
  So in that case, in the comments, one person was saying...
• 25:35
  I think they were talking about – I won't name this person because you and I both know them, but I haven't got the permission.
• 25:40
  But it was someone who has some relationship to the Australian Jewish community, and they were saying, well, yeah, but it's not surprising because this person is related to a Jew.
• 25:53
  Yeah.
• 25:54
  And another person chimed in as a comment on the comment, a reply to the comment, saying, it's very important that we not talk about Jews that way.
• 26:04
  It has nothing to do with the Jewish people.
• 26:06
  This is all about Zionism being a fascist, genocidal, colonialist ideology, not the Jewish people themselves.
• 26:16
  And I thought, that is such a ridiculous, cute piece of, like, fig leafing.
• 26:23
  In the sense that, like, why are you even bothering?
• 26:25
  Like, don't think that you're on the right side of history.
• 26:29
  We're not talking about Negroes.
• 26:32
  We're talking about the black international, you know, the way that...
• 26:36
  The people whose melanin content under their skin, epidermal layer.
• 26:41
  We're talking about an ideology of African, you know, undermining of Western values.
• 26:48
  We're not talking about, it's like, talk about passing the, you know, so that is the sort of soup that I think you're, you've done a good job of identifying.
• 26:58
  I mean, one of the, I loved the screenshot in your piece about the Royal Commission, which was from the anti-Zionist social media platform.
• 27:07
  which said, oh, your little Jewish genocidal feelings are hurt?
• 27:10
  Boo fucking hoo.
• 27:13
  And, like, they've made the mistake there of using the J word instead of the Z word, but it's, like, emblematic of a sense, a wider sense that any time a Jewish person raises the question about, like, isn't it a little bit intimidating for...
• 27:32
  Someone waving a Palestinian flag on horseback to be parading up and down the beach.
• 27:38
  Doesn't that sort of rhyme with imagery of ISIS and jihadism in some way in the immediate aftermath of October 7th, which is something that happened here in Sydney and the police didn't really stop it.
• 27:51
  I think they gave him a fine or just a warning.
• 27:55
  When a Jewish person says, like, that feels a little bit like a veiled threat or a harbinger of what is implied about what's to come for us, then it's totally normalized in Australian society to just wave that away and go, like, ah, Jews are always making up anti-Semitism when it doesn't exist.
• 28:13
  It was just a dude on horseback.
• 28:16
  And it's very hard to know how to get one's hands around that.
• 28:18
  Exactly.
• 28:20
  So I've like, one of the things that's happened is I've been, and it's funny to me, given how much on my personal level, in my politics, I do support Palestinian cause.
• 28:31
  I do support Palestinian statehood, all of these things.
• 28:34
  And I am wildly critical of Israel to the point that would make, you know, Michael Gawenda punch me if he ever met me probably.
• 28:42
  But the idea is,
• 28:45
  All I'm trying to be is consistent to the ethics and belief I've always had, which is, and I remember before this issue came up, you know, I used to believe, and I still believe to a degree, that when I used to say, hey, this is racist, because I just experienced something that I think is racist.
• 29:02
  And I'd have white colleagues and friends say, no, it wasn't.
• 29:05
  I'd be like, no, you're not qualified to tell me, I'm telling you from my experience with racism, that what I experienced was racist.
• 29:13
  And in the people of color community, in the progressive left community, we always use that as an acceptable metric.
• 29:20
  If a person of color says they've experienced racism, a minority says they've experienced racism, don't say they haven't because that is erasure of their experience.
• 29:28
  And we all believe that until Jews said they experienced anti-Semitism.
• 29:33
  And so for me, that became the thing.
• 29:35
  Wait, hang on.
• 29:36
  Why are we suddenly applying a different rule to one community over all other communities?
• 29:42
  Oh, that is anti-Semitism.
• 29:43
  Now I understand why I was wrong.
• 29:45
  That is Baddiel's basic point, isn't it?
• 29:48
  And again, you don't have to think that it's anti-Semitism.
• 29:52
  You just have to notice that it's a different standard for one group and others and wonder why.
• 29:57
  And anti-Semitism is such a slippery kind of...
• 30:01
  thing.
• 30:02
  It always wears the face of whatever the elites think is bad at any particular point in time.
• 30:07
  I was trying to do a stand-up bit.
• 30:09
  I don't do stand-up very much these days.
• 30:10
  I don't have the time, but whenever I do, I always burn my career.
• 30:14
  I got up on stage.
• 30:16
  Or end up with a fatwa on your head.
• 30:17
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 30:19
  I got up on stage.
• 30:20
  I was trying to work a bit.
• 30:21
  The idea behind it was that, you know, some of the problems are that we're not clear anymore on what is anti-Semitism,
• 30:30
  you know, Israel's committing genocide in Gaza is called anti-Semitism by some people.
• 30:35
  But on the scale of anti-Semitism, there's Jews in the center of the earth controlling the banks on one end, and hey, stop killing babies in Gaza on the other end.
• 30:45
  You've got to admit, one kind of anti-Semitism is a lot nicer than the other one, you know?
• 30:49
  So maybe we have, but yeah, that bit didn't do well.
• 30:52
  Yeah, I think there's something there.
• 30:55
  Yeah, it just needs a good punchline.
• 30:57
  I'm not sure what that is.
• 30:57
  Yeah, yeah, yeah.
• 30:59
  But yes, the double standard is the thing and just the general lack of concern and the lack of – the trouble with trying to impose these things into the context of a royal commission is that –
• 31:17
  you need to sort of arrive at a communally agreed upon definition of not just what anti-Semitism is, but what all kinds of acceptable bounds of expression are.
• 31:30
  And this gets us into much bigger questions that Australia is wrestling with at the moment about hate speech and what should and shouldn't be considered free speech.
• 31:40
  Like, I do think that...
• 31:43
  All reasonable people can agree that a Jewish schoolgirl who's waiting at the bus stop with an obviously Jewish identity marker on her uniform who gets harassed or has something thrown at her is bad.
• 32:02
  but whether or not the guy on horseback with the Palestinian flag on the beach is bad, whether or not, you know, mobs every week, yeah, exactly, on the opera house steps, you know, or the screaming, where are the Jews, is bad, whether or not, yeah, chanting from the river to the sea.
• 32:20
  That mob also screamed, fuck the Jews, let's be very clear.
• 32:24
  They didn't scream, gas the Jews, which was the contention that,
• 32:27
  The crikey article had, but they did say fuck the Jews and where's the Jews.
• 32:31
  I didn't know they said fuck, fuck the Jews because Antoinette Latouf tells me that they only said where's the Jews.
• 32:35
  No, I've heard the audio as well.
• 32:37
  And where's the Jews?
• 32:38
  They weren't asking out of sense of concern.
• 32:40
  Exactly.
• 32:40
  I think it's totally beside the point.
• 32:43
  Like, I mean, you've got a mob of angry people screaming where's the Jews.
• 32:46
  Yeah.
• 32:47
  Then, yo, gas the Jews, fuck the Jews, where's the Jews?
• 32:50
  I don't want people yelling angrily about the Jews in one way or another.
• 32:55
  This is not mentioned the Jews in chants and sermons.
• 33:01
  And it becomes this really, really tricky thing because I do think that sustaining liberal democracy in a multicultural, multi-ethnic society in the 21st century when we're all deranged by algorithms is –
• 33:14
  is a challenge for liberalism and probably requires a more robust conception of us all signing up to universalist liberal principles of pluralism and tolerance than we currently – than the left is currently comfortable articulating because we're in this diversity sort of zone where like every idea is great and that's also in Kumbaya –
• 33:39
  even to the people who are chanting things that approximate hate speech.
• 33:46
  But I, like you, am leery of laws about that because the law that would punish from the river to the sea or where's the Jews or the imam who's preaching incredibly hateful things about gay people or women...
• 34:02
  They will invariably just get deployed against people who are unpopular with the ruling elite, which is quite frequently people like you and me saying things that I don't want to be punished for saying.
• 34:14
  Yeah, and I think that's been my big surprise with Australian political discourse in the last few years, where the quick run, the speed run to censoriousness, particularly from our politicians, whether that be from pressure on writers festivals to pressure on actual legal definitions and phrases that should now be banned and outlawed,
• 34:45
  you know, there is a massive part I always understood.
• 34:48
  And I think as far as I understand it, the Australian constitution has understood.
• 34:53
  With the Australian constitution, we have to be clear, does not have something like the First Amendment or the Fourth Amendment, sorry, right?
• 34:59
  It has a First Amendment model.
• 35:01
  It does not legally protect...
• 35:04
  Wait, the fourth is unreasonable search and seizure, isn't it?
• 35:07
  Yes.
• 35:08
  Second is guns.
• 35:09
  Yeah, fourth is unreasonable search and seizure.
• 35:11
  I meant First Amendment, free speech.
• 35:13
  Yeah.
• 35:13
  Now, the interesting thing is, as far as I understand this, and it's been a while since I read it, but the protection of First Amendment rights in America has more to do with the individual's right to say and speak their truth or whatever, whatever they want to say and speak.
• 35:29
  Whereas in Australia, the Australian Constitution, the way it frames it, it implies a freedom of political communication.
• 35:35
  The goal being that that is important to protect democratic systems.
• 35:40
  Right.
• 35:41
  And the quick rush away from that protection of democratic systems using
• 35:48
  free speech as a tool has been disappointing to me.
• 35:52
  And it's something that I thought would be, it didn't, liberal, liberal, green, it doesn't matter.
• 35:58
  Any party seems quite eager to censor things that make them uncomfortable, things that they qualify as divisive or problematic to the social cohesion concern.
• 36:12
  Without thinking about the long term connotations of that, you know, the river to the sea phraseology, for example, is a perfect example.
• 36:17
  In Queensland, you can no longer use the phrase from the river to the sea.
• 36:22
  There are certain exceptions, I believe, around, you know, artistic expression and things like that.
• 36:26
  But if you get up on the street and chant it, you probably would be arrested.
• 36:31
  And it's such a short term tool to give to a government where, you know, in a few years time, another government come along and outlaw some other phrase, which would hurt the other side of politics.
• 36:43
  And I just don't understand why they don't see that.
• 36:46
  I feel like it's such a long term wound for a short term healing.
• 36:52
  Yeah, that is disappointing.
• 36:54
  I mean, what's the alternative?
• 36:55
  Because the free speecher will say, no speech law is going to get rid of the underlying ideology, and we need a bigger strategy to address that.
• 37:07
  But then the politician, the kind of, I suppose, cynical or expedient politician who just wants to introduce a law will say, well, great, you can go on your half century long mission of changing the hearts and minds of entire communities, or you can just get rid of the thing that you want to get rid of.
• 37:25
  tomorrow?
• 37:25
  Well, I suppose the question is end results, right?
• 37:30
  I'm not saying the hearts and minds thing would work either.
• 37:32
  There's no guarantee that the idea that we will one day have a community or a society where there's no racism expressed and there's no bigotry expressed and there's no hate expressed or objectable statements expressed is ridiculous.
• 37:45
  That does not happen.
• 37:46
  It will not happen and probably I would say should not happen.
• 37:50
  Because one person, same as one person's terrorist, another person's freedom fighter, one person's hate speech is another person's stand up comedy routine or manifesto or personal expression of, you know, whatever.
• 38:02
  So I do think that that's an impossibility anyway.
• 38:06
  But if the end goal of banning a phrase is, oh, now that we've banned it.
• 38:11
  that feeling will go away, the bigotry will go away, the racism will go away.
• 38:16
  That we know is not true.
• 38:18
  That may not be the goal.
• 38:19
  The goal may not be to stop the person from believing that there should be a single Palestinian state from the river to the sea.
• 38:25
  The goal is that the passerby who's on their way to synagogue doesn't have to feel intimidated by a line that whatever its intention was lands for them as a...
• 38:40
  a symbol of your people should be either at best put on boats and sent back to Eastern Europe, or at worst, if they won't get on the boats, slaughtered.
• 38:53
  Like that's the way that it lands.
• 38:55
  Coming back to your point about the way that a fence is sort of taken.
• 39:00
  even if it's not given.
• 39:02
  So why does hate speech laws – what is wrong with a society just saying, look, the Americans can all be cowboys if they want, and they can have their free speech norms enshrined in the Constitution?
• 39:15
  Always.
• 39:15
  Americans have always had massive censorship issues as well, as we know.
• 39:19
  Well, yes, but they have to fall within constitutional parameters that don't exist here.
• 39:25
  So, you know, what's going on in the UK in terms of, you know, the police constantly investigating people for allegations of hate speech could not take place in the United States.
• 39:34
  They did get challenged in court and the cops have better things to do than investigating old ladies for writing on Facebook that there are too many migrants in the country or something.
• 39:44
  But the...
• 39:48
  The argument for it here, which I have more sympathy for than I did when I lived in the States, is just why do we have to be the crucible of conversations for global civilization?
• 40:03
  Why can't we just be a nice walled garden where people aren't allowed to do things that intimidate people?
• 40:09
  their fellow man?
• 40:11
  Because unfortunately we do live in, we live in a society.
• 40:18
  We do live in a society and it's a global society, whether we like it or not.
• 40:21
  There's that thing you see a lot of people complaining about when it comes, whenever migrant issues come to Australia, you know, like Indians and Pakistanis fighting with each other or something like that.
• 40:31
  They'll say, why can't they just leave their issues at the border?
• 40:34
  Why do they have to bring their, you know, all issues here?
• 40:37
  It's because that's just, we are particularly a migrant nation.
• 40:40
  You know, there are a few migrant nations in the world.
• 40:42
  Australia is one of them.
• 40:43
  And when you are a migrant nation, you have a connection to the rest of the world, you cannot deny.
• 40:48
  The idea of a walled garden is interesting and it is possible to a degree, but the walls can only go so high.
• 40:55
  At some point, those walls do stop happening.
• 40:59
  If the idea of the wall is to keep things from coming in, at some point, the walls then just are becoming, you know, fields that create echoes that prevent conversations from developing.
• 41:09
  Yeah, no, I don't think that's possible.
• 41:11
  And that's not what I meant by a wall garden.
• 41:13
  I meant a place where there are rules of the game that are more...
• 41:18
  They're particular to the...
• 41:19
  Yes, and that are more emphatic about conciliation than they might need to be everywhere.
• 41:24
  To me, that's more interesting.
• 41:27
  Things that work towards conciliation, reconciliation, which happens through conversation, is far more valuable.
• 41:35
  And I think it's one of the things that we've seen a massive gap of in Australia.
• 41:41
  I actually, to be very honest, I'm not blowing smoke up your ass, I think your podcast is one of the only places it's happening in the country.
• 41:47
  Thank you.
• 41:47
  Which is...
• 41:48
  People from opposing points of view coming to have those discussions openly, vehemently having their opinions challenged.
• 41:58
  One of the things I found so fascinating is you get guests on and they are people who firmly believe in what they believe in from either side of politics or whatever.
• 42:07
  And so many times you'll put a very obvious question to them, a question that, you know, as a listener, I'm going, I wish someone would ask that.
• 42:13
  And then you'd ask that from the listener point of view.
• 42:15
  I don't know whether you believe it or not, but that's irrelevant.
• 42:17
  We're asking the question and it flummoxes the guest.
• 42:22
  And I'm always surprised.
• 42:23
  I'm like, wait, so was your personal bubble so small that you never encountered an opposing point of view?
• 42:30
  You never had your ideas critiqued at all?
• 42:33
  And I'm discovering that more and more so.
• 42:35
  And I think even something like this, where let's say you ban from the river to the sea,
• 42:39
  They'll just change it from one body of water to another body of water, right?
• 42:42
  From the lake to the pond, whatever.
• 42:44
  As we saw, they all started singing John Farnham songs, for fuck's sake.
• 42:48
  No one should have to suffer that.
• 42:50
  That's right.
• 42:51
  From the Jordanian border to the beaches of Haifa.
• 42:57
  Yeah, you can do whatever you...
• 42:59
  Language is unfortunately very malleable.
• 43:01
  You can't ban languages.
• 43:02
  The biggest mistake is thinking you can control language that way.
• 43:07
  So the idea of even, you know, the idea of 18C, which is this law in Australia that allows people to be...
• 43:13
  It's a civil prosecution, not a criminal one, but, you know, it holds people to account for hate speech regarding race, religion, creed, etc.,
• 43:21
  And it hasn't stopped bigotry from happening.
• 43:24
  People haven't stopped being racist or voicing racist points of view because of it, because these things just don't work.
• 43:30
  So if the goal is... Well, just to be clear, it stops the particular thing that it lists, right?
• 43:37
  I mean, but you're saying that it's like trying to stop water running downstream with a few pebbles.
• 43:42
  They'll just find other ways of doing things.
• 43:44
  You might not be able to do a Heil Hitler salute, but you just find other coded ways of...
• 43:50
  Getting your message across.
• 43:51
  And in some ways, it becomes more dysfunctional, because then people get pushed underground, they have to do things more secretively.
• 43:57
  And you get a kind of a hotbed that also has like a frisson of naughtiness about it, which is kind of appealing to young people in a way that just being a bunch of dickheads on the street doing Heil Hitler salutes doesn't.
• 44:10
  Absolutely.
• 44:11
  One of the best benefits of free speech is you get to see people for who they are versus who they pretend to be.
• 44:17
  You know, like we know who thinks anti-Semitic, racist, you know, whatever things, because they are free to say it out loud.
• 44:27
  Whereas if they're couching it behind hidden phraseology and and and only using.
• 44:32
  Well, now we have social media that changes things a lot, but, you know, only using personas to present that information to us, we would not have known otherwise.
• 44:41
  We would have thought the problem had gone away, whereas the problem was actually festering and growing.
• 44:46
  And one of the best examples of that is the Weimar Republic.
• 44:49
  I mean, I hate taking everything back to Godwin's Law.
• 44:53
  Yeah, you lose for having invoked the Nazis first.
• 44:56
  But one of the big things, arguments always put forward, is if you don't control hate speech, then the Nazis will come and rise.
• 45:04
  Or there'll be a resurgence of Nazism.
• 45:07
  During the Weimar Republic, they tried a lot to prevent Nazi language from entering public spaces.
• 45:15
  They outlawed phraseology, they outlawed the official titles, they outlawed language, particular to the Nazi communities, and it all moved it underground where it festered and grew even larger.
• 45:25
  And I think that's part of the thing.
• 45:28
  I just don't know why the belief that...
• 45:31
  legislation and government edict is a useful tool for controlling language and therefore being more socially cohesive is a belief because it has not borne out to be true at all.
• 45:45
  I mean, it's so – so there's this weird fuzzy edge that I think enters here between language that is obviously happening.
• 45:55
  So I got into an argument with Julian McGrath, the eSafety Commissioner on Q&A, a television show in Australia, about whether or not Elon Musk's tweets during the London race riots two summers ago, I think, should be illegal in Australia.
• 46:15
  So he was saying civil war is inevitable.
• 46:19
  in the UK.
• 46:20
  And she was saying, and Patricia Carvellis, the host, was basically agreeing with her, and most Australians kind of seemed to go along with the idea that that's an incitement to violence, because it encourages white supremacists to think that migrants are leading them to a civil war.
• 46:39
  My position was that...
• 46:42
  An incitement to violence is meet me at Federation Square at 3 p.m. tomorrow and let's bash some Muslims' heads in, and then you do that.
• 46:50
  That's an incitement to violence.
• 46:52
  Making a prediction about cultural fractures is...
• 46:58
  It may be unhelpful, it may be wrong, it may be unwise, it may be stupid, it may be likely to create more violence, but it has to fall within the parameters of things that a person can permissibly say in a free society.
• 47:12
  Otherwise, you're just never able to make dire predictions about the future at all, if they might upset people.
• 47:18
  In the present.
• 47:19
  And the prohibition on making warnings like that is precisely what has gotten the UK into the fever pitch situation, which it is right now, where the only people who are articulating, well, now this isn't true, but two years ago, the only people who were articulating...
• 47:37
  questions about the pace of immigration were people who were coded as far right because for anyone else to do so was regarded as deeply illiberal and bigoted, which means that if only bigots can talk about something, then the only people talking about that thing will be bigots and the rest of the conversation and they will sort of hijack the conversation.
• 48:00
  grey area, right, and you could take it back to the context of what is intimidating and what is not intimidating.
• 48:07
  Your hate speech laws might say that you shouldn't be allowed to, say, gas the Jews, but a Jewish family is at the beach.
• 48:18
  Someone walks past and says, fuck the Jews or yells baby killers at them.
• 48:28
  Now, that's not really free speech.
• 48:32
  It's not really an idea.
• 48:33
  It's not really a political statement.
• 48:35
  It's an expression that is intended to intimidate.
• 48:39
  Right.
• 48:40
  And then there's remove the Jewish family on the beach from the equation and the person is just yelling that into the public and then maybe it is a political thing.
• 48:51
  And so when I talk to my Jewish friends about this –
• 48:55
  they tend to regard it as being a pretty clear-cut thing of like, you can express ideas, but you cannot target people.
• 49:02
  You can't express ideas that seek to make a particular type of person feel unsafe.
• 49:11
  And I don't see it as that clean.
• 49:13
  I don't think that it is that clean.
• 49:15
  I can't see – there are so many scenarios that you could come up with which are both, which are the speaker making a political point and it being received as intimidation.
• 49:26
  Well, that's – and that's the frustration that I'm trying to articulate really badly, which is the problem we fall into is therefore believing.
• 49:35
  And the river to the sea is the perfect example of this.
• 49:39
  The person saying it –
• 49:41
  can defend saying it by saying, I am talking about a society or a country that should be created in which everyone is equal, whether they're Jewish or whether they're Palestinian and blah, blah, blah, or utopian society, etc., etc.
• 49:54
  And the other side can say, no, you're talking about genocidal erasure of Jewish people in Israel.
• 50:00
  So both sides are, one side is presenting what they're saying in the best possible version of it, with the most generous possible meaning.
• 50:08
  And the other is taking it in the worst possible version.
• 50:11
  And both sides are equally valid in their response.
• 50:15
  That's the problem is I think right now each side is very keen to depict the other side as duplicitous, as lying, as malicious in their depiction or description of the phraseology.
• 50:32
  Well, actually, sorry, finish that thought and then I'll jump in.
• 50:36
  No, no.
• 50:37
  So that's the problem.
• 50:39
  So when the government, the Queensland State government says from the river to the sea should be banned, the people saying from the river to the sea, largely, there are some who mean it the other way, but largely the people who are saying it don't have the intention of saying it as a means of wipe out the Jews.
• 50:54
  They're saying some other version of it.
• 50:56
  There's actually an imbalance there, Sammy.
• 50:59
  I think you're mostly right that both sides are attributing to the other a level of conscious intimidation that is not actually intended.
• 51:11
  But it is a bit of a one-way street at the moment because the Jewish community...
• 51:18
  largely, I think, thinks that there's more malice than there is in... Well, I'm not even sure this is true, but let's suppose this is true.
• 51:26
  I just want to tease out an imbalance.
• 51:28
  But what the person chanting from the river to the sea thinks of the Jewish response is not that the Jewish response is malicious or necessarily disingenuous, but that it is hypersensitive and that they are...
• 51:44
  willfully misunderstanding the point in order to provide cover for genocide.
• 51:50
  So there are several different dynamics going on.
• 51:54
  There's because I feel intimidated by the thing that you're saying, I'm going to assume that you're trying to intimidate me, even if you're not.
• 52:03
  And then on the other side, there's because you're claiming that you're intimidated by an innocuous political chant, you're a servant of a foreign genocidal power.
• 52:17
  Yes, and that is largely the way it plays out again and again and again.
• 52:23
  You see the same thing repeated, for example, with the Globalize the Intifada.
• 52:28
  When Grace Stame had said Globalize the Intifada, from Gadigal to Gaza, Globalize the Intifada.
• 52:35
  Let me just explain that to Americans again.
• 52:37
  Yeah, go ahead.
• 52:38
  This is a former Australian of the year.
• 52:40
  She was a survivor of sexual assault, I believe, and spoke out and...
• 52:47
  So she's a well-known... Change sexual assault laws in Australia.
• 52:49
  Yes.
• 52:49
  To protect, to help...
• 52:50
  Very influential.
• 52:51
  A poster child of the sort of Me Too movement in Australia.
• 52:55
  And yes, she was at a Gaza protest and was chanting from Gadigal to Gaza, was it?
• 53:02
  Globalize the Intifada.
• 53:03
  Globalize the Intifada.
• 53:04
  Gadigal is an indigenous term for traditional lands.
• 53:10
  So it's a way of...
• 53:10
  In Australia, the pro-Palestinian cause has been folded into the local...
• 53:15
  question of indigenous rights as well because the palestinians are indigenous the indigenous australians are indigenous so like you will sometimes hear phrases like from gadical to gaza or always was always will be linked to palestinian land because there's a slogan here always was always will be aboriginal land yes uh yeah um and so you see that and and
• 53:40
  Look, there's a lot of things within that phrase, globalized intifada, in that the first intifada was a peaceful intifada, the second one was not.
• 53:48
  Intifada does mean shaking off, but it also, for a lot of people from Israel and of Jewish background, it means terrorist attacks against Jews and terrorist attacks against Israel.
• 54:00
  And a lot of people who do say, no, that's not how we mean it.
• 54:05
  may mean it in that way.
• 54:06
  And the other side are also saying it's the same way, like the phrase after 9-11, I remember a lot of Muslims used to argue, jihad doesn't mean terrorism.
• 54:13
  Jihad just means, you know, strive to change, make a commitment to change.
• 54:17
  You can have a jihad against being fat or whatever.
• 54:20
  And I was like, I've never heard a single person say I'm doing a jihad against carbs, but sure, let's play that game.
• 54:28
  But also it's completely disingenuous.
• 54:30
  I mean, like the context,
• 54:31
  It matters.
• 54:32
  Yes.
• 54:32
  The literal, you can look at it, look something up in the dictionary and it'll say one thing, but everybody in Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, maybe not everybody outside those places, but everybody in Israel and the West Bank and Gaza understands what intifada means in the context of the Israeli and Palestinian conflict.
• 54:52
  It looms largest as the series of...
• 54:55
  bus bombings and cafes blowing up in 2000 and 2001.
• 54:59
  You know, people are not generally thinking, well, actually, technically, the initial, like the first intifada was mostly rocks and stones.
• 55:06
  The etymology of the word intifada comes from the original.
• 55:09
  So none of that's happening.
• 55:11
  And if I remember correctly, the protest in Sydney that Grace Thames said that was against Isaac Herzog's.
• 55:17
  visit to Sydney.
• 55:18
  Yes, the president of Israel was visiting.
• 55:21
  After the Bondi beach attack.
• 55:23
  So to say that to Herzog, I understand why you want to say it to him.
• 55:29
  because you think he's the president of a state committing genocide.
• 55:34
  But to say that in Sydney right after Bondi is to then deny that the people, the Jewish people in Bondi might have real concerns around the phrase intifada being yelled at them.
• 55:46
  And so, yeah, I mean, I found it threatening because I felt like it's very, you would have to be,
• 55:55
  almost aggressively stupid, like almost self-consciously, willfully blind to not see the Bondi attack itself as an example of successfully globalizing the Intifada.
• 56:10
  I mean, the Intifada in the context of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is... Ending up with shooting Jews on the beach in Sydney.
• 56:20
  The whole conceit of it is...
• 56:23
  This is a no-holds-barred struggle.
• 56:25
  This is a post-colonial liberationist struggle, and in those kinds of struggles, invariably, civilians are caught up because civilians are not collateral damage.
• 56:37
  They're actually part of the occupying force.
• 56:39
  It's just not...
• 56:41
  In the ideology of Algerian liberation against the French colonialists or something like that, it is totally legitimate to target civilians in the eyes of the liberation ideology because they're not just civilians.
• 56:53
  They're complicit participants in an oppressive movement.
• 56:59
  colonial project that they have no right to be participating in.
• 57:02
  And that is foundational to the meaning of Intifada in the context of Israel-Palestine.
• 57:08
  So it becomes kosher, pardon the use of that word, to blow up buses full of kids on their way to school because there are no innocents in that process.
• 57:20
  Now, I understand there are different definitions of that.
• 57:23
  And then the globalized part, the globalized means let's take this out of the localized area of the Middle East and let's globalize it.
• 57:31
  Well, we've just seen what, yes, okay, congratulations.
• 57:34
  You just globalized the Insofada.
• 57:35
  Like you had a no holds barred attempt to globalize.
• 57:42
  To globalize the inter-parleter.
• 57:43
  Well, yes.
• 57:44
  I mean to perform what you call it, a collective punishment on the people who are responsible for the Zionist project in a global fashion.
• 57:53
  Yeah.
• 57:55
  But at the same time, as you define it that way, I know for a fact that if you ask Grace
• 58:00
  That is not the definition.
• 58:01
  Exactly.
• 58:02
  Yes, you're right.
• 58:03
  You're right.
• 58:03
  But I mean, I did say you would have to be like willfully stupid.
• 58:06
  And she probably, no offense.
• 58:11
  I'll allow people to draw whatever conclusions they want to.
• 58:15
  I'll throw metaphorical punches at Joel Jenkins, Caitlin Johnstone.
• 58:20
  There's a lot of people I'm happy to go after.
• 58:22
  I'm not going to go after it.
• 58:23
  I'm not going to go after the beloved heroine of Australian feminism.
• 58:28
  I think at the end, it just comes back to that.
• 58:31
  whether or not my intentions are to hurt you and you take my language as hurtful, in any other context, for any other community, we would then go, okay, I'll change my language.
• 58:47
  For example, people of color.
• 58:48
  We hated the phrase colored people.
• 58:50
  We said people of color.
• 58:52
  Instead, I don't know if it's an improvement, but it's what's happened.
• 58:55
  This is the only case.
• 58:58
  where because of Israel, people on the left have this carte blanche to then say whatever they want.
• 59:06
  And it doesn't matter how hurtful, offensive, fierce, frightful, intimidating it is to Jewish people, because Israel exists, so we can say whatever we want as long as they're there.
• 59:19
  It's almost like...
• 59:21
  If the hope of one day Israel no longer committing genocide in Gaza and no longer being an apartheid state does come true, we're really going to deprive a lot of people of a lot of convenient justifications to be anti-Semitic.
• 59:34
  And that will really suck for them as well, it sounds like.
• 59:36
  No, I mean, I think that is true.
• 59:38
  And just to expand on what I said earlier about anti-Semitism always taking on a different face.
• 59:45
  I know this sounds...
• 59:46
  I used to think this was...
• 59:48
  sort of a stupid thing.
• 59:49
  I mean, I used to just sort of cringe because there's something almost supernatural about it.
• 59:53
  It's almost like we're talking about anti-Semitism as if it was like a shape-shifting demon that like possesses society.
• 1:00:00
  I don't mean it that way, but I do think that it actually functions a bit like that in the way that memes...
• 1:00:07
  can.
• 1:00:08
  That narratives and stories, the hero's journey, or the role of the elder grandmother in society, or I don't know, the fact that the ocean and Poseidon always have particular resonances, or astrology.
• 1:00:26
  There are just...
• 1:00:28
  things that we've sort of inherited and accreted over time in civilization that we reach for that keep resurfacing and keep waxing and waning.
• 1:00:36
  And I do think anti-Semitism, like, I don't know how it started initially, but once it got a toehold, the scapegoating of Jews, the sense that Jews are the other, that they have a weird loyalty to each other that is unique among peoples, that is not shared by, you know, which is...
• 1:00:56
  Crazy, because of course Jews have an allegiance to each other.
• 1:00:58
  So do Sri Lankans.
• 1:01:02
  So do gay people.
• 1:01:03
  But this idea that there's something inherently suspect about them, once it's got a foothold, it really does then rise and fall and spread and mutate culturally as a brain virus that does seem to almost function like...
• 1:01:21
  a thing.
• 1:01:21
  And so when I talk about it, I don't mean to sound like I'm sort of, you know, woo woo.
• 1:01:25
  I'm just talking about it as a phenomenon.
• 1:01:27
  But in the, you know, in the pre-World War II era in Western Europe, cosmopolitanism was sort of like the most suspect thing.
• 1:01:40
  Like, you know, people, you know, it was a time when people thought that, you know, fatherland and country were important.
• 1:01:47
  And
• 1:01:47
  So Jews were cosmopolitans.
• 1:01:49
  They were painted as being these sort of airy-fairy traitors to the strong, upstanding nationalist backbone.
• 1:01:58
  Nowadays, nationalist backbones are out of favour, and what's in favour is post-colonial guilt, reconciliation, an appreciation of the plight of traditionally marginalised communities, especially brown-skinned ones, especially Muslims,
• 1:02:13
  And so, you know, it's a perfect fitting into the narrative, into that kind of narrative of the preconceptions about right and wrong that elites hold in Western societies, that Israel is behaving in ways that are precisely consistent with what you would –
• 1:02:32
  I guess, norm violations that trigger the specific preferences of our people at our time.
• 1:02:37
  And you can go back and look at the way that anti-Semitism showed up in Russia in the 1800s and take it all the way back.
• 1:02:43
  It's always that the Jews are guilty of the thing that elites in that society regard as being the most debased thing.
• 1:02:52
  And today that is...
• 1:02:56
  I mean, it sounds weird that genocide would ever have been in favour, but today it's particularly out of favour.
• 1:03:03
  I think there's a Tariq Ali.
• 1:03:05
  He is a Pakistani English, British intellectual.
• 1:03:11
  And he once said that if, you know, I'm paraphrasing here, but if Israel just stopped persecuting the Palestinians, anti-Semitism would end.
• 1:03:20
  And I thought it was one of the dumbest things I'd ever heard because I was like, oh, okay, Israel existed before 1948.
• 1:03:25
  I didn't realize that.
• 1:03:26
  Like, you know, that was the real reason behind this.
• 1:03:30
  Similarly, I agree.
• 1:03:33
  And again, it's something I struggle with because I completely agree with your point of view, that it unfortunately is a container in which whatever you pour into it takes its shape.
• 1:03:44
  And at the same time, it is a litmus test for society.
• 1:03:51
  what the fears, concerns, paranoias, prejudices of the society is by what they reflect onto the Jewish population.
• 1:04:00
  And I think totally that is true.
• 1:04:02
  I didn't, I used to personally believe it was only limited to misogyny.
• 1:04:07
  So the thing I'd learnt in university was one of my lecturers had once said that you can tell everything about a society by how it treats its women.
• 1:04:15
  I think that's very true.
• 1:04:17
  But I also think
• 1:04:18
  But also how it treats its Jews is also a very good litmus test as well.
• 1:04:22
  Or at least what it believes it's Jews to be secretly guilty of.
• 1:04:25
  Exactly.
• 1:04:25
  Or it would be Jews to be, because some societies like Pakistan, etc., just don't have Jews anymore.
• 1:04:31
  But at the same time.
• 1:04:33
  The problem sits because there's that part of me that grew up with a lot of anti-Semitism, etc., ingrained as well.
• 1:04:39
  And also part of me that is very, very connected to pro-Palestinian arguments, causes, beliefs, which goes, yes, but then believing and saying the thing that you just said, which I do agree with.
• 1:04:52
  allows people to bury the problems and crimes that Israel is committing against the Palestinian people.
• 1:04:58
  I completely agree.
• 1:04:59
  And that's the problem.
• 1:05:01
  Therein lies, like, so, like, that was the thing that I, the struggle I had with the Dara Horn interview I heard on the podcast where,
• 1:05:08
  She has this beautiful explanation of why anti-Semitism, very similar to yours, is anti-Semitism is a she's like it is the big lie.
• 1:05:16
  It is the lie that transcends time.
• 1:05:18
  It has been in societies always.
• 1:05:20
  It will continue to be in society always.
• 1:05:22
  And thinking it is just a unique problem is not understanding the scale of the problem.
• 1:05:28
  And then she went on to say, and all the criticism of Israel is rooted in that.
• 1:05:33
  Yeah, I think it's just such an illogical – it's just a non sequitur.
• 1:05:37
  It's a non sequitur.
• 1:05:38
  Like, take this as an analogy.
• 1:05:40
  I mean, just to pull something out of my bum, I haven't thought about this before.
• 1:05:43
  But –
• 1:05:45
  Rape is something that always has existed and always will exist and currently exists.
• 1:05:53
  It is woven into the fabric of mostly males to feel on some level, some of them, an entitlement to get their rocks off and to treat...
• 1:06:07
  Females as objects, as sex objects.
• 1:06:09
  Or they're aroused by control and power and all that.
• 1:06:13
  Whatever it is, yes.
• 1:06:14
  But it's a phenomenon that you find everywhere in all times.
• 1:06:18
  Right.
• 1:06:18
  That does not mean that we don't have very good tools to turn the volume up and down on its incidence.
• 1:06:26
  We have a dial that can go very, very high in the direction of tolerating and expressing the kinds of toxic masculinity that lead to sexual violence.
• 1:06:38
  And then we can turn it in the other direction and we can get sexual violence down to as lower level as it's possible to reasonably expect, given that it is a pervasive thing that humankind has always lived with.
• 1:06:51
  So too is it with antisemitism.
• 1:06:54
  To say that it is a thing that is consistent across certainly Western civilization and the Arab world, you know, in a kind of a timeless way, is not to say that we don't have dials.
• 1:07:06
  And the Netanyahu government has been turning the dial up to 11 for 25 years now by behaving in ways that perfectly conform to everyone's preconceptions about cruel, calculating colonial Jews.
• 1:07:23
  So, I mean, both things can be true.
• 1:07:26
  There's, to kind of connect it back to the conversation we were having earlier about free speech and legislation and laws and improving society and the freedom it provides.
• 1:07:35
  I'm going to draw a long bow here.
• 1:07:36
  So give me a second.
• 1:07:37
  Okay.
• 1:07:38
  There's a Bill Burr stand up bit.
• 1:07:42
  I'm laughing just thinking of the man.
• 1:07:43
  Right.
• 1:07:44
  Yeah.
• 1:07:44
  One of the greatest comedians of all time.
• 1:07:46
  So he had this stand up bit about how there was a sandwich board outside a coffee shop, which said there was some misogynistic joke like, you know, um, um,
• 1:07:58
  we like our women like we like our coffee and punch.
• 1:08:02
  I can't, only the black within our, I cannot remember the language at all.
• 1:08:05
  But his joke was, and that a lot of people complained and they had the misogynistic domestic abuse joke taken off the sandwich board outside the coffee shop.
• 1:08:14
  And he's like, who exactly was the guy who was about to beat his wife and then saw that and was, no.
• 1:08:21
  Or the guy who had no intention of beating his wife and saw that and was like, oh, I got to swing at her now.
• 1:08:27
  And at the same size of joke, it works.
• 1:08:28
  And at the point, it works.
• 1:08:30
  But at the same time, the alternative to that point is that the more you say these things, the more you normalize these jokes, and the more you normalize that language, the more you allow people who do think that way, or allow people who are on the verge of thinking that way to then start thinking that way, right?
• 1:08:47
  And so the same thing applies here, where the more you normalize antisemitic language, whether it's coded or not,
• 1:08:57
  the more likely people are to become increasingly anti-Semitic, probably.
• 1:09:02
  And similarly, the more you take it away, I don't know if that removes it from society as much.
• 1:09:08
  And I guess the point I'm trying to make here is I don't even know myself where that balance lies in how much should a society say or not say things that are perceived as hateful objection, etc., etc.
• 1:09:21
  I just feel that that balance should be something negotiated by society.
• 1:09:28
  with itself and not imposed on the members of that society by legislation, because legislation is a hammer, not a scalpel.
• 1:09:37
  It is very good at shutting things down.
• 1:09:39
  So the perfect example is ABC, the national broadcaster here, Australia made a big, made a joke about a billionaire, Gina Reinhart.
• 1:09:47
  She is, the joke was a violent joke.
• 1:09:52
  And so the director of the ABC came out and said, we will no longer allow jokes with violence in them.
• 1:09:57
  And I'm like, comedy exists in violence.
• 1:09:59
  We have punchlines.
• 1:10:00
  You bomb, you die, you kill.
• 1:10:03
  That's this ridiculous law to now create.
• 1:10:05
  It's a metric against which comedy can't exist.
• 1:10:08
  Similarly, saying speech that does not intimidate, humiliate, insult, or offend should now be outlawed is not something that's enforceable because you're just...
• 1:10:21
  limit all speech.
• 1:10:23
  I mean, any speech is by the listener perceivable, perceivably different than by the speaker.
• 1:10:30
  What this reminds me of coming of, this brings us back to the walled garden idea, right?
• 1:10:33
  Where assuming that the walled garden, that the goal of the walled garden is to create a society in which there's greater conciliation and less intimidation and hostility inside it.
• 1:10:45
  It strikes me that the alternative to the walled garden, which America has done quite well, is to insist culturally on a set of norms that have to be in the number one.
• 1:10:59
  I've got a, can you hear me?
• 1:11:02
  Yeah.
• 1:11:02
  I've got an error clicking up.
• 1:11:04
  Just click away from that, John.
• 1:11:07
  No arrow here on Riverside.
• 1:11:08
  Okay, good.
• 1:11:10
  It's weird.
• 1:11:10
  It doesn't even give you an option to X out of it.
• 1:11:12
  It's just saying we can either troubleshoot or chat with support.
• 1:11:17
  Do you want to pause it and then... Should we just X out of it and reconnect?
• 1:11:30
  Will it still be in there somewhere?
• 1:11:32
  Just want to make sure we don't lose it.
• 1:11:36
  And why don't you chat with support on the side as well, but once we've got it back up.
• 1:12:01
  Hey, hey.
• 1:12:07
  Hey, mate.
• 1:12:08
  Yep.
• 1:12:08
  Does that work?
• 1:12:09
  We lose all of it.
• 1:12:10
  No, no.
• 1:12:10
  We've got it.
• 1:12:12
  Oh, that'd be great, wouldn't it?
• 1:12:13
  Oh, my God.
• 1:12:13
  I've had that before.
• 1:12:14
  Okay.
• 1:12:14
  Before I lose my train of thought, let me pick that up.
• 1:12:17
  Yes.
• 1:12:18
  The alternative to the walled garden, which America has done really well, I think, is to insist culturally upon everybody who comes to the country placing in the number one spot on their priority list, allegiance to that country.
• 1:12:33
  Okay.
• 1:12:34
  I used to be extremely anti-patriotic and anti-nationalist, and I was a universalist globalist, and I still sort of in my heart of hearts am.
• 1:12:43
  But I think there's a utility in having a very simple set of rules that you basically insist that people subscribe to.
• 1:12:52
  And in America, that might be that.
• 1:12:55
  You put your faith in the flag and the country over your commitment to any other country or ideology that you believe in freedom.
• 1:13:08
  And I suppose that's basically about it.
• 1:13:10
  It's the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, right?
• 1:13:12
  Yeah, the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, right?
• 1:13:14
  But I mean, most people don't even think about it that way.
• 1:13:17
  It's just that if you gave them a list of identities and you asked them to rank them, then I think that in the United States, American and probably the state that they belong to would be invariably in the top three or five, if not always in the top one and two spots.
• 1:13:37
  Whereas in Australia, I think there'd be a whole bunch of other things
• 1:13:40
  First.
• 1:13:41
  Well, so we, I, yeah.
• 1:13:42
  So I don't know if, so the alternative to the, the, the way of doing the walled garden in a way that works, and you're just making me think of this now because of your, your pouncing on the word conciliation would be either,
• 1:13:54
  If you have a disagreement with some... To instantiate the cultural norm that if you have a disagreement with somebody, you have to sit down with them and break bread and actually flesh it out in a spirit of intellectual empathy where you're trying to understand each other a little bit better.
• 1:14:09
  That's hard work, but as you say, it's the work that I try to do, that I've committed my career to, and I don't think it's so hard that it's beyond the ken of normal people to take a crack at.
• 1:14:22
  And if you're not going to do that, then you need to get rid of the idea of the walled garden of conciliation, where we're all skipping through the flowers with holding hands and singing, and require everybody, essentially, to sign up to the idea that,
• 1:14:43
  Your first allegiance is to Australia.
• 1:14:46
  Australia is a part of Western civilization.
• 1:14:48
  Australia is a democracy that is multicultural and also based on Anglo-Saxon law, and that has to be your first allegiance.
• 1:14:59
  But unless you grow the balls to do the latter, you're probably going to need to do some version of the former.
• 1:15:06
  Otherwise, you're going to balkanize into a splintered, unmanageable, quarreling set of tribes.
• 1:15:12
  Well, I mean, look, because within that, there's so many interesting...
• 1:15:17
  points.
• 1:15:18
  One is the America one person believes exists or should exist is very different from the America the other person believes exists and should exist, right?
• 1:15:26
  So what is America is different to different people within America as well, which is fascinating.
• 1:15:32
  Like, at the end of the day, I still love America as a concept so much.
• 1:15:36
  I mean, you know, the promise of America was something that I think even other countries in the world somehow bought into, which is
• 1:15:47
  Australia does try it, but I don't know.
• 1:15:51
  There's a lot of limitations.
• 1:15:52
  So one of the things we do is the citizenship test.
• 1:15:55
  I've taken it because I had to become a citizen.
• 1:15:59
  And I remember that there was a problem with that because I took the citizenship test.
• 1:16:02
  And in that, one of the questions was, Australia has free speech.
• 1:16:05
  Yes or no?
• 1:16:06
  And I was like, well, technically, because of the existence of 18C and defamation law, I was like, but they don't want that.
• 1:16:14
  So when we click yes, I'm like, all right.
• 1:16:15
  So automatically, like now this is a problem in how I define Australia versus they do.
• 1:16:20
  But...
• 1:16:21
  I think part of the thing is America has a founding myth that is glorious.
• 1:16:26
  You know, they overcame the petition and the democracy.
• 1:16:29
  And then there's all of these, you know, overcame slavery, et cetera, et cetera.
• 1:16:32
  Australia's founding mythology is not a good sell.
• 1:16:36
  You know, what's funny is you and I could sit here and possibly between us name every single American president.
• 1:16:42
  from George Washington down to Donald Trump today.
• 1:16:46
  You know, we might have to brainstorm a little bit for some, but we'd probably get all of them.
• 1:16:50
  Name every Australian prime minister from Federation to today and I'll give you $100.
• 1:16:55
  Like, it's just not, no one does that.
• 1:16:57
  I think I can name literally about six prime ministers.
• 1:17:00
  I mean, Edmund Barton, was Parks a prime minister?
• 1:17:04
  Yeah.
• 1:17:05
  No, I didn't.
• 1:17:05
  Henry Parks?
• 1:17:06
  No, Henry Parks.
• 1:17:08
  Jono's shaking his head.
• 1:17:09
  Who was Henry Parks then?
• 1:17:10
  He was a founding father.
• 1:17:11
  Yeah.
• 1:17:12
  Yeah, Jono, look up Henry Parks, Jono.
• 1:17:14
  I know we have our father's name Henry Parks.
• 1:17:15
  Yes, Henry Parks.
• 1:17:19
  And then you fast forward to basically 1950.
• 1:17:22
  And then we could probably do Menzies onwards.
• 1:17:25
  Right.
• 1:17:25
  So, you know, Australia was founded by John Howard in 1987.
• 1:17:28
  You know, like that's where we are.
• 1:17:30
  So as a country, we're kind of missing that part.
• 1:17:33
  And you can't manufacture that.
• 1:17:35
  But I'm not saying that you need that.
• 1:17:37
  I don't think you need that, actually.
• 1:17:39
  I don't think that you need the glorious, you know, rebellious narrative of a nation's founding necessarily.
• 1:17:49
  I think what you need is...
• 1:17:50
  I think it helps, though.
• 1:17:51
  It doesn't hurt.
• 1:17:52
  Doesn't hurt for sure.
• 1:17:53
  I mean, but I think you can, I guess what I'm groping for is a way for the old school left, the left that gave us the civil rights movement, the left that gave us gay marriage, the left that fought, the left that got its hands dirty, the left that was on the field.
• 1:18:15
  The Greens party, for example, right.
• 1:18:16
  Well, no, I actually don't mean something as partisan as that.
• 1:18:19
  I just mean the enlightenment.
• 1:18:23
  I mean basically like – and I shouldn't call it the left necessarily.
• 1:18:26
  Conservatives will hate me for that.
• 1:18:28
  But I mean – and the –
• 1:18:33
  the instinct in human nature that we can strive to do better, to live together and to uplift each other, which sometimes comes across in conservatism.
• 1:18:43
  It might be an Edmund Burke and or John Stuart Millian kind of conception.
• 1:18:47
  If you're talking in the 1700s or 1800s, but yeah,
• 1:18:51
  the force that extended the franchise to everyone, the force of the female suffragettes, the force of, I guess, the expansion of freedom inside the liberal project, it was an aggressive, forceful, passionate...
• 1:19:10
  I'm thinking of Christopher Hitchens.
• 1:19:11
  I'm thinking of voices of...
• 1:19:14
  Early Hitch, that is.
• 1:19:15
  I'm thinking of voices of...
• 1:19:18
  Furious secularism and reason, fighting in a jungle of religious delusion and tribal craziness.
• 1:19:27
  And we just have become extremely queasy about that because it feels a bit colonial.
• 1:19:33
  It feels a bit white.
• 1:19:34
  It feels a bit...
• 1:19:35
  British Empire.
• 1:19:37
  So we sort of use slogans like Western civilization, but we have to find a way to construct a narrative that we can take to the imam who is preaching anti-Western and sexist and anti-Semitic and homophobic shit and say, no, that's not okay here.
• 1:19:55
  You can do it.
• 1:19:55
  We're not going to arrest you for it, but just so that everybody knows, we're not going to be queasy about calling it out as bullshit because it doesn't...
• 1:20:02
  align with this thing that we are all requiring ourselves to agree with in order to earn the right and to accept the responsibilities of being an Australian who loves Australia.
• 1:20:13
  And I don't know what... And I'm not just saying the imam.
• 1:20:15
  I mean, you also say that to the pro-Israel activist who's sending secret text messages to the chair of the Australian Broadcasting Corporation to have people fired because they're doing the bidding of a foreign country.
• 1:20:28
  And you can say...
• 1:20:29
  Australian foreign policy and Australian media is not going to be bullied by foreign countries.
• 1:20:34
  You know, we believe in free speech because of this precept, this box in which, you know, we're trying to construct our own lives.
• 1:20:42
  And we just don't – we have lost any ability if we ever had it to have that conversation.
• 1:20:46
  So I don't know if that's true.
• 1:20:48
  I think they're in – I'm very optimistic.
• 1:20:52
  And I feel like I don't know whether that's a contrarian in me.
• 1:20:54
  I'm just being optimistic because everyone's being pessimistic right now.
• 1:20:56
  But my optimism comes from a couple of things.
• 1:20:59
  One is my gripe in that example with the pro-Israel guy texting the director of the ABC.
• 1:21:05
  Is it with the pro-Israel guy?
• 1:21:07
  Because everyone has a right to contact the ABC and issue a complaint.
• 1:21:11
  My gripe is with the director of the ABC who gives more weight to one person contacting than another person who might contact him.
• 1:21:18
  Yes, true.
• 1:21:20
  I curate literary festival in Adelaide and, you know, the festival has pressures on it all the time about, you know, what about these people?
• 1:21:28
  What about those groups?
• 1:21:29
  And what about this person or that person?
• 1:21:31
  And we stand up to that pressure because we have a very firm belief around free speech.
• 1:21:36
  You know, it's something I find isn't hard to put into impact or effect if you are just willing to take a moment to consider what's important.
• 1:21:45
  Democratic values are more important.
• 1:21:47
  But at the same time, the people who are right now, arguably, I'm going to make a very contentious point, are saying to the gay mom,
• 1:21:55
  Now, you can say what you want to say, but at the same time, we will fight for your Volterian right to say what you want to say, even though we vehemently disagree with it.
• 1:22:04
  Are the people that are derided all the time, which is the gays for Gaza or the queers for Gaza groups.
• 1:22:11
  And, you know, the argument I always put to them is, hey, if you go to Gaza, you'll be thrown off a roof by Hamas.
• 1:22:17
  And they're going, yeah, sure.
• 1:22:19
  But we still want to fight for the rights of the Gazans too.
• 1:22:22
  continue to be people with self-determination the same way we are here in Australia.
• 1:22:27
  So sometimes I think the idea that there are people who in the past used to fight for rights and take it to the barracks and contest concepts and ideas in the open market of free speech, but they aren't there anymore, I think is dismissing the people who are doing it.
• 1:22:47
  They're just doing it in ways that make people currently
• 1:22:50
  uncomfortable, which I think was true at the time, even of those people.
• 1:22:54
  There were, if you look at the early first wave, second wave feminist movements, there were parts of that movement, fairly sizable parts that today you look at and go, well, that was obviously impractical.
• 1:23:04
  They were never going to live in a women's own society.
• 1:23:07
  Why was that even a thing they were fighting for?
• 1:23:09
  But they were fighting for it because every group needs its forward, you know, advanced troops, its shock troops, its whatever.
• 1:23:16
  And in the end, the society balanced it out into a more evenly spread version of progressive acceptance of women's role.
• 1:23:37
  ridiculous ideas that we now take for granted would have been.
• 1:23:40
  I mean, this has always been my criticism of, you know, in particular my colleagues on the sort of social justice left who regarded as being self-evident that they always would have stood up to slavery or they always would have been champions of, you know, they're demonising Thomas Jefferson for having owned slaves.
• 1:24:02
  And my point has always been I know for certain,
• 1:24:06
  that you would not have been an abolitionist in the era of slavery, because to do so, you would have to temperamentally be someone who is extremely willing to buck the norms of their peers and take outlandish, courageous moral positions.
• 1:24:27
  So for you to be the type of person who would be anti-slavery in a society where slavery was the norm...
• 1:24:34
  you would have to be demonstrating to me now, either by being a total vegan or by never flying on a plane because of climate change or even just by bucking the norms of your peers that you're that type of person.
• 1:24:50
  Now, the fact that you're constantly banging on about how bad racism is...
• 1:24:55
  That is exactly the sort of thing that you get reinforcement from your peers about.
• 1:24:59
  I mean, you are just preaching the mainstream orthodoxy at the moment.
• 1:25:02
  Of course, we all know that racism is bad.
• 1:25:04
  You're just saying it more emphatically than the rest of us are.
• 1:25:07
  In other words, you're a conformist, and a conformist today is anti-slavery, and a conformist then was pro-slavery.
• 1:25:15
  So don't tell me that you would have been anti-slavery back then.
• 1:25:17
  then you're not temperamentally suited to it.
• 1:25:19
  You would have to be proving something that seems totally batshit crazy.
• 1:25:24
  You would have to be arguing for that right now, and then I might believe that you would have been doing the same back then.
• 1:25:29
  But in your analogy of the gays for Gaza or something, I do think it matters what it is that the extreme person who's taking the unlikely position believes in.
• 1:25:42
  I'm arguing, I'm not arguing that we've gotten bad at making unreasonable demands that are hard for others to understand.
• 1:25:53
  I'm arguing that classical liberals have gotten bad at doing that on behalf of liberalism because that has become tarnished.
• 1:26:03
  with post-colonial guilt, understandably, and sort of whiteness and so on.
• 1:26:08
  The gay, the queers who are marching for Gaza, they may have a laudable desire to liberate an oppressed people, but I don't think that they're motivated by a desire for conversation, conciliation and understanding in Australia.
• 1:26:29
  And the climate activists who are chaining themselves to, you know, railway tracks to disrupt everyone's morning commute or throwing paint on paintings are behaving in ways that are perfectly consistent with some of the great moral heroes of all time.
• 1:26:43
  If you, you know, compare them to the early suffragettes or something.
• 1:26:49
  But it matters what they're trying to do, whether they will achieve those goals, and what their ultimate worldview is.
• 1:26:56
  So, you know, the claim is not nobody's being audacious.
• 1:27:01
  The claim is that the wrong kinds of people are being audacious because they have fairly infantile and still quite identitarian and tribalistic ideas about what they're trying to achieve.
• 1:27:12
  Instead of working towards what I regard as being the light on the hill, which is finding a way to understand each other better in a terrain that privileges classical liberal ideas of tolerance and pluralism and non-tribalism and individualism.
• 1:27:30
  Well, I think if I can summarize that, what you're saying is they're not being goal-oriented or objective-oriented, you know, to use corporate language for a second there.
• 1:27:40
  And that's a fairly valid critique, I think, of a lot of the left right now.
• 1:27:46
  I don't know how we get there.
• 1:27:49
  I think there's a lot of...
• 1:27:53
  I mean...
• 1:27:54
  The problem for me, it all comes back to free speech, right?
• 1:27:56
  So like everyone has their own bed bear, if they're a bug bear, if they're a women's rights activist, they'll say any society's problems can be rooted in misogyny.
• 1:28:06
  Dara Horn would say every society's problems are rooted in its understanding and treatment of Jews.
• 1:28:09
  I would say it's always about its relationship with free speech.
• 1:28:13
  I think the left lost its way a lot when it started seeing free speech, not as a boon, but as a threat to society.
• 1:28:25
  I remember I was talking to John Safran about this years ago.
• 1:28:28
  I'd done a documentary for Radio National on free speech.
• 1:28:31
  And in that, he was saying that it was so funny when he was growing up.
• 1:28:35
  It was the right that was the censorious ones, the ones who would say the Christian right who would censor books and comics and TV shows and movies and jokes and whatever.
• 1:28:44
  The big famous case, I don't know if you remember, was Piss Christ, which was an artist who put a crucifix in a jar of his own urine.
• 1:28:53
  Was Piss Christ an Australian phenomenon?
• 1:28:57
  I think it was an American one.
• 1:28:59
  I don't know why I remember.
• 1:29:00
  Piss Christ, yeah.
• 1:29:01
  What's his name?
• 1:29:02
  Who's the mayor of New York who then?
• 1:29:05
  Giuliani?
• 1:29:07
  Yes.
• 1:29:08
  Giuliani, I remember for some reason, making statements about how it's blasphemous and offensive and things like that, but it was protected under free speech laws.
• 1:29:15
  But, you know, that was the right.
• 1:29:18
  They shut down art and creativity and et cetera, et cetera.
• 1:29:21
  And then that just in my lifetime started happening from the left.
• 1:29:26
  Everything became offensive.
• 1:29:27
  And, you know, we've talked about this.
• 1:29:28
  Everyone's talked about this endlessly about, you know, the safe spaces conversations and this is offensive and that is offensive.
• 1:29:35
  And everything's triggering.
• 1:29:37
  And now I'm shaking and crying all the time.
• 1:29:39
  And all of these things came about.
• 1:29:41
  And I think what happened was when the left stopped championing free speech.
• 1:29:46
  They stopped, A, having conversations amongst themselves that were open and challenging and shutting those down.
• 1:29:53
  And then B, lost their own moral place in society as something that was an arbiter of justice and instead became just this group that is easy to dismiss because they're always yelling, crying, telling people to shut up and how hurt they are.
• 1:30:12
  And now they are easy to dismiss for that purpose.
• 1:30:14
  Yes, absolutely.
• 1:30:15
  Yeah, I know.
• 1:30:15
  I mean, I think all of those are good points.
• 1:30:17
  It reminds me also of the bigger conversation that we're kind of sort of circling around, or that's the elephant in the room here, which is the rise of a kind of a populist, xenophobic, anti-immigrant sentiment, not just in Australia, but elsewhere, where the limits that we've tried to place on speech around some of these issues,
• 1:30:41
  issues in order to ensure that we are, you know, I guess it's the walled garden.
• 1:30:46
  You know, this is the walled garden phenomenon coming back to bite me on the arse because I'm frequently a critic of the way in which, but actually I don't think, no, I don't think it's fair to say that this is exactly the thing that I'm talking about, which is coming back to bite me on the arse.
• 1:31:05
  The difference is there has been a...
• 1:31:10
  A consensus among elite opinion makers in universities and media outlets, journalists, policymakers, activist groups, about the right way of thinking about a set of issues, which we have sometimes called wokeness in the past 10 or 15 years, but is a much bigger phenomenon than that.
• 1:31:32
  I mean, this always happens, of course.
• 1:31:34
  Of course, powerful interest groups define their own worldview as the definition of good and bad and poo-poo, other ones, whether that's anti-communists in 1950s America with McCarthyism or the Crusades all the way back.
• 1:31:55
  Yeah.
• 1:31:58
  The taboo about talking about immigration and the taboo about talking about the capacity of different migrant groups to integrate into liberal democracy is...
• 1:32:12
  And the taboo around expressing what you might call demographic anxiety or discomfort about a rapidly changing complexion of your neighbourhood main street.
• 1:32:27
  Not just here, but like in the UK where people can...
• 1:32:31
  There are English towns where you could take a snapshot of the high street in the era of the parents of people our age, and their parents and their parents and their parents and their parents and their parents and their parents and their parents and their parents, and it would all be peopled by people who looked roughly the same.
• 1:32:52
  And now all of a sudden, the people look completely different.
• 1:32:56
  Like, it may not be a bad thing.
• 1:32:58
  It may be a great thing.
• 1:33:00
  Now there's an Indian takeaway on the corner or whatever.
• 1:33:04
  But to talk about that was kind of taboo.
• 1:33:09
  It was like, we're all on the multiculturalism train and it's a great thing and our diversity is our strength.
• 1:33:15
  And anyone, any normie who wanted to be like, is it though?
• 1:33:19
  Like, can I, what if I sort of,
• 1:33:23
  do just want the street to look a bit the same as it did when my parents and grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents.
• 1:33:29
  Am I evil now?
• 1:33:30
  Am I like a bigot?
• 1:33:33
  The elite's imposition of its worldview of globalist, multiculturalist, sort of multi-ethnic nirvana onto everybody else is...
• 1:33:47
  was a sort of early, soft form of anti-free speechism.
• 1:33:54
  And the reason I think it's a little bit different from what I'm arguing for is it didn't make the case.
• 1:33:58
  I'm arguing for making the case, for getting your hands dirty and making the argument, and hearing opposition and framing the argument in terms that your opponents will understand.
• 1:34:07
  I'm arguing for what John Howard did on guns here, where he stood up to his own side, or what Obama did in his race speech, where he stood up to his own side and tried to articulate a vision of America that didn't pander to the left's idea about America being structurally racist.
• 1:34:26
  So it would require leftists to get real about...
• 1:34:30
  wokeness and to sort of have a reckoning and then to say, and this is what we believe and why we believe it.
• 1:34:36
  And if you don't agree, then absolutely.
• 1:34:38
  I want to hear you.
• 1:34:39
  I want to understand you.
• 1:34:41
  And now our failure to do that sort of means that One Nation and other populist right-wing anti-immigrant parties have suddenly just inhaled all of the oxygen that's been lying there latently and that has found no other escape there.
• 1:34:57
  Well, that comes like, I wrote a column a few weeks ago for Crikey, which is a local news magazine, online magazine for American listeners.
• 1:35:07
  It's called Crikey.
• 1:35:08
  It's a terrible name.
• 1:35:09
  It's like having a British magazine called Corblimy.
• 1:35:12
  Like, it's just like, I always joke that it's a name for an Australian newspaper in a Will Ferrell movie about Australia.
• 1:35:20
  Yes, that's so true.
• 1:35:22
  It's so true.
• 1:35:22
  It's truth news or something.
• 1:35:24
  So anyway.
• 1:35:24
  Sammy, just to hold that thought, but I just want to give a nod to Michael Moynihan, my friend in New York who- Who's one of my favorite people to listen to.
• 1:35:32
  Yeah, he's awesome.
• 1:35:33
  So he hosts, he co-hosts the fifth column.
• 1:35:36
  And when I was on it once, it was while I was hosting Weekend Breakfast on ABC TV.
• 1:35:42
  And so I said, oh, you know, now I'm a television host as well.
• 1:35:46
  So I host the morning television show in Australia.
• 1:35:51
  And he goes, what's it called?
• 1:35:53
  Wake up, you cunts.
• 1:35:56
  Crikey is the newspaper version of Wake Up, You Cunts.
• 1:36:01
  Very much so.
• 1:36:02
  And look, in terms of the stuff I published there, some would argue it's very much in the same tone.
• 1:36:06
  No, it's good.
• 1:36:07
  Your column's good and Crikey's good.
• 1:36:08
  I'm a subscriber to Crikey, you know, among many other publications.
• 1:36:11
  It's well worth reading.
• 1:36:13
  But, yes, the point, the article that you're talking about is the reason I wanted to get you on the show.
• 1:36:16
  So I'm glad after an hour and 35 minutes we finally got around to it.
• 1:36:20
  Well, I mean, the article I was talking about was Pauline Hanson, the leader of the One Nation Party, being the anti-immigrant party, etc.
• 1:36:28
  in Australia, was recently censored by the court for a tweet that she put out against Marine Farooqi, who is a member of the Greens Party.
• 1:36:42
  The queen had just died.
• 1:36:43
  Maim Faruqi had said, I cannot mourn the genocidal leader of a colonial power.
• 1:36:50
  And Pauline Hanson had said, well, then piss off back to Pakistan.
• 1:36:53
  And it became a court case.
• 1:36:55
  And then basically, you know, Pauline Hanson was told that she, I think she, Maim Faruqi did not seek damages to,
• 1:37:05
  So the court declined proposing orders for corrective pin tweet, if I remember correctly.
• 1:37:09
  But I don't know whether the damages are paid or legal fees are paid.
• 1:37:13
  But regardless, you were.
• 1:37:14
  I mean, this will be amazing to American listeners, which comes back.
• 1:37:18
  No, no, no.
• 1:37:19
  I just mean the fact that a court was involved.
• 1:37:22
  So all she said was piss off back to Pakistan.
• 1:37:25
  Yes.
• 1:37:26
  Right?
• 1:37:26
  Like that is absolutely protected in the United States under the First Amendment, no question about it.
• 1:37:31
  Someone denigrates your head of state who's recently deceased and you say if you don't like it,
• 1:37:39
  I mean, the president of the United States says shit worse than that to migrants all the time.
• 1:37:44
  He's got Africa shit for all countries.
• 1:37:46
  And this was illegal.
• 1:37:47
  Was this because of 18C that it was illegal?
• 1:37:49
  Yes, it was not on 18C.
• 1:37:50
  However, what's interesting is if you read the court judgment and orders...
• 1:37:55
  The court themselves said that this was close to, if not at the core of political communication, and that the 18C, 18D, you know, wide net offend and insult qualifications were very vaguely applicable here.
• 1:38:10
  And the court seemed like they were actually quite uncomfortable with applying it.
• 1:38:14
  Yet, all three judges unanimously upheld the law.
• 1:38:17
  And to me, that became this problem of...
• 1:38:21
  you now have a situation where sometimes the judges themselves do not agree with the judgment that they are forced to pass because the law already exists.
• 1:38:30
  And that, to me, goes back to the question, what exactly was the benefit of this?
• 1:38:34
  Did it make people less racist towards Ma'in Faruqi?
• 1:38:37
  Did it make Pauline Hanson think that she is no longer, Ma'in Faruqi should no longer piss off back where she came from?
• 1:38:43
  The benefit of this, to me, is nil-
• 1:38:47
  when you compare it with the detriment it provides, which is now yet another legal case which can serve as precedent towards censoring people who are engaging in political speech.
• 1:38:57
  And that, to me, is the problem.
• 1:38:59
  Yeah, I mean, also, it's just, why are we wasting a court's time on two public figures arguing with each other about this?
• 1:39:09
  So Maureen Faruqi, who is...
• 1:39:13
  I think it's probably relevant to mention that she's a Pakistani Muslim Australian, right?
• 1:39:18
  So it's not that the Pakistan thing comes out of nowhere.
• 1:39:22
  And she's very left wing and she's very, I mean.
• 1:39:25
  I may have once described her as the minister of standing next to science, which I think pissed her off.
• 1:39:33
  She stands next to signs and I find I have found her when I've interviewed her in the past to be somewhat I don't want to say disingenuous but somewhat tricky to pin down on.
• 1:39:51
  I think the word is performative.
• 1:39:53
  Performative and a little bit shape-shifting in terms of like, I'd really just, I'd love to get her on the show and just talk about Islam and Islamism and Zionism and jihadism and progressivism and cohesion and all of that.
• 1:40:07
  But I just get the sense that she wouldn't be up for that.
• 1:40:10
  But if you are, Maureen, come on the show.
• 1:40:13
  She came out of the court recently.
• 1:40:14
  house after this, after she'd sued her fellow parliamentarian for saying piss off back to Pakistan, declaring that, and this is from your piece, hate speech is not free speech.
• 1:40:31
  And you write, well, that's an emotionally satisfying slogan, but it's an intellectually evasive one.
• 1:40:36
  Hate speech is speech in the same way a shit sandwich remains a sandwich.
• 1:40:41
  Yes.
• 1:40:42
  Yeah, and I think that's a good point.
• 1:40:44
  The original judgment against Pauline Hanson said that because she has a high profile and she has political power, that amplified the intimidating and silencing effect of her words.
• 1:40:59
  I mean, so what?
• 1:41:02
  Who gives a shit?
• 1:41:03
  Like, what are we talking about?
• 1:41:04
  Like, so she's a public person making a public point against another public figure, both of whom chose to be in the spotlight.
• 1:41:14
  Like, I kind of understand...
• 1:41:16
  I mean, maybe I'm getting a little bit like power imbalance-y and woke-y here, but I'd sort of understand if there was like a...
• 1:41:22
  If Alex Jones is hounding some ordinary civilian and turning their life upside down by telling them to piss off back to Pakistan.
• 1:41:31
  Right.
• 1:41:31
  That's one thing.
• 1:41:33
  Two parliamentarians who are both famous arguing with each other and one of them is a bit impolite.
• 1:41:39
  On Twitter?
• 1:41:40
  Yeah, on Twitter.
• 1:41:41
  I mean, it's almost like the invocation... Like if she'd said...
• 1:41:46
  piss off back to where you came from without saying Pakistan, would it have been different?
• 1:41:52
  If she'd said, shut the fuck up, would it have been different?
• 1:41:57
  If it had not been a Pakistani Muslim parliamentarian but an Irish Australian parliamentarian and she'd said, piss off back to Ireland, would it have been the same?
• 1:42:10
  It's like so subjective.
• 1:42:14
  And that's the problem I had where everyone on, you know, you're talking about people on the left not being able to address people on the left, but everyone, it's the same reason why I write so many columns talking about anti-Semitism versus Israel-Gaza because people on my side of politics,
• 1:42:29
  are in agreement, I'm in agreement with them about a lot of the things we have shared beliefs about.
• 1:42:34
  The blind spots, or at least what I perceive as the blind spots, are the ones that I want to address because they're my audience.
• 1:42:39
  They're the ones reading Crikey.
• 1:42:41
  They're the ones reading my columns.
• 1:42:43
  And if I say things to them that get them angry, but at least get them to think, I'd much rather that than just having them applaud for me, right?
• 1:42:51
  So it's that thing, it's a stand-up comedian thing.
• 1:42:53
  I never like stand-up comedians where the audience is just clapping the entire time.
• 1:42:56
  If you're not laughing, then you're not, I'm not doing my job.
• 1:43:00
  And so it's the same impulse.
• 1:43:02
  And I felt like in this case, everyone was like, yes, Marine Farooqi won.
• 1:43:06
  And I'm like, what did we win?
• 1:43:07
  What exactly was the victory here other than a court making a judgment that sets a bad precedent?
• 1:43:13
  That's what I saw here.
• 1:43:14
  And so that for me, yeah.
• 1:43:15
  Also, it's so tribal.
• 1:43:17
  It's so predictably, yawn-inducingly tribal to be like, we won because the bad lady we don't like lost.
• 1:43:25
  Yeah.
• 1:43:26
  Yeah, okay, if the shoe was on the other foot and, like, you know, someone...
• 1:43:29
  If Jacinta Price had sued...
• 1:43:30
  Exactly.
• 1:43:31
  Who's a conservative parliamentarian, had sued... And if she'd sued Marine Faruqi or Adam Bant, for example, who's a white man, for racist language and 18C had said Adam Bant is wrong...
• 1:43:42
  They would have been like, it's a ridiculous witch hunt.
• 1:43:44
  Everyone knows that Adam Bant's heart is pure...
• 1:43:47
  And the law is terrible and this is fascism and that's my thing is that I just – I struggle with double standards.
• 1:43:55
  I would much rather there be consistency of application of ethics.
• 1:43:59
  I'd like triple standards.
• 1:44:01
  I realize that you have to go because you've got another recording.
• 1:44:03
  I wanted to talk about the phenomenon of Pauline Hanson and One Nation, but I think we probably – we've gotten close enough.
• 1:44:10
  I think we've gotten close enough.
• 1:44:13
  No, it's lovely to talk to you as always.
• 1:44:16
  Likewise.
• 1:44:16
  Let's just shoot the shit about culture and liberalism whenever we get the opportunity.
• 1:44:23
  And do you want to direct people to...
• 1:44:25
  Yes, I have a podcast called News Weekly that's spelled W-E-A-K-L-Y.
• 1:44:32
  I did a writing pun on a audio format.
• 1:44:34
  That's how intelligent I am.
• 1:44:36
  Yeah, thank you.
• 1:44:37
  Just look up my name, Samisha.
• 1:44:38
  It'll come up in the podcast thing.
• 1:44:40
  It's a weekly news satire podcast.
• 1:44:42
  It's getting more and more serious recently.
• 1:44:45
  And otherwise, you can just find me on the same interwebs that everyone else exists on.
• 1:44:49
  If you just Google around, I'm at the Festival of Dangerous Ideas, but I think that's sold out.
• 1:44:53
  So there's no point promoting that one.
• 1:44:55
  Oh, fabulous.
• 1:44:55
  Okay.
• 1:44:56
  Well, text me.
• 1:44:57
  It's not because of me.
• 1:44:57
  It's because Antoinette Latouf is on the panel.
• 1:44:59
  That's why.
• 1:44:59
  It's not because of me.
• 1:45:00
  Let's catch up while you're in town.
• 1:45:02
  I hope to see you at the festival.
• 1:45:03
  Would love to be prepped.
• 1:45:04
  Great.
• 1:45:04
  Thanks, Sammy.
• 1:45:05
  Thank you.
• 1:45:06
  Cheers.
• 1:45:06
  Bye.