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JUST JOSH: PROTESTERS AT SEINFELD · Uncomfortable Conversations with Josh Szeps

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G'day, humans. Welcome to the Safe Space for Dangerous Ideas. I'll tell you one space
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that was not safe for dangerous ideas, or even for very undangerous jokes. It was Jerry
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Seinfeld's show in Sydney last night, where I had the great fortune to be attending.
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He's a childhood hero of mine. I first saw Jerry when he was doing his, I'm telling you
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for the last time tour, which was in 1998, 26 years ago. I was fresh out of high school,
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huge fan of Seinfeld. He was retiring. All of the jokes, all of the material that he had accumulated
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throughout his entire life as he was putting the sitcom to bed. It was amazing. I mean, seeing him,
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it's like, you know, it's just seeing one of the greats. You know, the guy's 70 years old,
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almost 70 years old, and he is so sharp. I mean, he comes running out onto that stage sprinting,
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grabs the microphone stand. It drops to the floor. He wrestles the mic off it. His hair is all
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over the place. He's already sweating. He's so warmed up. People start taking photos of him on
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their, on their phones, despite the fact that in the foyer, of course, there have been huge signs
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saying no photograph, no photography, no video taping of the performance. And instead of trying
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to object to it, he's like, come on, come on to it. Take the videos, take the photos.
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And everyone pulls out their phones and he proceeds to essentially roast them, roast all of us
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for being phone adult addicts. And does, you know, this whole routine, which is absolutely hilarious
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opening material about our relationship to phones, about how things didn't really happen in
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our lives, unless we've captured them on the phones. He says, you know, people say you shouldn't
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be filming stuff on your phone. You should be there and enjoying your life. What life? He says,
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what life your life is here for the phone goes into a whole stick about how, you know, eight years
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later, the phone is going to suggest a photo to you or a video that will remind you of the fact
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that you are here tonight, which you will have missed because you are photographing it on your phone.
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Anyway, the first 20 minutes of the show is fantastic. Goes off without a hitch. And then we hear
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the protesters. Just a few rows behind me. A couple of noisy people pull out a Palestinian flag.
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Jerry stops talking. He goes, oh, here they are. Here they are. He's like, I hired these people.
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I hired him. They go on about stop killing Palestinian babies. They tell him that he's worthless
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because he went to Israel and thereby supported genocide. Anyway, there's some video footage that
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they took. You can have a look. Oh my God. Your conclusion is genocide. Shame on you.
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So that was that. And surprisingly enough, he didn't really do material about it. I mean, he did,
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there was one joke in response to it as the audience started booing these people. He said,
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keep on going. You've almost got him. You're winning them over. But beyond that, he didn't go into
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any stick, which I've heard him do on podcasts. So I know he has material about Gaza and about
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Israel. I was curious as to whether or not he isn't sure exactly where a Sydney crowd is going
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to land on this. I sort of wondered if maybe he was in New York. He probably would address it more.
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But being in Sydney and having seen that there were mobs of people waving Palestinian flags just
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days after October 7th on the footsteps of the opera house chanting something about Jews. It
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was initially reported that they were saying gas the Jews or kill the Jews. And now everyone's
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like, oh, no, they were simply saying where are the Jews? Either way, I don't want a mob of people
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screaming where are the Jews right after thousands of Jews have been kidnapped and slaughtered.
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And so maybe he just feels like that's one way of not getting the audience on side. But
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as a result of not really putting a button on that disruption, and of course the two people were
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escorted out by security within what 90 seconds, two minutes, something like that, he never quite
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regained his stride. The show never swore again after that. Now I could tell he was a little
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distracted. Most people wouldn't have, but you know, when you've kind of lost your train of
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thought, you go down one avenue and then you don't quite follow it up. You don't quite complete
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the bit. You move on to another bit. He couldn't remember exactly where he'd been. It was not the show
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that I would like to have seen. Still hilarious. I still love the guy, but they did some damage.
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And as Jerry said, while I was screaming at him about genocide and about free Palestine from
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the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. He said, you know, I really don't care. This is
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for these people. These people have paid money to see me. You are disrupting them, not me.
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And disrupt if they did. So is this now the world that we live in? We're here in Australia,
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a multicultural, multi-ethnic, multi-religious democracy. It's not really possible to just go and see
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comedy without the most tepid of gestures towards Israel's right to defend itself on the part of
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the comedian gets transmuted into some genocidal homicidal tragedy that needs to be resisted by
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disrupting everybody else's enjoyment of a night out. I have to say once again, no one has been a
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bigger critic of Benjamin Netanyahu than I have. I've called him a corrupt little hack many,
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many times. I think what's going on in Gaza is a tragedy. I've been consistently opposed to
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all of the settlement building that Israel has been doing in the West Bank, the persistent lack
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of a rapprochement, of a road map for peace since 2008 when Netanyahu came to power. I agree with
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the slogan that it is the most unjewish thing in the world to make someone a refugee. We have been
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refugees for thousands of years. It's all we have ever been up until 1948. It's a moral calamity
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that there is this population of people who've been forced to live in squalid open air refugee camps
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essentially in perpetuity. Israel has to shoulder some of the blame for that, especially the current
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Israeli government that's been in power essentially since 2008. But Zionism is complicated.
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It doesn't seem complicated to the people who are waving the flags and disrupting Jerry's show.
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It doesn't even seem complicated to most of the people who I see commenting on it on social media.
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But setting aside the settlements, the fact that Israel has a military occupation of land
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that it conquered in 1967 when the Arab states tried to wipe it off the map, setting that aside,
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the question of whether or not Jews should have a right to their traditional homeland in some
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capacity, whether the same sort of gesture that we give towards Indigenous peoples everywhere,
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which is that they have a connection to the land that predates anyone else's and therefore have
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some standing to have some say over what happens to that land, that gesture which we make towards
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Indigenous Australians and Indigenous Americans does not apply to the Indigenous people of the
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Middle East is weird, shall we say. I would just want to quote before I go on here from a great
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piece in the Australian financial review by Amy Friedenberg who is a lawyer. Its entitled Zionism
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is about Jewishness, so anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism and it's a really interesting piece because this
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is a question that I've wrestled with a lot. When people talk about Zionism, they say we're not
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being anti-Semitic, we're just questioning Zionism and indeed there have been periods of my life
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where I have been an anti-Zionist in the sense that I think it's a bit retrograde, it's a bit 19th
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century to say that one ethnic group should possess a country. It's something that's been
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done a lot. I mean, Bangladesh was the Muslim bit of South Asia when the British pulled out.
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There are countless examples of people having some ethnic or religious heritage to a parcel of land
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and therefore regarding it as theirs, look at the Saudis. But I still think probably not a great
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look. Everywhere should try to be small or liberal, pluralistic, democratic and support the human
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rights of all of the people who live in that space. That is something that the original founders
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of Israel had as a vision. Although it was a Jewish state, you can be an Arab-Israeli citizen,
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there are Arabs in parliament, there are Arabs on the Supreme Court, you know, 20% of the Israeli
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population in Israel proper itself is Arab. So it is supposed to be a pluralistic place, certainly
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a place that's pluralistic with respect to women's rights and gay rights and so on in a way that
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is completely unrecognizable throughout the rest of the Arab world and the Muslim world.
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Nonetheless, the idea of Zionism does feel a bit old-fashioned and yet the way that anti-Zionism
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is being used at the moment and the way that free Palestine from the river to the sea is being used
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as if it were a morally obvious good is troubling and perplexing. I want to read from Amy
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Friedenberg's piece in the financial review because I found it thought-provoking as someone who
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does not think that anti-Zionism is necessarily anti-Semitism. But I may now believe that,
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at least in the way that Friedenberg frames it. She writes, Zionism is the belief in a right
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to self-determination for the Jewish people in their ancestral homeland, Israel,
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a land in which the Jewish people have had a continued presence and connection for over 3000 years.
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Israel and its capital, Jerusalem, have been at the very heart of the Jewish faith and its history.
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Sighted in biblical stories from the rule of King David from about 1000 BC to the destruction of
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the First Temple and the Second Temple by the Babylonians in 586 BC and then the Romans in 70 AD.
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The Old Testament is replete with references to Israel starting in the Book of Genesis as is
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the New Testament, including with the birth of Jesus, a Jew in Bethlehem. The vast majority of
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Jewish people in Australia and over the world write to Amy, identify as Zionists. Israel is central
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to Jewish customs and obligations, including the shattering of the glass at the conclusion of Jewish
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wedding ceremonies, which is a reminder of the destruction of the Temple, prayers that are recited
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facing the direction of Jerusalem, and concluding Passover meals with the words next year in Jerusalem,
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signifying the desire of the Jewish people to be able to return to their homeland in Israel.
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Once properly understood in this way, write to Amy, Zionism is clearly a characteristic of being
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Jewish. Just like any other religious belief or trait, it has nothing to do with the expansion
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of geographical borders or the right of any other peoples to own their self-determination,
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which are separate political arguments with vastly varied opinions among Zionists and non-Zionists
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alike. Accordingly, she writes, and because she's a lawyer, she's talking about the implications
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of this for anti-discrimination law and what is legal and illegal to say what should be considered
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properly racial vilification, for example. She writes, accordingly, treating someone unfavorably
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because they're a Zionist is to treat them unfavorably because they're an intrinsic element of their
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Jewishness and think to hear to why Jerry Seinfeld is being singled out, for example. Amy goes on
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to write, it is therefore discrimination and in contravention of state and federal anti-discrimination
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laws. This is no different to treating a practicing seek unfavorably for wearing a turban,
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treating a Muslim unfavorably for requesting breaks from work to pray,
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or treating a Catholic unfavorably because they adhere strictly to the teachings of the Catholic
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Church. Sacking employees for being a member of a Zionist WhatsApp group, Amy writes,
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would displaying signs at a university that say, Zionists not welcome, are clear examples
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of unfavorable treatment which would contravene state and federal legislation. However,
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she writes, expressions of anti-Zionism can manifest in other ways.
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Explicit threats to destroy the state of Israel or rid it of its Jewish inhabitants,
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for example, the chant from the river to the sea, she writes, are both anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic.
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In circumstances where half the world's Jewish population currently lives in Israel,
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to call for the elimination of Israel is to undermine the existence of Jewish people.
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Further, she writes, when anti-Zionist rhetoric perpetuates hate intimidation, again,
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think about what happened last night at Jerry Seinfeld, intimidation,
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expressions of anti-Zionism that threaten to destroy the state of Israel or at least rid it
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of its Jewish inhabitants, like the chant from the river to the sea, which they were chanting
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last night in the theater. Further, Amy writes, when anti-Zionist rhetoric perpetuates hate
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intimidation and violence towards Jewish people in our community, then it can only be understood
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as anti-Semitism. Similarly, when it's used to justify the resurfacing of tropes and conspiracy theories
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about Jewish people, it is clearly anti-Semitic. Think about all the social media posts that you've
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seen, or if you haven't seen them, you're lucky that I've seen, that say things like Zionists love
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the blood of babies. This is the oldest trope in the book. Amy writes, all this does not mean that
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someone can't criticize the government of Israel, or its military operations, or call for the end
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to this conflict and loss of innocent lives both in Gaza and Israel. However, there's a distinction
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between legitimate criticism of the Israeli government and sloganism that de-legitimizes the
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Jewish people or supports the destruction of Israel. What is it that the protesters were doing
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last night? Were they criticizing the Israeli government? No. They were sloganeering about
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the existence of Jewish people in the Middle East. Accordingly, Amy finally writes, while one can
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legitimately criticize the actions of Israel, its government, or defense force, or mourn the tragic
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loss of innocent lives, it's unacceptable and unlawful to engage in conduct that treats a person
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differently or unfavorably because of their core Jewish beliefs, including their belief in a
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homeland that is for being Zionist. Now, I suspect that a lot of people will hear about
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what happened at Seinfeld's show, and it wasn't just this show, it's been at many, many shows
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that Seinfeld has been doing. And they'll think, look, these people go too far, it's not right to
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disrupt a show, but their hearts in the right place. You know, at least they're supporting the
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dead babies. At least they're supporting an attempt to do something about the worst humanitarian
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catastrophe of their lives. In fact, one journalist who I follow and who I have a lot of respect for
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in most other respects in Australia is posting regularly on Instagram these snapshots of text
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that she's written about Gaza, one of which says, and I quote, what is unfolding in Gaza,
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what we are right now bearing witness to is one of the greatest atrocities in living memory.
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The killing of innocent people, men, women, children, the elderly, the infirm, the disabled,
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mothers, fathers, teachers, doctors, journalists is unequivocally, categorically wrong.
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There is no other side. She writes, there is no explanation, no justification, no context,
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no assurance, no documented history, or imagined future, no posturing, no promising, no
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professing. There is nothing, nothing, nothing, she writes, that changes this most basic of truths
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in this moment. There is only one side. She wrote on Instagram to her many, many followers,
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it is as Naomi Klein tells us in doppelganger to side with the child over the gun, no matter
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who's child or no matter who's gun. There is something so incontrovertible, she writes,
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about siding with a child over a gun, something so blindingly pure.
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Well, that's an easy way to avoid dealing with the complicated reality of the most intractable
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geopolitical problem that the world faces, isn't it? I would also note it's actually the same
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moral chess move that the Israeli far right did after October 7, where those of us who wanted to
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understand October 7 in the context of the persecution of Palestinians were told, no, no, there's
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no point in looking at context, just look at all the people who were being raped and slaughtered
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on October 7. That's all we need to look at. Don't talk about settlements, don't talk about
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a Palestinian homeland. This is just about October 7. Let's start the clock at midnight on October
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6 and let's just look at the atrocities. Let's ignore what Israel has been doing in Gaza. Let's
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ignore what Israel has been doing in the West Bank. Let's ignore all the failed peace talks. Let's
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ignore the missed opportunities of the Netanyahu government. Let's ignore the provocations against
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Palestinians. Let's ignore the absence of a peace deal and only look at the atrocities of October 7.
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Because morality is very easy when you're looking through a microscope that's pointed up your own
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ass. It's more complicated when you need to step back and look at the history of the conflict,
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what both sides want and where we might go from here. If you were to talk to the protesters
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who ruined Jerry Seinfeld's show for me at least last night, how much do they know
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about what the Arabs were offered in 1948 and rejected? The Arabs were offered the land
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that is currently the Palestinian territories and they didn't want it. They wanted the whole thing.
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They wanted from the river to the sea. They wanted the Jews in Israel to suffer the same fate as
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the Jews had in almost every single, not almost, in every single other Arab majority country in
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the Middle East, where they had been persecuted, killed, pushed out of their homes, driven out of
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those countries. A mass exodus, a gigantic refugee flow. There's sometimes this misconception that
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all the Jews in Israel came parachuting in from water on Europe in order to resettle a land that
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none of them had been living on for the past 5,000 years to pull some kind of poker chip out of
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their pocket and go, ah, my great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great parents,
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times a million greats in the time of King David were here, therefore I get to take your house.
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There was a bit of that. There was a bit of that more in the 1920s and 1930s as Zionism started to
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pick up steam. But most of the Israelis who live in Israel, most of the Jews are indigenous to the
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Middle East. Most of them have fled from other Arab majority countries. They are from that neck
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of the woods. They can trace their lineage back to that neighborhood. Now, of course, there were
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also Palestinians who were living alongside them who had driven out often violently and those people
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were supposed to go to a state of their own in the Palestinian territories, which was ostensibly
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going to be its own country in 1948 until the Arabs, not the Jews, rejected it. I know this
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seems like such old hat. What on earth does this history have to do with the reality of babies
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being bombed right now? Unfortunately, it has everything to do with it because it's relevant to
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how we assign blame for what's happening, how we assign blame for the tragedy that the Palestinians
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find themselves in. I regard the Palestinians as essentially hostages, hostages partly of Israel,
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and hostages partly of Hamas, hostages of Egypt, which also we often forget, shares a border with
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Gaza, a border equally closed as Israel's border. I mean, it's funny. People talk about the block
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aid on Gaza, the embargo on Gaza, the fact that Gaza since the Israeli withdrawal in 2005 hasn't
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truly been free, not a free independent state because Gaza's haven't been able to travel,
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they haven't been able to go anywhere else, they haven't been able to have stuff come and go freely
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in and out of their country. I can't imagine why there might be objections to the Gaza's having
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stuff come and go freely when clearly they use them for really constructive things like building
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lots of tunnels and building lots of rockets and building paragliders with which they can enter
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their neighboring country and slaughter people and rape people. I can't imagine why there would be
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such an embargo, but when you ask people about the blockade of Gaza, who is blockading Gaza,
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the answer is always Israel. No, the answer is Israel and Egypt, and also Hamas who don't let any
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garsens out. Even if you did open the border, Hamas wouldn't persecute you or shoot you for leaving.
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This is a horrible situation where young Palestinians, and I say young because they're not
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complicit in any of the political failures that have led to their fate, young Palestinians find
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themselves stuck as hostages in this grand geopolitical game. How much do they know and how much
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the protesters last night at Jerry Seinfeld's show know about the offer that was on the table in 1948?
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Do they know about the Camp David Accords in 1978? Do they know about Oslo in 1993? Do they know
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about Oslo 2 in 1995? Do they know about the Camp David process in the year 2000? Do they know about
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Israel's withdrawal from Gaza in 2005? Well, presumably they know about that because they probably
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regard that as being a great victory. Do they know about the offer that Ehud Olmah, the Prime Minister
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of Israel, made to the Palestinians in 2008 that was also rejected, which would give them essentially
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all of the Palestinian territories back with a few carve-outs that would be offset of carve-outs,
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that is, for Israeli settlements in the West Bank, that would be offset by giving them land
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that currently belonged to Israel. Were any of these offers perfect? No. Were they better than
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the status quo in 2024? Certainly. Surely, yes. Surely, surely, yes. I mean, this is complicated.
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What's going on in Palestine is horrendous. But you have a statelet and enclave where after
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the withdrawal of Israel in 2005, there were elections, people voted for Hamas, a jihadist,
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ISIS-style, death cult, that group obviously didn't run any more elections. Why would it?
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And as a consequence, you've got these poor people imprisoned by Israeli aggression,
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Egyptian intransigence, the effect of being totally ignored by other Arab states that proclaim
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loudly how much they care about the Palestinians, but actually treat them with total contempt and
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disdain, refuse to resettle any of them, refuse to employ them, for example, as laborers in the
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Gulf States, and instead import hardworking Bangladesh's and Pakistanis in to build their stadiums
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and to build their airports, not letting any Palestinians leave. You have this total hypocrisy
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on all sides, where people profess a love of these people, but when it comes to the crunch,
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do absolutely nothing for them. If you want the Palestinians to ever have a state,
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then you have to support Palestinian liberals, Palestinian feminists, Palestinian gaze,
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Palestinian pluralists and progressives in sloughing off the yoke of jihadists and ISIS-style
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Hamas terrorists, and somehow having a space in which they can breathe, in which they can pursue
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some kind of conciliation with not just Israel, but the West, Western civilization, ideas of
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democracy and equality before the law. You have to get them out of the tyranny of Hamas
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and ISIS and Hezbollah and Tehran. Now, how do you do that except by prosecuting a war in
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Gaza? Like people say, well, you're not going to get rid of Hamas, what Israel is doing is unjustified.
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I mean, you're not going to get rid of the ideology of anti-Semitism, you're not going to get
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rid of the ideology of anti-Zionism, you're not going to get rid of the ideology that fuels terrorism
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and fuels Hamas, but you may be able to get rid of the actual individuals who are the senior
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leadership of Hamas, you may be able to get rid of the actual battalions that threaten Israel.
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Am I convinced that what Israel is doing is actually necessary militarily?
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Well, being a military ninkam poop, I am not. I have no idea. I think it's quite likely that Netanyahu,
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that corrupt little hack, as I've said a million times, is clinging onto his political life
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by trying to prolong a war. It's entirely possible that he is cynically manipulating the war.
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It's entirely possible that there could have been a less bloodthirsty solution.
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But at some point, getting rid of Hamas, getting rid of the battalions and the infrastructure
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and the chain of command of an ISIS-style jihadist group, Hellbent on driving all of the Jews
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out of the Middle East is surely a prerequisite for Palestinian liberation.
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So those people who disrupted Jerry Seinfeld's show with their facile, fatuous chance about
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from the river to the sea and about how Jerry is complicit in genocide because he went to the
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state of Israel, they're really saying that he's complicit in genocide because he's a Jew.
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The idea that they're on the right side of history and that they have the backs of Palestinian people,
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this is laughable. The only long-term solution for the Palestinian people
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is going to be to provide some kind of evidence to the rest of the world that they could run a state
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the way that, for example, the United Arab Emirates runs a state and not like some dysfunctional
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combination of Yemen and Saudi Arabia would run a state. It brings us back to this kind of simplistic
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moral calculus that is evidenced even just on social media all the time, indeed in the
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Instagram post that I was just reading out about how there is only one side when you look at a baby
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facing a gun. I mean, let's just examine the morality of this for a moment because
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I'll know I'll get into trouble by saying that actually sometimes you should side with the gun
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over the baby, but allow me a thought experiment. If you have a gun and let's make it a Jewish baby
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to make it easier for the quote-unquote anti-Zionists to stomach, not a pure,
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blameless Palestinian baby, but one of those nasty little Jew babies, and if I told you that
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if you kill the Jewish baby, Palestine will be free from the rivet of the sea forever,
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and not one more drop of blood will be shed from a single Palestinian or Israeli,
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and there will be peace in the Middle East for the rest of time.
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If you didn't kill that baby, you would be a moral monster. I mean, you don't have to be much
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of a utilitarian to think that the just thing to do would be to kill the baby. And if you don't
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believe that on the basis of that argument, just raise the stakes, just say that killing that baby
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is going to avert a cataclysmic global nuclear war which will annihilate humankind altogether.
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And not killing the baby is going to lead to total peace and artificial intelligence
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revolution that is going to make us all prosperous and happy for the rest of time. Would you still not kill
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the baby? This is moral, fatuous, simplistic nonsense to say that when faced with a gun and a
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baby, I will always side with the baby. If you do that, you're an idiot. You're not thinking things
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through. Now, it may be the case that the killing of these specific Palestinian babies right now
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at this point in the war is completely morally unjustified because there is no larger good to be
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gained. And if that's the case, I'd probably agree with you. Like at this point, hasn't hum
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us been sufficiently decimated, can't we grow our way towards a ceasefire? Can't we release all
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the hostages? Something that you usually don't hear about when people are posting on Instagram
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about it. You know, you never hear them say, well, I mean, would you just release all the humus
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should just release all the hostages and then it'd be much easier to get a settlement. No,
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but let's just suppose that it may be the case that these babies' deaths are completely unwarranted.
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That's fine. I'm with you. But that is very different from the simplistic, sluganering and posturing
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and waving of Palestinian flags and saying any baby's death is never justified. War is sometimes
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justified. World War II was justified. A lot of babies died. And I mean, the idea that this particular
31:23
war is uniquely, uniquely barbaric. Like the terminology here, what we are now bearing witness to,
31:31
this journalist is writing on Instagram, giving voice to the majority. I would say the moral center
31:38
of gravity of Australian public opinion and global public opinion, although global public opinion
31:43
is probably even more anti-Semitic than this. Well, we are now bearing witness to, she writes,
31:48
is one of the greatest atrocities in living memory. In another post, she cites some examples
31:56
of people who've been killed recently in Gaza. She writes, and I quote,
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today I read a story about a fetus pulled from the womb of its dying mother in Gaza.
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Great, great bedtime reading, by the way, if you're scrolling through Instagram,
32:13
I like something to look at before I shut eyes. Let's put on the, put on the electric blanket
32:19
and read a story about a fetus being pulled from a womb. She writes, perhaps you'd like to know
32:25
about another baby, a one-year-old who was rushed in to see a surgeon because his leg had been blown
32:29
off. The one thing intact was his blood-soaked diaper. Perhaps you'd like to know about the
32:36
two orphaned teenagers. She writes, she goes on to tell their story. Perhaps you'd like to know
32:41
about the little boy who had a bad Ramadan because he missed his parents. They had been killed,
32:45
martyred, as he put it. She writes, perhaps you'd like to know about six-year-old Hindu Rajab,
32:50
who died slowly and alone in a car, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Perhaps you'd
32:55
like to know there's a photo of Siddharthasuna on the internet wearing a colorful jumper,
33:00
looking warm and happy, smiling beneath her perfect bangs. Now she's dead as well. Perhaps you'd
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like to know, she writes about Farrah Hamam, Yusuf Bar, or Malik Sami, Muhammad Magari, or Asila
33:11
Mira Alashahi, or Elena Momen, Riyadh Al Rifi, or George Sobi, George Al Suri, or Joan Alina Suramere,
33:21
or Mira Abdul Rahman Fatih Radwan, or Tasnim Ramzi, or the Karaman, or Rakan Khosam Hussein Musa,
33:29
or Eta Frassein Riyadh. Perhaps you'd like to know how old they were, she writes that they were zero.
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Years old, that none of them made it to their first birthday.
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My tone is not intended to imply that I don't think that each of these deaths is horrendous.
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Every death is horrendous, and my heart genuinely does. Go out to the travesty, the catastrophe
34:01
that's being inflicted on the people of Gaza. My perhaps cynical tone
34:08
reflects my curiosity about why this journalist knows all those names,
34:16
and not the names of people being killed in equal or larger numbers in other recent conflicts.
34:24
We're living in a scenario in which we're receiving our news about the world mediated through
34:32
algorithms that are tweaked and gamed by powerful forces. We're not sure exactly why things go viral,
34:43
why they get more engagement or less. We do know that on TikTok, the likelihood of anti-Israeli
34:52
pro-Gaza content to be elevated is vastly more than on other social platforms.
34:58
So something's going on in the Chinese Communist Party's design of the TikTok algorithm
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that favors that content. I mean, try putting up a video about Tiananmen Square on TikTok and
35:10
see how well it does. So we know that there's something going on in the background there.
35:14
We know that Tehran and his boiler and ISIS got pretty good at the viral social media game.
35:25
As I've said before, just remember during the Arab Spring and during the fight against ISIS after
35:31
that, those viral videos of Daniel Pearl being beheaded, the Wall Street Journal journalist,
35:38
of captured US fighter pilots being dressed up in Guantanamo Bay style orange jumpsuits and
35:45
trapped in cages in the desert and set on fire. This was before virality was even a thing,
35:51
before we all had supercomputers in our pockets delivering us the latest news videos. But they
35:56
got to learn how to do this and Hamas has collaborations with ISIS and they're funded by the Iranians.
36:02
So a lot of the quote-unquote citizen journalists who are on the ground documenting these things
36:08
that are being paraded by well-meaning journalists in Australia and the rest of the West have been
36:13
generated by people who have an agenda. That doesn't mean that each death isn't tragic. It does mean
36:20
that we are all a little bit like a cat with a laser pointer following the thing that's right
36:26
in front of our face. In 2020, there was a war between Azerbaijan and Armenia. And just last year,
36:36
Azerbaijan took back control of the area that it was fighting for. This was the month before the
36:43
Hamas attacks. How much did you hear about it in the month before the Hamas attacks? It was a
36:49
three-year-long war that put an end to a 30-year standoff over this enclave and it forced
36:56
an exodus of ethnic Armenians, an attempted genocide certainly in ethnic cleansing.
37:04
Who was standing up for the Armenians? Who was posting the names of the Armenians?
37:11
Northern Ethiopia has been racked by horrendous violence and fighting in recent years. What are their
37:18
names? Who gives a shit? I mean, there was the conflict prompted by the Myanmar Army's coup in 2021.
37:28
Not to mention the Russia-Ukraine war. You're talking about 40 to 90,000 Ukrainians dead,
37:37
135 to 180,000 Russians killed in the meat grinder of that conflict. Do we have any sympathy
37:46
for the Russians, for the Russian soldiers? I mean, why not? Look, I hate Putin. I don't think you
37:55
can roll tanks into a neighboring country. I think he has to lose. I think that's vitally important.
38:00
But what culpability does a conscripted 18-year-old Russian kid from the far-eastern provinces of Russia,
38:08
who's flown across the country, across five-time zones or seven-time zones or whatever the hell it is,
38:16
into the meat grinder of all what culpability does he have for Putin's decisions?
38:21
In some respect, isn't he a bit like the Gazan child? Isn't he a bit like the Gazan teenager,
38:29
who is essentially also a victim of an autocratic, irresponsible, reckless regime,
38:36
one that's even worse than Putin's government, one that hides its own military assets behind
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civilians, so the civilians will get killed, one that intentionally makes it almost impossible for
38:47
Israel to clear out how much strongholds without killing children so that the videos of those
38:53
children will appear in the Instagram Reels and TikTok videos of the journalists, like the one
38:59
who I'm quoting. Why don't we care about the Russian soldier? You know, in Sudan, 15,000
39:08
people are dead, more than seven million people are being internally displaced in Sudan.
39:14
That's more people than all the Palestinians who live in all of Palestine. What are their names?
39:20
What are their names? Why aren't we making the analogy about every one of them
39:27
when faced with the option of their life versus the soldier's gun? The moral calculus is simple.
39:33
The reason you don't think the moral calculus is simple is because you've got no fucking idea
39:37
what's going on in Sudan and you frankly don't have any fucking idea what's going on in Palestine and
39:41
Israel either. You've got a morally simplistic infantile view of the world.
39:47
You tell me about the name of Sidra Husana, you've seen her photo in a colorful jumper,
39:54
she looks warm and happy smiling beneath her perfect bangs. Why did you see that photo?
39:59
Who posted the photo? Who supplied the photo? The Hamas Information Ministry? Who else would
40:06
supply it? You talk about the little boy who had a bad Ramadan because he missed his parents
40:11
because they'd been killed martyred as he put it. Well, maybe part of the bloody problem
40:16
is that we're dealing with a situation where when people's parents are killed, they are regarded
40:22
as being martyrs. This is kind of the unspoken thing that people feel frustrated about not being
40:28
able to air publicly. We are not dealing with two equal sides here. Let's just set aside for a moment
40:37
the question of the tragedy that is being inflicted on the people of Palestine because I could go
40:42
on and on about the tragedy that was inflicted on the people of Israel on October 7th. I can
40:46
quote from the New York Times about how they went and looked at the video footage, the photographs,
40:50
the GPS data from mobile phones, how they interviewed more than 150 people, including witnesses,
40:56
local personnel, soldiers and rape counselors who'd been brought in after October 7th,
41:02
and how they identified seven locations where Israeli women and girls were sexually assaulted
41:08
and mutilated. There are witnesses, multiple witnesses describing in graphic detail how more than
41:15
30 bodies of women and girls in and around the rave site and Kibbutzim were found by first
41:21
responders with their legs spread, their clothes torn off and signs of abuse in their genitals.
41:28
There was one corpse that the Times reviewed photographs of, she had dozens of nails driven into
41:34
her thighs and groin. And if you have children listening, turn off for a moment here because I just
41:42
want to tell you what we're dealing with. The Times viewed a video showing two dead Israelis
41:47
who appeared to have been shot directly in their vaginas. They interviewed a woman a 26-year-old
41:52
accountant who at 8am on October 7th was hiding under the low branches of a bushy tree just off
41:59
route 232, not far from the rave. She'd been shot in the back and she covered herself in grass
42:07
and lay her still as she could. And she says she saw motorcycles, cars and trucks pulling up.
42:13
About 100 men got out in military fatigues and combat boots,
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how my soldiers. They handed around assault rifles, grenades and small missiles and badly wounded
42:24
women were being handed around. One guy, she says, grabbed one of the women by the hair and made her
42:31
bend over while another raped her. And every time she flinched, he plunged a knife into her back.
42:41
Just remember, a baby versus a gun. Oh, anytime there's a baby versus a gun, it's a very morally
42:47
simple thing. Just side with the baby. Are we side with this woman? Are we side with this woman?
42:53
I mean, yeah, I guess the most fatuous thing to say is all violence is bad. So after this attack
42:59
happened, what should have happened? No violence in retaliation, no dismantling of hummus,
43:04
shake hands with hummus, like going to business with the jihadist Isis style, death cult,
43:12
an anti-pluralistic, anti-women, anti-gay, misogynistic, crazed,
43:17
theocratic death cult. Is that the solution? Or do you have to drop a few bombs and kill a few babies?
43:22
While one terrorist, I'm quoting from the New York Times here. Oh, this woman said she watched
43:31
another woman shred it into pieces. That's a direct quote. While one terrorist raped her,
43:36
another pulled out a box cutter, you know, a Stanley knife, and sliced off her breast.
43:42
And the other throws her breast to someone else and they play with it, throw it and it falls on
43:46
the road. The men sliced her face and then the woman fell out of view. Around the same time,
43:54
this witness said she saw three other men, women raped and terrorists carrying the severed heads
43:59
of three more women. One of the women who was taken hostage who wasn't killed was nine months pregnant,
44:05
so something has happened to that baby as well. We don't know what.
44:09
These people who were doing this on October 7th were the government of Gaza,
44:21
the democratically elected government of Gaza. Now, of course, the babies who are currently being
44:30
murdered killed, I should say, in Gaza by Israeli bombs did not elect those people.
44:42
But why does Jerry Seinfeld have more responsibility for the fate of that baby?
44:50
Then whichever of its parents and uncles and imams and cousins do support Hamas have.
45:01
Why are they less culpable for the death of the baby? Given their general support
45:09
for a culture under civilization and a demos that has put in charge the people who pulled off
45:15
October 7th, then Jerry Seinfeld does. This tricky thing that I'm alluding to that is so
45:23
frustratingly difficult to talk about because it sounds like some form of white supremacy when I
45:29
suppose it is at worst a form of Western civilization or chauvinism is that there's a difference
45:37
between the way that different civilizations and different cultures approach life.
45:45
There are some that are somewhat more dysfunctional, somewhat more conspiracy adult,
45:53
somewhat more disempowering to creativity. There are places that
46:02
spread ideas of grievance and demonization and self-victimhood and complaint, places that are
46:10
anti-innovative, that valorize violence and martyrdom that are religiously oppressive and sexist
46:21
and anti-Semitic and anti-Western and anti-enlightenment and anti-compromise and anti-democratic
46:28
and anti-conciliatry, anti-pluralistic, anti-diverse, anti-gay that are theocratic
46:38
that are in colloquial terms basket cases.
46:42
And there are a lot of basket cases across the Middle East.
46:50
Israel is not a perfect country. Israel has an infuriating, frustratingly right-wing government
46:57
that has been sinfully intransigent on the issue of what to do about Palestine since 2008.
47:03
It's not in an easy neck of the woods. Of all the places you could move to in the Middle East,
47:12
surely Israel would be the one you'd choose. It's the one where gay pride parades take place.
47:18
It's the one where women enjoy equality. It's the one where IT startups happen.
47:27
It's the one where Arabs are on the Supreme Court, where Arabs are in Parliament, where
47:32
Arabs enjoy full citizenship. It doesn't absolve Israel of anything that it's doing.
47:42
But as I've said before about this, sorry conflict.
47:49
This is more about us than it is about Israel.
47:55
We are complicit in some historical crimes. We are complicit in the genocide of our first
48:02
nations people. We are complicit in colonialism. Indeed, we are complicit in many of the factors
48:09
in the 20th century that gave rise to Arab dysfunction. Our thirst for oil, our support of the
48:16
Shah in Iran, our backing of Saddam Hussein in the 1980s. There are lots of ways in which we've
48:24
intervened that have encouraged dysfunction in the Arab world. Right now we find ourselves in a
48:33
situation where you have people standing up in Jerry Seinfeld's show, demonizing him for being
48:45
a supporter of genocide because he visited the only democracy in the Middle East.
48:53
And stood with some of the people from his own tribe, his own community, his own ethnicity
49:00
who had been horrendously traumatized, not just by Hamas, but by a culture of dysfunction,
49:10
a culture of deep antisemitism, a culture of Jew hatred, a culture of insistence that someday
49:19
there will be a Palestine from the river to the sea, that someday the Jews will be out.
49:25
The great Satan of America will be vanquished. The little Satan of Israel will be in the
49:30
dust pale of history that valorizes martyrdom. I don't want what I'm saying to be in any way
49:38
misunderstood as being some kind of a justification for the collective punishment of Palestinians or in
49:44
any way, a way of absolving the Israeli military for the blood that it has on its hands,
49:51
for the innocent people who've lost their lives in Gaza. But I don't want us here in Australia,
49:59
here in the West to become vulcanized into quarrelling simplistic morally fatuous infantile
50:08
groups of certainty, hunkered down in trenches, committing some kind of performative war of
50:17
attrition against each other, where whoever can shout loud us and disrupt the largest number of
50:22
comedy shows wins. This shit's complicated. I wish I'd got to enjoy an uncomplicated night of
50:33
comedy with Jerry Seinfeld last night. God bless. I'll see you next week.