Juno News - November 04, 2023


Why do leftists support Hamas？ (ft. Andy Ngo)


Episode Stats


Length

7 minutes

Words per minute

135.68314

Word count

1,006

Sentence count

40

Harmful content

Hate speech

1

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In the wake of the Freedom Convoy, why do people on the far left join forces with pro-Hamas and pro-Gaza protesters who are Muslim? And why do they do so with people who would have no home in Gaza that would be particularly comfortable with them?

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 On the weekend, 100,000 people took to the streets of the city I'm in right now, 100,000
00:00:15.020 to get, I mean, we thought the Freedom Convoy was great because of how many people it brought
00:00:18.740 out, but 100,000 people on the streets, many of whom were very explicitly supportive of
00:00:26.520 violence against Jews and violence against Israelis.
00:00:30.320 I'm not going to say every one of the 100,000 was, but enough were that it should give a
00:00:34.140 lot of cause for concern.
00:00:36.440 So you can make an argument that is a logical argument, even if you disagree with it, that
00:00:41.780 people who are of Muslim background, Arab background would have a reason to align with the Palestinian
00:00:48.680 cause.
00:00:50.040 Why do people on the left outside of that?
00:00:53.320 Why do people on the so-called queer left, who would have no home in Gaza that would 0.98
00:00:59.620 be particularly comfortable with them, do that as well?
00:01:01.760 I wanted to talk about that and this idea of coalitions, which are really at the core of
00:01:06.000 why wokeness has been so powerful.
00:01:08.060 And I did so with Andy Ngo, who is a fantastic contributor.
00:01:12.300 He is a great exposer of the far left and has risked his own safety on a number of occasions
00:01:18.800 to do what he does.
00:01:20.560 And it was interesting that his take on that very dynamic.
00:01:24.040 We've seen, obviously, pro-Hamas or pro-Gaza protesters who are Muslim, in which I think
00:01:31.240 we can understand a little bit about where they're coming at it.
00:01:33.660 But we've also seen supporting Gaza and Hamas, people on the far left that are in these very
00:01:38.880 weird coalitions, people that wouldn't really get along very well in Gaza.
00:01:42.700 And I'm wondering, with your experience covering far left protests, how these people rationalize
00:01:47.920 support for a society that doesn't really have a place for them in it?
00:01:51.040 I think the narrative that the public has been sold on the very complicated conflict involving
00:02:01.740 Israel and various Palestinian militant factions is that it's about oppressor versus oppressed,
00:02:10.120 which is this cliche that you hear brought out a lot.
00:02:13.920 But really, that's simply sort of the way it's framed.
00:02:18.580 So to a leftist mindset, they want to be on the cause of the oppressed.
00:02:28.240 But there's also been quite, I mean, it's not quite as simple as that.
00:02:33.600 There's a long, we've had years now of radical leftist ideologues, many of them academics,
00:02:43.220 pulling in the Palestinian-Israel conflict, weaving it into the decolonization theory and
00:02:55.500 ideology, I would say.
00:02:57.140 And that, we're also now post three years after George, more than three years after George
00:03:07.500 Floyd, in America, you have a generation of young people who were radicalized.
00:03:17.560 And now they've been mobilized again to sort of be the foot soldiers.
00:03:21.080 The ideologies, the thread that runs through BLM, Antifa, decolonization, critical race theory,
00:03:31.380 Israel hatred, it's a very, it's a thread of bloodlust.
00:03:38.340 The ideologies for each, these different things are quite different.
00:03:41.980 I mean, you have to wonder, what does Palestinian nationalism and radical Islamic politics have
00:03:52.660 to do with Antifa or BLM?
00:03:55.060 Well, really very little other than the fact that they would like to see America suffer,
00:04:01.560 and its friends and allies internationally suffer as well.
00:04:04.980 Do these people understand or have an ability to rationalize this internal cognitive dissonance
00:04:12.900 if pressed?
00:04:14.260 Or is it that they genuinely are never pressed, and they do not give it any intellectual weight
00:04:18.660 whatsoever about how they can support these two things that are contradictory or that have
00:04:23.400 nothing to do with each other?
00:04:24.380 They're, they're not pressed in their circles, for one.
00:04:28.440 So I think they generally don't have to really think about it.
00:04:34.240 Or, they've been radicalized to become the faithful and the devout, that it doesn't matter
00:04:44.440 actually what countering evidence you present to them, they're able to reject it.
00:04:48.900 What is, I guess, the logical outcome of this?
00:04:54.040 I mean, a few weeks ago, we had in Canada, a lot of Muslims and evangelicals linking arms,
00:04:59.240 supporting parental rights, speaking up against transgender ideology.
00:05:02.180 Now, you know, two groups that are on this different side on Israel-Palestine.
00:05:07.300 I mean, are we just going to see more and more of those fractures?
00:05:10.160 Or do you think the left will just keep getting larger and larger as that sort of amorphous
00:05:14.420 protest blob that I know you've seen?
00:05:18.900 Well, what's been happening with the left is that their alliances and their coalitions
00:05:23.160 have been growing.
00:05:23.860 It hasn't gotten smaller.
00:05:26.260 They've added to the long list of people who have grievances.
00:05:29.940 It's only grown.
00:05:31.320 I mean, you know, first it was about black grievance, then it's about brown grievance,
00:05:40.020 then queer and gay grievance, trans grievance.
00:05:43.460 It just keeps growing.
00:05:45.620 And the danger of all this is that present within that type of worldview, there's a lot
00:05:55.980 of support for the use of extreme violence and terrorism.
00:06:01.880 And I think what surprised me a bit about some of the rhetoric that's come out in the last
00:06:08.920 three weeks since the 7th of October is that how open they are about their incitement to
00:06:16.540 violence.
00:06:17.440 Before, during the George Floyd-inspired BLM antifa rights, it was a bit more subtle.
00:06:22.840 It wasn't, when I say a bit more subtle, it wasn't subtle then, but there was a bit of
00:06:29.080 enough plausible deniability, sort of like when people were smashing up businesses and
00:06:36.320 setting fire to police stations.
00:06:39.640 They were saying they were doing it for racial justice or out of rage because of what's been
00:06:47.620 happening to blacks in America, that it justifies this type of reaction.
00:06:52.580 Now it's like the sentiment is people expressing the support for the actions of Hamas.
00:07:01.500 Like that is, uh, they've crossed the line and, uh, some of them have been called out for
00:07:12.040 it, but a lot of them have been called out and their response is, yeah, and so what?
00:07:17.060 Thanks for listening to The Andrew Lawton Show.
00:07:19.420 Support the program by donating to True North at www.tnc.news.