00:06:31.240Et cetera, et cetera, and then a fight would break out, right?
00:06:36.480So these are the stories I grew up with, and I think it very much shaped sort of how I think about the world.
00:06:43.000And sometimes I joke that, you know, this is a family business, right, as sort of fighting anti-Semites.
00:06:47.620But, you know, I came to the United States as a refugee, fleeing state-sponsored anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union, and I've spent much of my life trying to understand this phenomenon that has so radically upended my life, that of my family, that of my community, and so many others, both Jewish and, I will point out, non-Jewish.
00:07:09.440Anti-Semitism is a radical, you know, revolutionary force that transforms societies, you know, creates, you know, displacement and mass migration, launches whole nations to war.
00:07:23.140It's something that is really consequential.
00:07:25.200And what I really came to understand, my fascination was not only understanding my story and how this thing called anti-Semitism led to the displacement and the violence and everything that my family endured.
00:07:39.520But what I came to really understand is that I have a fascination with the ways in which falsehoods shape reality, because anti-Semitism, racism, all of these things are based in falsehood, right?
00:07:51.020They're based in nothing verifiable, nothing evidentiary, nothing empirical.
00:08:03.680They have consequences that are existential in nature.
00:08:07.080And so what I came to understand is that ideas are powerful.
00:08:10.760What we believe about the world ultimately shapes human behavior on both an individual as well as a civic or policy level.
00:08:18.600And so ideas are very dangerous. They're very powerful and very dangerous. And so understanding the nature of ideas, how they travel, how they influence us, how they cross pollinate from one ideological sector to another, because that's also been a feature of anti-Semitism is the way that these ideas are fungible, the way that they travel and are able to adapt to different social, political, cultural, religious and other environments.
00:08:48.600environments um the way that they're able to shapeshift and evolve in order to to survive and
00:08:53.800perpetuate themselves um all of these things are deeply uh i think interesting to me but also
00:08:58.920deeply consequential for our world right so let's talk about that maybe start with that with current
00:09:03.760events so obviously there's the terrible events that uh happened in detroit yesterday which could
00:09:09.340have been far worse uh prior to that uh where i am right now with the uh shooting up with high
00:09:16.640velocity weapons at three synagogues in the city of toronto and then the u.s consulate
00:09:21.360events in norway yesterday um you know the stuff is now happening truly on a daily basis
00:09:28.960getting back to what you said about ideas um how they're dangerous a lot of people when they hear
00:09:34.360that well it's just an idea you know you can agree with it or not it doesn't actually it isn't
00:09:39.560consequential in terms of human behavior how what do you say to those who say well it's just an idea
00:09:46.300don't worry about it. It's just some words. Is there a connection between Detroit or Toronto
00:09:52.140and these attacks and words? Yeah, I mean, obviously, I think that's a really unsophisticated
00:09:59.300approach to understanding our world. When you actually look at the scholarship, there is more
00:10:05.100or less consensus among scholars that things like, you know, mass racist violence, genocide, right?
00:10:11.540Those things don't just sort of occur in a vacuum. They're not random. They are very much shaped by political rhetoric, by reporting, by the things that people ultimately believe to be true or not.
00:10:25.580right? That ultimately shapes what they do with that information. So, you know, if you start to,
00:10:33.580you know, you take any example, whether it's the Holocaust or whether it's the Rwandan genocide,
00:10:39.020the programs, for example, in Rwanda that described the Tutsi population as vermin,
00:10:46.860as termites, that dehumanized them. Those ideas ultimately led to the genocide. It led to the
00:10:57.720mass violence that that population experienced. And that is the case in every sort of instance
00:11:04.140of mass violence, is that there's a period of sort of conditioning, right? People need to
00:11:09.760need to believe certain things. And only then do they act on those things. Right. And when you look
00:11:17.520at anti-Semitism, what it actually is, is an interpretive framework. It's an analytical model
00:11:24.560that purports to explain the world and how it works or how it, quote unquote, really works.
00:11:30.900Right. In other words, anti-Semitism isn't just a kind of social prejudice. It is really a
00:11:38.860particular way of trying to understand the world, specifically trying to understand the delta
00:11:44.620between the world as it is or as we perceive it and the world as we think it should work or the
00:11:51.620way that we wish it looked. In other words, it answers questions around issues of right and
00:11:59.460wrong, justice and injustice. Why are there innocent people dying in wars? Why do some
00:12:04.420people not have enough to eat? Why don't I feel like I can attain redress of grievances through
00:12:09.360the democratic process? Antisemitism purports to explain all of those things by pointing to the
00:12:16.060Jews, the Zionists, the globalists, Israel, the rootless cosmopolitans, whatever term you want
00:12:22.860to apply. That is what antisemitism does. So in other words, it's not just we don't like the Jews
00:12:29.980because, you know, they are, you know, worship a particular way. I think, you know, we oftentimes
00:12:36.180think about anti-Semitism as a kind of anti-religious bigotry, right? Probably because
00:12:41.380we think of Jews as a religious community. Actually, only 11 percent of U.S. Jews would say
00:12:46.320that being Jewish is primarily about religion. And certainly when we look at the motivations
00:12:51.260that anti-Semites give for carrying out acts of mass violence, it is rarely a theological quarrel.
00:12:58.400It is rarely about, well, I don't like the way that they worship their God or the, you know, it's not that. It is oftentimes a conspiracy theory about that essentially lays blame for something going wrong in the world at the feet of the Jews.
00:13:15.160and and what the the perception of what it is that is going wrong changes depending on one's
00:13:20.500vantage point right um one thing i always say is that anti-semitism will tend to dress for the
00:13:25.560occasion if it's trying to seduce people on the left uh it will take the form that will be most
00:13:30.540resonant with people on the left right it will use the frameworks the language the the values
00:13:35.800of the left if it's trying to seduce people on the right it will use the the language and symbols
00:13:40.840and and and values of the right if it's speaking to a christian audience it'll speak in the language
00:13:45.020of the Gospels. In Islamic audience, it'll speak in the language of the Quran, of Hadith, etc.,
00:13:50.320right? You get the point. So anti-Semitism always appeals to the particular worldview or the
00:13:57.820particular grievances in a particular society or in a particular space where it's trying to
00:14:05.100seduce people to embrace it, right? So that, I think, is a point that is really central to
00:14:12.460understanding how antisemitism actually functions in the world. And you've used that phrase,
00:14:17.860conspiracy theory. I mean, what you've described, in effect, is antisemitism as a conspiracy theory,
00:14:24.240whether for the right or the left. But I mean, like most conspiracy theories, it didn't just
00:14:29.420start. Where are these dominant themes of antisemitism? Where are they ultimately coming
00:14:34.960from? Was it the Soviet Union? Well, no, I think it goes back quite a bit further. And it's
00:14:40.880important to understand that, you know, all forms of, well, let's call it what it is, all forms of
00:14:46.880propaganda build on the propaganda that came before it, right? So we have to sort of go back
00:14:53.400into history to understand how these things developed. And I would say that anti-Semitism
00:14:59.660goes back to ancient antiquity, but it got a particular, I think, virulence with the New
00:15:08.360Testament, right? The advent of the New Testament, because, um, look for 2000 years, one of the
00:15:14.720dominant lenses through which people have tried to understand the world and make sense of it and
00:15:18.980their place in it and all of that has been Christianity, right? It's the largest religion.
00:15:23.220It shapes how people understand, uh, you know, it is one of the most, uh, sort of influential
00:15:28.380ideologies or ways of seeing the world. Um, and it has shaped the way that people have understood
00:15:33.060it. And who is the Jew within the sort of the gospel narrative, if you will? Well, it's the
00:15:40.460people to whom Jesus came first to minister, bringing a message of peace and honesty and
00:15:45.920purity and forthrightness and goodness and all of these wonderful things. And what did the Jews do?
00:15:50.720Not only did they reject this wonderful, beautiful message, but then they killed Jesus, right? And
00:15:57.180who is Jesus? Jesus is the embodiment of God's presence on earth. In other words, the Jews
00:16:02.840killed God himself. Now, what kind of a people would do something like this? First of all,
00:16:07.120a very evil people to reject such a wonderful, beautiful message of purity and honesty and all
00:16:11.840the rest. But secondly, also a very powerful people who can kill God himself. This must be
00:16:17.820a very powerful group of people. And so I think from that, you get the development of a perception
00:16:24.140of Jews as a collectivity, as a malicious force in the world, but a powerful force, right? Able
00:16:30.760to control the global banking system, able to control the media, able to control the United
00:16:36.720Nations, able to control the U.S. government, right? The Zionist occupied government. All of
00:16:41.640these things, I think, come from a perception of Jews or the Jew as a powerful evil force in the
00:16:49.920world. And that is very much shaped, I think, by a kind of religious thinking that has prevailed
00:16:54.320over the last 2000 years and has also shaped in turn shaped Islam, the second most most dominant
00:17:01.660religion in the world. Right. So I think when you look at, you know, basically two thirds of the
00:17:06.300of the human population of the planet, it's been shaped by these narratives in which the Jew is a
00:17:12.880a source of sort of perfidy in the world, a source of maliciousness, of a rejection of
00:17:21.760the message of the pure and the saintly, right? In other words, the Jew is outside of the community
00:17:28.080of the good, right? And that perception of the Jew is not only outside of the community of the
00:17:33.380good, but doing harm from outside to us, the community of the good, that I think was very
00:17:40.180much shaped by, you know, basically centuries of this kind of religious thinking. But certainly
00:17:47.600over time, it has developed into non-religious forms, right? So you take, for example,
00:17:52.440the idea, the ancient idea of the blood libel, this notion that Jews subsist on the bodies or
00:17:59.220the fluids, right, the blood of non-Jews and particularly of Christian children, right? Well,
00:18:05.760Well, you know, that's the original form, right?
00:18:33.420They're the sort of arch capitalists that are exploiting and sort of benefiting themselves off the hard work, the labor of others.
00:18:41.200So these ideas might start out in one form, but over the centuries, they develop into new forms, sometimes sort of removed from their original religious context, but nonetheless retaining a lot of the same elements.
00:18:54.900this lunatic yesterday in detroit you know the shorthand because those of us in the media are
00:19:00.760always looking for the simplest uh explanation right so it's like he's had two brothers who
00:19:07.040were killed uh in lebanon therefore ipso facto here's why he did it but i guess you know the
00:19:14.340point that you would make and certainly guys like me make is well actually it's a bit more complex
00:19:18.980from that. And probably if we dig into this guy's background, we'll find that he was paying
00:19:25.000attention to anti-Semitic propaganda and that type of manipulation over a period of time. It
00:19:31.000wasn't just his brothers. This is what he actually believed. What do you think about that?
00:19:35.600No, absolutely. I mean, these ideas don't come from nowhere. People don't just up and start
00:19:40.640murdering their neighbors, right? They have to be driven to that by the things that they believe
00:19:45.080about their neighbors and if they see their neighbors as a source of evil in the world as
00:19:49.480a source of oppression exploitation uh you know bloodshed right etc then you can expect that they
00:19:56.260will carry those ideas out in some way big or small it might just be you know what i'm not
00:20:03.040gonna uh you know uh make friends with jews i'm going to avoid jews i'm not gonna do business
00:20:08.160with jews it might be something like that um or it might be you know what i'm gonna pick up a gun
00:20:38.180somebody who had been convicted of a terrorist crime.
00:20:40.220But he thought that if I just, you know, hold these Jews hostage, that they will be able to then compel the release of this political prisoner because that's how powerful the Jews are.
00:20:51.940All they need to do is pick up the phone, right, and make one call and the U.S. government will comply.
00:20:58.680Right. There is a kind of conspiracist logic, right, at the center of the way that many of these people think.
00:21:04.520And that is one of the dangers of anti-Semitism to the non-Jewish world.
00:21:08.800The harms of anti-Semitism extend well beyond the Jewish community. Any time an individual or a society embraces irrational ways of trying to correct what is going wrong in the world, trying to set their life on a better path, or generally just trying to address whatever the grievance of the day is,
00:21:31.500That is going to inevitably spell disaster for their ability to to attain redress of grievances, to set things aright, because anti-Semitism ultimately functions as a kind of red herring that redirects our focus away from what are often systemic root causes of the problems we face and onto Jewish boogeymen.
00:21:51.660You know, Sartre in Anti-Semite and Jew, you know, wrote about this. He has this line where he talks about the ways in which anti-Semitism will, you know, will lead people to, you know, sort of riot and burn down some synagogues and beat up a few Jews, thinking they've really made a change to whatever the conditions are that are afflicting them.
00:22:13.500But what they've actually done is sort of it functions as a kind of pressure release valve. Right. When the pitchforks and torches come out, this is a way to sort of sublimate or externalize all of those misgivings about the way that maybe there's a kind of injustice in society happening and ultimately leaves that system entrenched because you haven't actually struck at the root of the problem.
00:22:40.340you've just beat up a few Jews who have little to nothing to do with the problem itself, right?
00:22:44.540So in other words, anti-Semitism is harmful because it undermines our ability to rationally
00:22:49.760and therefore effectively solve the problems facing our society, our world, or ourselves as individuals.
00:22:56.140So much of it, just objectively, is just dumb and evil and wrong.
00:23:03.100But obviously, it is increasingly, with each passing day, become persuasive and effective with so many people, including some people none of us expected.
00:23:16.240Why is the language of anti-Semitism, the propaganda of anti-Semitism, so effective now?
00:23:23.060What has happened to give rise to that?
00:23:26.260Yeah, well, there's been a bunch of factors that give rise to it.
00:23:29.820You know, people look, there's been a 900 percent increase in anti-Semitic incidents in the United States over the last decade.
00:23:39.720That doesn't happen, you know, by accident.
00:23:43.880There are factors that contribute to rising anti-Semitism in any society.
00:23:48.400And scholars will oftentimes point to factors that tend to induce collective anxiety.
00:23:59.820civil unrest and political instability, pandemics and epidemics, resource scarcity,
00:24:08.200wars, terrorism, et cetera. Anything that makes people feel uncertain about the future will tend
00:24:12.700to raise anxiety and lead people to start asking questions about who is one of us and therefore
00:24:19.000probably safe, probably not the source of the threat, and who is one of, quote unquote, them
00:24:23.060and could be the source of the threat. Right. And that's that that that's a that that process
00:24:29.840leads to any number of sort of forms of bigotry or oppression, be it Islamophobia, be it anti
00:24:35.200blackness, et cetera. However, anti-Semitism has a particular explanatory power or a perceived
00:24:42.660explanatory power. Right. And part of that has to do with the way that it tends to simplify complex
00:24:50.720processes in the world. Right. If you again, if you are faced with economic challenges and you're
00:24:58.180thinking, like, why can't I find a job? Why can't I, you know, put food on the table for my family?
00:25:04.620Well, economics is difficult to understand. People, you know, spend their entire careers
00:25:09.460trying to understand market dynamics and, you know, economics. Right. Like along comes somebody
00:25:16.000who says, like, never mind all that. I'll give you the simple explanation. It's the Jews
00:25:20.380secretly pulling the strings of the economy in order to benefit themselves at the expense of
00:25:24.880non-Jews. That's a simple explanation that anybody can digest. You don't need to do any intellectual
00:25:29.880work. You don't need to do any education, any further research. It's all laid out for you.
00:25:35.160That's incredibly attractive. The second factor that I think a lot of people miss is the specific
00:25:42.440language that is used by anti-Semitism. It is a language of salvation. Anti-Semitism will always
00:25:51.500tend to present itself in the form of a salvific narrative. We, the anti-Semites say, have come to
00:25:58.060save you, the people, the race, the nation, the world, from the domination, exploitation,
00:26:04.420you know, of the Jews. It always speaks in a language of liberation. It always presents as
00:26:11.920politics of emancipation or social justice. And that's true of left antisemitism, but it's also
00:26:17.220true of right-wing antisemitism. If you listen, for example, to the address given by Fritz Kuhn,
00:26:26.660the head of the German-American boon, the pro-Nazi party during World War II in America,
00:26:32.260right, at Madison Square Garden, between 20,000 and 30,000 Americans turned out for this,
00:26:37.660essentially a Nazi rally with swastikas and the whole deal. And in the opening address that was
00:26:44.400given by the head of the pro-Nazi German-American Bund, Fritz Kuhn says, what is our political
00:26:49.360platform here? What are we trying to do in America? He says, first, a socially just white
00:26:56.860Gentile ruled the United States. But the first thing he says is not white and Gentile. The first
00:27:03.160thing he says is socially just. And in the rhetoric throughout his speech, he says why
00:27:09.600social justice has been usurped in the United States and who did it. And of course, who did
00:27:15.180it is the Jews, right? Through their manipulation of the press and their domination of the banking
00:27:20.320system and all these things. In other words, there's an injustice that is happening in the
00:27:24.760United States. And what we have come to do, the German-American Bund says, is restore control
00:27:31.340over the american government over the country of america to the people who built it to real
00:27:38.000americans right so that is how anti-semitism always sounds whether it's on the left or the
00:27:44.920right the only thing that changes is one's perception of what qualifies as social justice
00:27:50.020is social justice restoring power over uh immigration and the border to real americans
00:27:57.540Or is social justice not mistreating the migrant, the immigrant, the asylum seeker, the refugee?
00:28:03.800Depending on your vantage point, the anti-Semitism will reorganize itself in order to fit with that perception of what social justice means.
00:28:15.100So right now you have on either side of the immigration issue anti-Semitism popping up in different ways.
00:28:21.840On the one on the one side, you'll you'll hear notions that the Jews are flooding our country with immigrants who don't belong here in order to replace the rightful white population of America.
00:28:34.800That's the great replacement theory. Right. The Jews are pushing open borders. That's on the on the right. On the left.
00:28:41.000It's the exact opposite. ICE equals Israel. The reason that ICE agents are murdering innocent migrants and refugee seekers and asylum seekers and et cetera is because they're being trained in racist brutality by the IDF.
00:28:59.060So any you take any issue where there's a perceived injustice, anti-Semitism can function on either side of that issue and can function as a kind of explanatory mechanism that reaffirms whatever your worldview already is.
00:29:14.080And that's the other thing that makes it so attractive. It reaffirms. Right.
00:29:18.920And in so doing, it puts us back into control. The thing I said about anxiety. Right.
00:29:23.680We don't like uncertainty. The mind flees uncertainty. We want to know who's doing this to us. And we want it to be tangible. Market forces like supply and demand, you can't get your hands around. You can't touch, smell, see, hear, or wring the neck of supply and demand. But you can wring the neck of a Jew.
00:29:44.780It concretizes the source of evil when the reality is it is invisible market forces that often lead to economic misery.
00:29:55.440But we don't like that. We want something concrete.
00:29:58.180We want something that we can touch, feel, see, hear, smell and understand and grasp, because then maybe there's a hope that we can stop it.
00:30:05.900Right. If you identify the source of the threat of the thing that's making you feel precarious, making you feel like, I don't know if there's a future for me in this country or in the world, if I'm going to survive, if my family is going to have enough to eat, et cetera.
00:30:20.140Right. Even even if you are I don't know if you've ever been really sick. I have. I was really ill for a long time and the doctors didn't know what was wrong with me.
00:30:31.440They ran every diagnostic test and they couldn't turn anything up.
00:30:36.240And I have to tell you, the anxiety of not knowing what was wrong with me was one of the worst things ever.
00:30:42.860And the moment I got a diagnosis, it it it gave me a certain sense of relief.
00:30:50.060Even if the diagnosis is scary, even if the diagnosis is you might die from this, it puts you back into the control seat to know, hey, well, at least I know what's going on with me.
00:31:00.720And at least now I can think about what might be the path to recovery.
00:31:04.660But when you don't know what is threatening you, when you don't know why you're feeling precarious, why you're feeling the way that you are, that is really scary.
00:31:13.920So the utility of anti-Semitism, and this is a question I think we all have to always ask, is not only what is anti-Semitism and how does it function, but to what end is anti-Semitism being embraced?
00:31:25.640What is its utility to those who embrace it?
00:31:27.940And one of the utilities of anti-Semitism is in that explanatory power to put us back into the control seat to say, like, here's the source of the threat.
00:31:38.080Here's the source of what is afflicting us so that at least now that you know who's doing this to you now, maybe you can stop it because at least you've now identified the target of where we need to aim our activities, whatever they may be, our resistance, our whatever.
00:31:52.700Right. Two more questions. One is this.
00:31:55.800So you've talked about how it is so attractive, quote unquote, you just talked a moment ago that it's explanatory power. How is it that it has become so dominant and so very effective with young people?
00:32:10.100So Gen Z, principally, you know, 18 to 24 in Canada, in the United States, in Western Europe, it's kids, you know, I can say that because I'm a dad, who are buying into this at a far greater frequency and much more emphasis than any other demographic. Why is that?
00:32:29.080Yeah. Well, I think there's a there's a few factors. And and look, you know, the other thing that needs to be said here is that anti-Semitism shouldn't be regarded purely as a kind of prejudice like any other.
00:32:42.860It also shouldn't be regarded as entirely organic. When we start to see anti-Semitism rise in a society, it is often not only because of the conditions that I had described, those sort of collective anxiety inducing factors, but also because those factors are willfully, intentionally, strategically exploited by state and non-state actors with a particular agenda.
00:33:06.820Right. Be it Russia or the Soviet Union, be it Iran or be it other state actors, anti-Semitism has served, has been wielded as a political tool for centuries.
00:33:18.840Right. And so we have to we have to also be conscious of that. And when when any propagandist looks at a society and says, I need to reshape how people in this society understand the world.
00:33:32.960Right. Because what's what this is, it's not just as simple as, you know, when we think about propaganda, what we're thinking about really is getting people to believe falsehoods or to disbelieve facts.
00:33:46.120That's what we think of as propaganda. This is something different. This is something that the that the Russian intelligence services have referred to as activity, which is active measures, a very innocuous sounding term for essentially a kind of what would you call it?
00:34:05.200like a social engineering, a cognitive warfare strategy, it's aimed not simply at getting people
00:34:12.380to believe or disbelieve certain facts or falsehoods. It's aimed at reshaping the way
00:34:17.820that people interpret facts that are available to them. So this is a much bigger, wider, deeper
00:34:26.200process. And so if you think about how do I reshape the way that an entire society understands
00:34:33.680the world, understands geopolitics and all of these things, where are you going to target in
00:34:38.420a society? Well, you're going to target the sites of knowledge production and knowledge
00:34:42.820certification. In other words, where did people go to find out what is real and true about the
00:34:47.780world? Well, they go to colleges and universities, research institutions. They go to journalists and
00:34:54.040news outlets. They go to social media nowadays, particularly the young. And
00:35:00.540increasingly to large language models, right? AI. So if you want to reshape the way that a
00:35:09.940society understands the world, that is where you want to target, right? And that happens to be a
00:35:14.060lot of the places where young people are, you know, existing, right? On college and university
00:35:21.420campuses, on social media, relying very heavily on AI models, right? So that's one
00:35:30.400factor that we see as operative here. But the other thing that I will, I think the two other
00:35:36.640things that I will highlight, one is that young people are still for, oh, am I stuck? It looks
00:35:42.200like my, it's not so weird. I can turn off my videos. Okay. The other factor is, oh, okay. Let
00:35:53.460me. The other factor is young people are still forming their sense of the world. It hasn't become
00:36:03.780so concretized or petrified. It hasn't set in yet. It's still quite fungible, their understanding of
00:36:10.720the world. And so they're impressionable. People have long said, there's all kinds of quotes we
00:36:18.360can pull from multiple historical figures that essentially say that he who commands the youth
00:36:24.940controls the future or something, you know, something to that effect. I think Hitler said
00:36:28.560it, Goebbels said some version of that, right? Many, many people have understood that if you
00:36:33.460can control how the youth thinks about the world or your society, then you can essentially
00:36:40.860control the future. And so that's another factor is the impressionability of young people
00:36:47.760And the last factor goes back to what I said about anti-Semitism taking the form of this sort of salvific narrative, a social justice ethos, or a politics of liberation.
00:37:00.020That's very appealing to young people because they're not only very impressionable, but they're also very idealistic.
00:37:08.480They see that this world isn't quite the way it should look, right?
00:37:12.440There are still many injustices, inequalities.
00:37:15.220There are things going wrong with the world. And they believe that a better, more equitable, brighter world is possible. They haven't yet become jaded. Right. And so anti-Semitism has a particular appeal to to a group of people like that, because it is the story that anti-Semitism tells is that idealistic story of, you know, if we only deal with the Zionists or the Jews, you know, they're the ones standing between us and that better, brighter world.
00:37:43.720And it is possible. We just have to deal with the Zionists and the Jews. And then if we deal with them, we will set everything aright. That's a narrative that appeals to an idealistic group of people.
00:37:54.660So I think, you know, for for all of those reasons, right, the fact that they exist on social media, which has become the I think the most effective propaganda delivery vehicle that that we've ever seen in history, the fact that they are impressionable, the fact that they are idealistic and the fact that they that they exist in spaces that are primary targets for influence campaigns.
00:38:18.500All of that leads to what we've seen develop certainly over the last couple of decades, which is a reversal of previous trends.
00:38:28.180You know, it used to be the case that younger people were far less racist, anti-Semitic, Islamophobic, xenophobic, et cetera, than their older peers, than their parents, their grandparents, et cetera.
00:38:42.540We now see that older generations have lower levels of anti-Semitism. And among, you know, younger populations, it is sky high.
00:38:52.080Final question. You've referred to this, I think, elsewhere as an information war. I've certainly done so in my book and the documentary. Are we losing the war?
00:39:02.460um that's a that's a that's a poignant question i don't know um uh you know i
00:39:13.340i'm inspired by the words of rabbi abraham joshua heschel who who has shaped a lot of my um
00:39:23.300uh moral uh religious and political thinking um and he said that we have to be optimists
00:39:30.860even against our better judgment. I think Dr. King said something very similar, basically making
00:39:37.380the case that change is hard. It takes a long time. It is daunting. And in order to sustain
00:39:46.220the effort necessary to make change, you have to believe it's possible. You have to have a
00:39:52.640tremendous faith in the possibility of a better world, in the possibility of turning the tide,
00:39:59.360et cetera. And so I want to I want to remain optimistic, even against my better judgment,
00:40:04.780because everything I'm seeing right now is not painting a very optimistic picture. But I think
00:40:10.640that, you know, for me to remain in this fight, I have to believe that it's worth it. I have to
00:40:17.200believe that it's possible that we will win. So I maintain that sort of optimism, despite the fact
00:40:48.480than there are Jews existing in the world,
00:40:51.680that, I think, shows just how daunting
00:40:54.940the information war is there's a real asymmetry here right there's just not enough jew like if
00:41:01.700every single jew on the planet posted a pro-jewish message it would not even qualify as a drop in the
00:41:10.020bucket compared to the numbers on the other side it's just it's very and and of course the algorithm
00:41:17.160rewards that right the bigger the the the size of the potential population with whom a message
00:41:24.460will resonate, uh, the more the algorithm promotes that message, right? So we are a severe
00:41:30.560disadvantage on multiple fronts. Um, the other thing I will say is that, um, there's an asymmetry
00:41:37.800in terms of, uh, this fight because on the one side you have the Jewish community, right? And
00:41:45.280yes, a few allies, uh, I don't want to discount our allies. We do have them. Um, but, but, um,
00:41:51.840On the one side, you have the Jewish community and it's, you know, a set of Jewish communal institutions like Simon Wiesenthal Center, like ADL, AJC and others.
00:42:01.180On the other side of that fight, you have state level actors like Russia, like Iran, like Qatar, right, et cetera, with state level sized budgets, state level sized armies of personnel whose job it is all day, every day to go to work, to try to sow division, polarization, anti-Semitism, extremism, incite people to, you know, radicalism and violence, et cetera.
00:42:25.780That's their job. That's all they do all day, every day. Right. And so I think unless and until we actually recognize that anti-Semitism is not merely an organic social prejudice and start approaching it as a tool of geopolitics, as a tool of empire building.
00:42:43.040Right. As a until we recognize that we're in the midst of information warfare being waged by powerful, very wealthy state level actors, we're going to lose this war.
00:42:57.020I think the what you the angle that you are bringing, the fact that you are trying to highlight the fact that anti-Semitism isn't just like, well, people distrust or are suspicious of those who are different than them.
00:43:08.560But no, no, no, actually, wait, this all of that is being exploited by state actors with a particular agenda. Right.
00:43:15.140Bringing that critical. I think that that realization is absolutely critical to any success that we can hope to have in this fight.
00:43:22.420Unless we realize what is actually happening, the scale and the scope of what anti-Semitism is and by whom and by what factors it's being driven.
00:43:31.420unless and until we realize that and change our approach, our interventions, our countermeasures
00:43:38.320to align with that, we're not, we can't expect any success in this war. I really believe that.
00:46:32.140So, Al-Quds itself is a reference to Jerusalem and to specifically the Dome of the Rock.
00:46:40.500And I'll could say is an annual event started in, I believe, 1979 to mark a day of resistance.
00:46:51.640And so if you were to ask organizers, they would say it's a global day of action against imperialism, against Zionism, against war, against aggression.
00:47:02.020They frame it as an anti-war, pro-peace-type demonstration, seeking to end occupation in Palestine and elsewhere.
00:47:16.820You also have people, critics, people concerned about Al-Quds Day as sort of a fomentation or manifestation of anti-Semitism because of the deep focus on Israel.
00:47:33.760And so this year, as we've had in many years in Toronto, there was a rally outside the U.S. consulate and, you know, it almost didn't happen.
00:47:47.740Well, I shouldn't say that, but the province kind of sort of tried to make it not happen.
00:47:52.200Well, let's talk about that because you're, along with an observer of these events, you're also a lawyer and you know quite a bit about the application of the law to protests and protesters.
00:48:03.760um so the government provincial government doug ford sought an injunction prior to this
00:48:10.480event taking place can you give us kind of a play-by-play about how that went and what you
00:48:15.920thought about it so for those who aren't familiar an injunction is basically a court order that
00:48:23.600prevents someone from doing something or requires someone to do something and in this case you had
00:48:28.880the province who wanted to prevent this i could say rally march from gathering and proceeding
00:48:38.080the thing is this is an annual event and we learned through the court record that police
00:48:44.880have actually been coordinating with organizers for weeks to try and figure out the route and
00:48:52.160the parameters and so on and so forth. Apparently not permits. That has not come up as something
00:48:59.460the police required or anyone was particularly concerned about. But an injunction is sort of an
00:49:05.560emergency motion by nature. What happened here is the Premier on Friday afternoon, the day before
00:49:14.080the protest, made a video posted to social media saying that he had instructed the Attorney General
00:53:26.000They presumably want to have a lot of people in attendance.
00:53:29.500they make noise with noisemakers and have signs and all sorts of things and then when you guys
00:53:36.260go to film them they get very hostile and sometimes aggressive with you they did the same
00:53:41.360thing with other media who were present yesterday and you know my reaction watching is well what the
00:53:47.200hell did you expect like people you want people to see this don't you what's wrong with people
00:53:52.260seeing it and documenting it i just don't get that i find that very odd what you experience
00:53:57.660It seems to happen every time with this crowd that they are very hostile towards you when you show up.
00:54:05.780It's not an entirely rational reaction if you look at it through the lens of I'm participating in a public demonstration and I am trying to attract attention.
00:54:17.860So naturally, I'm going to receive it.
00:54:20.100But I think their rationale is often, you know, I personally as an individual, yeah, I'm here as part of this group, but I don't want to be identified. This political cause could put me at risk for my job or school or whatever they have going on in their lives.
00:54:40.340And there's also a sense of hostility toward anyone who isn't clearly and unequivocally with the group, right?
00:54:50.360For some more savvy protesters, that's a matter of narrative control and not wanting to have footage that you're not in control of circulating.
00:55:00.360And for protesters who are maybe more casual, it's almost a visceral reaction to, well, you're not with me, so I don't want to be on your camera.
00:55:10.340But that's just not how the law works in Canada, of course.
00:55:38.520Yeah, there is a subjectiveness to that, right? I think that there are things that were said that are objectively hateful, right? And there are individual protesters.
00:55:55.300And even if we look at the event itself and what is it rooted in, if you are Israeli or pro-Western civilization, very easy to conceive of this as a hate rally and as intended to destabilize and intended to foment hatred against sort of these, what are characterized as imperial forces.
00:56:23.180If you were to speak with, I think, the majority of attendees, they would not consider themselves to be participating in hate.
00:56:34.280They would actually consider themselves to be peace activists.
00:56:37.580So what do you do when there is such a gap between sort of this people conceiving of themselves and what they're doing, people perceiving what is happening?
00:56:48.760Like, can you just blanket characterize it as a hate rally or not a hate rally?
00:56:53.960I don't know that that is particularly helpful.
00:56:57.200And I think we're at a point where the discourse around hate is so muddied by so much garbage that has sort of polluted that entire discourse that my personal preference is, okay, let's focus on the actual tactics and behavior.
00:57:13.860Because Canada, we're not doing a great job, to put it mildly, you know, in regulating any sort of unlawful behavior.
00:57:24.160So expression is that's advanced, right?
00:57:27.920Let's just like, let's focus on the other stuff, the more kind of mundane and those tactics.
00:57:35.840And I think that that is a better starting point for us because we are almost kind of
00:57:41.080incapable as a nation at this point in time to regulate anything.
00:57:45.900So regulating hate or speech is just a really high bar.
01:01:57.440It's not just a Canadian thing. Throughout the Western world, globalizing the Intifada seems to have worked with an awful lot of people. And we see that in actions like West Bloomfield, like Norway, like Rotterdam, like Toronto.
01:02:12.760We see it in attitudes like, can a star, a rising star of the Democratic Party, like Josh Shapiro, run and have a chance at getting the party nomination to go up against the Republicans of the White House in 2028?
01:02:29.040and it is it is a bad time you know i started the show with lad gakin who is um simon wiesenthal
01:02:37.140center and an expert on anti-semitism and he makes the same point as you have but just for
01:02:43.220people you know in the united states and elsewhere listening in you made reference to olivia chow
01:02:49.140um and i think it's important people know that olivia chow didn't even bother to go to any of
01:02:55.580those synagogues that had been shot up to show support or comfort the people
01:03:01.180there. And that's kind of an awful thing to do, isn't it? Like, that's,
01:03:05.580that's not what a mayor is supposed to do.
01:03:08.200I should put out a video with the chief of police, Myron Demke,
01:03:11.620who's been just awful on this as well. And, um,
01:03:17.100it was, uh, you know, described as a hostage video,
01:03:20.860but she didn't show up to uh to the synagogue um it's yeah we're in a bad spot as she said to a
01:03:31.600couple of counselors one time is uh they were trying to deal with um a motion before city
01:03:37.040council at toronto uh on these hate rallies that have been going on since you know the the pro
01:03:42.940hamas rallies um she said oh you don't like those crazies in the street those crazies voted for me
01:07:33.480But the voting public seems to be willing to say he's protecting us from Trump, so we're going to back him, even though the numbers are horrible.
01:07:41.000Like, we lost 108,000 full-time jobs in February.
01:07:47.120That would be akin to the Americans losing a million jobs in a month.
01:07:52.040And Carney is getting away with saying our jobs numbers are better than the Americans.
01:18:43.860you need all the strength that you can muster in order to rebuild.
01:18:49.540And caucus management is really hard when you're not yourself a member of parliament.
01:18:54.080So if it's anybody but Eddie McPherson, it'll be a big challenge to manage caucus
01:18:59.220because at the same time, you're not in parliament and you left to crisscross the country.
01:19:03.480You can't spend your time in Ottawa. That's not the place to be.
01:19:06.640So that's the kind of person that anybody should be looking at.
01:19:09.640But we're saying all this, Warren, but to me, it seems to be almost a forgotten conclusion that the Democrats will pick Avi Lewis at the convention in Winnipeg.
01:19:19.740So, you've got Avi Lewis trying to rebuild in this slender majority environment.
01:19:27.000You've got Pierre Polyev trying to carve out some kind of credibility and get some popularity.
01:23:29.640Well, I mean, Don Cherry has a long history of being insulting towards French-speaking Canadians in general to Quebecers.
01:23:36.300But also, I mean, as one of the Blackian people, Mario Simard, he said he insulted everybody that was not a white, English, Canadian man.
01:23:46.200So, you know, he does not resonate the same way in Quebec,
01:23:50.780and his name is not cherished the way he is in English Canada, that's for sure.
01:23:56.260So, you know, to me it was not surprising to see a guy like Andrew Lawton
01:23:59.760push forward this idea and this petition.
01:24:02.660I was a little bit more surprised to see Poitier pick it up
01:24:05.300and the Conservative Party embrace it,
01:24:07.660because clearly they don't have that Quebec sensibility.
01:24:11.420And you could see all these Quebec Conservative MP going out of their way to make public statements to oppose this idea, to oppose this nomination, one after the other.
01:24:22.700And they were doing that because in Quebec, this blew up.
01:24:25.620I mean, the blocs certainly, you know, made some hay with it and good for them.
01:24:30.760But the media, you know, columns after columns are denouncing this idea.
01:24:35.720It's probably getting more press in Quebec than anywhere else in the country, even though the guy, you know, he was not watched as much in Quebec being an English-only speaker, but his reputation and the offensive things he said make him very toxic.
01:24:53.840So I am not sure I understand what benefit it gives the Conservatives
01:24:59.200if they are hoping to make major inroads in Quebec.
01:25:03.080They have some MPs there, but they need more if they want to form government.
01:25:07.040And this is the kind of move that shows that they're kind of still tone deaf towards Quebec.