Making Sense - Sam Harris - #173 — Anti-Semitism and Its Discontents

Barry Weiss is a staff writer and editor for the Opinion Section at the New York Times. She was also an op-ed and book review editor at the Wall Street Journal before that, and worked at Tablet, the online magazine of Jewish politics and culture. She is a native of Pittsburgh, and in fact was a bat mitzvah at the Tree of Life synagogue, and knew people who were killed, as you ll hear in this episode. This is a timely conversation, and Barry and I cover a fair amount of ground here. We talk about the different strands of anti-Semitism, right-wing, left-wing and Islamic, and the difference between them, which was a point that only became clear to me in reading Barry s new book, How to Fight Anti-Semitism . We discuss the so-called Great Replacement Theory, the populist response to globalization, and other topics that have their theological roots in Judaism and the fate of the Jews in Western Europe. And, of course, we talk about feminism and its role in the anti-semitism debate, and what it means to be a liberal in the 21st century. Make sense of it all, and let me know what you think of it in the comments section below! Tweet me if you have any thoughts or suggestions on how to make it better. I'll be listening to this episode and sharing it on the podcast. Timestamps: 4:00 - What does it mean to you as a Jew? 5:30 - What do you think about it? 6:20 - Is it a good thing? 7:40 - How to fight it better than it matters? 8:10 - Why it matters to you? 9:00 11:30 Does it matter to you more than it does it matter? 10:40 12:10 13:00 Is it not? 15:00 What do I like it better? 14:00 Can you be a Nazi or Nazi or a Nazi adjacent? 16:20 17:00 Do you think it matter more than that? 17, is it a bad thing than it's not a Nazi, right or not a better than that ? 15, or is it not a right or a good word? 13, right and a lot of it's a lot more? 21:00 Does it really matter to me?

00:00:00.000 Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris.

00:00:21.060 Well, very brief housekeeping here. Just reminding you all once again that if you're supporting the

00:00:26.860 podcast, please subscribe to the subscriber-only feed. You do this by, with your mobile device,

00:00:34.540 going to my website, going to the subscriber content page, and grabbing the RSS with one

00:00:42.260 click on the icon of the podcasting app that you're using. If you're not using a supported app,

00:00:49.200 then you can manually copy the RSS information, and that will ensure that you get all the content

00:00:56.140 that I produce going forward. Okay, well, I'm recording this on October 27th,

00:01:03.980 probably releasing this on the 28th, but this is the one-year anniversary of the Tree of Life

00:01:09.660 shooting in Pittsburgh, where 11 people were murdered. I believe six were injured, and this

00:01:18.200 was the worst attack on the Jewish community in American history, I believe. And the timing of

00:01:24.400 this episode is fortuitous because I am speaking with Barry Weiss about her new book, How to Fight

00:01:30.680 Anti-Semitism. And Barry is a staff writer and editor for the Opinion section at the New York Times.

00:01:37.300 She was also an op-ed and book review editor at the Wall Street Journal before that.

00:01:41.980 She has worked at Tablet, the online magazine of Jewish politics and culture.

00:01:46.300 And she is a native of Pittsburgh, and in fact was a bat mitzvah at the Tree of Life synagogue

00:01:53.980 and knew people who were killed, as you'll hear. So this is a timely conversation,

00:02:01.220 and Barry and I cover a fair amount of ground here. We talk about the different strands of

00:02:07.360 anti-Semitism, right-wing, left-wing, and Islamic. We talk about the difference between anti-Semitism

00:02:14.120 and other forms of racism, which was a point that only became clear to me in reading Barry's

00:02:20.440 book. We talk about the so-called Great Replacement Theory among white supremacists, the populist

00:02:27.920 response to globalization, the history of anti-Semitism in the U.S., its theological roots, criticisms of

00:02:36.860 Israel, the fate of the Jews in Western Europe, and other topics. I'll have a few more things

00:02:43.860 to say about all this in my afterward. But now, without further delay, I bring you Barry Weiss.

00:02:53.140 I am here with Barry Weiss. Barry, thanks for joining me on the podcast.

00:02:57.220 Thanks for having me, Sam.

00:02:58.800 So you have written a book that's not going to be controversial at all. This has to be fun for you.

00:03:06.340 I know this is already out and launched and reviewed, and you're well into your book tour,

00:03:11.580 or maybe somewhere near the end of it, or maybe the book tour is going to subsume the rest of your

00:03:16.240 life. But it sort of feels like that at the moment.

00:03:19.040 Yeah. The book is How to Fight Anti-Semitism, and it is a great and bracing read. It's a short book.

00:03:26.660 This is one of these books that you really can start and finish with confidence, which is nice.

00:03:32.380 We want to talk about this in great depth, the topic of anti-Semitism.

00:03:36.800 But before we do, I just want to get some context for you and your work as a journalist and as an

00:03:45.200 opinion person. How would you describe your politics and your career thus far as a journalist?

00:03:53.100 Well, if you Google me, you'll get one answer, which is that I'm apparently extremely controversial.

00:03:58.700 My answer is that I'm fairly boring. I am very socially liberal. I'm sort of hawkish on foreign

00:04:06.900 policy. I consider myself left of center. But I think, like many people who are similarly positioned,

00:04:15.500 we're a bit politically homeless at the moment. So we sort of don't fit into either of the increasingly

00:04:20.960 extreme tribes and therefore are sort of seized upon and pilloried by both of them.

00:04:28.340 You know, just for some background, I spent six or seven years at the Wall Street Journal

00:04:32.680 in two stints, first as an op-ed editor on the editorial page and then as a book review editor,

00:04:39.240 both of which were under the umbrella of the editorial page, which is, of course,

00:04:44.080 famously, I would say, free market conservative place.

00:04:47.300 And I was always the most left-wing person in that milieu. Then I moved after Trump became the

00:04:54.500 candidate and I didn't want to be a part of an editorial page that was in some way apologizing

00:05:00.640 for or kind of quietly supporting him or covering for him. I left along with many people, including

00:05:07.100 Brett Stevens, who's now my colleague at the New York Times. And I went from being sort of the most

00:05:11.520 left-wing person at the Journal's editorial page to one of the most, I guess, right-wing people

00:05:17.020 at the New York Times. So that sort of, I think, concisely sums it up a little bit.

00:05:21.720 Yeah. So needless to say, you are often maligned as a Nazi or Nazi adjacent. And I know the feeling.

00:05:29.200 And perhaps we'll get into that. But let's talk about the genesis of the book, because I believe

00:05:34.900 you began writing this book after the synagogue atrocity in Pittsburgh, which landed all too close

00:05:43.200 to home. Perhaps summarize what happened there for those who have forgotten.

00:05:49.360 Right. There have been so many since then. On the morning of October 27th, 2018, a white supremacist

00:05:57.140 walked into Tree of Life Synagogue in Squirrel Hill, which is the neighborhood of Pittsburgh,

00:06:01.900 where I was raised. Tree of Life was the synagogue where I became a bat mitzvah.

00:06:06.280 And he walked in. He shouted that all Jews must die. And then he murdered 11 people there 1.00

00:06:13.560 on a Shabbat Saturday morning. I was in Arizona at the time. I got a text from my youngest sister

00:06:21.180 on our family chat. And she simply said, you know, there's a shooter at Tree of Life.

00:06:25.520 I immediately thought of my dad, who often goes to synagogue at one of the different services

00:06:30.980 that meets there on Saturday morning. There are three communities that meet in that building.

00:06:34.900 And I immediately typed back, is dad? I didn't even finish the question. Thank God he wasn't there.

00:06:41.920 He was still at home with my mom. But my mom wrote back, you know, we're going to know a lot of people

00:06:46.120 there. And my dad knew six or seven of the people that were killed. I knew two. I was supposed to fly

00:06:53.120 to Israel, of all places, the following day to do a reporting trip on a very famous archaeological dig

00:07:00.480 in Jerusalem called the City of David. I put off the trip. I went home for the week. And I just sort

00:07:07.000 of immersed myself in what happens to a community and a community you know so well in the aftermath

00:07:13.380 of something like this. And wrote several columns. I was on Bill Maher that Friday night. And I actually

00:07:20.020 was under contract to write a different book, one that I'm still on the hook for, sort of about our

00:07:25.780 culture wars. But found myself just drawn back again and again to this topic and just sort of

00:07:32.820 seeing it everywhere I looked. And so I sort of went hat in hand to my publisher and asked if I could

00:07:38.340 do this quickly first, and if we could get it out before the Jewish high holidays, which somehow we

00:07:44.480 managed to do.

00:07:45.780 Hmm. Well, you do a few very useful things in the book, and one of which is to differentiate

00:07:51.680 the three poles of anti-Semitism, the right-wing, the left-wing, and the Islamic, I think we'll find 0.95

00:07:58.560 as we speak about these things that the latter two interact in ways that are so cynical and sinister 0.99

00:08:05.900 on the Islamic side, and so phantasmagorically stupid and masochistic on the left-wing side that, 1.00

00:08:13.320 I mean, honestly, it's very hard to understand how that alliance is even possible. But when we talk 1.00

00:08:19.000 about this, I think the left-wing and the Islamist problem will become sort of braided. You also make 1.00

00:08:26.000 a point which I hadn't really seen made before, which is that one of the reasons why the Jews are 1.00

00:08:32.440 so often attacked from the left and the right and elsewhere is that on the right they are considered

00:08:40.580 non-white or insufficiently white and yet able to pass for white in this kind of sinister way. 0.76

00:08:48.080 And on the left, if anything, they are extra white. I mean, they somehow have extra privilege and 0.87

00:08:54.920 the least points in the intersectionality Olympics. Perhaps we should start with the right-wing

00:09:01.400 side because that's sort of the cleanest to talk about, and this obviously is most relevant to what

00:09:07.620 happened in Pittsburgh. Did I describe the way you differentiate these things accurately?

00:09:12.540 Yeah. I had written a column. There was a survey or a study that came out that was very shocking

00:09:19.260 last year about the prevalence of anti-Semitism in Europe from, I believe CNN did it. And I wrote a

00:09:27.600 column laying out this, what I described at the time as sort of a three-headed dragon. I used that same

00:09:34.720 structure in the book, but frankly, if I'm honest, I had hoped to avoid the chapter on Islam.

00:09:42.380 For all of the reasons that I think we'll get into, but are probably already obvious to anyone who

00:09:47.580 listens to your show and sees the way that your ideas get talked about, that it's a very scary topic

00:09:54.640 to write about. And I had honestly hoped to avoid it and then realized that it would be the most

00:10:01.140 intellectually dishonest thing to write a book about anti-Semitism and not talk about it.

00:10:04.920 Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, let's start with the cleanest case, which is the extreme right. And

00:10:11.400 you make a point in the book that I really had never considered, and it explains a lot, which is that

00:10:17.500 anti-Semitism really is not just another flavor of racism on the right. You know, I won't put the

00:10:24.800 words in your mouth, but how is the white supremacist hatred of Jews different from their hatred of other

00:10:31.440 groups? So, and there's an anti-racist activist called Eric Ward, who runs the Western States 0.88

00:10:37.920 Center. And his essay, which is called Skin in the Game, I really recommend it to people,

00:10:44.140 was illuminating to me and helped inform my thinking on this. So what he says is that when

00:10:50.780 I heard, and maybe you're similar, when I saw the marchers in Charlottesville shouting,

00:10:55.840 Jews will not replace us. I heard that originally in a very straightforward way. I heard it as the

00:11:02.980 Jew is not going to take my place in the corner office. A Jew is not going to take my status in 1.00

00:11:08.920 society, something along those lines. But I realized in reading Eric Ward's work and others, that that's

00:11:15.880 not what they were saying at all. What they were suggesting is that Jews in a way, and this is Eric

00:11:22.820 Ward's language, they're in a way the greatest trick the devil has ever played. And the reason 0.99

00:11:27.700 for that is because at least in America, this is not true in Israel, where the majority of Jews

00:11:32.900 are of Mizrahi descent. So they're of North African and Middle Eastern descent. In America,

00:11:37.940 the majority of Jews are of Eastern European or Ashkenazi descent. 15% of American Jews are Jews of

00:11:43.420 color by the most liberal estimate. So we appear to be white, and we can pass as white. And so we trick

00:11:50.200 real white people into thinking that we're like them. But in fact, we're loyal to black people and 0.64

00:11:57.040 brown people and immigrants and Muslims. And if you go and you read, you know, you could see them as

00:12:02.200 deranged, or you could see it as a kind of, you know, conspiracy theory. When you read the social

00:12:08.700 media postings of the killer in Pittsburgh, right? The reason that he chose Tree of Life as the synagogue 0.91

00:12:16.720 is that the previous weekend, the previous Shabbat, Tree of Life had participated in what was called

00:12:23.320 National Refugee Shabbat, in which dozens of synagogues around the country came together to

00:12:29.560 say, we are safe spaces. I hate that language, but we are, we are places that are open to the stranger.

00:12:37.660 And the reason that we are is that one of the core Jewish values is the idea that we should never 0.99

00:12:43.220 oppress a stranger because we know what it was to be strangers in the land of Egypt.

00:12:47.440 And that whole initiative was put together by a very, very admirable, righteous organization

00:12:54.220 called HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society founded in the 1880s to help settle Jews fleeing

00:13:00.300 Eastern European pogroms and now helps Jewish refugees, but all kinds of refugees and immigrants

00:13:05.480 around the world. And he said in his, in his social media postings, and there's lots of expletives,

00:13:11.600 but something along the lines of, you know, screw your optics, I'm going in, these people are 1.00

00:13:17.680 bringing in, you know, they're sullying the country by helping bringing in the quote, dirty Muslims. 1.00

00:13:23.420 So that is the logic behind it. So Jews are kind of the linchpin in a way of white supremacist thinking 1.00

00:13:31.800 because we're the kind of shadow force being the handmaidens of the people that white supremacists 0.63

00:13:39.940 see as sullying white Christian America, if that makes sense.

00:13:45.480 Well, unfortunately, there's very often a kernel of truth embedded in these conspiracy theories. And

00:13:53.080 the kernel of truth here is that, of course, Jews have historically had a very positive attitude

00:13:59.340 towards civil rights and been very supportive of civil rights in the US. And through hard experience,

00:14:06.320 learned the consequences of being the victims of jingoistic immigration restrictions. I mean,

00:14:14.880 the most probably shocking case is what happened in 1939 with the SS St. Louis. This was a ship that

00:14:22.840 was carrying over 900 Jews who were seeking to escape the Holocaust. And it was denied entry in the US.

00:14:30.420 It was also denied entry in Cuba and Canada and wound up having to return to Europe where many of these 0.99

00:14:36.480 Jews ended up in Auschwitz. Experiences like that that would explain, you know, apart from just basic

00:14:43.480 human decency around the general problem of refugees, that would explain a positive orientation toward 1.00

00:14:52.620 immigration that if you're a white supremacist, you would revile. So we could sort of run to the same

00:15:01.160 thing here on the right with the association between Jews and socialism and communism. There have

00:15:09.480 been, you know, very prominent Jews who were supportive of those political movements. And it's kind of a

00:15:17.560 perfect storm of populism and isolationism and conspiracy thinking, you know, that's been fed for

00:15:25.480 more than a century with, you know, notions of born of fake literature, like the Protocols of the Elders of

00:15:32.500 Zion. And, you know, it culminates now in what you refer to as the Great Replacement Theory, which 0.92

00:15:38.940 perhaps you want to summarize. The right is organized around a kind of an anti-globalist

00:15:44.560 inward turn into nationalism and jingoism and isolationism and Jews are on the wrong side of

00:15:53.360 that divide. Right. And that's a problem like that set up, you know, leaving out the internet and

00:16:00.420 all kinds of other new phenomenon. But that is familiar to us, which is one of the reasons that I

00:16:07.060 think right-wing anti-Semitism is easier to grasp because we only need to look at, you know, our

00:16:13.720 grandparents' generation in Europe and what they experienced to understand it. It's like,

00:16:19.080 it's, I think it's in our bones in a way. And I would also just, just speaking of the St. Louis,

00:16:23.600 I don't usually recommend anything on Twitter, but there's this really beautiful moving Twitter

00:16:29.660 account called St. Louis Manifest that actually just tweets out the bios of everyone that was on

00:16:36.140 that ship that I follow. That's just really moving. And there's photographs and people want to know

00:16:41.640 more about it. Wow. So remind me, what is the Great Replacement Theory?

00:16:46.720 The Great Replacement Theory is, there's a great essay that Thomas Chatterton Williams

00:16:51.180 wrote about it, but it's, it's really this basic idea that's summarized by Steve King, which is,

00:16:57.940 you can't replace our civilization, as he put it, with someone else's babies.

00:17:03.940 This to me is a deeply anti-American idea because the ideal of this country is the idea that our

00:17:14.300 civilization is open to anyone who wants to adhere to the ideas of it. It has nothing to do with

00:17:22.060 bloodline. It has everything to do with fealty to a certain set of beliefs. And this whole notion of

00:17:30.300 sort of like blood and soil nationalism that you increasingly see on the right, and that is at the

00:17:35.920 heart of Great Replacement Theory, which is that civilization or culture is somehow something that

00:17:41.240 is passed down in the blood and not something that's passed down through culture and ideas and

00:17:48.040 beliefs is just, to me, deeply anti-American. And anyway, that's the idea of it.

00:17:53.980 Yeah, well, and it's mirrored on the left with this notion that identity, you know, racial identity

00:18:01.500 in particular is morally and politically paramount, as though, and anything you would say against,

00:18:09.020 let's say, Islam on the left will be immediately conflated with an attack on people for the color of

00:18:15.660 their skin or the origin of their birth. Whereas it's always, certainly in the context of a conversation

00:18:21.240 like this, a criticism of ideas and their consequences, right? If I'm going to criticize

00:18:26.340 neo-Nazis, I'm not criticizing white people. I'm criticizing terrible ideas. And when I'm 0.97

00:18:32.360 criticizing Islamism or jihadism, I'm not criticizing Arabs or any other ethnicity. I'm criticizing the 1.00

00:18:39.280 consequences of ideas. And the fact that people can't track this continues to be bewildering.

00:18:47.000 Part of it is that they can track it and they're deciding not to. And the other problem, right,

00:18:53.740 is that we have a president who does exactly the opposite. You know, he attacks people not based on

00:19:00.940 their ideas often, but based on immutable characteristics like their race or their gender

00:19:07.960 or, you know, their religion. Obviously that's mutable, but you know, that's part of the problem 0.61

00:19:13.060 is that he, the second he touches something, it becomes toxic.

00:19:17.720 Let's take a moment to just remind people a little bit more about the history of antisemitism in the

00:19:22.740 U.S. because it reaches further back than I think most people realize. So let's just briefly talk about

00:19:30.400 the 1930s and what you do in the book.

00:19:33.900 Well, so, you know, it's amazing to me that most people my age have never heard of the name Charles

00:19:41.360 Coughlin, but that's a name that if you're at all involved in the Jewish community, that is very,

00:19:48.200 very familiar. He was the radio host, sort of the Rush Limbaugh of his day, I guess, different, but very,

00:19:54.720 very popular in the same way, much more popular. I think something like 30 million Americans listen to

00:20:00.780 him every week. He is someone, he was a priest who's based in Michigan. He got so many letters

00:20:07.620 that the town he was from actually had to build a new post office to keep up with the amount of mail

00:20:14.060 he received. He was just hugely, hugely popular. And this was something who, you know, told 30 million

00:20:19.940 Americans that the Jews deserved Kristallnacht. He talked about the Jews as modern Shylocks who have 0.83

00:20:27.920 grown fat and wealthy. I mean, these are some of the most sort of old, vile, anti-Semitic tropes, 0.86

00:20:36.320 and you could hear them on the radio in America in the 1930s. You know, Henry Ford, people think of

00:20:43.880 Henry Ford as the automaker, which of course he was, but he had a, Hitler shouted him out in Mein Kampf.

00:20:51.120 He was awarded this thing called the Grand Cross of the German Eagle, which was the highest honor the

00:20:56.820 Nazis gave. And I think, you know, there was a short film made about this next thing I'll tell you,

00:21:03.680 which is, I really recommend to people, it's six or seven minutes. And you can watch, you know,

00:21:08.520 in 1939, 20,000 people showed up at Madison Square Garden to raise their arms to Heil Hitler and stood 0.53

00:21:17.140 beneath signs saying, you know, smash Jewish communism and stop the Jewish domination of Christian Americans. 0.79

00:21:23.020 So that all happened here. And yet still, and this is the thing that I find fascinating, 0.79

00:21:29.920 I was still very much, and I don't know about you, Sam, raised on the idea that America was uniquely

00:21:36.140 inoculated from the virus of anti-Semitism that was just much more natural, or so I was taught in 0.71

00:21:43.140 places like France and Germany and England.

00:21:45.700 Yeah, yeah. It actually wasn't until I read the book, The Abandonment of the Jews by David Wyman,

00:21:51.680 which I think came out in the mid-80s, that I understood just how touch and go the history is

00:21:58.780 here. I mean, you literally had congressmen giving anti-Semitic speeches on the floor of Congress

00:22:04.380 while the Holocaust was raging, and we understood the shape of it. I mean, it's just, it's mind-boggling 0.95

00:22:11.120 that the history was what it was. And, you know, you could add Charles Lindbergh to the list of

00:22:17.720 prominent figures who got singled out for Nazi accolades. And Charles Coughlin was a Catholic

00:22:25.920 priest. So he links up with a larger trend of Catholic fascism or fondness for fascism and,

00:22:34.600 you know, explicit anti-Semitism. And all of this, of course, is cashed out in Christian 1.00

00:22:42.980 theology, both Catholic and Protestant theology. I mean, you know, the Protestants are hardly better. 0.98

00:22:49.800 I mean, once Martin Luther got an audience, he started, you know, raging against the Jews,

00:22:55.700 really an explicitly eliminationist vein. And you cite some of this in your book, that the New Testament

00:23:02.460 has several verses that seem to justify anti-Semitism outright.

00:23:07.480 Yeah. I mean, the most famous of which is, you know, I think it's in the book of Matthew,

00:23:12.580 his blood be on us and on our children, you know, which was used to justify, you know, untold amounts

00:23:18.600 of violence. It's such a historically bloody line that even Mel Gibson, who right now is making a movie

00:23:26.280 called The Rothschilds, and I'm not kidding, even he in Passion of the Christ, which was 0.94

00:23:32.160 in Aramaic, didn't translate the verse into English. Because that's, you know, that's how

00:23:37.780 controversial it's been. But of course, there was Vatican II, and I don't want to undo the amount

00:23:43.380 of progress that's happened, because of course it has.

00:23:45.960 Yes. But again, the progress has to grapple with the fact that, obviously, there's an incoherence here,

00:23:52.600 because there are anti-Semitic lines in the Bible, and, you know, 2,000 years of theologically

00:24:00.380 mandated anti-Semitism resulted, and yet Jesus and the Twelve Apostles and the Virgin Mary were all

00:24:06.480 Jews. How there could have been such a durable basis for Jew hatred is a little hard to square,

00:24:12.500 except for the fact that it really was a kind of internecine schism in the religion. I mean,

00:24:18.800 you have Jews who were, in order to maintain their Judaism, had to explicitly reject the 0.51

00:24:26.940 Messiah status of Jesus. And that's, you know, that is the founding sin that really is unforgivable 0.94

00:24:34.320 if you're a dogmatic Christian.

00:24:36.360 Yeah. The other thing that, just going back a bit to American history piece, is after Pittsburgh,

00:24:43.100 you know, there was a lot of talk about how there had never been an attack on a synagogue. Actually,

00:24:50.280 there had never been that many people killed in a synagogue. That was true. And it was by far the

00:24:58.160 most violent attack against Jews in American history. Also true. But there had been, and this

00:25:05.340 is one of the things I was shocked to find out, a lot of attacks on synagogues. A lot. You know,

00:25:11.340 and I sort of go through them in the book. And the ones that stick out to me the most were these

00:25:15.660 sort of spate of attacks, specifically targeting civil rights, supporting rabbis in the South,

00:25:25.560 in Mississippi and in Atlanta specifically. And one of the occasions they actually went and I believe

00:25:31.620 bombed the house of the rabbi. And that was news to me. I had not grown up learning about that at all.

00:25:38.720 Yeah. Yeah. There's an ambient level of anti-Semitic hate crime in the U.S. And there

00:25:44.740 has always been, and I've always been somebody who, as a Jew, have minimized its significance. I mean,

00:25:52.480 it's always felt to me that anti-Semitism is not a major problem in the U.S. And even, I mean,

00:25:58.440 as shocking as, you know, the murder of dozens of people in any given year is, we're not talking

00:26:06.020 about, you know, 9-11 scale terroristic atrocities against Jews in general. Obviously, it could get

00:26:13.680 a lot worse. But the thing to point out is that all of the people who complain about hate crimes

00:26:20.600 against other groups, you know, in particular Muslims in the U.S., have been complaining about

00:26:26.120 a level of hate which has always been less than the level of hate crime against Jews. I mean,

00:26:32.160 any given year, if you look at FBI statistics, and you look for hate crimes against mosques and

00:26:37.880 Muslims, it's always less than the number of hate crimes against Jews and synagogues. I mean,

00:26:43.420 these are mostly property crimes in most cases. And again, you know, I don't mean to minimize it for

00:26:48.900 the people who suffer directly, but in a country of, you know, 330 million people, the numbers are not

00:26:56.160 that high. But it's generally ignored by, I mean, we just, we have to make apples to apples comparisons

00:27:02.660 here. If you're going to derange our politics over how awful it's been getting for Muslims in the

00:27:11.160 United States, it would be only decent to notice that the numbers for the same sorts of insults and

00:27:18.420 crimes against Jews has, for every year since 9-11, been, you know, five acts of worse.

00:27:25.980 And it's just, I'm teaming in the world.

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Making Sense - Sam Harris - October 28, 2019

#173 — Anti-Semitism and Its Discontents

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