Making Sense - Sam Harris - #373 — Anti-Zionism Is Antisemitism

00:00:00.000 welcome to the making sense podcast this is sam harris

00:00:23.880 okay well i am back in town after traveling for about 11 days in europe this is my first podcast

00:00:35.700 after that disastrous presidential debate this was actually a perfect example of the

00:00:42.500 relevance of substack for me because i couldn't record a podcast i was traveling i was actually

00:00:48.780 on an airplane the morning after the debate but i could post a short piece to substack

00:00:54.900 which i did so there's just the cadence of doing a once a week podcast allows for certain things to

00:01:03.460 fall through the cracks and my writing over at substack will help fill those cracks anyway if

00:01:09.880 you want to read me over there you can just search my name over at substack and you will find it

00:01:15.700 if you haven't read what i wrote last week my main point was not merely that biden should drop out of

00:01:23.340 the race he clearly should and those who have worked so diligently up until this point to conceal his

00:01:30.300 deficits should be ashamed of themselves i don't know how they thought he was going to bluff his

00:01:35.760 way through this but more important i think we have to acknowledge that we have paid a significant

00:01:42.180 price for his deficits already right it's not just that he can't campaign effectively and offer any

00:01:49.940 assurance that he's going to beat trump in november and spare us a second trump term it's that he can't

00:01:59.020 speak effectively about anything certainly not extemporaneously right he's done no interviews with

00:02:07.320 the new york times or the washington post or the wall street journal and he hasn't done them for a

00:02:12.760 reason and the job of the president is not just to be cognitively intact such that you can make

00:02:20.000 decisions right i mean let's just grant that he may be intact enough to make all the decisions he needs

00:02:27.320 to make one could be forgiven of course for feeling that they saw no evidence of that in last week's

00:02:33.260 debate but even granting that his cognition may be all there the job of the president is also to

00:02:42.720 communicate and persuade right and there has been so much he should have communicated about

00:02:49.820 about the war in ukraine about the war in gaza he should have been able to push back against all of

00:02:56.880 this insanity we have witnessed in response to america's engagement such as it is in both of those wars

00:03:05.180 he has to make sense of these things in public he has to make the case for why america needs to be

00:03:13.020 engaged in the world he needs to be able to do a two-hour interview or a two-hour press conference

00:03:19.020 right he's 81 and is not up to the job there's a proper insanity surrounding the president now

00:03:26.960 where people are just torching their reputations coming forward and defending him this includes

00:03:34.720 president obama it includes governor newsom jesus christ you cannot tell america they didn't see what

00:03:44.200 they saw during that debate right he didn't just have a bad night it's not at all analogous to obama's

00:03:51.560 bad debate against romney no one came away from the debate that obama clearly lost thinking obama is

00:04:00.720 unfit to be in the oval office because his faculty of speech and very likely cognition is so degraded

00:04:08.980 right that was not the lesson drawn there it absolutely was last week about president biden

00:04:16.400 the democrats ignore that or obfuscate that at their peril not just at their peril at everyone's peril

00:04:24.660 because if half of what democrats believe about a second trump term is real well then what are they

00:04:33.260 doing rolling the dice with biden at this point i think there is no way that man wins in november

00:04:40.660 so obviously biden himself should decide to drop out but short of that there has to be a way to do this

00:04:51.020 at the convention anyway lots of people are talking about that writing about that let's just see what

00:04:56.980 happens also sometime last week there was a demonstration effectively a pro-hamas demonstration

00:05:04.640 in front of a synagogue in los angeles that really was quite ugly you had people blocking jewish access

00:05:11.840 to a synagogue in the most jewish neighborhood in los angeles this is a point that noah pollack

00:05:20.700 made over the free press if you had a bunch of masked christian republicans gathered in front of a mosque

00:05:28.120 in los angeles assaulting muslims what would the response have been as he says we would now be several

00:05:35.780 days into a national news cycle about islamophobia and injustice in america there would be joint lapd

00:05:42.540 fbi task forces kicking down doors and press conferences vigils presidential speeches and multi-part

00:05:50.200 investigative reports from numerous leading publications i think that's extraordinarily likely

00:05:56.020 to be true right as many pointed out the essence of anti-semitism are the double standards one

00:06:04.640 continually discovers here right it happens to the jews and no one seems to care if it happened to the

00:06:12.000 muslims if it happened to black americans we'd never hear the end of it it's the stuff that has been

00:06:18.540 normalized around the jews that seemed so insidious and i was in new york not that long ago i happened

00:06:25.080 to walk down fifth avenue past the big synagogue there i guess it's somewhere around 65th street or so

00:06:33.300 and noticed not for the first time but for the first time i noticed how normal it had seemed that out in

00:06:41.900 front of the synagogue entrance there are these giant blocks of stone each one is about the size

00:06:48.600 of a i don't know a washing machine they look nice they're nice blocks of limestone or something and

00:06:56.760 um they're certainly not an eyesore but they're quite unusual you know they're the sidewalk is ringed

00:07:03.440 there with these giant blocks of stone well think about that for a moment what are they doing there

00:07:08.640 you know what they're doing there they're to prevent a car jumping the curb and mowing down

00:07:16.060 people in front of the synagogue entrance right people who you could assume if they're gathered

00:07:22.540 there in any number are jewish right it's to prevent the murder of jews in manhattan this is normal

00:07:31.720 but it's only normal for jews right no one else has to do this in american society which brings me to

00:07:39.720 the topic of today's conversation today i'm speaking with michael kotler wunsch who is israel's special

00:07:46.760 envoy for combating anti-semitism and she's also a prominent speaker and author and researcher and

00:07:53.100 independent policy and strategy advisor covering anti-semitism and law and human rights and zionism

00:07:59.480 she was once a member of israel's knesset and she's a trustee of rabbi sax's legacy trust

00:08:07.300 anyway i recorded this conversation back in december about seven months ago and didn't release it and

00:08:16.060 really that was just based on my own incompetence really i mean what happened is i recorded it and then

00:08:24.840 i kept hitting the topic of october 7th i've recorded several solo podcasts you might recall

00:08:31.680 i felt like i had spent so much time on october 7th that i was um you know wearing out the interest of

00:08:40.160 the audience so the the weeks and months passed and it never felt like the right time to release it

00:08:45.720 but i went back and listened to it and it is still perfectly relevant i don't think there's a sentence in

00:08:53.640 here that has that shows its age right i mean we're still in this moment of moral confusion around

00:09:00.760 october 7th and in any case michael is an extraordinarily clear speaker i mean she speaks

00:09:08.960 with an urgency and eloquence that you don't often hear on really any topic she's spectacular and i

00:09:16.880 discovered her in a youtube clip back in i guess it was probably november where she was dressing down

00:09:24.640 the u.n and um just did that as effectively as as i've ever seen anyone do anything like that

00:09:33.360 it's worth watching that performance in front of the u.n which as we make clear in this podcast is a

00:09:39.520 hostile environment for jews and certainly any representative of israel in any case before

00:09:46.360 giving you the conversation with michael i wanted to explain the title i've given this podcast because

00:09:52.600 this represents a change in my view of the situation post october 7th before october 7th i certainly

00:09:59.820 would have said that anti-zionism is quite distinct from anti-semitism and at one point i could have even

00:10:07.580 claimed to have been an anti-zionist of some sort myself after october 7th i don't think there's any

00:10:15.280 meaningful difference i mean there's still a conceptual difference that we could semantically

00:10:21.060 justify but anyone who's arguing that israel shouldn't be a jewish state at this point is clearly

00:10:29.500 betraying if not an outright hatred of jews such moral confusion about what happened on a

00:10:37.560 october 7th and about the risks to israel not just to the nation state but to the actual

00:10:43.240 inhabitants the existential risk to them posed by hamas and hezbollah and the islamic republic of

00:10:50.860 iran anyone who is arguing that israel shouldn't exist as a jewish state at this point is so out of

00:10:58.840 touch with what has happened there and with what millions upon millions of people who really do hate

00:11:06.920 the jews want to have happen there between that river and the sea so as to render any semantic

00:11:14.340 distinction there i think morally confused it's not important to make the distinction the thing to

00:11:21.840 acknowledge that all of these people who are calling into question the legitimacy of the state

00:11:27.360 of israel and the legitimacy of its fighting for its own survival against antagonists that really do mean

00:11:34.740 to perpetrate a genocide there these people are not engaging with the actual moral terrain i mean

00:11:42.160 every bit as much as holocaust deniers are not actually a party to the conversation about what

00:11:49.040 happened in europe in the 40s and about what many people think should happen at some point in the future

00:11:55.360 that's actually a good analogy is holocaust denial synonymous with anti-semitism well technically no

00:12:04.540 right i mean one could find some anomalies in the historical record or take an interest in the

00:12:10.600 possibility that such anomalies exist so as to call some part of that history into question and to not

00:12:17.980 be motivated by an abiding hatred of jews but you think a lot of people are standing on that part of

00:12:25.340 the venn diagram no right if you're in the holocaust denial business we know what you're up to and i think

00:12:33.880 we're in the same spot post october 7th with anti-zionism it seems to me that the thing that most people

00:12:39.980 don't understand here the justification for the state of israel certainly post october 7th which was

00:12:47.920 a direct echo of a multi-century history of pogroms and a direct echo of the holocaust itself i mean

00:12:57.900 this was not normal violence and the jews can be forgiven frankly for perceiving a threat that most

00:13:07.780 other identifiable groups could never imagine feeling right i mean the jews have on countless

00:13:14.960 occasions discovered from one day to the next that their neighbors want to kill them this is the part

00:13:23.220 of the history of the holocaust that most people don't understand i mean most people when you think

00:13:27.460 about the holocaust you think well there was auschwitz right there was the killing machine of the

00:13:33.120 third reich the mechanization of death perpetrated by nazi germany on the jews of europe now that's

00:13:42.660 obviously a significant part of the story but it's by no means the whole story and on some level

00:13:48.720 it's not the most disconcerting part of the story right i mean there were about six million jews killed

00:13:56.380 in the holocaust about three million i believe within the concentration camp system so about three

00:14:03.660 million died outside of it and this is through mass shootings and ghettos and forced labor and death

00:14:11.340 marches and other means obviously a lot of this was the result of what the nazis did in particular their

00:14:18.940 mobile killing units the einsatzgruppen but they had an uncountable number of collaborators in all the

00:14:26.960 countries they invaded right and in many cases they didn't have to force anyone to round up their local

00:14:34.940 populations of jews for slaughter right they simply had to give them permission and in countries like

00:14:41.720 lithuania and latvia and ukraine and belarus and poland and romania and croatia and even greece right

00:14:51.280 there were just well-known atrocities committed by locals who weren't forced to do anything right they

00:14:59.640 just realized that they could and this is the history that is even more unnerving for jews these were

00:15:08.340 neighbors suddenly turning on neighbors and torturing them and beating them to death or shooting them

00:15:17.340 in ditches or helping the nazis do that very directly they were jews who returned from concentration camps

00:15:28.160 after they were liberated only to be murdered by their neighbors there's a quote here that i found in

00:15:36.540 dan stone's recent book the holocaust and unfinished history he introduces it with the following nazi

00:15:44.540 germany was certainly responsible for initiating the program to kill the european jews and the killings

00:15:50.160 occurred within this overall framework but at the local level the ways in which the killings often took

00:15:55.940 place were quite different from the factory line extermination associated with the death camps

00:16:01.440 not least because many locals participated and then he introduces a quote from another source

00:16:09.040 here's that quote for the jews living in these eastern european villages towns and cities who had

00:16:15.840 coexisted with their christian neighbors for centuries the fact that their acquaintances colleagues

00:16:21.880 classmates and friends had turned against them hunted them down or delivered them to the nazi murderers

00:16:29.760 meant that they experienced the holocaust not just as a murderous invasion by a foreign enemy

00:16:35.740 but also as a series of communal massacres in a once familiar but now lethally hostile environment

00:16:43.040 i mean that really is different the once familiar but now lethally hostile environment and it's the

00:16:54.160 intimations of that right the fact that society can turn and become a lethally hostile environment

00:17:02.400 for jews right as for no other people on earth i mean i guess it's possible it could happen for some

00:17:09.920 other people but who has it happened to for the last two thousand years right so the jews can be forgiven

00:17:17.600 for not having the patience to split hairs about the motivations of people who are blocking synagogues

00:17:25.920 in los angeles and beating people up who try to enter right are these people really anti-semitic or are they

00:17:33.920 just anti-zionist right these people who are holding jews in los angeles responsible for policies of a foreign

00:17:44.640 country israel is this anti-semitism or is it just really passionate anti-zionism the stupidity

00:17:53.760 on display by people who can't figure out the difference between what hamas did on october 7th and

00:18:02.320 what the idf has done in fighting hamas which again is using its own population as human shields

00:18:09.600 which is still holding american hostages again another thing that our president can't talk about

00:18:19.040 anyway michael and i cover much of this terrain we discuss the bias against israel at the u.n

00:18:25.440 the nature of double standards the precedent set by israel and its conduct in the war

00:18:30.720 the shape-shifting quality of anti-semitism anti-zionism as the new strain of anti-semitism

00:18:37.760 the zionism is racism resolution at the u.n the lie that israel is an apartheid state

00:18:44.880 the notion that israel is perpetrating a genocide against the palestinians another lie

00:18:50.880 the marxist oppressed oppressor narrative that is confounding people the false moral equivalence

00:18:58.240 between the atrocities committed by hamas and the deaths of non-combatants in gaza the failure of

00:19:03.600 the social justice movement to respond appropriately after october 7th what universities should have done

00:19:09.760 in those early days reclaiming the meanings of words extremism of many types versus civilization

00:19:18.160 and other topics anyway this is another psa so no paywall and again sorry for the delay on this

00:19:25.920 podcast i just dropped the ball i want to apologize to mccall for that and thank her for her patience

00:19:33.920 and now i bring you mccall kotler wunch

00:19:42.320 i am here with mccall kotler wunch mccall thanks for joining me thank you very much for having me on i

00:19:48.560 am sure i sounded like a diaspora jew in the pronunciation of your name but it's great to have

00:19:54.160 you here like many people i i first became aware of you seeing your really brilliant and searing speech

00:20:02.640 in front of the un recently when did you give that speech is that about a month ago that was

00:20:08.320 yeah that was just about three weeks ago and uh well you know we saw one manifestation of what i was

00:20:14.160 trying to say just in the complete silence regarding obviously the women so brutally raped on 10-7 but

00:20:21.200 that's as i said just one manifestation of what that speech was about yeah so um

00:20:27.440 obviously we're going to talk about what happened on october 7th or at least

00:20:31.920 more about the aftermath and what did and didn't happen in the aftermath but before we do just

00:20:38.000 summarize your career up to this point i mean how is it that you became israel's special envoy for

00:20:46.160 combating anti-semitism and how is it that such a role exists and i think that's kind of a rhetorical

00:20:52.720 question but for how long has it existed and just how is it that you you come to occupy it so israel's

00:21:00.160 special envoy for combating anti-semitism actually joins a coalition of special envoys from around the

00:21:05.280 world the united states included canada european countries the european parliament south af south

00:21:11.360 american countries and really it is testament to a devastating reality in which we have seen a

00:21:17.280 consistent rise in anti-semitism in real spaces and virtual spaces on the streets on campuses and

00:21:25.360 israel's special envoy for combating anti-semitism i am actually the second person to hold this position

00:21:31.280 appointed by the state of israel and in many ways the way that i think of it is that not only am i israel's

00:21:37.600 special envoy for combating anti-semitism with regards to the state of israel but as israel is

00:21:42.960 the nation state of the jewish people to which jews prototypical indigenous people returned after

00:21:48.640 thousands of years of exile persecution well i am in that sense the jewish people's special envoy

00:21:55.200 for combating anti-semitism at a time where if before 10-7 we knew there was this very very troubling

00:22:02.400 gradual increase in anti-semitism that manifested on multiple sort of spaces and places 10-7 became an

00:22:11.280 explosive manifestation of of the anti-semitism that we see that we'll talk a little bit about

00:22:16.800 i hope during this podcast but i come to it from decades really of work in the several spaces that

00:22:24.320 enabled this mutation of anti-semitism that we saw on 10-7 whether it be the international law

00:22:31.040 institutions and human rights that were co-opted and weaponized to enable this mutation of anti-semitism

00:22:36.160 of this particular strain this virulent lethal strain and my sort of academic expertise and

00:22:43.280 research with regards to university spaces in which this particular anti-semitism has been explosive and

00:22:49.520 finally as a legislator with regards to the social media platforms and the way that all of those spaces

00:22:55.600 feed into each other to have created this perfect storm if you will in a very very negative way

00:23:01.840 is what guides me in my role as israel's special envoy and so did did you mean that there are special

00:23:09.040 envoys for those other countries on the topic of anti-semitism absolutely so the united states the

00:23:15.440 united states has deborah lipstat she's the united states special envoy for combating anti-semitism

00:23:19.760 canada has deborah lyons the european parliament and the eu has katarina von schnerbein there are

00:23:25.680 many special envoys interesting i was totally unaware of this yeah i know i know of deborah's work but i

00:23:32.080 didn't know she was our special envoy well one would hope there would there'd be no such need but

00:23:37.120 obviously the need is excruciating at the moment well i want to talk about the history of anti-semitism

00:23:43.200 as you see it and how this this hatred has has morphed over the the centuries but before we jump

00:23:50.800 into the history can you just tell me what is happening at the un because i mean again i discovered

00:23:56.960 you in your speech there where you were expressing and i i recommend that everyone listen to the speech

00:24:03.200 or watch it on youtube it's um it is there in all its uh moral clarity i mean it's amazing the

00:24:10.160 the effectiveness with which you were able to express moral outrage in that context and the

00:24:17.120 and the outrage is so appropriate given how the un has behaved and for really a long time i mean can

00:24:25.600 you just tell me how the double standards applied to israel have become enshrined there and what

00:24:34.160 explains it i mean it just it's you know it's functioning almost like an anti-semitic organization at

00:24:39.360 this point and it's frankly pretty bizarre to see so what's happening at the un so here's the

00:24:45.520 devastation of it and i think that anti-semitism is just perhaps the as i referred to in that speech

00:24:50.800 the bloody canary in the mine shaft but here's the thing that this infrastructure was created post-world

00:24:57.360 war ii to ensure that an international rules-based order guided the way in which countries held each

00:25:05.200 other to account and were held to account including by the way in situations of war

00:25:10.160 and the understanding that if that infrastructure that was created mandated to uphold promote and

00:25:17.040 protect these foundational principles in order that we fulfill the prospective or future looking

00:25:25.360 commitment of never again right post-holocaust understanding that not only six million jews but six million jews

00:25:34.240 were systematically murdered butchered burned because of this lethal hatred that enabled their

00:25:43.040 dehumanization their delegitimization and the application of double standards to them as individuals or as

00:25:50.240 communities in their various countries that enabled the atrocities of the holocaust so the never again

00:25:56.160 principle which the majority of the countries that joined at the time in understanding that we need to

00:26:01.520 ensure that never again and i say prospective or future looking because we can't very well prevent the

00:26:07.200 past can we but what never again committed to do was to actually learn from the past from that

00:26:14.880 demonization delegitimization and double standards the process that enabled eventually because it didn't

00:26:21.760 happen overnight the atrocities of the holocaust so that never again and words like genocide and crimes

00:26:28.320 crimes against humanity coined actually for the nuremberg trials because there were no words to describe

00:26:35.200 the atrocities that were perpetrated by the nazis and their helpers that systematically burned and massacred and

00:26:44.240 butchered jews well the understanding was at the time that never again was a shared prospective commitment and that it

00:26:52.800 needed a set of rules the international rules based order with the understanding that rules have to be

00:26:58.880 applied equally and consistently to all the parties member states of the un and be upheld in all of the

00:27:07.120 institutions that it would roll out or create as mechanisms to uphold whether it be the red cross

00:27:13.360 whether it be the refugee entities that were created and so on and what has happened systematically in the un

00:27:20.720 uh... with a majority of countries that have no regard for that international rules based order in fact do

00:27:27.920 everything possible to violate that international rules based order without accountability enables for

00:27:33.760 example on november 2nd for iran or rather the islamic regime of iran and differentiated with the people of iran

00:27:41.760 iran to be appointed to be the chair of the uh... human rights council's social forum that's not a joke

00:27:48.960 right so when we understand let me just stop you right there how is that i mean that it's beyond a joke

00:27:55.040 i mean it's absolutely perverse so it's like a saturday night live sketch of dysfunction at the un

00:28:01.600 and how can anyone with a straight face put iran on a human rights council so you're a hundred percent

00:28:09.280 right and that's why you know i choose to shine a light on that and not solely on the anti-semitism

00:28:14.640 piece because i think that this is where we have to hold to account all of the governments including

00:28:20.080 those governments funding these institutions funding the agencies of these institutions whether it be i

00:28:25.600 i mentioned the red cross i'm going to mention anra a single refugee entity created for one group of

00:28:33.600 refugees so there is one u.n mechanism created for all refugees around the world and it's uh the uh

00:28:40.560 unhcr created in order to ensure that refugees and their needs are taken care of for the first

00:28:46.080 generation of refugees and guess what the u.n created another additional entity singularly or singling

00:28:54.400 out one group of refugees that is palestinians who singularly get to hand down refugee status from

00:29:01.600 generation to generation to generation and we are now at the fifth generation of refugees that is almost

00:29:08.880 counterintuitive to the whole purpose of an entity created by the u.n funded by the international

00:29:14.880 community so here we are with countries that do replace respect excuse me and uphold and promote and

00:29:21.120 protect presumably the rules-based order except that they are funding entities including those that i

00:29:26.720 mentioned within the u.n and including the u.n infrastructure that appoints iran or that appoints

00:29:31.920 china or that appoints other countries to ridiculous positions where an orwellian inversion is too much even

00:29:38.880 to imagine right in this moment in time and we have to hold those countries to account so the very

00:29:45.360 countries that were entrusted to uphold promote and protect that international rules-based order and

00:29:50.720 actually do respect it but enable these entities that do not and that systematically violate it

00:29:57.200 including with regards to anti-semitism and specifically israel in the demonization the

00:30:01.440 delegimization and the double standards applied to israel and we should know israel has a specific

00:30:06.640 agenda item that comes up every time that the human rights council meets so all of the countries in the

00:30:13.600 entire world iran cuba venezuela you name them china the uyghurs in china you name the countries

00:30:19.360 with flagrant human rights violations all of them together have less human rights violations than one

00:30:24.640 single country the state of israel according to the human rights council in the u.n those are just

00:30:30.000 you know there are so many examples but those are just the most blatant ones that are really a call

00:30:36.000 to action at this moment in time in 10-7 ripping off so many masks ripped off that one as well

00:30:41.360 so as an organization is it even redeemable at this point i mean i know it's the only thing we have but

00:30:49.200 it just it seems like a moral farce and a an increasingly dangerous one that this is getting

00:30:56.880 normalized right and i don't understand what obviously israel has some important allies and and you'd

00:31:03.280 think that the united states and the uk and other countries that are aligned here could make a

00:31:10.240 difference i mean what what is it going to take to bring some moral sanity to that organization

00:31:17.520 well it's going to take exactly what you just said it's going to take those countries by the way the

00:31:21.360 the overwhelming majority of the funding for the u.n comes from those countries so the interesting

00:31:27.120 thing is that those countries by funding this orwellian inversion are actually enabling the perversion

00:31:32.480 that we see right that enables and empowers genocidal terror organizations that are proxies of

00:31:38.400 genocidal terror regimes and actually other authoritarian governments to sort of get a free pass at the

00:31:44.080 very place that was created to uphold promote and protect these foundational principles this is a

00:31:50.400 moment of reckoning in that sense and maybe the last sort of opportunity for those countries recognizing

00:31:58.080 through the very very clear inability to unequivocally condemn 10-7 and i want to be clear

00:32:04.320 anybody that cannot unequivocally condemn the atrocities of 10-7 the burning of babies of entire families the

00:32:13.040 raping of women so badly their legs can't be straightened for burial the abduction the killing

00:32:18.640 the mutilation of thousands actually in violation of a ceasefire that on october 6th held a very fragile

00:32:27.280 one between hamas a genocidal terror organization that took over the gaza strip where israel has not been

00:32:32.160 seen since 2005 that he holds palestinians hostage as human shields as sacrifices whatever you want to call

00:32:40.160 them but has no regard for human life as a genocidal terror organization anybody that can't condemn that day

00:32:47.520 and that magnitude of barbaric savage atrocities unequivocally is not upholding promoting or protecting the

00:32:56.880 foundational principles of life and of liberty that those institutions were created to ensure and to

00:33:02.240 secure so it pretty much exposes a whole range of organizations of mechanisms of the institution

00:33:10.320 itself of the un if for example the un women's groups resisted condemning and actually were silent and we

00:33:18.800 know that silence is complicity until a couple of days ago when they issued some very lukewarm sort of

00:33:24.480 statement in anticipation of the event of an event that took place at the un initiated by israel

00:33:30.000 yesterday exposing the silence that actually empowers that genocidal terror that used rape brutal

00:33:37.520 rape and and sexual crimes that cannot even be imagined but are not actually not too terrible to have

00:33:44.560 happened just too terrible to imagine that were described in this day that was held at the un yesterday so

00:33:49.360 in anticipation of that one of the women's groups issued some sort of a lukewarm statement 50 days

00:33:54.480 after the atrocities were perpetrated but you're 100 right in your question and it'll be up to the

00:33:59.920 countries mostly as i said that are funding this infrastructure to ensure that it upholds its

00:34:05.920 original mission statement or collapses because where we may be the bloody canary in the mineshaft the

00:34:11.200 mineshaft is collapsing all around us and that is what 10-7 exposed very clearly for anybody paying attention

00:34:17.360 well again i want to talk about some of the history here but i just i think we should focus on the un for

00:34:24.480 a few more minutes here because it's it's really hard for people who are not really steeped in the details

00:34:30.400 here to understand how bizarre the status quo is here so perhaps you can dissect one of these double

00:34:39.280 standards for us and just let's just see how deep it runs because what many of us perceive you know

00:34:47.040 those of us who are paying attention perceive israel to be in a perpetually in a in a no-win situation

00:34:53.680 i mean that because they're clearly fighting a defensive war i mean as you correctly pointed

00:35:00.640 out there was a ceasefire anyone calling for a ceasefire now should recognize there was a ceasefire

00:35:06.080 on october 6th which was broken by hamas and it was broken in a way that again as you said

00:35:13.120 is so patently evil and so patently in violation of any sane use of self-defense even even you were if

00:35:22.080 you were going to grant the claim that the palestinians in gaza are being occupied or imprisoned

00:35:30.480 or consigned to some kind of apartheid state and you know i i would not grant those claims but even

00:35:37.040 if you were going to grant that and imagine that hamas as their duly elected representatives

00:35:44.720 organized a a properly conceived defensive act of war against israel so as to throw off those shackles

00:35:55.520 well just the moment you look at the details of what they did as you said i we don't need to

00:36:01.200 linger on them because i've done that in previous podcasts but you know consciously targeting for

00:36:07.440 torture and rape and mutilation and destruction non-combatants children and taking children hostage

00:36:15.600 right killing their parents in front of them and taking them hostage the details are so obviously in

00:36:21.360 violation of every norm of self-defense or just war and they're completely unanalogous to collateral

00:36:31.680 damage in time of war where you're where non-combatants get killed inadvertently that it's just if you can't

00:36:39.760 see you know which way is up here morally there's there's something quite wrong but so israel is being

00:36:45.280 held to a standard now in defending itself against this where the scrutiny on its own collateral damage

00:36:52.720 is of a sort that no other democracy defending itself has ever seen right so when the when the us is

00:36:59.120 fighting the islamic state in iraq and bombing mosul there's no there's no such analogous scrutiny on the

00:37:06.480 the civilian death toll now we should be quick to admit that it is of course tragic that civilians die

00:37:13.840 in any of these conflicts and you know we we would all hope that israel would be holding itself to

00:37:19.680 the highest possible standard of waging its ground war in gaza so as to protect civilian life but

00:37:25.680 they're fighting an enemy that is consciously using human shields and trying to leverage collateral damage

00:37:32.400 in a propaganda victory with the rest of the world and that propaganda victory is only possible given

00:37:39.280 this complete inversion of moral sense that we're describing at the un and obviously it's not just

00:37:44.800 at the un it's elsewhere and we'll discuss that but perhaps you can just unpick this particular

00:37:51.360 double standard the scrutiny applied to israel when it wages a defensive war in the aftermath of

00:37:59.680 thousands of rockets and medieval level barbarism in its own territory against its civilians what is

00:38:07.600 happening at the un and how is that this double standard of scrutiny justified what is not being

00:38:14.160 done to syria or to saudi arabia or to russia that is being done to israel in this context right so that

00:38:23.760 double standard and and and i think we'll drill down on on some other things that have happened at the

00:38:28.720 un but that double standard is actually one of the most critical pieces to understand look

00:38:33.280 double standards or the selective application of any principle undermines the entire infrastructure

00:38:41.200 always when people say to me i'm not a lawyer i don't understand that i say look if you're three

00:38:45.360 years old and i say to you we're going to play a game and you're going to play according to the

00:38:48.960 rules but i'm not that three-year-old will say to me i'm not playing i'm not playing that is the

00:38:55.600 problem with double standards and that should concern us all so the consistent application of double

00:39:01.840 standards or the selective application of standards to one single member state in the family of nations

00:39:08.880 that happens to be the proverbial jew among the nations the jewish nation state that is israel

00:39:14.160 that is a problem not just for that member state it is a problem for the infrastructure created

00:39:20.400 that has to uphold promote and protect those foundational principles we spoke about including

00:39:25.680 there is a body of laws called the laws of war including the laws of war now everything you've just

00:39:30.880 mentioned including over eleven thousand five hundred rockets that have been launched at israelis

00:39:37.600 including this morning i received pictures from my husband hiding in a stairway in his office building

00:39:43.280 eleven thousand five hundred rockets launched at israelis imagine this in you know new york city

00:39:50.000 in washington in berlin in toronto eleven thousand five hundred rockets every time there are red alert

00:39:56.640 sirens blaring sending you into safe rooms since and on 10-7 each one of those rockets targeting israeli

00:40:05.920 civilians from populated areas in gaza what i just said in international law language or the laws of war

00:40:13.120 is a double war crime because you're targeting civilians from densely populated areas endangering civilians

00:40:19.600 a double war crime not one of that eleven thousand five hundred double war crimes not one has been

00:40:27.280 condemned by the institutions mandated to uphold promote and protect double standard when you look at what

00:40:35.120 you described as those barbaric atrocities they are so far beyond the pale of anything that the laws of war

00:40:43.920 war clearly stipulate as absolutely ever ever being justified and nonetheless what we have is a response

00:40:54.080 that you know the nazis at least hid what they did during the holocaust they hid what they did because they

00:41:03.200 they had an understanding that morality would judge them and one day would judge them looking back you know on 10-7 the

00:41:13.360 3 000 plus barbaric savages that infiltrated israel under the first barrage of rockets that we experienced at 6 30 a.m

00:41:21.760 on what was the sabbath and a holiday that celebrates our you know bible our book that has kept us together as a people for

00:41:30.720 thousands of thousands of years that day violated by rockets what happened on that day was live streamed

00:41:37.840 it was filmed on gopros it was with pride that many of them called parents to say that they murdered 10

00:41:45.120 jews that is something that we have to look at very clearly and understand that when they did that when

00:41:51.360 they did not even hide they knew that they would be receiving support including right here on university

00:41:57.600 campuses that would actually echo the hamas charter that like mein kampf calls for the murder of jews and

00:42:03.280 the annihilation of israel from the river to the sea that's a call to annihilate the state of israel

00:42:08.320 if you look at a map of the state of israel that is not two-state solution and anybody who cares about

00:42:12.720 palestinian well-being that's just hatred of jews and the complete unacceptance of israel's existence

00:42:20.800 in any borders double standard if we don't call out those double standards including in the

00:42:27.680 implementation of international humanitarian law and by the way you know israel not only holds itself

00:42:32.480 up to a very very high level of ethics in fighting wars generally because those are our principles

00:42:40.320 but you should know and all of our listeners should know that international actually is created by precedent

00:42:45.120 what has happened in this fighting and you know as opposed to the united states that had to fight

00:42:50.320 millions or you know threats by millions of of genocidal terrorists or i don't know how many

00:42:56.640 of isis fighters and so on but had to fight them a long way from home israel is fighting this war

00:43:05.440 inside and just on the cusp just on its borders the precedent that israel has created in its war on

00:43:13.760 genocidal terrorists is now going to be a very high standard for all democracies that want to

00:43:20.080 uphold those laws of war the understanding that israel has created humanitarian quarters that it has

00:43:26.880 actually announced before any attack where it was going to announce and asked the civilians in those

00:43:32.720 areas to evacuate and that it is hamas that has prevented their evacuation in many cases or that

00:43:39.280 has intercepted the humanitarian aid that israel has enabled to flow through or that has stopped

00:43:45.040 civilians from actually moving from areas of gaza where israel had to fight hamas terrorists because

00:43:51.440 they use them as human shields building their infrastructures under mosques schools and hospitals

00:43:57.760 precisely for that reason the understanding that the world has enabled i'll call it a false moral

00:44:04.320 equivalence between that genocidal terror organization and democratic state defending itself

00:44:08.640 from it that's going to be a problem for all these democratic countries that have enabled that

00:44:13.440 because in many ways it's the double standard that undermines the entire infrastructure there is

00:44:19.680 tragic loss of life there is tragic loss of life but just like after 9-11 the only entity that has to be

00:44:28.400 held to account for the tragic loss of life both what it perpetrated on 10-7 and in the aftermath

00:44:35.280 of 10-7 in the palestinian loss of life is hamas a genocidal terror organization and if we are not

00:44:43.200 morally clear on that what those double standards actually do is empower terror and the regime's

00:44:49.680 supporting these proxies of terror and we've named some of them including iran with the iranian

00:44:55.760 current iranian regime all that does is empower those regimes and that is a problem for all

00:45:02.480 democracies and for all of us who cherish life and liberty and you know the thing with authoritarian

00:45:07.920 regimes is they have this funny tendency to actually say what they mean and mean what they say

00:45:12.800 khamenei just days before 10-7 the supreme leader of iran tweeted precisely what it was that we saw

00:45:19.040 happen on 10-7 only that he instead of using the word jew or israel exchanges it with zionist or zionist

00:45:27.520 cancer in this case that would be destroyed by palestinians now i'd say the conflation of

00:45:34.160 palestinians with hamas undermines the palestinian cause and we should be very clear on that if the

00:45:40.960 palestinian cause is represented by the genocidal acts perpetrated on 10-7 then we have to call that out

00:45:47.440 and say there should be a palestinian leadership sadly there hasn't been one that's vocal enough

00:45:53.120 that unequivocally condemns and says that was not in my name i truly long for a two-state solution and

00:46:00.880 for peace and coexistence recognizing israel's right to exist alongside whatever will be this long you

00:46:06.480 know long-term resolution of the conflict but it can't be that we expect that resolution of some kind

00:46:14.080 with an entity like hamas that perpetrated the atrocities of 10-7 and that is the problem with

00:46:19.680 double standards again if we do not have an equal and consistent application of any principle it

00:46:26.640 undermines it completely and it no longer exists for any situation any context so double standards in

00:46:33.680 any context actually undermines the principle in every context and that's what has happened

00:46:38.320 hmm well i want to talk about the sentiment among palestinians at the moment but uh let's get there

00:46:46.800 through a brief tour of the history of anti-semitism this goes way back this at least to christian

00:46:55.100 theology nearly 2 000 years ago and then it changed to my knowledge it changed somewhere around the 19th

00:47:03.520 century and it became an explicitly racialized notion i think the actual term anti-semitic first

00:47:09.920 appears in the 1850s and then we have things like the protocols of the elders of zion and in america we

00:47:16.720 had henry ford uh we obviously have the nazis and now we have this great reservoir of of muslim anti-semitism

00:47:24.800 which has been influenced by by its own theology but also by many of those modern trends how do you think

00:47:32.080 about the history here and and how can we understand the durability and and shape-shifting character of

00:47:40.640 this hatred so the oldest hatred in the world as jew hatred has been called by many including

00:47:47.600 the late professor robert wistrich the oldest hatred in the world has actually survived by mutating

00:47:54.400 so anti-semitism or jew hatred never died it just mutated and it mutated according to the guiding

00:48:00.080 social construct of the time and you mentioned some of them right religion science and i would

00:48:06.160 say in our day and this connects to our conversation about the un and about international law and human

00:48:11.200 rights in general the secular religion of our times human rights right if you latch on to the guiding

00:48:17.600 social construct of the time then what happens to that guiding social construct of course is that

00:48:24.320 it has been co-opted and weaponized for something very lethal right in that sense the mutation of

00:48:31.760 anti-semitism the strain that we see right now the 10-7 made very clear and i'll you know i think we should put it on

00:48:38.480 you know sort of on the sort of table as we talk about it 10-7 exposed the modern mutated mainstream

00:48:48.320 strain of an ever mutating virus and that is what anti-semitism is it mutates over time and that's how

00:48:54.640 it survives and that strain anti-zionism or the negation of israel's very right to exist intersects

00:49:02.880 at all of those places that you mentioned doesn't matter what side of the extreme of the spectrums it

00:49:08.320 comes from what we call extreme right what we call extreme left what we call extreme islamist ideology

00:49:14.800 the negation of israel's very right to exist in any border is shared by all of those extremities

00:49:22.560 and so the mutation of anti-semitism to this form to this strain that we have to identify and it's

00:49:29.100 important to say that the international holocaust remembrance alliance definition of anti-semitism

00:49:33.380 actually is the single definition and the benchmark definition including utilized by the coalition of

00:49:38.440 special envoys that i mentioned i'm a member of before the benchmark definition that enables to

00:49:43.460 identify this strain you know in a post-covid world we all understand the way that viruses mutate and

00:49:49.520 we understand that if we inoculate our societies our communities our families against just one strain

00:49:55.680 of a virus we are actually not immune to the other strains when it does mutate and the importance of

00:50:03.540 understanding anti-semitism in this way and the old strains never died they still exist just like with

00:50:09.060 covid there are old strains and new strains but we have to inoculate our societies our spaces our

00:50:14.360 communities our countries against this new strain that is the strain of anti-zionism exposed very

00:50:21.360 clearly not just in the atrocities perpetrated by hamas on 10-7 and in the gravity and the barbaric

00:50:29.040 savage nature of them but in the responses to what happened on 10-7 around the world including in

00:50:35.220 democratic countries that denied within hours that justified within days that supported that

00:50:42.100 continue to support and that attack jews in the wake of those atrocities that makes very clear that

00:50:50.260 anti-zionism or the negation of israel's very right to exist is the modern mutated mainstream strain

00:50:57.220 of anti-semitism that we have to be able to identify and combat and again the international

00:51:01.980 holocaust remembrance alliance definition is the single definition that was created in order exactly

00:51:07.020 to be able to identify and combat this strain we'll talk about it a little bit more the importance of

00:51:12.080 understanding that at this moment the history of anti-semitism or jew hatred as it was called before it

00:51:19.760 became anti-semitism as you said the understanding that it began not today and that there is a long

00:51:26.500 process of demonization of delegitimization and the double standards that were in a traditional form of

00:51:34.540 jew hatred an individual jew was barred from an equal place in society in the modern strain of anti-semitism

00:51:41.500 or jew hatred it's the proverbial jew among the nations that is the state of israel to which jews and

00:51:47.220 indigenous people returned after thousands of years of exile and persecution 75 years ago if we demonize

00:51:54.160 delegitimize and apply double standards to that jew among the nations then we enable the very same

00:51:59.960 process of that mutation of anti-semitism and if we drill down a little bit further you know we spoke

00:52:05.320 about the u.n the u.n zionism is racism resolution in 1975 passed in 1975 and i will argue after a series

00:52:15.060 of conventional wars failed to destroy the state of israel from that moment of return of that indigenous

00:52:21.500 people in 1948 so immediately after the partition plan was rejected by the arabs then living in what

00:52:28.360 was then british mandate palestine the jews accepting it immediately the next day actually the

00:52:34.320 war of independence broke out as we know but a series of conventional wars failed to destroy that

00:52:41.220 jewish nation state to which you know in many ways we would be remiss if we didn't understand that

00:52:48.180 return to zion enables the understanding that the unconventional war the war for public opinion

00:52:55.880 was waged in 1975 in that zionism is racism resolution recognized that conventional warfare was

00:53:04.080 not going to obliterate the state of israel annihilated the unconventional war for public opinion

00:53:09.780 and actually ironically or not then soviet union propaganda zionism is racism 1975 is alive and well

00:53:20.580 on 2023 university campuses in the name of progress so ironically or not that is a critical understanding

00:53:29.360 of how we got to where we got to and i would say the next just to just to um linger on that point

00:53:35.240 so that that has been traced to to soviet propaganda that that initiative well we know that it was soviet

00:53:42.600 propaganda actually the zionism is racism resolution including in the un and actually utilized in the

00:53:48.220 soviet union at the time in order to be able to sever the connection and any religious connection

00:53:53.660 obviously in the then soviet union was not an option right so we understand that identity was something

00:54:00.340 that was going to have to be um i'd say not mainstream that's the wrong word there was sort of a leveling of

00:54:07.620 the playing field right we were all just going to be the same comrades in the soviet union and identity

00:54:13.640 or particular identity was not going to work if the idea of communism was going to work and therefore

00:54:19.460 zionism is racism was a vehicle um not only to sever the identity of jews then living in the former

00:54:26.100 soviet union but in the in the understanding of how it was that israel should be regarded by the

00:54:31.000 former soviet union at the time and it's in a lie in its alliance with the then arab countries or the

00:54:36.160 arab league zionism is racism that took hold on university campuses as i said in the name of progress

00:54:43.700 in the last you know decades is based on that same understanding and we would be remiss if we didn't

00:54:50.560 mention in that context you know i'm not saying that all jews self-define as zionists or that all

00:54:54.680 zionists are jews not at all zionist is integral to the identity of the majority of jews who for

00:55:01.380 thousands of years and i insist on reminding us that word indigeneity belonging to an indigenous a

00:55:07.280 prototypical indigenous people that speak the same language hebrew and read the same book the bible

00:55:12.220 and traverse the same land israel and practice the same rituals and customs for thousands of years

00:55:18.080 that's why prototypical indigenous that's what indigeneity means the understanding that for

00:55:23.760 thousands of years that people and jews are a people 15 million of us not a very big one

00:55:29.660 actually longed and prayed and yearned to return to zion zionism is not a political statement it's

00:55:39.920 integral to the identity of the majority of jews that longed and yearned and prayed to return to

00:55:44.740 zion if anything zionism is more than 140 year old national progressive national liberation movement

00:55:53.020 based in that identity of a jewish people that enabled the return of an indigenous people to an

00:55:59.260 ancestral homeland national liberation that succeeded and taking that as the moment of reckoning that

00:56:08.120 zionism is racism passed in the u.n became mainstream on university campus in 2023 in the

00:56:14.100 name of progress is something that i believe that we will have to contend with including on university

00:56:19.420 campuses and spaces as we speak in sort of identifying and combating the anti-semitism that's become

00:56:26.740 mainstream on those campuses the next step that i wanted to mention sort of in the evolution of

00:56:32.080 this mainstream anti-semitism that we're seeing today is actually the apartheid lie you mentioned

00:56:37.400 it before look in 2001 there was a durban conference against racism no surprise durban south africa

00:56:44.160 and that conference against racism turned into an anti-semitic hate fest it was at that conference

00:56:51.380 that it became clear to all of the human rights advocates of the time that it was actually our

00:56:58.200 our skill our commitment our belief that we could ensure that never again principle that was co-opted

00:57:07.700 and weaponized i.e human rights for the demonization and the delegimization and the application of double

00:57:14.200 standards to the state of israel after that conference against racism which turned into an anti-semitic hate

00:57:21.320 fest in durban south africa what we saw is israel apartheid weeks across north america in nearly every

00:57:29.120 campus israel apartheid weeks no questions asked now some of us are old enough to remember apartheid

00:57:35.300 and israel has its share of troubles but israel is not an apartheid state and apartheid was one of the

00:57:42.700 cruelest eras to live under and attributing falsely the lie of apartheid to the state of israel does two

00:57:51.360 things it minimizes the suffering of those that lived under the apartheid regime and in many ways

00:57:58.320 it disenables to identify the challenges which israel like every other democratic country has and should

00:58:05.360 address that's not to say that israel is perfect that is to say that israel is not an apartheid state

00:58:11.360 and that misappropriating a historical concept like apartheid and placing it or forcing it onto an

00:58:21.220 irrelevant set of facts is actually a double undermining not only of what it was that apartheid

00:58:29.040 described singularly but disenabling to address the challenges that are in the false application to the

00:58:37.620 set of facts that it's applied to and next just to close the loop on that michael what what is the

00:58:42.820 status of arabs who are israeli citizens oh so we're clear in israel so we're clear so 20 percent

00:58:50.800 of israelis and by the way 20 percent of israelis some of them butchered including muslims including bedouin

00:58:59.040 including support workers that came to treat the nova festival participants this peace festival

00:59:07.680 the understanding that israel's 20 is represented in every walk of life in israel in the supreme court

00:59:16.020 in hospitals in the army in every walk of life in everyday things like shopping that 20 is represented

00:59:24.920 which is why i say the apartheid lie is such a vicious lie and such a i'd say almost a crime

00:59:32.680 against those that lived under apartheid because if 20 percent of israel's minorities muslims christians

00:59:38.920 druz bedouin are fully integrated into everyday life in israel to be seen in university campuses and on the

00:59:46.000 beach and everywhere you go then that means that what you've actually done is completely erase them

00:59:52.980 or strip them of agency now where there are issues is where israel has tried over and over again to

01:00:00.760 come to some sort of resolution with palestinians and here we go back to the challenge in coming to

01:00:07.640 resolution with somebody who denies your very right to exist that is a whole other story right what's

01:00:13.000 known as judea and samaria the west bank whatever it is that people use gaza including israel having

01:00:20.060 disengaged from gaza in 2005 post oslo accords exactly in orbit order to be able to great to

01:00:26.400 create final status borders so that these allegations can't be in any way true in any way a part of the

01:00:35.300 story of israel because israel does not want to be in gaza but hamas took over the gaza strip in 2007

01:00:42.840 and threw fatah members off roofs and has been actually in control of gaza israel has not been

01:00:49.100 in gaza since 2007 most people do not know that and there are of course other areas in which if

01:00:56.620 israel is to be able to come to some sort of final agreement with palestinians that do want to continue

01:01:01.900 living side by side that has been tried over and over again by israel and each and every time just like

01:01:08.960 the 1947 partition plan was rejected was rejected by palestinian leadership that's an important piece

01:01:15.700 of understanding but there is nothing between that and between what apartheid was that can describe

01:01:21.340 what israel's reality is including as i said not only on on 10-7 but since 10-7 and as i said

01:01:27.460 israel's hospitals are filled with not only patients but doctors and nurses of every religion and every

01:01:36.060 faith muslims and christians and jews and bedouin and druze and that is actually part of the

01:01:42.580 misunderstood part of the story that you only see when you experience in israel and finally i wanted

01:01:47.160 i want to give a moment to the most orwellian inversion of them all and that is of course the

01:01:52.480 attribution of the perpetuating and perpetrating excuse me a holocaust by israel in gaza or a genocide

01:02:00.020 i said before i mean the words genocide and crimes against humanity by the way what happened on 10-7

01:02:05.060 were war crimes and crimes against humanity and the makings of a genocide so dubbed by international

01:02:11.480 law experts and the orwellian inversion of accusing israel of precisely what it experienced not only in

01:02:17.960 the holocaust but on 10-7 accusing it of perpetrating a holocaust or a genocide in gaza is absolutely the

01:02:26.160 most orwellian inversion of them all and you know the 3000 plus hamas terrorists and their helpers

01:02:35.200 that came in infiltrated israel on that day in 10-7 the atrocities that they perpetrated intended to

01:02:43.060 elicit the memory of the holocaust the burning of babies and families so that they could only be

01:02:49.740 identified weeks weeks after they were murdered it took weeks to identify the remains of lillian

01:02:57.320 silver you know sometimes when we think of numbers it's too hard to even imagine right 1200 individuals

01:03:03.900 when we think of individuals like lillian silver a 72 year old canadian israeli that could only be

01:03:11.140 identified by her remains what remained of her weeks after 10-7 a peace activist by the way that lived

01:03:18.680 in one of the villages that were uh basically burnt and and and and pillaged and in in those

01:03:26.280 barbaric ways that understanding that it meant to elicit the memory of the holocaust and actually

01:03:34.020 create this multi-generational trauma that we haven't even begun to process if you ask me and you know

01:03:41.180 very few people know but some of the survivors and that's what they refer to them as of that nova peace

01:03:46.440 festival that i refer to earlier and and i don't want to name names obviously but at least 19 of them

01:03:52.880 are in psychiatric wards the understanding of what was witnessed on that day and since that day by those

01:04:00.600 that bore witness whether on that day or since that day identifying bodies identifying remains grappling

01:04:07.600 with what it was that the human mind can't even imagine but happened that understanding makes the

01:04:14.540 orwellian inversion and weaponization of the holocaust and the allegations of israel perpetrating a

01:04:20.520 genocide only more grotesque there can be no worse accusation against any country and so look what we

01:04:28.700 have if zionism is racism and israel is an apartheid state that perpetrates a holocaust or a genocide

01:04:36.500 then there is no defense including in for example diversity equity and inclusion principles in

01:04:42.700 workplace or in university settings for racists there is no defense for an apartheid state there

01:04:49.600 is nothing left to do with it but to dismantle it there is never legitimacy to perpetrating a holocaust

01:04:56.080 and a genocide and so through that systematic co-opting and weaponization of these terms of real world

01:05:03.300 events that occurred and their application in an orwellian way on jews on israel in a way that 10-7

01:05:11.380 exposed very clearly that now accuses jews around the world of them in canada in france in the united

01:05:18.480 states of america what we have is the making of the newly mutated strain of anti-semitism in basic

01:05:28.060 i'd say clear view for anybody that is paying attention anybody that is paying attention cannot

01:05:35.220 look away from this moment in time that demands that we utilize the international holocaust remembrance

01:05:42.040 alliance definition created in the aftermath of that 2001 durbin against racism understanding that

01:05:48.880 the mutation of anti-semitism weaponized and co-opted international law and human rights that includes

01:05:54.300 the demonization the delegitimization and the double standards against the state of israel just

01:05:59.600 replacing the traditional anti-semitism that did that very thing against the individual jew

01:06:04.940 first of all that was a brilliant dissection of some profound misunderstandings but so much of this

01:06:11.360 is a matter of consciously misusing terminology and then spreading that those lies and half-truths to a

01:06:21.560 wider audience that then unconsciously misuses these concepts and you just ran through many of

01:06:28.920 them i mean things like apartheid and genocide and holocaust and we might also add the concept of

01:06:35.300 colonialism as you've or it pains to make clear earlier that the jews are not colonialists or you

01:06:42.620 know interlopers in the land of israel but they've been indigenous people all this time and certainly longer than

01:06:51.560 anyone has thought in terms of there being a palestinian population not to say that their

01:06:57.720 ancestors don't reach back into that area as well but just just to say about that you know the fact

01:07:03.940 that i insist that i'm a member of indigenous people it doesn't preclude other indigenous peoples as we

01:07:08.960 know from other spaces and regions in the world yeah the only thing is that i expect the mutual recognition

01:07:14.460 of my indigeneity and my right to exist as who i am just as i afford that recognition to whoever it

01:07:20.680 else you know claims that indigeneity yeah and i think that that principle it's a foundational

01:07:25.100 principle by the way of international law and i think of human relations reciprocity right i expect

01:07:29.940 the very same recognition that i afford yeah and that is a critical piece of it yeah so you've alluded

01:07:37.160 to this definition of anti-semitism that you think is worth uh knowing what what is the definition

01:07:43.120 so first of all i recommend that everybody just look up the international holocaust remembrance alliance

01:07:48.720 definition the ira it's about a one-page definition and the importance of that definition is not just

01:07:54.720 to read what's in the neat little box of what anti-semitism typically is which i would say encapsulate

01:07:59.920 what we think of as traditional anti-semitism but actually to read the examples that are listed by the

01:08:06.320 ira because the examples enable us to identify what we've talked about about the strains of anti-semitism

01:08:13.760 right the understanding that a virus you know we had omicron we had covet 19 we had all kinds of

01:08:19.540 strains of a virus and we needed to name each of them or i'll give an example not from a virus we

01:08:24.680 understand what a table is but a table can come in all kinds of shapes and sizes and heights

01:08:29.280 so the fact that we understand what a table is what anti-semitism is very very sort of the high level

01:08:35.260 is not sufficient when we understand that we're going to have to understand the various

01:08:39.580 strains or forms in which that anti-semitism presents and 10-7 made clear why it is critical

01:08:46.720 to identify this strain so that if we're just busy with sort of the traditional strain that singled

01:08:53.420 out the individual jew or that denied the holocaust those are very important strains of anti-semitism

01:08:59.620 that we have to identify and combat but they are not sufficient if we are not going to commit to

01:09:05.640 identify and combat this strain that made itself very evident as i said not only in the atrocities

01:09:11.420 of 10-7 but in the responses to the atrocities of 10-7 across the world and campuses and on social

01:09:18.380 media then we're not actually committed to identifying and combating anti-semitism because if you allow

01:09:23.660 this current strain of a virus to run rampant again as we know it will infect our entire society the

01:09:32.140 fact that we've inoculated against the or identified the older strains is not going to be able to protect

01:09:38.040 us from this one and this one is festering it is not just percolating below the surface anymore when we

01:09:45.480 have a george washington university days after 10-7 essentially the hamas charter projected on the

01:09:52.740 library that says from the river to the sea a call to annihilate the state of israel if you look at the map

01:09:58.920 that's the entire thing and glory to our martyrs then we have a problem right here in identifying

01:10:05.660 and combating anti-semitism if we allow on social media spaces i referred to it before zionist that

01:10:13.580 codes jew to although there are protected characteristics on social media platforms if we

01:10:19.640 allow zionist to be used coding jew then we're allowing that same anti-semitism to run rampant and

01:10:26.820 infect an entire generation that consumes all of their information on social media platforms and

01:10:34.360 ironically you know and this is important and the reason that i keep sort of referencing 10-7 as a

01:10:40.780 reminder to 9-11 it's also about traditional media and not just social media imagine if 11 days after

01:10:49.360 9-11 the new york times would have posted on its front page evidence or data given to it by al-qaeda

01:10:55.780 that's actually what happened 11 days after 10-7 and if you can deny justify support and attack jews in

01:11:05.780 the wake of 10-7 why not 9-11 that's actually what happened with a tiktok letter from bin laden to

01:11:14.320 america where millions actually not only were exposed to this letter to america but gave us a sense of the

01:11:22.340 understanding that said well if you can deny justify support and attack jews in the wake of 10-7 why not

01:11:29.060 do the same with regards to 9-11 bin laden was right that is a problem for the united states of america

01:11:34.800 so whereas i think in many ways we understood the imperative to combat anti-semitism or to identify

01:11:41.360 and combat anti-semitism as a jewish issue it is not a jewish issue anti-semitism is in many ways

01:11:48.620 predictive of what it is that gnaws away at the foundations of democracies including right here

01:11:54.280 in the united states if we're not paying attention to what it is that's happening and anti-semitism is

01:11:59.860 showing the path to where we have to go in order to protect the foundations of democracies and i don't

01:12:06.340 mean by censoring or shutting down i mean by identifying and combating anti-semitism as a part of

01:12:14.300 what allows extremism to actually identify the strengths of democracies and use them as weaknesses

01:12:23.240 right that's what terror does we value life they glorify death but because we value life the hamas

01:12:32.600 not only did what it did to extinguish life on 10-7 it abducted 240 hostages it holds its own people

01:12:41.820 as hostage because we value life so if it hides under hospitals and schools and mosques it knows that

01:12:48.300 israel will be debilitated in many ways to fight in the way that it must fight in order to secure and

01:12:55.720 protect its citizens i think this is a much bigger story i really think that whereas israel is fighting

01:13:03.560 for its life and we're at an existential moment at 75 years young at a real existential moment not only

01:13:10.020 for israel as a jewish nation state but for jews around the world that are being attacked for what

01:13:15.840 happened on 10-7 but whereas israel is on the front lines and let it be clear it's not just the army

01:13:22.960 it's the entire israeli society that is deployed there is a war i said just today rockets continue

01:13:28.680 flying overhead and red alerts sirens continue blaring and there is a war that is ongoing right now in

01:13:35.820 israel but i would say that the war is raging and i'm gonna say something that you know may sound a

01:13:41.280 little you know difficult to understand when we're sitting here and there's no sirens blaring outside

01:13:46.180 it's a war that is raging right here too that unconventional war for public opinion is raging in

01:13:54.780 the streets of the united states and canada and all democracies and that's not just a war on the state

01:14:00.340 of israel it's a war in our shared humanity it's a war on civilization as we know it i said before

01:14:05.720 you know authoritarian regimes they have a funny way of saying what they mean and meaning what they say

01:14:10.500 if you just follow what khamenei intends to do it's actually to build a caliphate on the rubble of our

01:14:15.840 civilization whereas israel is the small devil the united states is the big devil and so on and so on and

01:14:21.320 it's not just iran obviously we have an intersection of very very bad forces that are bound together by

01:14:30.760 the commitment to undermine democracy as we know it and as we cherish it so again i think that this is

01:14:37.860 a moment of reckoning in all of the spaces that we've mentioned the international institutions

01:14:42.860 the university spaces traditional media social media but it's a moment of reckoning for ourselves as

01:14:49.500 people who cherish those foundational principles of life and of liberty to understand that this war

01:14:55.600 that's raging in israel it affects us and there are many people who are boots on the ground right here

01:15:00.900 in this war if we cherish life and liberty and those boots on the ground they have to be just as willing

01:15:07.820 as the boots on the ground in israel to what i call devastatingly after burying more of my friends

01:15:14.580 kids and more of my kids friends because i'm at that age i have three of my own children in the army

01:15:19.960 right now and that we haven't even begun to process but when you are fighting a war you have to be

01:15:26.260 willing to lose friends literally and figuratively that means on university campuses that means in all

01:15:32.440 of our spaces and workplaces ensuring that we understand that first of all dei principles have to be

01:15:39.860 applied equally and consistently assuming that we are supporting dei principles existence and they do

01:15:44.820 exist in all of our workplaces and universities if they leave out or exclude the jew slash zionist

01:15:50.920 supporter of israel that undermines the entire infrastructure that brings me to the beginning

01:15:55.100 of the conversation and even bigger than that it's a moment of reckoning to that entire analysis and

01:16:01.780 i'll say like a marxist analysis that divides the world into oppressed and oppressor into colonized and

01:16:07.920 colonizer we have to be asking ourselves is that true is the whole world divided into oppressed and

01:16:13.560 oppressor now i'll say something about that the jews don't fit right i said we're an indigenous people

01:16:18.220 returned to an ancestral homeland after millennia of exon persecution i'm not an oppressor i didn't come

01:16:22.880 from europe and stop sending me back there that's not my story but this is a much bigger moment of

01:16:28.820 reckoning for democracies and the dei infrastructure is sort of a derivative of it

01:16:34.660 are we satisfied with this division of the world and it's a marxist division of the world

01:16:41.460 speaking back to soviet propaganda into oppressed and oppressor what does that do to our democratic

01:16:47.880 societies is that what our democratic societies actually were intended to do is that sort of the

01:16:53.760 american dream that enabled refugees including european survivors of the holocaust to arrive here and

01:17:02.200 build a new life is this really a country that is an oppressor do we accept that that doesn't mean

01:17:08.200 there aren't problems like i said before it just means that applying social constructs that are

01:17:14.380 irrelevant to the set of facts to which we are looking dis enables the ability to actually ensure

01:17:20.600 equality of opportunities and equality and diversity that enables all of us to thrive and so on i think

01:17:27.700 that you know in many ways there were many good intentions that led us to this place in time but

01:17:33.980 it is a moment of reckoning that we have to look at the results of those intentions because intentions

01:17:39.440 have led to this place where the division of the world into this polarized reality in a social media

01:17:47.400 reality that anyway polarizes the way that we see the world and consume information is really destructive

01:17:54.020 for the foundations of all democracies again not just of israel and not just of jews living in the

01:17:59.920 various societies and countries and democracies in which they are now under attack well it is a very

01:18:07.000 complex picture there's there are two pieces or two points on the landscape that i think are worth

01:18:13.280 flagging i mean one is this is this wider tragedy of good intentions where you have people who i think are you

01:18:21.600 you know they're they're not all sociopaths right there these are these are you know college kids that

01:18:25.560 are idealistic and wanting to do good in the world and they have been fed a set of concepts that have

01:18:32.760 been i i'm convinced in in many cases consciously distorted so as to mislead them but they you know

01:18:38.780 when they're out there you know chanting from the river to the sea i would say that you know most of

01:18:43.740 those kids at cornell and harvard and stanford don't imagine that they're advocating a genocide of

01:18:51.160 jews or they do and think that jews aren't human and deserve to be well so yeah i would i want to

01:18:56.380 differentiate those two groups of people so they're the people who are who know what what these words

01:19:01.640 mean and know that they're misusing them and know how uh cynical and even evil this is in right we'll

01:19:10.040 say like a professor who's exhilarated on 10-7 yeah right so the people there are people who know the

01:19:15.220 details of what happened on on 10-7 and they're you know i would even say there's there's kind of a gray

01:19:20.320 area here where there are people who understand the details of what happened on 10-7 but they don't

01:19:24.860 understand how that kind of killing of civilians is radically different from the killing that happens

01:19:36.040 when you bomb the headquarters of hamas that they have conveniently located underneath the hospital

01:19:41.820 right so like they need to sit in a in a philosophy seminar to figure out how it is different

01:19:48.220 when you drop a bomb even though you've been telling people to leave a building for a week

01:19:52.640 and you drop a bomb and there are still people in that building and they die and they're innocent

01:19:56.860 non-combatants uh and how they've been you know in many cases obliged to stay there by the terrorist

01:20:02.640 organization that is running their society how that is different than going into a into people's

01:20:09.780 houses at dawn and tying them up and torturing them and burning them alive right like how are those two

01:20:16.480 things different that they're body count just keeping track of the number of dead does not give

01:20:22.100 you any understanding of the the minds that produced those calamities right right and just just to you

01:20:30.660 know piggyback on the double standards conversation we had before the understanding that isis had to be

01:20:36.520 not just you know destroyed but destroyed over however long it took even if there were tragic

01:20:42.940 civilian the tragically civilians killed or that the nazis the war against the nazis absolutely i'm sure

01:20:50.940 had casualties of civilian nature as well but we could not afford as humanity to not fight them to the end

01:20:59.440 we could not afford not to win the war against the nazis because that would have been the end of

01:21:04.920 millions of more of you know innocent lives that's a very complex sort of you know sort of understanding

01:21:11.860 except that it isn't right except when it isn't we're very clear on why the nazis or maybe some

01:21:16.620 people aren't but we're very clear on why the nazis had to be destroyed in world war ii and i think

01:21:21.600 that what you're touching upon is actually a part of this unconventional war for public opinion that

01:21:27.760 enables the false moral equivalence right the false moral equivalence between a democratic country that

01:21:32.860 not only can but must defend its civilians and in this case a genocidal terror organization but one

01:21:40.680 proxy of a genocidal murderous regime alongside many other countries you know you know if we reference

01:21:48.220 the past i can use nazis but there are regimes currently that are in that sense the false moral

01:21:55.100 equivalence they are empowered by it because if everything if we level the playing field then we say

01:22:01.160 okay then it's fair game and everybody is equal except that there are things that are out of bounds

01:22:06.940 not all things are created equal there is the imperative need to differentiate between good and bad and i think

01:22:16.220 that that's part of the conversation that we need to be having and just to go back to the university piece

01:22:21.240 you know i think this is a real moment of reckoning for university spaces first because if you can't

01:22:27.060 unequivocally condemn what happened on 10-7 there's something seriously wrong and if you have professors

01:22:32.060 who are exhilarated about what happened on 10-7 or students that support what happened on 10-7 and that

01:22:39.720 threaten fellow students to commit the atrocities that were perpetrated on 10-7 whether it is we will

01:22:46.980 rape you or we will burn you then there's something seriously wrong with the university setting and

01:22:52.260 obviously with the society in which that happens but there is another piece and sort of the pseudo

01:22:57.280 academic in me can't help but talk about this in fact when i meet university presidents or chancellors

01:23:02.240 this is usually the most important piece of the conversation that i have with them and that is

01:23:06.900 the moment of reckoning for universities in terms of their mission what is the role of university and as

01:23:13.980 far as i knew it was the pursuit of we can't say this word anymore i mean it's another whole conversation

01:23:19.800 it was a pursuit of truths but let's just say let's just say in a post-truth era at the very least it's

01:23:24.460 the pursuit of knowledge well if universities have become spaces in which instead of teaching people

01:23:31.300 how to think we are teaching people what to think meaning you know either they or their friends are

01:23:39.000 being brainwashed that is a real problem for mandated institutions to teach people how to think

01:23:46.640 to critically think to pursue knowledge that's a problem for humanity it's not just problem for

01:23:52.240 each and every individual university and so the university presidents have come to this moment

01:23:57.020 of reckoning at this time many of them just wish it would go away i understand actually because when

01:24:01.760 you come in for a three or four year term the last thing you want to do is have to cope with what

01:24:05.940 has been happening festering percolating for decades including we should say foreign funding

01:24:11.540 that has come into the university without transparency whether from cutter or from other

01:24:15.900 places and you wonder how has that impacted not just free speech but academic freedom what is it that

01:24:22.220 has happened in university spaces and i think that you know 10-7 is a moment of reckoning as i said

01:24:28.940 for many of the spaces or many of the masks that have been uncovered universities a critical one

01:24:35.040 and i go back to the international holocaust remembrance alliance definition of anti-semitism

01:24:39.600 you know there is an infrastructure that protects all students and all of those students get to

01:24:45.660 self-define as what they are and who they are that should include zionists who self-define as zionists

01:24:51.360 whether they're jews or not jews and for that protection to be afforded to them equally and

01:24:56.340 consistently like it is the safety and security of all students is ensured by all universities you have

01:25:02.340 to be able to use the international holocaust remembrance alliance definition again to identify

01:25:06.800 this strain that threatens their safety and security now on campus as opposed to everybody else who you

01:25:14.640 know is ensured safety and security so just to be clear michael that this strain you're referring to

01:25:22.120 is one that has cynically leveraged the rubric of social justice i mean it's almost like an export of

01:25:29.980 of american civil rights history where it's very very much modeled on the african-american experience

01:25:36.740 and the current variant which is to view white people and white adjacent people as being oppressors

01:25:44.700 and all people of color as being oppressed you know whether you know directly or systemically

01:25:50.060 and in that context i mean certainly when you're on the left side of the political spectrum in america

01:25:55.860 jews are viewed as essentially extra white right i mean their view on the far right they're viewed as

01:26:01.720 not white right so they're getting it from both sides but on the left what anti-semitism always is

01:26:06.060 for what we are and what we aren't so that's the strain you're talking about it's kind of a social

01:26:10.980 justice quasi-marxist dei leveraged animus against israel and zionism it's what i call anti-zionism

01:26:19.680 exactly it's what i call anti-zionism and anti-zionism is anti-semitism i'm not saying

01:26:24.540 that anti-zionism you know in many ways there are anti-semites who are not anti-zionists right they

01:26:30.300 just hate jews and believe that they should all die right they don't care about israel you know

01:26:34.520 that's maybe the traditional anti-semitism was just not anti-zionism but this new strain the

01:26:40.320 anti-zionism strain like if you look at the intersecting circles in a venn diagram is the majority

01:26:45.120 of the current mutated you know campus kind of anti-semitism that we are witnessing and you're

01:26:51.140 right it has intersected with all those i say it tragically actually because i think you know in

01:26:56.220 many ways it undermines those other social justice movements in that it has been co-opted and weaponized

01:27:03.640 for this and you know just because you said you know that you know sort of elicited the social

01:27:08.440 justice piece you know when when israel began exposing in a very devastating decision what it was

01:27:15.100 that happened on 10-7 and and and you have to know that it is grueling there is not a family

01:27:19.980 not a home not a neighborhood that is not impacted by the atrocities or by their aftermath so you know

01:27:27.000 the the soldiers that were then you know sort of called up including our own best friend's son who was

01:27:32.700 killed three hours after the 10-7 attack when israel began divulging the atrocities and of course

01:27:40.100 the denial that came immediately thereafter is heartbreaking because what israel did was

01:27:45.300 actually what i call and for many of maybe you know an older generation that's listening to us it

01:27:50.840 was an emmett till moment where emmett till's mother decides that she is leaving the casket open

01:27:56.700 for everybody to see what it was that happened when emmett till was beaten to death as grotesque as he

01:28:03.620 looked and the grotesque nature of the 10-7 attack in israel's decision and it was a painful decision

01:28:10.080 much like mrs till made a very painful decision to leave that casket open it has a lot of implications

01:28:16.880 for our i'll say for our own mental health to look into that casket to open it up to the world in that

01:28:23.440 way but the decision to open up the casket or to leave it open is not just israel's the decision

01:28:30.340 to look into what israel has exposed in leaving the casket open is going to have to be civilization's

01:28:36.480 decision right all of those social justice movements that we just moment mentioned if they

01:28:41.980 choose to look away or to look and not believe or to look and remain silent which is what we saw at

01:28:48.160 the un women's groups and so on or the children's groups it was international children's day also no

01:28:53.120 mention of anything that happened including the drugging of children and the burning of children

01:28:59.000 even not just burnt alive on that day but children kept in captivity that were burnt a marker so that

01:29:05.940 they wouldn't run away with an exhaust of a of a motorcycle right when you think of that casket

01:29:11.760 being open but civilization choosing to look away then i think that that's the moment of reckoning for

01:29:18.780 what you call the social justice you know movement and principles that have been appropriated

01:29:23.580 and weaponized in the enablement of this mutation of anti-semitism or in its current strain of

01:29:29.620 anti-zionism yeah yeah well um i guess at this point i want to ask you what we should do i mean

01:29:37.560 specifically with respect to two venues here so you've spoken about college campuses what should

01:29:45.180 colleges have done and what should they do now what should donors to colleges or erstwhile donors to

01:29:52.380 colleges do and what should we do about social media what should those running these platforms

01:29:59.320 do and what should we as as users uh what what should governments do and what should we as users

01:30:05.060 ask to be done how do you view i mean i think the role of social media here is just overwhelmingly

01:30:11.500 important it's just it seems to be the thing that is kind of a hallucination machine that is

01:30:17.520 distorting everything but just finish your remarks on the college problem because it you know obviously

01:30:24.760 this was shocking to so many of us to see some of the most privileged and ostensibly best educated

01:30:32.700 people in our society lining up to support a effectively support a terrorist organization that

01:30:39.760 had just committed atrocities of a sort you didn't think you were going to see any time this century

01:30:46.080 and the mismatch between their moral pretensions and what in fact they're supporting couldn't be

01:30:53.400 more glaring i mean literally you have blue-haired people you know whose whole lives are organized

01:30:58.960 around trans rights or gay rights or women's rights supporting an organization and even i think we have to

01:31:06.440 admit a a wider community among the palestinians that would hurl them from rooftops if only they could

01:31:13.600 be given the chance and i should just say as a kind of a footnote to what i just said is that i just

01:31:18.680 think there's obviously not not all palestinians are fans of hamas but i think we would be lying to

01:31:25.780 ourselves to think that none are right and there's there were those jeering mobs you know spitting on

01:31:32.720 on hostages uh and worse uh and those are not all members of hamas one one must imagine so

01:31:40.560 there is this larger problem of a kind of you know to take the narrow case and an eliminationist

01:31:47.860 anti-semitism among palestinians and among muslims generally uh there's a a sympathy for the whole

01:31:54.920 jihadist project which is the underlying uh moral horror and political horror that is bigger than

01:32:01.940 than anti-semitism and it is the very thing that is putting so much of the muslim world in collision with

01:32:08.240 um open societies everywhere uh and that is you know that's a larger problem which obviously i i

01:32:13.740 focused on but what what would you have university presidents do or have done on october 8th and 9th and

01:32:21.080 10th when they saw their their student body erupt in in some cases well-intentioned but in many cases

01:32:29.020 not you know grotesqueries of uh moral confusion so actually the first thing that some universities

01:32:37.360 did very successfully is so simple that i can't believe i have to say it but it's the unequivocal

01:32:44.160 condemnation of the atrocities we saw in 10-7 that's it that's it right the understanding that

01:32:53.020 if you call out hamas a genocidal terror organization that in its charter is committed to the annihilation

01:32:58.440 of the state of israel and the murder of jews and actually showed us what they mean by that

01:33:03.960 in the hamas charter showed the entire world and it would have actually in many ways i think that

01:33:10.680 kind of leadership and moral clarity and courage that i would hope for i think it would have actually

01:33:15.940 headed off a lot of the counter demonstrations that we saw hours and days after when there was lack

01:33:22.720 of moral clarity and courage all it took and in the university campuses the few that issued a clear

01:33:28.600 unequivocal condemnation that said because we support because we support humanity and peace

01:33:36.520 we have to unequivocally condemn what it was that we witnessed as a world atrocities the likes of which

01:33:43.320 the jewish people have not experienced since the holocaust happened on 10-7 which universities were

01:33:49.860 actually good here there were a couple of universities there was a statement issued i believe

01:33:53.980 yeshiva university in brandeis led a couple of university presidents that joined just it's i mean

01:33:59.840 it's devastating to me that i even have to mention it right because all it is is an immediate unequivocal

01:34:06.020 condemnation of the atrocities we saw on 10-7 immediate and that headed off a lot of the responses

01:34:13.240 that were enabled by these sort of either silence right so if universities issued statements in the

01:34:20.700 past about what happened in ukraine or what happens anywhere else in the world and failed to do so on

01:34:25.960 this day that the world hasn't experienced something so grave on then they sent a message

01:34:33.260 the first thing would have been just to issue a clear unequivocal condemnation that should not

01:34:39.860 be difficult when we saw the magnitude of these barbaric atrocities that's the first the second

01:34:46.700 and this is sort of not in a reactive whack-a-mole what are we going to do about this demonstration or

01:34:52.420 that demonstration because from the river to the sea we have to react to as we said is a call to

01:34:57.480 annihilation is a call to genocide actually especially when it's coupled with glory to our martyrs who

01:35:03.160 perpetrated these atrocities on 10-7 and that is something that universities are going to have to address

01:35:07.980 but in a proactive kind of way and i mentioned it so many times but i have to mention it again

01:35:13.100 it's actually to adopt and implement the international holocaust remembrance alliance definition the result

01:35:19.120 of a 15-year democratic process that's been adopted by more than 40 countries more than a thousand

01:35:23.980 entities it's not enough to just adopt it obviously has to be implemented but this is not something that

01:35:29.120 we have to sort of reflect on and worry about it is a working definition it's not even legally binding

01:35:35.260 it's a working definition that in an educational spaces where more than in an educational space do

01:35:41.740 you want to say this is how you're going to know to identify and combat by the way this is true on

01:35:46.980 social media platforms it was my engagement when i was a legislator precisely for this reason

01:35:51.420 with social media platforms to adopt and implement ira algorithmically because how are you going to know

01:35:57.460 that you were engaged in holocaust denial when you don't even know what the holocaust was

01:36:01.800 and how are you going to know that you're engaged in this strain of anti-semitism that denies israel's

01:36:07.380 very right to exist from the river to the sea glory to our martyrs if you don't have a definition it's

01:36:12.760 not because i'm a lawyer it's just because in order to be able to identify and combat anything

01:36:16.600 you first need to define it comprehensively all versions of it so university spaces and beyond

01:36:24.080 workplaces social media platforms have a definition that enables them to not only adopt it but implement

01:36:32.480 it to identify anti-semitism and then make the decision what we do as an educational institution

01:36:38.760 or by the way what we do as a social media space i don't want social media spaces censoring or removing

01:36:44.800 i actually want them to refer out to the ira to the international holocaust remembrance alliance

01:36:49.280 that says when you're engaged on holocaust porn on tiktok there is such a thing point of view videos

01:36:55.860 it says did you know that you are now engaged in what is a violation of the ira working definition

01:37:02.280 of anti-semitism in holocaust denial and did you know what the holocaust was because most of the people

01:37:08.800 on that platform have no idea neither what holocaust denial is nor what the holocaust was so in that sense

01:37:14.960 there is a key moment to utilize to adopt and to implement this resource that was created precisely

01:37:22.100 for this moment in time and hasn't been done rigorously enough and finally i'll say in a in a in a very clear

01:37:30.240 way the reclaiming of principles and of words to what they actually mean i mentioned the word

01:37:38.220 indigenous we mentioned the holocaust we mentioned apartheid we mentioned racism we mentioned zionism right

01:37:44.640 positively and negatively what is zionism it's integral to the identity of the majority of jews

01:37:50.480 it's how the majority of jews self-define it is integral to the identity meaning i can't just shed

01:37:55.340 that zionist pound of flesh to be a good jew that means maybe there are jews that can but i can't and i

01:38:02.600 deserve the very same equal understanding as all other self-defining identities so that would be the third

01:38:08.860 piece and that is to reclaim what words what concepts what historical facts that have been

01:38:14.740 appropriated weaponized distorted and actually in that way not only to reclaim them but enable

01:38:21.840 what i would call reclaiming intersectionality you know 10-7 enables a very important moment i think

01:38:29.080 and it is to transcend real and perceived differences of politics of religion of denomination of geography

01:38:38.780 that we're holding on to for dear life and to understand that what 10-7 did is draw a line in

01:38:44.680 the quicksand we have to identify it between extremism and it doesn't matter where the extremism comes

01:38:50.760 right left center islam extremism and civilization as we happen to like it the understanding that there

01:39:00.180 are more of us that actually happen to appreciate our civilization that cannot imagine ripping down a

01:39:07.960 poster of a 10-month-old baby being held hostage because what we see is a 10-month-old baby but there

01:39:14.300 are individuals that are tearing that poster down because that baby has been demonized and

01:39:19.120 delegitimized and applied double standards to anti-semitism and there are people in the streets

01:39:24.220 saying to them what are you doing what do you think you're doing and it doesn't matter if they're

01:39:29.140 jewish or if they've gone to university or if they're i you know i don't know what they are if

01:39:34.820 they're just walking by and if they're strangers and saying why are you ripping down a poster of a 10-month-old

01:39:40.740 baby that is being held hostage by a genocidal terror organization i think that this is an aha moment

01:39:46.040 that actually requires that we transcend real and perceived differences and reach across them

01:39:52.240 to make clear that we are intent on protecting civilization as we know it and as we happen to

01:39:59.000 like it from this extremism that is either percolating just below the surface or already festering and

01:40:05.360 infecting our societies and the 10-7 did that too so in whatever space whether it's the university campus

01:40:11.620 with the social media space or workplaces or high schools or community centers in whatever space

01:40:18.420 i think that 10-7 leaves us with a great deal of work but that there are tools and resources that we

01:40:26.060 should be using and i've named some of them but i think that this is a critical moment for us to

01:40:31.940 realize that what binds us together as a civilization certainly in democracies that cherish

01:40:37.820 life and liberty is far greater than what sets us apart and that means that what we're battling

01:40:43.320 together is extremism it's not you know the real or perceived differences of yesterday jew and non-jew

01:40:50.220 right and left it's not that it's extremism that's threatening the foundations of democracies

01:40:56.460 and 10-7 and the responses to it made it abundantly clear well michael thank you for your moral and

01:41:04.360 conceptual clarity and uh for your for all of your work in this area i look forward to a time

01:41:09.880 when you'll be out of a job but somehow i think that's not coming soon so um please take care of

01:41:15.180 yourself and uh keep going because you're you really are a necessary voice at this moment thank you i

01:41:20.980 appreciate it and uh i look forward to a continued conversation as i think that really what's most

01:41:25.540 important is that we make this accessible to broad publics that recognize the responsibility of our

01:41:30.840 our times and that never again is right now

Making Sense - Sam Harris - July 02, 2024

#373 — Anti-Zionism Is Antisemitism

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