In this episode, James and Mike discuss the anti-Israel and anti-colonialism that has been the rallying cry of Queers for Palestine for the past few weeks. They discuss the nature of the pro-Palestine movement, the role of Western liberals in supporting it, and the role that religion plays in it.
00:01:28.480James, let's start with talking a little bit about kind of the nature of the Palestinian and Israel conflict as we know it.
00:01:40.500Yeah, I guess we've kind of got a difficult situation because you've got wildly different perspectives in two groups of people.
00:01:47.820You've got a land-based disagreement, so one group saying that we deserve this land and another group saying we deserve this land.
00:01:58.820You have a history together as well as you have differences in religious beliefs and claims to that spot as well.
00:02:06.560And when you mix all this together, you've got a difficult situation where it's hard to find any compromise when people think they have the divine right to a place.
00:02:51.840Also, if a mass protest, if there's any messaging that is common and repeated and pretty much is sanctioned by a mass protest, that's usually, you could sum that up as them being one of their beliefs.
00:03:07.800You do get into a tricky place where, I don't know if everybody thinks they're subscribing to the same ideas.
00:03:14.920So from the river to the sea, Palestine must be free.
00:03:20.300I hear some people saying that that means zero Jews in the whole area from the river to the sea.
00:03:27.740Like the only way that it can exist peacefully is if nobody's living there who is Jewish.
00:03:36.440Other people just say, well, that's more metaphorical and maybe they're supporting that, chanting that, and maybe not thinking about it in the same way.
00:03:47.360So you may get some disagreements on what some of these messages actually mean.
00:03:53.460And you get people actually living there, but then you have this Western dynamic of people supporting from the West with kind of a limited perspective here.
00:04:03.640And that's maybe something we'll touch on is when you get activism from the West being filtered through these identity politics.
00:04:16.120Yeah, well, and part of what it looks like, as it turns out, it seems, is that to be a Western liberal or a leftist, that means that you must support Palestine.
00:04:30.260And apparently, if you support Israel, that means you're a right-winger, a far-right, or otherwise a conservative.
00:04:37.580What do you think are some of the reasons for that?
00:04:44.400And I'll have my opinion in there after.
00:04:47.220So I think when it comes to social justice, they're very much focused on an oppressed and oppressor lens.
00:05:01.500And no matter where you were like, intersectionality is basically this idea that everybody is oppressed and the oppressor because you may be oppressed on multiple categories.
00:05:12.660And if that is a core belief, it is not surprising for people to look at Palestine and maybe look at some of the land disagreements or the territorial shifts as acts of oppression.
00:05:54.380One thing to add is if you do talk to some people from Israel, they are viewing themselves as oppressed as well and being oppressed by Palestine and or just the religious texts calling for their demise.
00:06:10.620And the surrounding – well, that's for sure.
00:06:13.120And who talked about that just last week about – oh, that was the Eric Weinstein and Sam Harris debate where Eric talked about how there are certain elements of the Jewish and Christian texts that put a natural sort of – I don't know the term,
00:06:37.380but sort of a limiting factor on the religion that Islam doesn't have when it comes to conquest, military might, and the ultimate goal of the religion.
00:06:50.040I'm very much simplifying it, but I think that's maybe what you're referring to.
00:06:53.040Yeah, and if – I think if you look at the pure numbers, the ratio of Muslims to Jewish people in that area, very much – is it 1 billion to – is it even a couple million right now?
00:07:11.800Yeah, I think it might be 8 to 12 million or in that kind of range, I think.
00:07:51.780And so how do you come to terms with that in discussions?
00:07:55.880Well, and so that leads me nicely into what my little pet theory on this is, is that the – and Douglas Murray talked about this as well later in a video clip that we're going to show.
00:08:11.480So – but he talks about how Western liberals have been taught for decades now that all oppressions intersect and overlap and are related to each other.
00:08:22.480And this is a situation where, in my opinion, Western liberals being raised and taught in schools their whole lives about how we live – in the U.S. and Canada specifically – about how we live on stolen lands.
00:08:39.140We're colonizers, we're colonizers, we're oppressors, all of the crimes that we committed against the indigenous populations.
00:08:45.960What I believe is that Western liberals see themselves in this conflict as being in the position of being able – as they feel being able to stop or prevent a modern-day colonization.
00:09:01.940And in some way, this would atone for the self-hate and the guilt that they feel for how they were raised to view themselves in the Western world.
00:09:16.340Yeah, it's – they can't stop colonization at home, so they're looking to other places to – where this is maybe the – in their eyes, the biggest current example of this happening.
00:09:28.940Yeah, it's the – it's happening in real time, their perceived atonement for the sins of their fathers, right?
00:09:37.920Yeah, and I guess that touches on also the driving motivation of some of these activists is this idea of quick salvation from sins.
00:09:50.780And it's funny, you are born with original sin of – since if everybody's oppressed and oppressed, it doesn't take long before you are blamed of being an oppressor to somebody else.
00:10:05.380So nobody is free of sin in this way of thinking.
00:10:10.740So that's where you have to find ways of atoning.
00:10:13.760Yeah, and do you think that there's also – I hadn't thought about this until just now – but do you think there's also sort of a view amongst Western liberals of the less educated type, we'll say, that view Jews as white or as synonymous with white people, despite what the demographic makeup of the area might actually reflect?
00:10:42.940Yeah, I think when you're looking at even like university admissions or – I don't know how they start filtering down, but I know like the category of white or white adjacent or whiteness has been expanded.
00:11:04.000So you can find Asians in Western universities are now being –
00:11:11.240It's Harvard you're referring to, right?
00:11:12.540They are – yeah, they are overperforming.
00:11:15.280Therefore, they're being treated as white in the same kind of – when they're rebalancing admissions to try to increase numbers of underrepresented groups.
00:11:25.660Was it Harvard or Yale that basically straight up said that they would not be following the recent Supreme Court judgment about that?
00:11:52.160James, let's have a quick segue into what has seemingly happened to media coverage of the Ukraine because ostensibly the war in Ukraine is still happening.
00:12:38.720You think that would be balanced out, but you almost have these cases where it almost just – en masse, you get just excitement, this buzz over a certain topic and –
00:13:34.900And it doesn't feel like – it feels to me – and I don't mean this to come off as conspiratorial, but it feels to me anyway that there was precious little goodwill left regarding the media coverage of Ukraine-Palestine.
00:13:56.600But now, with the Palestinian conflict, that is much more polarizing, and there's not a lot of consensus for or against it at this time, which maybe that drives more clicks.
00:14:10.080Maybe that's a little bit more of a hot-button issue that they can capitalize on from a – purely from an engagement perspective.
00:14:18.440Yeah, it's always worth kind of looking at some of these things.
00:14:24.120Sometimes you have coverage that is – the amount of coverage is linked more directly to somebody's bottom end, let it be driving engagement, kind of tailoring to the viewers.
00:14:37.020So you do get this case on both sides of the aisle.
00:14:41.700You will get people speaking to their – feeding content to their echo chamber because their viewers either expect content on that or it resonates with their viewership, their pre-existing viewership.
00:14:53.820But one thing I did notice is – so the last time we spoke, and we can link to this in the show notes, but we were talking about some of the parental rights protests here in Canada, the Million March for Kids,
00:15:10.460which kind of had a strange demographic where normally on the Left, you think the Left is a bastion for all these underrepresented groups, these minorities, the people of color.
00:15:28.320And the parental rights protests geared around gender ideology and what should be taught in school and how much it should be withheld from parents as well as can like a kid socially transition, change their name without the parents knowing about it, without the parents' consent.
00:15:50.660And you saw firsthand, a lot of people there were from – they were Muslim, they were basically a wide cross-section of Canada representing these protests who were pushed back against the Left.
00:16:05.740And it's strange now to see the Left almost – like these woke activists trying to tag along with people that they were at odds with before.
00:16:23.480It's almost like they just forgot about the fact that their beliefs don't align with the ideology that they're pushing, which makes kind of this whole gays for Gaza or queers for Palestine, these movements, very strange because they are advocating for something for people that do not support their views.
00:16:48.300Yeah, they do come across as sort of strange bedfellows, don't they?
00:16:54.300And it is – I don't know what to call it, if it's sweet in a way that they've put aside their differences from just a couple months ago and are now all uniting against Israel and the Zionists.
00:17:11.640Or if it's more just an indication of the hypocrisy of the movement in general because, yeah, at the Million March for Kids, I would say that there was – it was highly representative demographically.
00:17:25.660There were people of all shapes and sizes, colors and creeds.
00:17:29.040But there was definitely a strong showing of Arab and what can only be assumed as Muslim support.
00:17:40.240And understandably so because the Muslim faith is particularly – I don't know if I would say unique, but it's particularly strong still in the modern era on parental rights and family structure and nuclear families and all that sort of thing.
00:17:59.040So it makes sense that they would be the ones particularly in support of such movement.
00:18:04.600Whereas what you found on the counter-protester side, the more stereotypically leftist side, the rainbow flags side, is overwhelmingly white, overwhelmingly young, college, university-aged.
00:18:22.760Not a lot of what you would assume would be people who had young families who would be affected by these issues.
00:18:35.020So that was an interesting thing to observe.
00:18:37.720And then now when the Israel-Palestine conflict really popped off just a month ago, it is very strange and interesting to note that now all is forgotten.
00:18:54.180They're back on the side of the same Arab people that they were so vehemently opposed to not a month before.
00:19:02.440I don't know if it's a nuance that they're maybe not aware that they're showing or if it's hypocrisy or what it is, but it's noteworthy.
00:19:24.020One way to look at this conflict is I'm always wary if a side says you cannot talk about this or any side start trying to shut down discussion or quickly labeling people.
00:19:39.460So it doesn't matter where it's coming from.
00:19:42.100If somebody says, if you don't believe this, then you are this label or vice versa.
00:19:50.000And it seems like the Antifa crowd is very much the ones fighting Nazis at other rallies are very much very comfortable at rallies where some very anti-Semitic statements can be shouted out loud without distancing themselves from these statements.
00:20:17.300Yeah, that's interesting how the people who are so quick to call others the big modern N-words are seemingly, they're sounding closer and closer to the people that are condemning it.
00:20:38.580And it's, maybe we'll also leave a link to horseshoe theory in the show notes because that's what it feels like to me.
00:20:45.680I think, James, you have a video queued up that demonstrates something like that.
00:20:50.260Well, yeah, let's take a look at, so we've got a good channel.
00:21:00.120Well, we're going to link to this below is Common Ground Conversations.
00:21:05.680Fantastic individual, basically going in the streets and having conversations with people and trying to get a sense of what their thoughts are and really just a genuinely curious individual.
00:21:22.160This video is the guy that Peter Boghossian interviewed in Melbourne, right?
00:21:28.540Very much a similar, almost a similar curiosity to like what people believe and why.
00:21:33.960So, in this video, he goes over his ideas and his take on the conflict, breaks down his ideas, and very much advocates for somebody to do their own thinking.
00:21:53.260He has a conversation with a Jew, and then he also has conversations with the Palestinian, but the funny thing is he gets attacked by these professional protesters, or these people who seem to show up at any protest and have these same destructive tactics that we see.
00:22:17.620Antifa, regardless if they call themselves, regardless if they call themselves Antifa, they have the same tactics of disruption, noise-making, physical disruptions, and or just general preventing discussions from happening.
00:22:30.920And let's play just a little bit of the professional protest, professional protesters here.