The Joe Rogan Experience - Joe Rogan Experience #2497 - Gad Saad

00:00:01.000 Joe Rogan Podcast, check it out.

00:00:04.000 The Joe Rogan Experience.

00:00:06.000 Train by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

00:00:09.000 Good to see you, sir.

00:00:14.000 Oh, so good to see you.

00:00:15.000 How you been?

00:00:15.000 What's happening?

00:00:17.000 Doing great.

00:00:18.000 Got big news.

00:00:19.000 Big?

00:00:20.000 I'll talk big, very big.

00:00:21.000 Before I start with it.

00:00:22.000 Okay.

00:00:24.000 Drops.

00:00:25.000 The book.

00:00:26.000 Suicidal Empathy.

00:00:27.000 Suicidal Empathy.

00:00:28.000 A quote that we use all the time.

00:00:29.000 That's right.

00:00:30.000 Yeah, it is.

00:00:31.000 It is a good quote.

00:00:33.000 And it is a very accurate quote for the Times.

00:00:35.000 I like this where they're carrying the sign, Free the Wolves.

00:00:38.000 The lamb is carrying.

00:00:39.000 Well, I wanted the cover to be as evocative as the concept, right?

00:00:45.000 Dying to be kind.

00:00:46.000 There you go.

00:00:47.000 And they are, just in the last two days, there have been so many new cases of suicidal empathy that I regret that I couldn't include them in the book.

00:00:56.000 Like which ones?

00:00:57.000 So, did you hear about the one where the guy who tried to assassinate President Trump?

00:01:02.000 Oh, yeah.

00:01:03.000 The judge then went and said, I am so sorry that.

00:01:06.000 You know, you're not being treated nicely.

00:01:08.000 You have a room without a window.

00:01:11.000 This is just, it's mean.

00:01:13.000 Oh, see, I don't think that that's suicidal empathy at all.

00:01:15.000 I think that's signaling.

00:01:17.000 I think that's signaling that he wishes that that man was successful and that he supports his endeavor.

00:01:23.000 Fair enough.

00:01:24.000 The second example, actually, today, Dave Rubin shared it with me.

00:01:30.000 It was the one where a felon of color who had just been released ended up pushing. 0.77

00:01:37.000 Right? 0.59

00:01:38.000 And the previous person that he had been entangled with didn't want to, whatever, press charges because she didn't want another black man to be in prison.

00:01:47.000 Oh, boy. 0.65

00:01:51.000 So I hope to get into the book in a second.

00:01:53.000 But the other big news is that this past year I've been a visiting scholar at Old Miss, University of Mississippi.

00:02:03.000 I had taken a two year leave from my school in Montreal.

00:02:07.000 Starting this summer, we are moving permanently to Oxford.

00:02:13.000 So the Lebanese, Jews, Canadians are going down to Oxford, Mississippi, and we're very excited.

00:02:19.000 Wow.

00:02:19.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:02:20.000 So you're going to be there for two years.

00:02:22.000 So, how does that work?

00:02:23.000 Three years.

00:02:24.000 Three years.

00:02:24.000 To get a green card or a visa?

00:02:26.000 Yeah, so the previous two years that I did, it was a leave of absence.

00:02:30.000 So I only had to get a TN visa.

00:02:32.000 But now that we're moving, I applied for an EB1A visa, which gets you a green card.

00:02:39.000 They're called extraordinary visas.

00:02:42.000 You have to pass certain criteria to demonstrate.

00:02:44.000 You are extraordinary, aren't you?

00:02:45.000 And rather easy on the eyes.

00:02:49.000 And so that went through, thank God.

00:02:52.000 And so, yeah.

00:02:54.000 So we're very excited.

00:02:55.000 Congratulations.

00:02:55.000 Yeah, yeah.

00:02:56.000 So, and hopefully this will be a fast track to my inner spirit is American, but maybe we can legalize it and turn the SADs into Americans. 1.00

00:03:05.000 Wow. 1.00

00:03:06.000 Inshallah.

00:03:06.000 You're going to join the team.

00:03:09.000 If you'll have me.

00:03:10.000 I will have you.

00:03:11.000 Come on.

00:03:12.000 Welcome aboard.

00:03:13.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:03:13.000 We need more people that are thinking straight.

00:03:15.000 So that's the big news.

00:03:16.000 That's awesome, man.

00:03:17.000 Thank you.

00:03:17.000 Congratulations.

00:03:18.000 That's a fantastic thing.

00:03:19.000 That's beautiful.

00:03:20.000 Do you want to get into the book and then we talk about other stuff?

00:03:23.000 Sure, whatever.

00:03:24.000 So I thought maybe I'd give you, because I know that you know the parasitic mind really well.

00:03:29.000 And so I wanted to kind of contextualize this book in relation to that book.

00:03:34.000 So we are a thinking and a feeling animal, right?

00:03:37.000 Both our cognitive system is important and our affective system is important.

00:03:41.000 For example, advertisers recognize that.

00:03:45.000 If I'm trying to sell you a mutual fund, I need to engage your cognitive system.

00:03:51.000 Here are the seven reasons why you should buy my mutual fund.

00:03:53.000 If I'm trying to sell you perfume, I don't tell you this is what Harvard physiologists think about the science of olfaction, right?

00:04:02.000 I need to engage your affective system.

00:04:05.000 So, in that case, I will show you a pretty girl on a horse with beautiful hair, and the brand name will be Mystère, right?

00:04:13.000 I'm just engaging your emotional system.

00:04:16.000 Well, the parasitic mind was the story of what I need to do to hijack your cognitive system, your ability to think.

00:04:25.000 Rationally, and hence there were all these parasitic ideas that destroyed your capacity to think.

00:04:30.000 But for me to completely zombify you and hijack you, I also need to zombify your affective system.

00:04:38.000 That's where suicidal empathy comes in.

00:04:40.000 So, if I can hijack both your cognitive and emotional systems, you become a wood cricket, which we could talk about what that reference is.

00:04:48.000 What's a wood cricket?

00:04:49.000 So, the wood cricket is an insect that abhors water, it wants nothing to do with water.

00:04:55.000 But when it is parasitized by a neuro parasite called the hairworm, the hairworm needs the wood cricket to happily and merrily commit suicide by jumping into the water because that's the only way that the hairworm can complete its reproductive cycle.

00:05:14.000 So once the hairworm hijacks the wood cricket's ability to think and to invoke its survival instinct, it erases its survival instinct, then it is owned by the hairworm.

00:05:25.000 And so I use that principle to explain suicidal empathy.

00:05:29.000 Yeah, we've actually shown videos of that.

00:05:31.000 It's very strange.

00:05:32.000 It's amazing.

00:05:32.000 The cricket really commits suicide.

00:05:34.000 It jumps in the water, drowns, and the worm wiggles out of its body.

00:05:38.000 And that's how it's born.

00:05:38.000 Exactly.

00:05:39.000 Exactly.

00:05:41.000 And there are so many cases of that in nature.

00:05:44.000 Yeah.

00:05:44.000 Indeed.

00:05:45.000 And so the way that I originally had the epiphany to use the parasitological framework so, parasitology is just a study of host parasite interactions.

00:05:56.000 So, a tapeworm is a parasite, but that.

00:05:59.000 Parasitizes my intestinal tract.

00:06:01.000 But a subfield of parasitology is neuro parasitology.

00:06:05.000 Those are the parasites that need to go into your brain, altering your circuitry to suit their interests, including ideas. 0.96

00:06:12.000 And that's how I came up with the parasitic ideas of the parasitic mind.

00:06:16.000 But in order to fully tell the story, I then had to say, but a lot of the mechanisms by which people seem to be completely hijacked in terms of their ability to think critically is really coming from an affective place.

00:06:31.000 And so, how can I explain that?

00:06:33.000 And so, what I argue in the book, and then we can drill down to endless examples if you want.

00:06:38.000 I'm not saying that empathy is a bad thing. 0.86

00:06:42.000 Because even though the book is just dropping, there's already been maybe 10 articles that have been hit pieces against the book, which of course, people, it means people haven't read it yet, where they say, you know, here comes the dark Jew who is trying to promulgate the idea that empathy is a bad thing. 0.85

00:06:58.000 He's a neo con right wing guy, an Elon guy, a Donald Trump guy.

00:07:05.000 I'm not saying that empathy is bad.

00:07:07.000 Empathy is actually a very important virtue to have.

00:07:11.000 In order for you and I to have a meaningful conversation, I need to put myself in your mind and vice versa.

00:07:17.000 That's called cognitive empathy, right? 1.00

00:07:20.000 Theory of mind is something that typically autistic children fail on very early in life. 0.93

00:07:24.000 That's how you diagnose them as being autistic.

00:07:27.000 So there's nothing wrong with well modulated empathy.

00:07:30.000 The problem with empathy, like most things in life, is if there's too little or too much of it.

00:07:37.000 Aristotle explained this to us thousands of years ago via his golden mean.

00:07:42.000 If a soldier is not courageous enough, if he's cowardly, it's not good.

00:07:45.000 If he's too courageous, he becomes a reckless martyr, that's not good.

00:07:49.000 There's a sweet spot in the middle.

00:07:51.000 I argue empathy follows exactly that rule. 1.00

00:07:54.000 Too little of it, you're a psychopath.

00:07:56.000 Too much of it, if it's hyperactive, if it is invoked in the wrong situations toward the wrong targets, you end up with suicidal empathy.

00:08:05.000 Yeah, I don't even necessarily know if it's empathy at that point.

00:08:09.000 It completely becomes illogical and ideological.

00:08:13.000 You just subscribe to whatever the ideology says and you ignore the reality.

00:08:21.000 Like this man that pushed that guy in front of the train.

00:08:23.000 Like, this is a violent criminal, and he had been arrested numerous times, I think more than a dozen.

00:08:29.000 And it was very clear there was something very wrong with this person.

00:08:32.000 He probably shouldn't be just running free, victimizing people.

00:08:35.000 There was another one where someone pushed this old guy down a flight of stairs into the subway and killed him.

00:08:42.000 Same situation, same kind of person, person that had been in and out of jail.

00:08:47.000 You know, every one of these people starts off as a child, every one of these people starts off as a baby.

00:08:53.000 And I can only imagine what kind of household they developed in.

00:08:58.000 I can only imagine what kind of abuse they suffered.

00:09:01.000 I can only imagine what happened to them.

00:09:03.000 And that's horrible.

00:09:05.000 But once they reach adulthood and they start victimizing other people, we've got to do something as a society.

00:09:12.000 Now, I don't know what the tools are to rehabilitate a person like that, but I know that they're not being employed.

00:09:18.000 There's not a whole lot of evidence of there's any successful program where they're taking a person like that.

00:09:24.000 Doing something with them that completely changes their personality and the way they interact with humans and releases them out in the world and they become a much better person than they used to be.

00:09:33.000 So, I call them in the book, I call them blank slate felons because if you remember the term blank slate, so in the parasitic mind, I talk about social constructivism.

00:09:44.000 Everything is a social construction, it's the tabula rasa premise.

00:09:48.000 We're born with empty minds with no individual differences in our potentiality, and it's only our unique life trajectories.

00:09:58.000 And our unique patterns of socialization that end up making us who we become, which in a small sense, that's true.

00:10:04.000 My life experience and yours is an indelible part of who we are as individuals.

00:10:09.000 But there are individual differences.

00:10:12.000 People are born with different proclivities eventually of committing crimes or of being NBA players or of being the next Einstein.

00:10:20.000 It's a very hopeful message, though, to start with the blank slate premise.

00:10:23.000 Yeah, it's just not accurate.

00:10:25.000 Because if you and I are both parents, I would love to subscribe to the idea that if only I knew the exact schedule of reinforcement of my how to ensure that my child becomes the next Lionel Messi or the next Albert Einstein, he too can become that.

00:10:25.000 Exactly.

00:10:41.000 That's a lot more hopeful than thinking, you know what, I don't think my son has the morphological features that are ever going to make him to be the next NBA star.

00:10:50.000 He's too short, he doesn't have the right athletic tools.

00:10:54.000 And so it's easy to understand why people can be parasitized by these ideas. 1.00

00:11:00.000 This person of color.

00:11:02.000 Was born into a white supremacist society. 0.89

00:11:05.000 So he's already been victimized by society.

00:11:07.000 And for you to now punish him by having him, you know, in the penal system, you're doubly punishing him.

00:11:13.000 So shouldn't you give him a second chance?

00:11:15.000 And by second chance, we mean 186th chance.

00:11:18.000 That's part of suicidal empathy.

00:11:19.000 But suicidal empathy doesn't even apply to only that.

00:11:23.000 The victims of rape are themselves suicidally empathetic towards their rapists.

00:11:30.000 Can I share some of those incredible stories?

00:11:31.000 Sure.

00:11:33.000 So I start off in the book with an example from a. 0.66

00:11:36.000 Norwegian man who had been sodomized by a Somali migrant.

00:11:42.000 Because the Norwegians are very kind and empathetic, they don't believe in long sentences.

00:11:47.000 He served maybe, I don't know, three years or four, like a pretty short sentence for a rape of another man.

00:11:52.000 When he was being released, he was going to be deported.

00:11:56.000 The victim of that rape had this huge existential angst and guilt. 0.93

00:12:03.000 Because now that Ahmad was going to be released back to Mogadishu, he wouldn't end up being able to maximally flourish that. 1.00

00:12:12.000 Like he should be. 0.67

00:12:13.000 Well, our emotional system did not evolve to be empathetic toward our rapists.

00:12:17.000 That would be an example of someone who's being suicidally empathetic.

00:12:21.000 Another great example.

00:12:23.000 What happened in that case?

00:12:25.000 In terms of whether he was deported or not?

00:12:27.000 I think, I don't want to misspeak, but I think he was deported to the screams and lamentations of his victim.

00:12:36.000 There is a woman who was raped in Germany, and when the authorities were trying to find out, More about who the perpetrators were, she lied to them and said that they were speaking in German, even though they were speaking in Arabic and Farsi.

00:12:54.000 Because if she had truly said what their language was, then those communities would have been marginalized.

00:13:00.000 So, you know, there's just an endless number of, like a litany of these examples.

00:13:05.000 And therefore, suicidal empathy is really pervasive once you recognize the mechanism.

00:13:11.000 When you look at the root of that, how is it so common?

00:13:14.000 Like, what happens?

00:13:15.000 So, I think that's a great question.

00:13:17.000 I think, again, it goes back to the one two punch of parasitic mind and suicidal empathy.

00:13:21.000 In order for the fertile grounds to be available for suicidal empathy to barge in, I first have to have certain ideas that are implanted in your brain.

00:13:34.000 So, let me give that sounds very abstract.

00:13:35.000 So, let me give you a concrete example.

00:13:37.000 Cultural relativism is a parasitic idea that I discuss in the parasitic mind.

00:13:42.000 It basically says who are you to judge the beliefs and the practices of another culture? 0.99

00:13:48.000 Shut up, racist, right? 1.00

00:13:49.000 So there are honor killings, shut up. 1.00

00:13:51.000 There are child brides, shut up. 1.00

00:13:53.000 There are female genital mutilations, shut up. 1.00

00:13:56.000 Don't judge other cultures. 0.98

00:13:58.000 Well, if you internalize that parasitic idea that it is not appropriate to ever judge the cultural practices of another culture, then that renders you impotent when you're making judgments about who should be let into your country, about whether you want an increase of people who hold those views or not. 0.58

00:14:19.000 Therefore, that leads to the suicidally empathetic position that all immigrants are equally likely to assimilate within the American ethos or the Western ethos. 0.52

00:14:30.000 So, we started off with internalizing a parasitic idea called cultural relativism, and that lays the foundation for then the suicidal empathy of open borders. 0.68

00:14:40.000 Well, there's no pressure at all to assimilate.

00:14:42.000 You're more than welcome.

00:14:44.000 That's one of the weird things. 1.00

00:14:45.000 More than welcome to establish a Somali community in Minnesota where no one speaks English. 1.00

00:14:50.000 Exactly. 1.00

00:14:51.000 It's very odd.

00:14:52.000 It's very odd that people want to come here, but when they come here, they want to essentially turn it into a smaller version, at least their neighborhood, of where they came from.

00:15:01.000 And a lot, I mean, if it were only that you don't speak English, I mean, to me, that's bad enough in that you're not going to be part of the fabric of the greater society.

00:15:01.000 Right.

00:15:10.000 But fair enough, that's not an existential threat.

00:15:13.000 But if you're then going to be advocating for many of the cultural beliefs that are perfectly antithetical to the whole society, Then we have a problem.

00:15:23.000 Yeah, and a lot of the cultural beliefs that are illogical have to be based on something else, and generally that's religion.

00:15:31.000 Yeah.

00:15:31.000 Indeed.

00:15:32.000 And you and I have talked very often about Islam and so on.

00:15:38.000 Some people, I think, I mean, I wonder what you think about this.

00:15:41.000 Do you think more Americans are willing to have an honest and open conversation about this issue, or are most still sort of the proverbial ostrich and they think it's gauche to talk about religion?

00:15:53.000 Well, I think it's really divided in party lines.

00:15:56.000 You know, people on the right are more than willing to talk about it.

00:15:59.000 There's very few people on the right who are empathetic about some of the differences that these religions have and hold, and some of the rules. 0.94

00:16:11.000 That they would like to apply, like Sharia law.

00:16:13.000 Whereas there's a lot of people on the left that are terrified of being called racist, terrified of being called Islamophobic or fill in whatever phobia, transphobic, whatever it is.

00:16:24.000 They're just terrified.

00:16:25.000 They're terrified of being labeled.

00:16:26.000 And it's interesting because that side of the political spectrum, the people on the left, are the quickest to pull the trigger and accuse someone of being something being racist, sexist, homophobic, whatever it is.

00:16:42.000 They're the quickest and the most vicious when it comes to attacking people based on them not going along with whatever narrative that's been established, which is interesting because they're the ones that also like to call people fascists.

00:16:58.000 But that is a form of fascism.

00:17:00.000 It's not like if you look at fascism, it's essentially most people think of it as right wing authoritarianism.

00:17:07.000 But it is also, if you look at the definition of it, it's also a complete Adherence to whatever narrative is being promoted.

00:17:19.000 You don't think about that when it's left wing, like left wing progressive fascism sounds like an oxymoron, but it's a mindset.

00:17:30.000 The problem is you're hiding this mindset in an ideology that you think is righteous.

00:17:38.000 You could say the same thing about religion, because this is also what people do with religion, because it is the right thing.

00:17:43.000 It's the right thing to do. 1.00

00:17:45.000 Throw the gay off the roof. 1.00

00:17:47.000 Like, it's like, it's really kind of fascinating. 1.00

00:17:50.000 Like, when you see, like, queers for Palestine, you're like, hold on. 0.99

00:17:56.000 Like, it is a wonderful thing to empathize for the Palestinian people and to think that they shouldn't be bombed into oblivion. 0.99

00:18:03.000 And I'm with you 100%.

00:18:05.000 But when you start supporting Hamas and saying, you know, we're queers for Hamas, like, and I've seen that. 0.82

00:18:11.000 I've seen trans people for Hamas. 0.60

00:18:12.000 And it's like, good Lord, what are you saying? 0.99

00:18:15.000 So I've got a.

00:18:17.000 A whole verbatim transcript between a street interviewer, you know, these guys that just take someone off the street and they tape it.

00:18:25.000 Yes, I think his name.

00:18:26.000 Yes, so we were we just had a little technical glitch.

00:18:29.000 So you were talking about one of those guys that interviews people in the streets.

00:18:32.000 So he he goes and intercepts this woman who's at a I guess like a you know free, free Palestine uh you know rally and he says, Oh, you're you're for Palestine.

00:18:44.000 She goes, Yes, she goes, Well, what do you think about their positions on uh you know queer people?

00:18:48.000 She goes, Well, I'm queer.

00:18:50.000 He goes, Oh, you're queer, so what do you?

00:18:51.000 What do you think about what they would do to you? 0.98

00:18:53.000 She goes, Well, they would kill me.

00:18:55.000 She goes, But then you still support them?

00:18:56.000 She goes, Yes.

00:18:57.000 He goes, But it doesn't bother you that you're supporting a group that would kill you for the way that you are?

00:19:03.000 She goes, No.

00:19:04.000 The fact that they would kill me doesn't mean that they don't deserve my support.

00:19:08.000 Well, that's the wood cricket, right?

00:19:10.000 I mean, there is no evolutionary mechanism that says I'm going to build an affiliation with a group that I know would kill me.

00:19:19.000 But she is so kind.

00:19:20.000 She's so empathetic.

00:19:21.000 She so transcends the earthly survival instincts.

00:19:25.000 That she has ascended to a higher plane of suicidal empathy.

00:19:29.000 So it literally is straight out of what you said.

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00:20:14.000 But in that situation, what they're doing is they're being motivated by what they see as a complete destruction of Gaza.

00:20:14.000 Right.

00:20:22.000 Right.

00:20:23.000 So it's a different situation because if there were no attacks on Gaza and Gaza was its own autonomous or completely separate state and it wasn't controlled by Israel and there was no conflict.

00:20:40.000 I doubt they would have the same mindset.

00:20:43.000 Like the mindset is coming out of watching the destruction of Gaza.

00:20:48.000 And so then instead of saying, hey, we shouldn't just be bombing this city into oblivion and supporting this, instead they go all the way and support the ideology of the authoritarian rulers of this area, which is kind of kooky.

00:21:07.000 But it's like, but it's much like a religion.

00:21:10.000 It's a you can abandon all logic.

00:21:14.000 As long as you adhere to, and you have to, in fact, if you want to be accepted.

00:21:19.000 And this is one of the things about the left is like there's never someone left enough.

00:21:26.000 And when you think you're left enough, they move the border, they move the boundary lines.

00:21:30.000 The goalposts are like a mile further to the left. 1.00

00:21:33.000 You're like, oh God, I got to support drag queens teaching kids now by themselves? 1.00

00:21:38.000 No parental supervision? 1.00

00:21:40.000 Twerking?

00:21:41.000 It's like it just keeps getting nuttier and nuttier to where any protest of it is.

00:21:47.000 Heresy.

00:21:49.000 And that's where it gets very strange and it behaves completely like a religion.

00:21:54.000 Other examples of suicidal empathy.

00:21:57.000 So I talk in the book about something I introduce as cultural theory of mind.

00:22:03.000 So, theory of mind is, as I discussed earlier, it's at the individual level.

00:22:06.000 For you and I to have a meaningful conversation, I need to be in your mind and vice versa.

00:22:11.000 Cultural theory of mind is the same principle, but it operates at the cultural level.

00:22:16.000 So, if culture A is Has a set of values that it adheres to.

00:22:21.000 And if it presumes that those values are processed in exactly the same way by the other culture, and that's a wrong presumption, I argue that that culture then lacks cultural theory of mine because it is assuming that its values transcend in exactly the same way to other cultures.

00:22:39.000 Now, why is that related to suicidal empathy?

00:22:41.000 So if you take, for example, the values that we hold dear in the West, magnanimity, generosity, kindness, Empathy, they're interpreted in other societies as weakness, weakness, weakness, and weakness.

00:22:58.000 And this is why I don't remember if I mentioned this to you before on the show or not. 0.57

00:23:03.000 In Arabic, when people would speak to me, I mean, many years ago before, I mean, now they recognize me, so they're not going to be as forthright in their positions. 0.97

00:23:11.000 But 25 years ago, they would all tell me, the West is a woman to be mounted. 1.00

00:23:17.000 Well, the reason why they're saying that. 0.98

00:23:18.000 They would all tell you that?

00:23:19.000 I mean, not all, but it was very common.

00:23:21.000 But it was a saying that is often.

00:23:24.000 You know, intimated.

00:23:26.000 Was this when you were living in Lebanon?

00:23:27.000 No, no, no, in Montreal.

00:23:28.000 In Montreal.

00:23:29.000 In Montreal.

00:23:29.000 We should tell people just my background.

00:23:32.000 Yeah, because it's very pertinent.

00:23:35.000 Sure.

00:23:36.000 So I was born in 1964 in Lebanon.

00:23:40.000 My family were part of the last remaining minuscule community of Lebanese Jews.

00:23:47.000 Historically, there was always a small but pretty vibrant Jewish community.

00:23:53.000 Most of the Jews had left prior to the start of the Civil War, which happened in 75.

00:23:59.000 I was 11. 0.99

00:24:02.000 Because they had already read the writing on the wall.

00:24:04.000 So most of my extended family, my aunts, my uncles, my grandparents, had left to various places, most of them to Israel, but some of them to Montreal, Canada.

00:24:14.000 That's why we ended up going to Montreal ourselves.

00:24:16.000 But my parents had refused to leave because they were very well entrenched within Lebanese society.

00:24:22.000 They had nice business and so on.

00:24:23.000 My older sibling, I have three other siblings.

00:24:27.000 One is 14 years older, one is 12 years older, and one is 10 years older.

00:24:31.000 The one who's 10 years older is the Olympian judoka that played in the Montreal Olympics in 1976.

00:24:40.000 So they already had left Lebanon prior to the start of the civil war because they had started facing some Jew hatred difficulties and even in tolerant, progressive Lebanon.

00:24:52.000 Unfortunately for me, being the last 10 years younger than everybody else, I was still a kid.

00:24:58.000 We got caught up once the civil war broke out.

00:25:01.000 Some really bad things happened during that first year, but then we were able to.

00:25:05.000 Thank God to escape to Montreal.

00:25:09.000 But then my parents kept returning to Lebanon because they still had business interests.

00:25:15.000 So they would go back to Lebanon from 1975 to 1980.

00:25:21.000 On one of their return trips to Lebanon, they were kidnapped by Abu Nidal's group Fatah.

00:25:29.000 And some really bad things happened during their captivity, very much like the stuff that you hear about on October 7th.

00:25:36.000 But luckily, They weren't killed, they were able to, you know, be freed.

00:25:42.000 I mean, they weren't freed through a commando operation, they were freed through the connections that my parents had.

00:25:48.000 My mother's best friend was a Syrian woman, Syrian Muslim woman, who was the personal dresser of Hafiz al Assad, the father of Bashir, the one who was recently deposed.

00:26:05.000 And so, through him, my siblings.

00:26:10.000 Reached out to this woman, her name was Ihsan.

00:26:12.000 I think she's passed away now.

00:26:14.000 She got the father involved.

00:26:17.000 He reached out to Yasser Arafat, who was the head of the PLO back then.

00:26:23.000 As I understand the story, Yasser Arafat said, Well, I don't even know whether they're with one of our groups.

00:26:29.000 Let me make some calls.

00:26:32.000 But at the time, there was sort of a battle between Yasser Arafat and Abu Nidal.

00:26:36.000 And he said, If it's the Abu Nidal gang that took him, You know, good luck, and it was the Abu Nidal group.

00:26:43.000 But I'm guessing there was some money that was exchanged.

00:26:46.000 My parents were freed.

00:26:47.000 When my father returned, he had a temporary facial paralysis akin to when you have a really severe stroke and your face is completely disfigured and asymmetric.

00:27:03.000 Guillaume Barr.

00:27:04.000 Is that what it's called?

00:27:05.000 Yeah.

00:27:06.000 But it got resolved.

00:27:07.000 And so for about, I don't know how long it was, maybe a month or two, his face was completely asymmetric.

00:27:13.000 Probably due to stress, the things that happened to him, yeah.

00:27:16.000 Uh, and actually, I mean, some of the stuff I may have briefly mentioned on this show, but here's a part that I'm almost certain I didn't mention.

00:27:25.000 At one point, the militia group was trying to get my parents to sign a confession letter that they are Israeli spies.

00:27:34.000 Which, if you met my parents, you would know that that's not a very likely reality because it turns out that if they signed that, then they could legally execute them.

00:27:45.000 And the guy who had started this whole thing was the owner of the building where my dad owned the store.

00:27:51.000 And if they could now get rid of them, the store would execute them.

00:27:55.000 So, it wasn't even like a religious thing, it was for one of the seven deadly sins of greed, at least as I understand it.

00:28:02.000 And, anyways, and so at one point they had separated my parents and they were trying to put a lot of pressure on each of them to sign this thing.

00:28:10.000 And they go to my mother and say, You know, admit that you're a spy, whatever, Israeli agent.

00:28:17.000 And she's like, Are you crazy? 0.86

00:28:19.000 I mean, just go ask my husband, you know. 0.96

00:28:21.000 And they kind of mockingly say, Oh, well, your husband has gone to.

00:28:26.000 Join his God, meaning that they've already killed him.

00:28:29.000 So then my mother is in her little cell and they're doing bad things to them.

00:28:34.000 And she hears my dad late at night in some other part of wherever they were keeping him.

00:28:40.000 He had a very whooping kind of cough, like a cough as if, actually, I have a similar cough.

00:28:47.000 I used to be asthmatic, so I have this very deep and loud cough.

00:28:51.000 And so she was hearing that cough, but she wasn't sure if she's just hallucinating this in her thoughts or whether it was real.

00:28:59.000 Well, it turned out that they hadn't killed them, but they were just trying to lean in on her.

00:29:04.000 And so that's the background that I come from.

00:29:08.000 So you are very tuned in to what could possibly go wrong.

00:29:08.000 Yeah.

00:29:15.000 Unfortunately, yes.

00:29:16.000 And this is why, I mean, many times when I've come on this show, you know, I've talked about some of those difficulties that, you know, all religions are not indistinguishable from each other.

00:29:27.000 All religions have certain features that might be transferable from one religion to the other.

00:29:32.000 Right.

00:29:33.000 But there are many elements that are very specific to a given religion.

00:29:37.000 Sure.

00:29:38.000 If you're an extremist Jain, then you really take your using the sweeping thing. 0.88

00:29:48.000 You know, when they walk, they use a broom so that they inadvertently don't step on an ant and kill it. 0.78

00:29:55.000 So, an extremist, extremist in quotes, Jain, someone who really takes his religion seriously, is someone who's going to be extremist.

00:30:04.000 In his pacifism.

00:30:06.000 Right.

00:30:07.000 Now, that religion has very, very different edicts about how to conduct yourself, even when you're walking on a sidewalk, than maybe an Abrahamic faith, whether it be Judaism or Christianity or Islam.

00:30:19.000 So the idea that ultimately all religions are simply preaching the same indistinguishable thing in slightly different ways is simply not true.

00:30:29.000 But it feels good to think that, right?

00:30:31.000 It's empathetic for us to think that.

00:30:33.000 We should never speak amongst.

00:30:35.000 Mixed company about politics and religion.

00:30:37.000 So, therefore, if I start saying something that might be pejorative of another religion, that feels icky, that feels gauche.

00:30:46.000 And that's why, by the way, earlier you mentioned that when we're talking about this, when I asked you, Are Americans more likely now to talk openly about Islam?

00:30:46.000 Right?

00:30:55.000 You said, Well, the Democrats are more terrified to do so than the Republicans.

00:30:59.000 Yeah. 0.87

00:30:59.000 But even the Republicans are, to some extent, suicidally empathetic because if you watch, even the ones who very forcefully criticize, Islam as being incongruent with American values, they'll always use linguistic coverage to protect Islam. 0.87

00:31:18.000 So it's Islamism. 0.99

00:31:19.000 Yes. 0.99

00:31:20.000 It's radical Islam. 0.99

00:31:22.000 It's radical. 0.98

00:31:22.000 Do you agree with that? 0.98

00:31:24.000 No.

00:31:25.000 No?

00:31:25.000 Not at all.

00:31:26.000 So, political Islam and Islamism is an indelible, inherent feature of Islam. 1.00

00:31:34.000 Much of Islam is Islamism. 0.86

00:31:37.000 So, if you do a content analysis of all of the canonical texts of Islam, which are the Quran, the Hadith, the deeds and the sayings of Muhammad, and the Seerah, which is the biography of Muhammad, you could do a quantitative analysis of how often it is preaching. 0.98

00:31:56.000 Brotherly love? 0.80

00:31:57.000 How often is it really concerned about the infidels? 0.98

00:32:00.000 How and so Islam in its nature is political. 0.80

00:32:04.000 Why?

00:32:05.000 There are many reasons why, but let me just give you one.

00:32:07.000 And then if you want to drill down, we can do so. 0.99

00:32:10.000 Islam is a fully proselytizing language, religion, meaning that it is incumbent in an ideal world to turn the entire world into the one true faith. 0.99

00:32:24.000 It is a peaceful religion if by peaceful it means the following. 0.99

00:32:29.000 Eventually, The entire globe, every millimeter of the globe, will be united under the unifying flag of Allah. 0.74

00:32:38.000 Now, let's take, for example, Judaism. 0.81

00:32:40.000 And it's not because I'm Jewish, but it's just to compare. 0.81

00:32:44.000 Judaism is precisely the opposite it is an anti proselytizing language. 0.81

00:32:50.000 You're not allowed to proselytize. 0.96

00:32:53.000 As a matter of fact, if you proselytize, let's say I try to convince you, Joe, you know, why don't you join the tribe?

00:32:59.000 And you say, you know what?

00:33:00.000 I think I'd like to.

00:33:01.000 It's a grind.

00:33:02.000 It's a grind, exactly.

00:33:03.000 My uncle did it.

00:33:03.000 It's a long haul.

00:33:04.000 Well, there you go.

00:33:04.000 Exactly.

00:33:05.000 So, it is literally in the canons of Judaism to try to dissuade the prospective convert to coming into the fold because the idea is to have a costly signal of your commitment, your religious piety to want to join the group. 0.90

00:33:05.000 Thank you. 0.90

00:33:25.000 So, it is a grind, it's very hard.

00:33:27.000 In Islam, you just have to say the one proclamation, the Shahada, one sentence, and you're in. 1.00

00:33:33.000 Now, try to get out. 1.00

00:33:34.000 There are apostasy.

00:33:36.000 Laws against you getting out. 0.99

00:33:37.000 So, the circuitry of Islam is one that is expansionist. 1.00

00:33:44.000 That's why you have two billion Muslims. 0.99

00:33:47.000 One out of every four human beings is Muslim.

00:33:50.000 And it only took 1400 years for that.

00:33:53.000 So, from a marketing perspective, as someone who studies consumer behavior, Islam is a brilliant marketing religion.

00:34:00.000 It has found a way to get a lot of customers and adherents. 1.00

00:34:06.000 Sucks at marketing because the entire circuitry of Judaism is meant to keep it very, very small. 0.99

00:34:14.000 And so, which one is likely to lead to greater problems? 0.98

00:34:19.000 The one that is meant to ensure that all of us become Muslim, or the one that says, even if your uncle wants to become Jewish, we're going to put the barrier so high that nobody will ever become Jewish. 0.66

00:34:30.000 So, we still have only 15 million Jews, roughly, in the world, almost the same as we had before the Holocaust. 0.98

00:34:37.000 Judaism sucks as a marketing religion, Islam incredibly successful. 0.98

00:34:42.000 In this country, the concern with Judaism is the support of the Israeli military. 1.00

00:34:49.000 Right. 0.82

00:34:49.000 That's the concern. 0.82

00:34:50.000 The concern is the amount of influence that it has on the United States government, how we got into the Iran war, why we give them so much influence over our military, over our decision making, over our politicians.

00:35:07.000 I mean, AIPAC famously Promotes and supports a tremendous amount of politicians in the United States. 0.73

00:35:15.000 That's the big fear is that there's an inordinate amount of influence that Israel has over foreign policy, our decisions, and even our political structure in the country.

00:35:28.000 Right. 0.70

00:35:29.000 Several ways to tackle this. 0.76

00:35:31.000 Say the Iran war, take Israel out of it. 0.87

00:35:36.000 Do you think there are multiple countries that would share in the recognition that probably an Iranian regime that hasn't Eschatology that basically says the end of times requires that there is sort of death to everybody before the final, you know, Imam comes back. 0.86

00:36:00.000 Would it be a good idea for the Brits or the Romanians or the French or some of the other, the Gulf countries, would they be happy if Iran had a nuclear weapon?

00:36:11.000 So to frame the issue of the US is attacking or is involved in the attack on the Iranians as, you know, The United States doesn't have personal agency. 0.75

00:36:24.000 They're all wood crickets that are being puppeteered by this incredibly powerful lobby called Israel.

00:36:30.000 That simply doesn't pass the smell test. 0.77

00:36:33.000 Of course, Israel has shared interests with the United States, as most allies would, where they both agree that probably an Iranian regime that has nuclear weapons would not be a good thing for world peace. 0.79

00:36:46.000 And so, because these two countries have maybe greater testicular fortitude than the NATO countries, it seems as though the The Israelis are puppeteering the Americans. 0.84

00:36:58.000 But do you really think that Donald Trump is sitting and saying, you know, had I not been such a weak guy with no personal agency, I wouldn't have fallen sway to the incredibly influential Zionist lobby? 0.74

00:37:11.000 Well, it's not just incredibly influential, it's the amount of financial support they gave his candidacy and again, all the different politicians that are beholden to Israel.

00:37:21.000 That's the concern that a lot of people on the right.

00:37:24.000 And on the left, have here in America.

00:37:27.000 Most people in America do not support this war.

00:37:30.000 It's the large percentage of people think it was a bad idea.

00:37:35.000 What are your thoughts?

00:37:36.000 I don't think it's a good idea.

00:37:37.000 Why?

00:37:37.000 Well, because first of all, it doesn't seem to have a clear resolution, right?

00:37:41.000 It's like we went over there because we were told that they were very close to developing a nuclear weapon.

00:37:50.000 But if you've paid attention to what Netanyahu has said over the last few decades, it's always been.

00:37:55.000 They're a year away.

00:37:56.000 They're two months away.

00:37:57.000 They're whatever it is.

00:37:58.000 I mean, he's been doing this forever.

00:38:00.000 Ever since he spoke at the UN and had that giant cartoon bomb. 0.99

00:38:04.000 Remember the fucking Looney Tunes bomb? 0.99

00:38:07.000 Yeah, yeah, yeah. 0.99

00:38:08.000 When he spoke at the UN.

00:38:09.000 I remember that. 0.65

00:38:10.000 Enrichment of uranium.

00:38:11.000 He's wanted this for a long time.

00:38:14.000 There's also a deep concern that he is only in office because of the war and he has corruption charges in Israel and that in order for him to stay in power and for him to avoid going to trial, he has to continue war.

00:38:29.000 Can I comment on that?

00:38:33.000 Let's suppose you go to see your physician and your physician says, Hey, Joe, God forbid, it looks like your blood sugar is very high, and I'm going to classify you as now, never mind, pre diabetic.

00:38:33.000 Yeah.

00:38:33.000 Sure.

00:38:46.000 I think you're diabetic.

00:38:47.000 And if we don't manage your sugar levels, there will come a day where I can tell you exactly what's going to happen. 0.75

00:38:55.000 We're going to have to amputate your extremities.

00:38:57.000 You're probably going to lose your eyesight. 0.96

00:38:59.000 You're probably going to have sexual dysfunction, and you're probably going to have some cardiovascular incident.

00:39:03.000 That doesn't happen on day two of you having been diagnosed with diabetes.

00:39:10.000 With diabetes.

00:39:11.000 Like there's a trajectory, and at some point, there'll be a tipping point where until then, none of the diabetes complications happened.

00:39:20.000 And why am I saying all this?

00:39:22.000 Because I can't comment as to whether he's been lying all the times when he said there's two more years left, or one more year, or six more months.

00:39:31.000 But surely we can grant the American government enough leeway to presume that if they thought that at this point it's the right time and it is now intolerable.

00:39:43.000 For them to go another day with the current reality that they probably had some intelligence that suggests that they are close. 0.67

00:39:50.000 So I can't comment whether Netanyahu was pulling our eyes, but surely it can't be that the Israelis are so manipulative in their puppeteering that they've pulled the wool over the American eyes. 0.68

00:40:03.000 And really, there's no danger that the Iranians were posing and we've convinced the Americans to go to war. 0.65

00:40:09.000 Do you think that it is that? 0.99

00:40:10.000 Well, I wouldn't say there's no danger, right?

00:40:13.000 So here's one thing that we do know.

00:40:16.000 They had said that their missiles could only reach a certain distance.

00:40:21.000 That proved to not be true because of the Diego Garcia missile launch.

00:40:27.000 So they have missiles that are capable of reaching Europe, and that was not something they had said before.

00:40:34.000 We know that they have enriched their uranium beyond what they need for nuclear power and that they're within striking distance of developing a nuclear weapon.

00:40:47.000 But wasn't it true that they had put See, it's hard to know as me, as a person sitting on a podcast studio in Texas, exactly what their ruling had been.

00:41:00.000 But that they had only done this in order to avoid the possibility of them being attacked, that they would get close to a nuclear weapon so at least it would deter some potential attacks on them, and that they were doing this out of self interest.

00:41:23.000 There's a large group of American politicians that did not want this war, that did not think it was warranted to attack Iran at this point.

00:41:32.000 Can I?

00:41:33.000 Yeah.

00:41:33.000 Okay.

00:41:35.000 So I think I've mentioned on the show before this distinction between deontological ethics, absolute statements.

00:41:42.000 It is never okay to lie, versus consequentialist ethics.

00:41:46.000 It's okay to lie if it is meant to spare someone's hurt feelings, right?

00:41:50.000 So if your wife says, Do I look fat in those jeans?

00:41:53.000 You put on your consequentialist hat and you say, You've never looked more beautiful because maybe she's put on a bit of weight, but you don't want to hurt her feelings.

00:42:00.000 So you lie.

00:42:02.000 And for most of us, we go through life, in most instances, putting on a consequentialist hat.

00:42:07.000 Okay.

00:42:08.000 I'm going to link it now to our discussion.

00:42:11.000 To have, for example, a deontological principle that says that I am always an isolationist.

00:42:17.000 Do you understand what I mean by here, deontological?

00:42:19.000 Meaning that it doesn't matter what the environment is out there.

00:42:23.000 I, as America, will never interfere in wars over there.

00:42:29.000 That Can't be an optimal strategy, right?

00:42:32.000 Because, so for example, if you were a deontological pacifist, you say, under no circumstances do I believe that violence is the solution.

00:42:42.000 Well, what would usually happen to a society if it adhered to deontological pacifism?

00:42:47.000 They'd be attacked, they'd be eradicated, right?

00:42:50.000 So it can't be that for some of these geopolitical issues, there is a rule that in its nature is deontological.

00:42:59.000 So many of the Americans that are anti this war are very, very staunchly steeped in sort of a libertarian slash deontological isolationist perspective.

00:43:12.000 Now, in many cases, I would completely agree with that position in that it's not the Americans' position to have to go and be the policeman of everywhere in the world.

00:43:23.000 But let's contrast it, say, with when World War II was about to happen, the appeasement strategy of Chamberlain, right?

00:43:31.000 This guy with the little mustache has, don't worry about it.

00:43:33.000 I absolutely have no design to do anything bad.

00:43:35.000 You swear, Adolf, it's all good.

00:43:37.000 Yeah, yeah, don't worry.

00:43:38.000 Promise you really don't, even though you're moving all of your stuff, you're a good guy, right?

00:43:42.000 I can trust you.

00:43:43.000 Yeah, yeah, of course you can.

00:43:44.000 So, appeasement only works if the other person is someone that can be fully trustworthy. 0.93

00:43:51.000 It is almost incontestable that if the Iranian regime in its current form could ever cause great damage to everybody, not only Israel, right? 0.97

00:44:00.000 I mean, the Gulf countries are not exactly putting up barriers against this war because. 0.98

00:44:06.000 They are also the enemies of the Iranians. 0.58

00:44:08.000 So it's undoubtable that, of course, the Americans have the Israelis in their ear pushing for their self interest. 0.64

00:44:17.000 But that's also called the reality of every nation on earth.

00:44:22.000 Every entity fights for its own interests.

00:44:26.000 But that doesn't mean that the Americans are so lacking in personal agency, are so gullible, are so easy to puppeteer that there must be this Zionist lobby that otherwise is pushing us into an unnecessary war. 0.75

00:44:40.000 Maybe another three years, maybe another five years, maybe another 10 years, it would have resulted in a disaster. 0.60

00:44:47.000 So, if you are a universalist and you want the Iranian people to maximally flourish, forget about Israel. 1.00

00:44:54.000 Don't even mention the word Israel.

00:44:56.000 Do you not want these 90 million people called Iranians who have a deeply rich historical heritage to flourish?

00:45:06.000 I've had many graduate students who are Iranians in my classes and so on.

00:45:10.000 They're some of the most modern, secular, Outward looking Westerners that have been choked for 47 years by a really nasty regime. 0.98

00:45:20.000 So maybe we could celebrate that if all this goes well, 90 million people are going to be freed.

00:45:27.000 And I could say that statement without ever invoking Israel.

00:45:30.000 What do you think of that? 0.61

00:45:31.000 Well, I think the reason why they're in the situation they're in in the first place is because of the United States.

00:45:37.000 It's because the United States and the British Petroleum Company were trying to nationalize oil.

00:45:43.000 That's what happened in the first place. 1.00

00:45:44.000 The Islamic Revolution. 0.99

00:45:45.000 Yes. 1.00

00:45:45.000 This is how it started in the first place. 1.00

00:45:48.000 They realized that the British Petroleum Company was making a ton of money and they wanted to nationalize oil, and we got rid of them and they installed this Islamic regime. 0.99

00:46:03.000 There's a lot of consequences for that down the road. 0.98

00:46:05.000 Obviously, the worst side of it was what happened to the Iranian people. 1.00

00:46:10.000 When you look at the photos and the videos of Tehran from the 1950s and 1960s, I mean, my God, it looks like a Western society. 0.94

00:46:19.000 Women wearing skirts and Everyone looks very modern and Western, and then it became this fundamentalist religious country that it is right now, this Islamic country that it is right now.

00:46:33.000 They're under a regime that murders protesters. 0.81

00:46:39.000 They famously murdered some high level wrestlers.

00:46:43.000 There was an Olympic gold medalist at the United States.

00:46:45.000 The UFC tried to get involved and try to keep him from getting murdered.

00:46:50.000 Yeah, they do horrible things.

00:46:52.000 There's no doubt about it.

00:46:53.000 It's a terrible regime.

00:46:55.000 There's a really good argument that that terrible regime is in place because of the CIA and because of the United States government, because the British Petroleum Company, because we intervened.

00:47:05.000 We've done that in the past.

00:47:06.000 We did that with Libya.

00:47:08.000 This is the reason why Muammar Gaddafi was out.

00:47:11.000 We had Russell Crowe, who's a brilliant guy on the podcast, was explaining the history of Libya and how great it was for Libyan people when Muammar Gaddafi was in power. 0.82

00:47:23.000 That if anybody wanted to get an education anywhere, they had.

00:47:28.000 Some certain skills or talent in some certain area, they would fully pay for their education overseas.

00:47:33.000 They gave everyone a house.

00:47:34.000 Everyone who lived there had a home.

00:47:36.000 I mean, people were educated.

00:47:37.000 And he was trying to set up something akin to the United States, but the United States of Africa. 0.99

00:47:43.000 And they were like, we can't have any of that.

00:47:47.000 And so they got rid of him, and Libya became a failed state.

00:47:51.000 We have monkeyed in other countries for our own interest for a long time with horrible consequences for the people in those countries. 0.97

00:47:59.000 And I think Iran is an excellent example of that. 0.89

00:48:02.000 So, how much of the Islamic regime coming into power in 1975, if you have 100 points that you want to allocate to either it's the U.S. that causes it versus there's an Islamic regime with its theology that is really nasty, how would you allocate the points in terms of the cause of that reality? 0.96

00:48:29.000 That's a good question.

00:48:30.000 That's a question that would be answered by historians rather than me, but I think.

00:48:35.000 There's no doubt that we played a major factor in that.

00:48:38.000 Don't you agree with that?

00:48:40.000 I mean, yes and no.

00:48:41.000 So let me explain why I say yes and no.

00:48:42.000 When you have a complicated geopolitical system, you can always look.

00:48:50.000 You remember the old butterfly effect, right?

00:48:52.000 There's a butterfly flaps its wings in the Amazon, and then how that reverberates into a cyclone somewhere else, right? 0.99

00:49:00.000 It's kind of bullshit, though. 0.98

00:49:01.000 But I mean, the principle of. 0.99

00:49:03.000 It's great if you don't understand how the weather works.

00:49:06.000 Fair enough.

00:49:07.000 But the idea that there are causal networks is such that in this complicated web of causal networks, you can always find a particular entity that you can try to link back all of the causes to that entity. 0.71

00:49:22.000 But the overthrow of a foreign government and supporting an Ayatollah to take their place, it's a pretty big factor.

00:49:29.000 But so that's why I asked you to allocate the 100 points.

00:49:32.000 I wouldn't be the guy to answer that.

00:49:35.000 I'm going to answer off the top of my head, and it's completely speculative.

00:49:38.000 So the numbers I'm going to say are not.

00:49:40.000 Let's ascribe 10 out of the 100 points to whatever power the US wields in that region to have allowed that regime to come in. 0.83

00:49:53.000 But that regime carries the other 90 points of the 100 because they are the ones who, for the next 47 years, implement the reality that the common Persian is going to experience. 0.70

00:50:07.000 Everything in the world can ultimately be linked back to oxygen. 0.88

00:50:12.000 To the United States, to the military complex, to the Zionist lobby. 0.69

00:50:18.000 Because in some very facile way, all of those entities are connected in a meaningful way in this causal network. 0.51

00:50:26.000 But is using Occam's razor, does it really make sense to blame, for example, people say ISIS is really due to whatever, Israel?

00:50:38.000 I mean, in some facile way, you could. 0.61

00:50:43.000 Draw the causal link of how there was a vacuum that was created by the US when they debathized Iraq that allowed an extreme. 0.67

00:50:52.000 Allowed an extreme. 0.52

00:50:54.000 So, do we blame ISIS on American policy or the Zionist lobby?

00:51:00.000 Or does ISIS itself have any personal agency in terms of what it then does for the next 10 years that it's in power?

00:51:08.000 Do you see what I'm saying?

00:51:09.000 I do.

00:51:10.000 So, this is the old story.

00:51:12.000 I'm going to butcher it, but I quoted in The Parasitic Mind For the man who has a hammer, he only sees the world as being made up of the nails, right?

00:51:21.000 So, this is when you're.

00:51:24.000 You're presuming that there is greater explanatory power to a particular cause than there really is.

00:51:31.000 Look, I'll give you an example.

00:51:32.000 Okay.

00:51:34.000 Let's suppose that the night before an eventual dictator that was going to become a dictator, his parents felt particularly amorous that night.

00:51:47.000 And what made them amorous to then eventually conceive that guy who became a dictator who killed three million people is that they played Barry White music.

00:51:58.000 Because Barry White's music is baby making music. 0.69

00:52:01.000 So it is, in a very silly way, absolutely true that had Barry White not been such a great singer with a deep voice that makes the ladies drop the panties, then those two parents of the eventual dictator would not have had sex that night. 0.94

00:52:19.000 I will stop you right there because I don't think there's sex that's ever been had because only of Barry White. 0.95

00:52:25.000 I think people have been having sex since the beginning of time.

00:52:28.000 I don't believe it.

00:52:29.000 It's wonderful music.

00:52:31.000 I don't think it causes sex.

00:52:32.000 Do not criticize Barry White.

00:52:34.000 I'm not criticizing.

00:52:35.000 I just say it's great music.

00:52:37.000 I don't believe it.

00:52:38.000 I think people have been getting it on from the beginning of time, and they probably would have done the exact same thing that night if it was Barry White or Barry Manilow.

00:52:46.000 I don't think it matters.

00:52:47.000 So let's not put Barry White.

00:52:49.000 There was some facilitating mechanism that rendered them amorous on that particular night.

00:52:56.000 Whatever that mechanism is, it is absolutely true that we can lay the blame.

00:53:02.000 Some blame. 0.75

00:53:04.000 Of that dictator eventually killing three million people, he would have never been born had they not had sex exactly at that moment. 0.87

00:53:12.000 I think that's a bit of a stretch.

00:53:14.000 I think it's a bit of a stretch when you actively work to overthrow a democratically elected government.

00:53:21.000 So, this now we're talking about what?

00:53:22.000 When they.

00:53:23.000 Well, not even a democratically elected government, because Libya wasn't a democratically elected government, right?

00:53:28.000 Like, not really.

00:53:30.000 Like, let's be honest, right?

00:53:31.000 Like, Putin's not really a democratically elected government.

00:53:34.000 President of Russia.

00:53:35.000 But you know what I mean?

00:53:36.000 But we 100% funded the rebels, 100% to kill Gaddafi.

00:53:43.000 Right.

00:53:44.000 That's, it's our responsibility why Libya fell. 0.99

00:53:47.000 Okay. 0.96

00:53:47.000 But if, okay. 0.96

00:53:49.000 True.

00:53:49.000 In that position.

00:53:50.000 100%. 0.50

00:53:51.000 Gaddafi, the way you made him out to be, was, I mean, he was Robin Hood, right? 0.97

00:53:55.000 Gaddafi was a pretty nasty guy. 0.95

00:53:56.000 No, no, no, no. 0.99

00:53:57.000 Good for the people in many ways, pretty nasty guy in other ways.

00:54:01.000 There is no egalitarian, beautiful leader out there.

00:54:06.000 They've never existed because the cold, hard reality of running enormous groups of people that are in conflict with other groups of people is you're going to have to crack some eggs.

00:54:16.000 You're going to have to do some terrible things, especially in those regions of the world where if you don't have an incredibly strong armed guy, then religion comes in and it becomes the strong guy. 0.57

00:54:27.000 So you have it in Egypt, you have it with Saddam Hussein, with Hafiz al Assad and then his son. 0.62

00:54:37.000 So, those guys are, if you're a universalist who wishes for individual liberties and freedoms to flourish for everybody around the world, then you're probably not supporting these guys.

00:54:49.000 Well, okay, we can use Saddam Hussein as an example.

00:54:49.000 Right.

00:54:51.000 Sure.

00:54:52.000 Look at what happened there.

00:54:54.000 I mean, it became a complete and total disaster, resulting in the death of at least a million innocent people.

00:55:00.000 Yes.

00:55:00.000 And didn't do anything positive in terms of turning that into a beautiful Western style democracy.

00:55:08.000 Yeah.

00:55:09.000 But by the way, that last sentence, I would argue that that's because of the Americans' lack of cultural theory of mind, because they presume that the desire to have democracy around the world is exactly what everybody wants, and therefore.

00:55:24.000 They're culturally blind to the fact that other places around the world may not share our own affinity for democracy.

00:55:31.000 Well, not just that, but culturally ignorant to the fact that there's Sunni and Shia Muslims and they were going to fight with each other. 0.81

00:55:37.000 Right. 0.85

00:55:38.000 Yeah.

00:55:39.000 Now, but do you, okay, so the Americans come in, they create a bad set of ecosystems that permits for ISIS to flourish. 0.81

00:55:49.000 At what point would you, in your causal link of explanations, shift from The catalyst of the Americans having done something that allowed ISIS to flourish to then saying, starting at time T, my causal weaponry is going to be targeting ISIS moving forward. 0.81

00:56:10.000 Well, it's a good question because, like, why did ISIS flourish in the first place?

00:56:13.000 Was it because of the removal of Saddam Hussein?

00:56:15.000 Was it because of the overthrowing of the country?

00:56:18.000 I mean, wasn't that.

00:56:19.000 It was.

00:56:20.000 So if that didn't take place, what would Iran and Iraq look like right now? 0.97

00:56:20.000 Yeah. 0.97

00:56:26.000 Right.

00:56:27.000 So, think about all of the people that have suffered horrifyingly as a result of ISIS.

00:56:35.000 If you are an individual that's walking around who is the recipient of that brutality, what would make more sense if you're engaging in statistical inferencing? 0.97

00:56:46.000 Would it be to say, you know, the guy that's about to string me up because I looked at a girl wrong and he's going to cut off my penis and my arms because I touched a girl? 0.78

00:56:58.000 I really can't blame ISIS because really it's American foreign policy that intervened in Iraq. 0.95

00:57:03.000 That's not how people navigate through their.

00:57:06.000 How did you get to that? 0.99

00:57:08.000 The guy getting his penis chopped off and his arms chopped off? 1.00

00:57:08.000 Meaning. 1.00

00:57:11.000 How did you get there?

00:57:12.000 You know how under Sharia law there are very strict rules about that govern the dynamics between men and women, right?

00:57:20.000 So I was just being hyperbolic, but let's say whatever the punishment is, you stole a loaf of bread, under Sharia law we cut off your hand, right? 0.62

00:57:27.000 So let's say you're a 12 year old kid. 0.95

00:57:29.000 Who just stole a loaf of bread from the souq, and the ISIS commanders have caught you, and they're about to institute Sharia law by cutting off your hand because you're a thief.

00:57:41.000 Would it be natural for you or your parents, the parents of the 12 year old who are crying because they're about to see the hand of their child cut off, would they say, I really can't be upset at ISIS and their brutality because ultimately ISIS only came in because of the geopolitical intervention of the United States?

00:58:01.000 Do you think that that would be a reasonable? 0.99

00:58:03.000 The whole idea sucks. 0.97

00:58:05.000 Like the complete imprisonment of any group of people under a totalitarian regime is terrible. 0.99

00:58:15.000 But that's it.

00:58:15.000 Full stop.

00:58:16.000 The question is how were they funded?

00:58:17.000 How did they get into the position that they got into in the first place?

00:58:20.000 How did they rise to power?

00:58:21.000 But nothing can happen.

00:58:22.000 But how much of it is because of our meddling that they rose to power in the first place?

00:58:27.000 So let's suppose we hadn't meddled.

00:58:28.000 So we meddled, we meaning the United States, let's say.

00:58:31.000 And I'm glad that I'm now including myself.

00:58:33.000 With we, we almost you're close, getting there.

00:58:37.000 So we meddled because whatever calculus, some of it was incorrect.

00:58:41.000 Maybe there was no weapons of mass destruction, right? 0.51

00:58:44.000 I mean, Saddam Hussein was a horrifying guy.

00:58:44.000 Of mass destruction.

00:58:47.000 I think if you ask me to rank all of them, maybe in terms of pure evil, he might have been the biggest of all the thugs, right?

00:58:56.000 And the sons are even worse, maybe.

00:59:00.000 You've heard of all the stories that they were doing.

00:59:02.000 It's just really defies complete serial killers.

00:59:05.000 Exactly.

00:59:06.000 Okay. 0.88

00:59:07.000 So now, if I am a typical Iraqi who's going about my business, I really would like to not live under Saddam Hussein's.

00:59:18.000 And I probably don't want to live under ISIS's thumb.

00:59:22.000 In an ideal world, I could live with complete dignity and liberty and so on.

00:59:28.000 The Americans, with all of their miscalculations, maybe naively thought that we'll come in and then kumbaya, we will create a new democracy in Iraq.

00:59:39.000 They completely miscalculated.

00:59:41.000 But the root cause of the daily evil that the Iraqis go through.

00:59:47.000 Cannot be put on the broad shoulders of the Americans because then that removes the personal agency of the actors in their daily lives that are causing them all the pain.

00:59:58.000 But there is a reflex, and dare I say, forgive me, a suicidally empathetic reflex that renders you somehow progressively sophisticated if you always turn all of the world's ills on your own society.

01:00:12.000 I agree with you and what you're saying, but the reason why we're there was not because we wanted to help people.

01:00:19.000 The whole reason why they came up with this fake weapons of mass destruction narrative is because they wanted to control the oil.

01:00:27.000 I really can't speak to that.

01:00:28.000 You could be right.

01:00:29.000 Oh, 100% I'm right.

01:00:31.000 Yeah.

01:00:32.000 We're not doing that to help people.

01:00:35.000 We didn't go to Iraq to help people.

01:00:37.000 It didn't even make sense that we're in there.

01:00:39.000 They weren't involved in 9 11.

01:00:41.000 The whole idea was nuts.

01:00:43.000 Okay, so let me. 0.98

01:00:44.000 I think the whole weapons of mass destruction narrative was complete bullshit that was cooked up to give an excuse to go over there and take over the oil. 0.97

01:00:51.000 It's not they made an error, they knew it was. 0.98

01:00:51.000 Willfully so. 0.98

01:00:53.000 Yes.

01:00:54.000 I mean, I think there's a lot of evidence to that.

01:00:56.000 There's no evidence that they had weapons of mass destruction as described by everybody to give the motivation for us to support the war.

01:01:04.000 Okay, so let me maybe, as the distinguished professor of the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom, I hope the University of Mississippi will be happy that I'm defending the United States as a Canadian, not yet American, but inshallah soon.

01:01:22.000 Is it not true that the default reality of Every unit, whether it be an individual, a grouping, a country, will typically, all other things equal, try to pursue policies that are in its best interest, right?

01:01:41.000 So when Trump says America first, MAGA, and all this, that's what he's appealing to, yes?

01:01:49.000 So does the U.S. ever do things that might be less than savory because they're pursuing their selfish interests?

01:01:58.000 100%.

01:01:58.000 And we can come up Right.

01:02:00.000 But that makes them a country made up of these things called human beings.

01:02:05.000 In other words, no society has ever been created that is made up of these utopian machines that, as they navigate the world, they look to the other for their, unless they are suicidally empathetic.

01:02:18.000 So the U.S. is made up of real human beings endowed with real brains, whereby they might say, hey, maybe if we take their oil and concoct a strategy, now, is that.

01:02:30.000 Good or bad, we can debate it.

01:02:32.000 But in the grand buffet of societies that have ever held power, does the U.S. and never mind the power asymmetry that the U.S. has vis a vis everybody else, is it the most restrained society ever? 0.65

01:02:48.000 If the United States today said, we need more beaches, all the Caribbeans are becoming the 51st state, could anybody do anything about that? 0.77

01:02:58.000 No. 1.00

01:02:59.000 Yet they don't.

01:03:00.000 So I think it would be good, certainly for Americans and me as an honorary American, to say, Does America do sometimes things that are less than perfect in a utopian world?

01:03:11.000 100% yes, you're right.

01:03:13.000 I can see that.

01:03:14.000 Does it wield its power in the most gentle ways compared to what it could do and compared to what other societies, if they had that power, would do?

01:03:23.000 I think America does pretty well.

01:03:25.000 No?

01:03:26.000 Am I too rosy about my views of America?

01:03:29.000 Well, that's an interesting question because China doesn't meddle in other countries the way we do, and they have a similar military might.

01:03:37.000 Not quite commensurate, but pretty similar.

01:03:41.000 Like, you don't see them invading other countries and doing the type of things that we do.

01:03:45.000 And I don't know if they threaten Taiwan, but they believe that Taiwan is a part.

01:03:49.000 They call it Chinese Taipei, right?

01:03:51.000 So, I'm going to use here some Arabic words, which I'll try to explain in English, but maybe to your Arabic listeners, they'll appreciate it. 0.98

01:03:58.000 The Chinese have greater wuhane and nesnase. 1.00

01:04:03.000 They are duplicitous in the way they do that stuff, right? 1.00

01:04:09.000 They caress you this way while they take, right? 1.00

01:04:12.000 So, yes, they are using a different modality to wield their power compared to the brash, rah, rah, rah Americans. 0.99

01:04:21.000 But let's not sort of romanticize what the Chinese could do, right? 0.67

01:04:26.000 Well, they're taking advantage of the openness of American society. 0.92

01:04:30.000 They've infiltrated universities, they've infiltrated a lot of tech sectors, they've sold American military a bunch of cell phone towers that are surrounding military.

01:04:41.000 Military bases that may or may not be transmitting data.

01:04:44.000 We've had to kick Huawei out of the country because it turns out that a lot of their equipment could be used for spying.

01:04:50.000 They buy farmland all around military bases.

01:04:54.000 They're doing a lot of things to take advantage of our silliness, but that's because we should have better laws to prevent what's essentially not our friends from doing that. 1.00

01:05:08.000 You can call them an enemy nation or whatever you want to call them, but we shouldn't be allowing a foreign nation that we are. 0.97

01:05:16.000 In conflict with to control land around military bases. 1.00

01:05:20.000 That's just stupid. 0.99

01:05:22.000 But that's because of our capitalist society. 1.00

01:05:24.000 I mean, you can't even own a business in China.

01:05:28.000 You can't go over there and buy stuff.

01:05:31.000 Like, you can't do it.

01:05:32.000 You can be in business with them.

01:05:34.000 And then you know what they do?

01:05:35.000 They just kick you out and take over it.

01:05:37.000 Right.

01:05:37.000 Change the name of it and take over all the IP and you're gone.

01:05:41.000 Bye bye. 0.96

01:05:41.000 And there's not a fucking thing you can do about it because they don't have an open society like we do. 0.96

01:05:46.000 Think about it. 0.98

01:05:47.000 I mean, if we're doing the ledger of sort of cruelty and evil, we could talk about how the U.S. versus China wields power around the world.

01:05:53.000 But how about internally, domestically?

01:05:56.000 We had a guy called Mao Zedong that was kind of pretty brutal.

01:05:59.000 That if we do the history of China in terms of how many millions of people were killed by that regime versus anything that's happened in the U.S., has the U.S. been perfect in the past 250 years?

01:06:10.000 Absolutely not.

01:06:11.000 No, there's never been a perfect regime.

01:06:13.000 Exactly.

01:06:14.000 So there's no perfect regimes.

01:06:15.000 And, you know, look at what they did just with their one child policy.

01:06:18.000 There you go.

01:06:19.000 I mean, there's a lot wrong with the way China does things, you know, but. 0.94

01:06:23.000 So to me, once I. Maybe that's why the University of Mississippi was keen on having me come. 1.00

01:06:29.000 I mean, I look at the United States as someone who, thank you for your earlier question about sort of where do you come from, Gad?

01:06:37.000 Tell us your story.

01:06:39.000 Some of the biggest defenders of the United States are typically, it might sound paradoxical, but if you think about it, it's not, are usually immigrants who have sampled from the wide variety of buffets of societies out there. 0.93

01:06:54.000 Therefore, we know that the anomaly called the United States is truly an anomaly, whereas the American wakes up. 0.97

01:07:02.000 In his life.

01:07:03.000 And he thinks that the liberties and freedoms that you have in the United States are just the default value.

01:07:09.000 That's just the way it is.

01:07:11.000 That's what makes the United States great.

01:07:11.000 It isn't.

01:07:13.000 So for me, by the way, that also explains why people think, for example, that I defend Israel because I'm Jewish.

01:07:21.000 There is an element of that.

01:07:22.000 I mean, most of my family's in Israel.

01:07:24.000 But it's really, I defend Israel because many of its values are congruent with those that we hold dear in the United States.

01:07:34.000 So given the region of the Middle East, If I'm going to send my daughter or yours to some university to study, I would much rather for her to be in a society in Tel Aviv or Haifa than I would in many of the other places.

01:07:51.000 So it's in that sense that I'm pro Israel.

01:07:53.000 So if you ask me to allocate 100 points to how much of my support of Israel is due to the fact that many of its foundational values are similar to those of the United States versus the fact that I'm Jewish and Israel is a Jewish state, I would say 80 20.

01:08:11.000 For the latter, meaning that I am defending the civilizational values of Israel in a very, very difficult and belligerent neighborhood. 0.90

01:08:21.000 Does Israel always do things perfectly? 0.90

01:08:23.000 No.

01:08:24.000 Do they have politicians that are corrupt? 0.83

01:08:27.000 Yes.

01:08:29.000 Have pedophiles who did bad things here tried to go there and have aliyah, meaning get residency there and run away from the thing?

01:08:39.000 Yes.

01:08:40.000 But it could also be the case that a bank robber or pedophile goes back to Thailand if there are no extradition mechanisms to bring them back to the United States.

01:08:50.000 So, my position of defending the United States or Israel or whomever else really stems from some foundational values of liberty and freedom.

01:09:00.000 There is no conceivable place in the world where, given the neighborhood that Israel exists in, one would conceivably defend any of those other societies.

01:09:12.000 Instead of Israel, if the metrics that you care about are personal liberties and freedoms, we could then debate specific policies and you'd be completely in your right to say, I don't like when the Israeli government does this.

01:09:25.000 But, well, let me ask you, and forgive me for asking you a personal question.

01:09:29.000 If, let's say, your daughter today said, Dad, I'd like to go and study one year abroad and it's going to be somewhere in the Middle East, you, Joe Rogan, how likely would you be?

01:09:42.000 To support her going in the Middle East to a university other than in Israel.

01:09:48.000 That's interesting.

01:09:50.000 When you say the Middle East, do you mean like Saudi Arabia or the United Arab Emirates? 0.96

01:09:54.000 Because I think it's pretty safe there.

01:09:56.000 Okay, so you're right.

01:09:57.000 That's true.

01:09:58.000 And by the way, I'm loving the openness that many of these countries are exhibiting.

01:10:03.000 And I'll tell you a quick personal story and then I'd love to hear your opinion.

01:10:09.000 I was approached by Al Arabiya.

01:10:12.000 Al Arabiya is the premier news network.

01:10:15.000 From they're Saudi, but they were actually located in Dubai.

01:10:22.000 And Riz Khan, who was the anchor that was flying from Dubai to interview me in Montreal for Al Arabiya, he used to be the main anchor, I think, at BBC Global or CNN Global.

01:10:36.000 I said to Riz, Are we going to be talking about things like Islam and these kinds?

01:10:40.000 He goes, Yeah, yeah, feel free to talk about whatever you want. 1.00

01:10:43.000 I said, Well, I'm not worried so much about me, but you're going to have to go back to that region.

01:10:47.000 Are you?

01:10:48.000 Comfortable, like, can I?

01:10:49.000 I mean, I'll be very professorial and proper, but I will say some difficult truths.

01:10:53.000 He goes, Say whatever you want.

01:10:57.000 That aired.

01:10:57.000 It was a two hour conversation where we, you know, we talked about all sorts of things, but we talked about Islam.

01:11:02.000 And then he said, They loved you.

01:11:04.000 About a month or two later, another state, another show contacted me, and I went also on Al Arabiya.

01:11:11.000 And then they even wanted to offer me a show.

01:11:15.000 Now, the Saudi group is. 0.79

01:11:18.000 Offering the Lebanese Jew who's often been critical of some of the tenets of Islam. 0.99

01:11:24.000 So I'm very optimistic about that. 0.98

01:11:25.000 So I agree with you that if your daughter wanted to perhaps go to some places in the Gulf countries, you'd probably condone it and support it. 0.71

01:11:32.000 But that would make it too easy. 0.94

01:11:34.000 So let me choose which country to choose. 1.00

01:11:35.000 That would be too easy, but that is the Middle East and there are Islamic countries.

01:11:40.000 Well, because those countries are having a revival of modernity.

01:11:44.000 Right.

01:11:44.000 Well, maybe that's what we should talk about.

01:11:46.000 Because is that possible with Islam that they could have a revival of modernity across the entire country? 0.91

01:11:51.000 Like imagine if Iraq. 1.00

01:11:53.000 Iran, all these countries were run like Saudi Arabia or run like the United Arab Emirates.

01:11:59.000 You would have a much more peaceful environment, wouldn't you?

01:12:02.000 So I'm going to be now very optimistic.

01:12:02.000 Yeah.

01:12:05.000 There is a package of cultural richness in the Middle East like no other.

01:12:13.000 And I come from the region, Arabic is my mother tongue.

01:12:16.000 The spirit of generosity, the spirit of loyalty when you're in the group, the hospitality is like no other.

01:12:23.000 Actually, I recently was telling some folks in Mississippi that.

01:12:28.000 The Mississippians remind me as though they were honorary Lebanese because they're so, it's that southern hospitality, really like over the top wanting to make you feel good.

01:12:37.000 So there are elements of the Middle East that have such a fabric of richness that if we can mine that and quell all of the tribalism associated with religions, I think it could be one of the most fertile and rich places in the world. 0.92

01:12:55.000 Now, it depends what we do with Islam.

01:12:57.000 If Islam is something that you practice privately as part of a long historical narrative, so for example, I'm Jewish, I'm very wedded to my Jewish identity, but I don't take many of the edicts of Judaism seriously in the practice. 0.58

01:13:15.000 I don't light the candle at 421 for Shabbat because if 422, God would be upset at me. 0.70

01:13:23.000 But if I went to the rabbi, he'd say it has to be at 421.

01:13:27.000 So I pick and choose. 1.00

01:13:28.000 Cafeteria Jew. 0.97

01:13:30.000 I pick and choose the parts that I wish to. 1.00

01:13:32.000 Cafeteria Jew is something I like that. 0.95

01:13:35.000 I don't practice some soft version of Judaism that allows for the eating of pork and shrimps.

01:13:43.000 I simply say I'm a glutton that likes to eat well, and shrimps and some pork taste really good.

01:13:50.000 So I'm just going to ignore those parts.

01:13:52.000 Interesting. 1.00

01:13:52.000 I think if Islam could allow for that cafeteria. 1.00

01:13:59.000 Which, by the way, many Muslims do now, right? 1.00

01:14:01.000 Like, not that.

01:14:02.000 I have friends that are Muslims now.

01:14:03.000 Exactly.

01:14:04.000 Hundreds of millions of Muslims want to cause zero harm to Jews. 0.61

01:14:10.000 So the problem is radical Islamism, like we were talking about before. 0.91

01:14:10.000 Right. 0.91

01:14:15.000 So you kind of.

01:14:15.000 It's not radical.

01:14:17.000 It's just Islam, and I choose to ignore the parts that I don't like.

01:14:22.000 You're putting an appellation on Islam that is unnecessary.

01:14:26.000 Islam is made up of many tenets.

01:14:29.000 It's not radical Islam.

01:14:30.000 There is no book called radical Islam. 0.85

01:14:33.000 There's only Islam.

01:14:34.000 I mean, Erdogan said there is no moderate Islam.

01:14:37.000 There's just Islam.

01:14:38.000 So is he an Islamophobe?

01:14:40.000 Right?

01:14:40.000 So there is a bunch of tenets.

01:14:43.000 There's the one that says kill, take a break, continue killing. 1.00

01:14:47.000 Fuck that. 1.00

01:14:48.000 I'm going to ignore it because I'm a good person, right? 1.00

01:14:50.000 Because there are mean Jews and nice Jews, mean Muslims, nice Muslims. 0.74

01:14:54.000 So many of the Westernization of it.

01:14:54.000 Right.

01:14:56.000 Right.

01:14:57.000 So if there is a way to maintain the Islamic heritage, there's Islamic architecture, there's Islamic poetry, there's Islamic philosophy.

01:15:08.000 There was a period under Islamic rule where many of the ancient texts from, you know, Greek philosophy were safeguarded by Islam, right?

01:15:18.000 So it's not as though. 0.99

01:15:20.000 That entire civilization is void of incredibly rich things.

01:15:24.000 But there are unfortunately elements of the religion that are not congruent with Western values. 0.68

01:15:31.000 If there is a way for us from this side of our mouth to honor Islamic architecture and poetry, and from this side of our mouth, forget the parts that say kill, kill, kill everyone, then I think you could have wonderful flourishing. 0.91

01:15:44.000 Right. 0.96

01:15:45.000 For it to evolve, then.

01:15:46.000 Exactly.

01:15:47.000 Yeah.

01:15:48.000 I see what you're saying.

01:15:49.000 You know, there's a really good argument that the reason why.

01:15:53.000 ISIS and these various radical organizations exist is because of the United States meddling in all these countries for decades and decades.

01:16:04.000 I don't know if you ever saw it, but Glenn Greenwald was on the Bill Maher show.

01:16:09.000 And Glenn, he's a very brilliant guy, and he had a very balanced take on it.

01:16:15.000 And he was arguing with Bill Maher versus why they behave the way they do, and making the argument that a lot of it was because of the United States intervening.

01:16:26.000 In their countries, that we've been over there and meddling in their countries and being meddling in their policies and their government for so long that this is the reason why these things happen in the first place.

01:16:39.000 I don't know if you've ever seen it.

01:16:41.000 It might do a good thing to play it because it was kind of interesting to watch Bill Maher kind of push back against it.

01:16:47.000 But Glenn Greenwald is very well read and really understands the history of this region.

01:16:55.000 I'm not a huge Glenn Greenwald fan.

01:16:57.000 Many of the positions he's taken I've really liked. 0.86

01:17:00.000 He does seem to have a bit of the self flagellation reflex when it comes to it all comes down to something that the U.S. has done that's evil or something that Israel has done is evil.

01:17:11.000 So, to our earlier conversation, there are features that ISIS believes in that they believe in independently of anything that the U.S. could have ever done or will ever do.

01:17:23.000 But if they were flourishing and we hadn't intervened in their country, do you think it's possible that the rest of the Middle East could be in a similar position? 0.75

01:17:32.000 Not to say that Saudi Arabia is perfect.

01:17:35.000 The Jamal Khashoggi thing is horrific.

01:17:37.000 I mean, just that alone.

01:17:39.000 This is a big criticism for a lot of the American comedians that went over there and participated in the Riyadh Comedy Festival.

01:17:45.000 It's like, do you not know what this regime did to an American journalist?

01:17:50.000 But is it possible that these countries could have evolved in a very similar way and become Yes.

01:17:58.000 No.

01:17:59.000 You don't think so?

01:18:02.000 No.

01:18:03.000 So Islam has existed for 1400 years, right?

01:18:04.000 So, why do these countries, why does the United Arab Emirates, why do they have a much more open society?

01:18:11.000 Have a much more open society.

01:18:12.000 Now, I mean, there are all sorts of reasons.

01:18:14.000 Maybe the rulers, I can't speak.

01:18:17.000 It is a lot of the rulers.

01:18:18.000 They're much more progressive.

01:18:20.000 Exactly.

01:18:21.000 So they've taken a pill of pragmatism that says that we could still maintain our unique identity while turning an open arms to the West.

01:18:33.000 Right.

01:18:34.000 And it takes courageous leaders to say, this is how we can have these two things coexist.

01:18:40.000 I could still be. 0.94

01:18:41.000 Fully steeped in my Muslim identity, but I'm not going to look at the other as a dirty kuffar, right? 1.00

01:18:48.000 The dirty non Muslim, right? 1.00

01:18:50.000 And so, good for them. 1.00

01:18:51.000 That's great.

01:18:52.000 But over the 1400 years, so we're going to, we, US, is going to celebrate the 250 years soon, right?

01:19:01.000 Islam has existed for 1400 years. 0.91

01:19:03.000 So, we could very easily, temporarily, just go back 250 years prior and remove anything that could be due to the US.

01:19:12.000 Is that true?

01:19:13.000 I mean, empirically.

01:19:14.000 Sure.

01:19:14.000 Okay.

01:19:15.000 And if we want to remove Israel from the story, we just have to go to 1948.

01:19:20.000 And so that's 70 something years.

01:19:23.000 And then anything that Islam would have done prior to 1948 could not be blamed on the Zionist entity. 0.63

01:19:30.000 Oh, for sure. 0.97

01:19:31.000 Well, we could go back to the beginning of the United States where the United States was being attacked by the Muslim. 1.00

01:19:41.000 Is that what you're talking about? 1.00

01:19:42.000 Yeah.

01:19:43.000 Yes.

01:19:43.000 Thomas Jefferson.

01:19:43.000 Exactly.

01:19:44.000 Exactly.

01:19:44.000 Yes.

01:19:45.000 So my point is tell everybody that story.

01:19:48.000 I don't know it too well, but Thomas Jefferson, I think, was being belligerent to some incursions of Muslim piracy or something like that.

01:19:58.000 Where they said that it was their right to do so because we were infidels. 0.99

01:20:01.000 Exactly right. 1.00

01:20:02.000 I mean, Winston Churchill has some really savory quotes about what he thought about his interactions with Islam.

01:20:10.000 And now he's British.

01:20:11.000 He's got nothing to do with the United States. 0.68

01:20:13.000 This was well before the existence of the Zionist entity. 0.59

01:20:18.000 It is part of the playbook to try to always blame some. 0.78

01:20:22.000 Other agent, other than our canons for why we're doing what we're doing, right?

01:20:27.000 I think that's why this is a good conversation, right?

01:20:29.000 This is very nuanced.

01:20:30.000 We're kind of laying out both sides of it.

01:20:33.000 That's why I love coming on the show whenever you have me on. 0.98

01:20:37.000 So if you crack a book, I don't mean you, but anybody who's listening to this, crack a book to say, okay, let me look at the number of military conquests where Islam was the offensive. 0.97

01:20:52.000 Party, right? 0.95

01:20:53.000 Not we were deep.

01:20:54.000 For example, people say, oh, the Crusades. 0.90

01:20:57.000 Well, the Crusades were a retaliation to hundreds of years of Islamic aggression. 0.97

01:21:06.000 It didn't come out of nowhere, but there's always what I call the amnesia of causality. 0.77

01:21:11.000 People always forget what was the original starting point. 0.90

01:21:15.000 Under Islam, as I said, the primary canonical requirement of Islam is to render the entire world Islamic.

01:21:24.000 Now, again, that doesn't mean that every Muslim believes this.

01:21:27.000 That doesn't mean that every Muslim leader believes this.

01:21:30.000 But we're talking about what's in the canons of the religion. 1.00

01:21:34.000 It is a violently expansionist ideology.

01:21:39.000 I mean, nothing could be clearer.

01:21:41.000 I've explained this previously on the show, but if you allow me, I'll explain it again.

01:21:45.000 Islam has dual logic.

01:21:49.000 Everything in Islam is broken down into two camps Dar al Harb and Dar al Islam, the house of Islam and the house of war. 0.85

01:21:58.000 Any country that is not yet under Islamic dominion is classified as under the house of war. 0.88

01:22:08.000 That's literally the words. 0.99

01:22:10.000 Now, any country that has ever become under Islamic dominion, ever, and then Islam loses, canonically, it must revert back to Islam. 0.99

01:22:22.000 So, Al Andalusia, right? 0.99

01:22:25.000 Andalusia in current Spain was at one point controlled by the Moors, right? 1.00

01:22:31.000 Muslims.

01:22:33.000 Therefore, when now you hear a lot of these Islamic extremist guys saying, Inshallah, we will get back Al Andalusia.

01:22:41.000 It's because once it became ours, it must always belong to us. 0.81

01:22:46.000 The same argument applies for Israel. 0.97

01:22:49.000 Even though Israel has thousands of years of lineage of the Jews to that land as the indigenous owners of that land, the fact that then Islam took over that region means it belongs to Muslims. 1.00

01:23:07.000 Now, we may tolerate the Jews to live there, but there can't be. 0.99

01:23:11.000 A Jewish state there canonically in the religion. 1.00

01:23:15.000 Okay, so those are just facts.

01:23:17.000 You could study the history of Islam to count.

01:23:20.000 Okay, there are currently 57, well, if you include the Palestinian territories in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the OIC, there are 56 or 57 countries that are part of that block that are Islamic.

01:23:35.000 Each of those countries, once upon a time, started with zero percent Islam.

01:23:41.000 Right? 1.00

01:23:42.000 I mean, it wasn't magical. 0.96

01:23:44.000 So, Indonesia was not Islamic once, right? 0.99

01:23:47.000 Libya was not, right? 0.69

01:23:48.000 Many of those countries were Christians, by the way, right? 0.64

01:23:52.000 Egypt was Coptic Christian.

01:23:53.000 Syria was tons of Christians.

01:23:56.000 Lebanon, within my lifetime, I was born in a Christian majority country.

01:24:01.000 Today, within my lifetime and yours, it has completely flipped to Muslim majority. 0.97

01:24:07.000 So, wherever Islam goes, sometimes it might take five years to flip it. 1.00

01:24:13.000 Sometimes it might take 500 years. 0.97

01:24:15.000 But as the Taliban explained to us, the American soldiers have the watches, we have all the time in the world.

01:24:24.000 So it's a long project. 0.90

01:24:26.000 So when Islam comes into the United States, it's not as though suddenly the United States of America is going to become under Sharia law tomorrow morning. 0.91

01:24:35.000 But if you have the imagination to extrapolate in two, three hundred years, if you were to repeat Dearborn and Patterson, New Jersey, And Minneapolis into 20 more cities, 50 more cities, 100 more cities, would you be living in the same United States? 0.96

01:24:54.000 Right.

01:24:54.000 And if not, is that a good thing or a bad thing?

01:24:57.000 Well, that's what people are, some people are very fearful of what's going on in New York City with Mamdani.

01:25:04.000 They think it's a Trojan horse, and that under the guise of progressivism and democratic socialism, that you're going to open up the door and eventually you're going to have a call to prayer in the middle of Times Square every day.

01:25:04.000 Yes, sir.

01:25:17.000 Exactly.

01:25:18.000 Well, listen, I'm wearing right now a Star of David.

01:25:21.000 Be careful.

01:25:22.000 Exactly.

01:25:24.000 As soon as I'm in New York and I go to one of those, I mean, I don't as much anymore because my stomach's a bit more sensitive as I get older, but let's say one of those street vendors, I right away put away my Star of David because I'd love to have my Shawarma without spit in it.

01:25:41.000 The fact that I now even think of that and that that's a reflex that I have today, That's not a reflex I had 15 years ago.

01:25:50.000 What changed?

01:25:51.000 Well, what changed are the demographic realities that cause that there's a greater number of people that are triggered by the Star of David.

01:26:00.000 Demography is indeed destiny.

01:26:02.000 So, you and I could fully agree that most Muslims are perfectly lovely.

01:26:07.000 And I mean, I'm the first one to say this because I come from that culture. 0.98

01:26:11.000 No Muslim has ever killed me, no Muslim has ever raped me. 0.97

01:26:15.000 But I do know that I've spoken to many Muslims before I was known and they knew who I was who say things about the Jews that would make Hitler and Himmler go, look, guys, we also hate the Jews, but I think this is too much Jew hatred, even by our standards. 0.99

01:26:32.000 So, there is an endemic feature of Islamic societies that renders the Jew as the ultimate shaitan, the ultimate devil. 0.96

01:26:41.000 He's demonic, right? 1.00

01:26:43.000 It's everywhere, it dictates every interaction.

01:26:47.000 I'll just give you a couple of examples.

01:26:49.000 In Sharm el Sheikh, which is a Red Sea resort area in Egypt, and Jamie is welcome to fact check me if he wants.

01:27:01.000 And I think in 2010, there was a spat of Uh, shark attacks on tourists, yeah.

01:27:07.000 And Sharm el Sheikh, do you remember after the investigation by the Egyptian authorities what they concluded?

01:27:13.000 No, want to take a guess?

01:27:15.000 No, it was that there is very, very clear evidence that those sharks were Zionist trained because what, yes, sir, because because the way that you can harm the Egyptian economy, certainly in that region, is to render the tourism activity lesser if you have a you know many attacks, and so. 0.99

01:27:38.000 I'm not saying every Egyptian thought this, but this was coming from the authorities saying that there's really very clear evidence that those sharks were Jewish assholes. 0.99

01:27:47.000 Hold on a second. 0.99

01:27:48.000 Wasn't there some evidence that there was illegal dumping of carcasses, of animal carcasses offshore?

01:27:58.000 As specific to that incident?

01:27:59.000 Yeah, I think that had something to do with the shark activity. 0.96

01:28:03.000 Israeli conspiracy theory.

01:28:05.000 The attack sparked conspiracy theories, possible Israeli involvement.

01:28:08.000 Egyptian television broadcast claims.

01:28:10.000 From Sal Sinai government, Mohammed Abdul Fadil Shosha, that Israeli divers captured a shark with a GPS unit planted on its back, allegedly by Mossad.

01:28:21.000 Describing the theory as sad, Professor Mohammed Hanafi of Suez Canal University pointed out that GPS devices are used by marine biologists to track sharks, not control them remotely.

01:28:34.000 Okay, but wasn't there something to do.

01:28:37.000 Yeah, that's what the last sentence speaks to what you said.

01:28:39.000 Yeah, ultimately thought the dumping of sheep carcasses, there it is, during the Islamic festival of.

01:28:45.000 How do you say that?

01:28:47.000 How do you say the festival was named?

01:28:49.000 Oh, Ayd al Adha.

01:28:52.000 On 16 November was the most likely explanation.

01:28:55.000 That makes sense.

01:28:57.000 That's why there was so much shark activity.

01:29:00.000 But the fact that somebody somewhere said, I think this got a Jewish signature all over it.

01:29:05.000 Right, but there's people in the United States that think the world's flat.

01:29:08.000 I mean, that doesn't mean it makes sense. 0.97

01:29:11.000 The capacity to be parasitized is hardly restricted to Muslim minds. 1.00

01:29:16.000 Everybody has the capacity to believe stupidity. 1.00

01:29:18.000 So I agree. 1.00

01:29:19.000 But there is something, there is a unique feature of the Muslim mind that tends to find causality in all maladies in the Jew. 0.99

01:29:28.000 So, and by the way, I have a theory, if I can share it with you here, as to this is not just Islamic Jew hatred. 0.98

01:29:37.000 Why is it that so many societies end up turning their animus towards the Jew?

01:29:45.000 Can I share it with you?

01:29:46.000 Yeah, why do you think that is?

01:29:48.000 So, here I'm going to use some of my psychological background.

01:29:51.000 In psychology, there's something called the self serving bias.

01:29:55.000 The self serving bias is how we attribute causality to the wins and losses in our lives.

01:30:02.000 So, most of us will attribute successes internally.

01:30:07.000 I did well on the exam because I'm smart and I studied hard.

01:30:11.000 And, excuse me, we will attribute failures externally. 1.00

01:30:17.000 I did poorly on the exam because Professor Sad is an asshole, right? 0.99

01:30:22.000 And you can understand why we would have evolved that rosy prism. 1.00

01:30:26.000 Life is tough, it's an ego defensive strategy.

01:30:29.000 I do well because of me, I do poorly because of the cruel world out there. 1.00

01:30:34.000 Now, imagine if we could find a culprit, and I'll explain why it is specifically the Jew. 1.00

01:30:39.000 Imagine if we could find a culprit, a universal culprit for all of our individual and collective failures. 0.99

01:30:47.000 And it's the Jew. 1.00

01:30:48.000 But why is it the Jew? 0.94

01:30:50.000 Why isn't it the Armenian? 0.97

01:30:51.000 Why isn't it the whatever? 0.79

01:30:54.000 Here, I'm going to use a term from Amy Chua.

01:30:57.000 Do you know Amy Chua?

01:30:58.000 No.

01:30:59.000 Okay, I thought that she might have been on your show.

01:31:01.000 Amy Chua is actually the mentor.

01:31:03.000 Of JD Vance.

01:31:04.000 She was his professor of law at Yale.

01:31:08.000 She's written several popular books, including the book on how to raise children as a tiger mom.

01:31:15.000 Have you heard the Tiger Mom book?

01:31:16.000 Sure. 1.00

01:31:17.000 You know, this kind of tough parental Asian excellence and so on. 1.00

01:31:21.000 So, Amy Chua introduced the term, I mean, the concept is not hers, but the term is hers market dominant minorities, meaning when you have a small, minuscule group of people. 0.94

01:31:35.000 In any cultural ecosystem that are boxing well above their weight class.

01:31:41.000 Now, in many cases, you'll have, for example, you have Lebanese, non Jews, Lebanese, who are the business owners all over West Africa. 0.91

01:31:50.000 So they are fitting that market dominant minority. 0.70

01:31:52.000 They're a small minority, but they carry all the business. 0.93

01:31:56.000 Okay, so it's not as though it's only the Jew that's the only market dominant minority. 0.91

01:32:00.000 Wherever you have market dominant minorities, you have animus towards that group because the greater group, many of whom are not being successful. 0.81

01:32:09.000 Look at that group with animus, with envy. 0.97

01:32:13.000 The Jews, wherever they are, are always, by definition, short of Israel, are always a minuscule group that is always boxing well above their wives. 1.00

01:32:25.000 Why is that? 1.00

01:32:26.000 There are several reasons.

01:32:27.000 I think predominantly it's really a punishing cultural of excellence.

01:32:33.000 And if you want, I can share a story from my own personal background.

01:32:37.000 And I don't know if I've ever shared it on this show.

01:32:40.000 So I did my undergraduate in mathematics and computer science.

01:32:43.000 Pretty serious stuff.

01:32:44.000 Then I did an MBA, both at top universities.

01:32:47.000 Then I was going on to pursue my MS, Masters of Science, and PhD.

01:32:52.000 One of the places that I had been accepted for my PhD was at UC Irvine.

01:32:56.000 I ended up going to Cornell.

01:32:58.000 At the time, my brother, the judo player, was living in Newport Beach, and he was keen to try to convince me after my MBA to work with him and put on hold going on for my PhD.

01:33:10.000 When my mother found out of his design to try to convince me not to pursue my PhD, when I returned to Montreal to their house, She says, Can I speak to you in this room?

01:33:20.000 And I'm thinking, Oh, am I in trouble?

01:33:22.000 She goes, I want to talk to you.

01:33:23.000 What's up, mom?

01:33:24.000 She goes, I'm hearing that you're thinking of maybe putting your studies on hold.

01:33:28.000 I said, Well, no.

01:33:29.000 She goes, Well, I just, before you say anything, do you want people to know you as somebody who dropped out of school?

01:33:35.000 So, from now, that's a very powerful story because in my mother's eyes, having an MBA and then taking a break before I pursue a PhD was something that would bring shame to the family as someone who had dropped out of school.

01:33:50.000 Now, do you think that if a group of people have internalized that level of excellence, are they likely to be successful or not? 0.65

01:33:59.000 If another group of people thinks that getting good grades is acting white, is that A recipe for success or not, right?

01:34:07.000 So, cultural values matter for whatever reason, whatever is in the water of the Jewish home, they tend to excel.

01:34:15.000 So, now wherever they are, they're doing really well.

01:34:18.000 Well, I wanted to be an actor and play in the Avengers and I didn't get the part.

01:34:23.000 Who controls Hollywood? 1.00

01:34:24.000 The Jews. 1.00

01:34:26.000 I wanted to get a small business loan and I didn't get it because my numbers weren't quite correct. 0.82

01:34:32.000 Who controls the banks? 1.00

01:34:33.000 It's the Jews. 0.97

01:34:35.000 So, it becomes very easy to attribute or ascribe. 1.00

01:34:39.000 All of my individual and collective failures on this minuscule group of people for all of my failings.

01:34:47.000 Thomas Sowell, whom I know you appreciate, yes, gave arguably the greatest one word answer that I've ever heard.

01:34:56.000 At one point, he was appearing on some show.

01:34:58.000 This is not too long ago, maybe 20 years ago.

01:35:00.000 He's now 95, and I think it's a travesty that he hasn't won the Presidential Freedom Medal.

01:35:06.000 I pray that President Trump gives it to him before he passes away because he's deserving of it.

01:35:12.000 He was asked once, Professor Sowell, what do you think it will take for people to stop hating the Jews?

01:35:22.000 And he gave a one word answer.

01:35:24.000 Do you want to take a guess what it is?

01:35:26.000 No.

01:35:27.000 Fail.

01:35:29.000 How did Thomas Sowell get this?

01:35:30.000 Because he's brilliant. 1.00

01:35:32.000 If the Jews were suddenly no longer succeeding in ways that are anomalous to their per capita numbers, then maybe. 0.92

01:35:44.000 They wouldn't be as hateful.

01:35:45.000 Okay, let me give you an argument against that.

01:35:46.000 Please. 1.00

01:35:47.000 Asians. 1.00

01:35:48.000 Asians in this culture, in this society, also box way above their weight.

01:35:53.000 Extremely disciplined family environment, pushed incredibly hard to succeed, but don't get nearly the kind of hate that Jewish people do.

01:36:04.000 So you're right, in the United States that's the case, but in some of the ecosystems in the Far East where they are a minority, I think it's the, I don't know if it's the Malays, I can't remember the exact grouping. 0.96

01:36:16.000 You have the almost the exact same animus for that group that succeeds a lot. 1.00

01:36:21.000 And actually, Thomas Sowell has done those analyses. 0.89

01:36:25.000 So, in other words, the point is it is what I'm describing is not singularly relevant for the Jew, but it is universally relevant for the Jew because there is no other grouping of people that is as successful in as many places and yet minuscule in all those places. 0.82

01:36:44.000 So, the Armenians also get. 0.80

01:36:46.000 That treatment in some ecosystems. 1.00

01:36:49.000 The Lebanese get that treatment. 0.98

01:36:51.000 Indians get that treatment in some ecosystems. 0.61

01:36:54.000 So it is not a unique feature of only animus towards the Jews, but the fact that in so many societies you turn to the Jew to blame your problems, I think stems from that. 0.74

01:37:08.000 Don't you think you could also make that exact same argument that those same people that are small in number but hyper motivated, And hyper successful would also be much better at influencing policy in the country that they live in. 0.74

01:37:24.000 Hence, meaning that they're more likely to get the ears, the lobby.

01:37:29.000 Not just the ears, but donate money, fund campaigns, get the ear of the president, donate money towards his campaign, fund him.

01:37:39.000 I suspect that the answer is you're right, yes.

01:37:42.000 Most people would say that that is absolutely the case.

01:37:44.000 But also, we could say that if we look at the philanthropy, Jewish philanthropy, compared to all other philanthropy, we'd probably score.

01:37:54.000 Very highly, if not more.

01:37:55.000 What kind of philanthropy were you talking about?

01:37:57.000 Art philanthropy, hospital philanthropy, literary philanthropy for the art, right?

01:38:04.000 So, in other words, look, my family, we moved to Montreal from Lebanon.

01:38:09.000 We moved to Montreal for two reasons.

01:38:11.000 Well, three reasons.

01:38:12.000 Number one, Montreal is also French.

01:38:15.000 In Lebanon, France, Lebanon used to be a French protectorate, so you already spoke French in Lebanon in addition to Arabic.

01:38:23.000 So, that was one.

01:38:25.000 Number two, The immigration policy for war refugees was maybe easier to navigate.

01:38:32.000 Canada was a more welcoming country than, say, maybe the United States.

01:38:36.000 But number three is that my mother's sister had already emigrated to Montreal with her husband.

01:38:44.000 And that husband became the director general of the Jewish General Hospital of Montreal, which is the biggest hospital in Montreal.

01:38:54.000 It's the Jewish General, right? 1.00

01:38:56.000 So, In other words, it is undoubtedly true, probably. 0.99

01:39:00.000 I don't have the empirical evidence that probably the Jewish lobby does its job really well and effectively.

01:39:08.000 But let's look at all of the other things that they also do well.

01:39:11.000 They contribute.

01:39:13.000 So, for example.

01:39:13.000 Well, that's wonderful, but that doesn't take away from the influence that it has on our policies.

01:39:19.000 Yes.

01:39:20.000 On our political candidates.

01:39:24.000 For instance, one of the reasons why Momdani won in New York City is because when they had the mayoral debate, He was the only one that said he's not immediately going to go to Israel.

01:39:34.000 A lot of people were shocked by that.

01:39:36.000 They were like, Why is everyone saying they're going to go to Israel when they win as the mayor in New York City?

01:39:42.000 It didn't make any sense.

01:39:43.000 People were kind of confused by it.

01:39:45.000 New York City's a mess, it's got a lot of problems.

01:39:48.000 This one guy said, I think I can serve Jewish Americans better by staying here in New York City, and I'm not going to go to Israel.

01:39:57.000 Everybody was like, Thank God someone said that. 0.52

01:40:00.000 Because all the other candidates, it seemed, at least to me as an outsider, We're being heavily influenced by the Jewish lobby.

01:40:10.000 Maybe.

01:40:10.000 So I don't, I really don't know.

01:40:11.000 Why else would they do that?

01:40:12.000 They're not saying I'm going to go to England.

01:40:13.000 They're not saying I'm going to go to France.

01:40:15.000 They're saying I'm going to go to Israel.

01:40:17.000 Right.

01:40:18.000 I mean, is it surprising that if you have a group of people who have been historically persecuted the way that they have?

01:40:25.000 By the way, I don't think.

01:40:27.000 But it's running for mayor of New York City and they're saying I'm going to go to Israel.

01:40:33.000 I think it's totally wrong if there is a conflict between. 0.87

01:40:39.000 The best interests of the country that you reside in versus Israel, you should always side with the former. 0.77

01:40:46.000 Understandably. 1.00

01:40:47.000 I agree.

01:40:48.000 But I think that the reason why they were saying that is they were being influenced by the people that were funding their campaigns.

01:40:56.000 I think the people in New York City recognized that and said, hey, there's something where they're not looking out for our best interests.

01:41:05.000 They're looking out for the best interests of the people that are funding them.

01:41:08.000 And those people have the best interests of Israel in mind above the interests of the United States.

01:41:13.000 And this is the same sentiment that people have for why we invaded Iran and why we funded Israel, why they're bombing Gaza, the same sort of thing.

01:41:23.000 And I would say from October 7th on, you know, first of all, immediately afterwards, tremendous support for Israel. 0.88

01:41:30.000 I mean, it was a horrific attack.

01:41:32.000 But the response, I think, has created a lot of anti Israel sentiment in the United States.

01:41:39.000 Yes.

01:41:40.000 Do you think that other lobby groups that very feverishly lobby for their self interest?

01:41:48.000 Would receive the same animus as the pro Israel lobby.

01:41:52.000 So, for example, they're not connected to a specific country.

01:41:55.000 That's the problem.

01:41:56.000 This one group is connected to a specific country.

01:41:59.000 Okay, so let's do a specific country.

01:42:01.000 Okay.

01:42:03.000 I've been a professor for 32 years, so I care about the ideas, the bad ideas that flourish within the university's ecosystem, hence, parasitic minds with salah empathy. 0.92

01:42:14.000 If you do a histogram of All of the nations that contribute to try to alter the types of ideas that are promulgated on American campuses, which lobby or which country scores way higher than anything you could ever hope for from Israel? 0.86

01:42:36.000 That's a very good question. 0.68

01:42:37.000 And I think that's a different thing because I think what you're talking about is influencing American education systems.

01:42:43.000 And that you could say China and Russia.

01:42:46.000 How about the Qataris?

01:42:47.000 Sure.

01:42:48.000 Yeah.

01:42:49.000 Well, there's a lot of people that.

01:42:49.000 Yeah.

01:42:52.000 From other countries, specifically influencing our education system and doing it within their best interest by donating a lot of money, by funding programs, by having a lot of foreign exchange students.

01:43:07.000 There's a big impact by other countries for sure, but they're not representing another country.

01:43:07.000 So that's.

01:43:13.000 Like, no one's saying, I want to win New York City and then go to Beijing.

01:43:18.000 Right.

01:43:19.000 Anybody who does that in the way you just said it, in my view, is violating.

01:43:24.000 The crazy thing is, they all did it.

01:43:24.000 It's most.

01:43:27.000 They all did it except Mom Dhani.

01:43:29.000 Cuomo did it.

01:43:30.000 They all did it.

01:43:32.000 They all said, I'm going to Israel. 0.94

01:43:32.000 Right. 0.94

01:43:34.000 So I can't speak to that.

01:43:35.000 I really can't.

01:43:36.000 But do you understand why people.

01:43:38.000 People with.

01:43:39.000 Yeah, here's the question.

01:43:40.000 Especially post October 7th, this negative sentiment because of the destruction of Gaza.

01:43:48.000 Any lobby group vociferously fights for its self interest.

01:43:53.000 The tobacco lobby.

01:43:55.000 Spends all their time convincing doctors, I'm talking 40 years ago, that there is no evidence that smoking is bad for your health.

01:44:05.000 Pharmaceutical drug companies, Oxycontin and Oxycodone.

01:44:08.000 So the reflex for a group that has its own interests to promulgate are going to do exactly that.

01:44:08.000 Exactly.

01:44:17.000 That's why they're called a lobby group.

01:44:19.000 So if from this side of our mouth we care about the fact that there is a Zionist lobby, it cannot be that from this side of our mouth, We don't care about the fact that there are Islamic based funding to all of the American universities that have parasitized your daughters and mine in ways that should be problematic because it's your daughter. 0.55

01:44:46.000 So, please explain how they've done that.

01:44:47.000 So, any Near East studies program, also known as political science program, also known as government program.

01:44:55.000 So, at Harvard, you call it the Department of Government, right?

01:45:01.000 All those schools will then produce kids. 0.98

01:45:05.000 All those kids are called John Smith and Jethro Roscoe, but yet they are on the front line after October 7th wearing their kefiyeh, stopping Jews from going to class. 0.93

01:45:19.000 And that happened at UCLA and at Wellesley and at everywhere and at Concordia University, my university.

01:45:26.000 What caused that to happen?

01:45:27.000 It's because there is one particular viewpoint that becomes the norm on university campuses when it comes to these geopolitical realities. 0.99

01:45:37.000 So, By the same way that I can be frustrated if Mario Cuomo is concerned about going to Israel when he is running for mayor of New York, I should also be very concerned that all of these Islamic countries are having a free fall, free for all with all of our children's things. 0.97

01:45:56.000 But yet, I don't see many people concerned about that. 0.94

01:46:00.000 It is that double standard that then makes you go, hmm.

01:46:04.000 Why are you, who lives in Iowa, so concerned about it?

01:46:08.000 Maybe there are really valid reasons for you to be concerned about the pro Israel lobby.

01:46:14.000 And let's have a conversation about that.

01:46:15.000 But then, are you honest enough to have a similar discussion about other ways by which we tilt our policies and our children's brains?

01:46:25.000 Probably not.

01:46:26.000 Could you explain how this is done?

01:46:27.000 Like, what do you think is happening in the universities where they're tilting people towards a pro Palestinian perspective?

01:46:35.000 Well, I mean, several ways.

01:46:36.000 One, I mean, if it's directly through funding, you fund a $30 million whatever.

01:46:42.000 You're probably not going to have faculty members who are going to be incredibly vociferous in their anti Islamic rhetoric if you have that.

01:46:53.000 I'll give you an example.

01:46:55.000 When I was potentially going to come, maybe they don't want me to hear this, but so be it.

01:47:00.000 When I was, one of the places that I was being recruited at was potentially the University of Austin, right?

01:47:06.000 And I came, I mean, they were going to make me an offer.

01:47:09.000 The University of Austin doesn't have a tenure system, they have a constitution.

01:47:13.000 It's a different kind of system.

01:47:16.000 Of course, what allowed me to not be canceled, I would have been canceled 30 years ago for all the things that I say and all the things that I write, is that I was protected by tenure.

01:47:25.000 And so I was very concerned about whether the fact that they don't have tenure, what happens if tomorrow.

01:47:31.000 Okay.

01:47:31.000 Right.

01:47:32.000 And I remember having a conversation, I won't mention his name, but you can probably guess who it could be, where I said, What happens under your constitution if tomorrow you get a $30 million donation from Muhammad Beltalik Tilal and he says, You know that little Jewish professor who's going on Joe Rogan and talking about bad things about Islam?

01:47:56.000 That has to stop.

01:47:57.000 His answer was the gentleman that I was, my interlocutor, was, Well, we're on the same team.

01:48:04.000 I fully support what you're saying.

01:48:07.000 Well, you support what I'm saying until money talks, right? 0.99

01:48:10.000 I can pick you a number, a donation number, where you're no longer support with equal alacrity my criticism of Islam. 0.94

01:48:19.000 Maybe it's 100 million. 0.91

01:48:20.000 Maybe it's $200 million.

01:48:22.000 Well, just given the people that I know that are the founders of the University of Austin, I don't know if that's likely.

01:48:28.000 You mean there is no reservation price? 0.77

01:48:30.000 It doesn't seem like they would be willing to go against the idea of Israel. 0.84

01:48:37.000 Well, maybe.

01:48:39.000 Does that make sense to you, though?

01:48:40.000 I mean, it does, but it wasn't sufficiently reassuring.

01:48:47.000 Reassuring.

01:48:48.000 Well, I can understand.

01:48:48.000 Yeah.

01:48:49.000 I mean, if I was.

01:48:51.000 Offered tenure or no tenure, tenure is the way to go.

01:48:53.000 Exactly.

01:48:54.000 It's the only way you could have real intellectual freedom.

01:48:58.000 Well, and by the way, to that point, so when I now got this beautiful position at the University of Mississippi, I don't have tenure there.

01:49:06.000 I don't really care that much.

01:49:07.000 But they put a clause in the contract that says that my rights to say, speak, and write whatever I want will be protected with the same staunchness that the First Amendment offers me and that tenure would offer me.

01:49:23.000 So even though I'm not officially there, a tenured professor at this stage of my career, I don't care.

01:49:28.000 But they enshrined it.

01:49:30.000 So what I So, to our earlier point, I think there is a way whereby I could put a load of money in front of you and say, So, how much do you now support freedom of speech for Gad Sad?

01:49:40.000 And I'm saying, maybe you're right that the University of Austin guys would never buckle to that.

01:49:44.000 But Harvard government department did buckle.

01:49:48.000 Columbia University under Edward Said.

01:49:50.000 Do you know who that is, Edward Said?

01:49:52.000 Edward Said was a kind of very pro Palestinian guy who was kind of a big shot in their political science department.

01:49:58.000 All of his teachings at Columbia University were.

01:50:04.000 Rather skewed in terms of being anti Israel.

01:50:07.000 And so the students that come out are going to be a product of what we taught them. 0.98

01:50:11.000 It's not surprising that they're all wearing kefiyeh. 0.74

01:50:13.000 And you think that this is directly because of funding and not because of what they've seen, the horrors of what's happened in Gaza? 0.57

01:50:20.000 Because I think that's what's turned most people that have no affiliation with any university because it's not all university students that are reacting the way they're reacting.

01:50:29.000 They're reacting because of what you could see when you see Gaza.

01:50:33.000 I mean, it's obliterated.

01:50:35.000 It's true, but we can go back to a time before October 7th and I can point you the difficulties that I faced at Concordia at not being able to walk around on campus freely also held true before October 7th.

01:50:53.000 So we know that we could eliminate the retaliation.

01:50:56.000 In that case.

01:50:57.000 Right?

01:50:57.000 So that goes to our earlier point.

01:50:59.000 We can blame ISIS for the US, but then I could take you to a time where the US didn't exist.

01:51:05.000 Which is called 1776.

01:51:07.000 Who are you going to blame now? 0.65

01:51:09.000 You can blame things in the Middle East on Israel, but I could take you to 1948 when it's not that. 0.78

01:51:15.000 So it's a very facile reflex to always find that culprit.

01:51:20.000 The reality is that any lobby group, by definition of the word lobby, is going to espouse positions that are in their self interest.

01:51:31.000 I understand that.

01:51:32.000 It doesn't surprise me that the pro Israel lobby does that, as do the Qataris, as do the Romanians, as do the Haitians. 0.75

01:51:39.000 Everybody does it. 0.92

01:51:40.000 For various dynamical reasons, yes, the Israelis are probably more in the ears of the things. 1.00

01:51:47.000 Is that because they're demonic? 0.96

01:51:49.000 No, because they have more power.

01:51:50.000 Is that weird?

01:51:51.000 Well, let me ask you this.

01:51:54.000 Sure.

01:51:54.000 Do you agree that anti Israel sentiment has ramped up since the response to October 7th?

01:52:00.000 Absolutely.

01:52:00.000 You may not like what I'm about to say.

01:52:05.000 I think most of the anti Israel sentiments, ultimately, if you scratch enough the onion and peel enough the stuff, Is rooted in Jew hatred.

01:52:17.000 Really? 0.92

01:52:17.000 I do. 0.92

01:52:19.000 So you don't think that it's a direct response to people seeing what happened in Gaza?

01:52:19.000 Really?

01:52:24.000 No, because.

01:52:25.000 You don't think that has an impact on it?

01:52:26.000 I've lived in the world before October 7th, and the world that I lived in and the Jew hatred that I face, right?

01:52:34.000 I don't have Joe Rogan's platform size, but certainly by the standards of most people, I have a huge platform. 0.88

01:52:41.000 The massive, the orgiastic, the Himmler level Jew hatred that I have faced. 0.93

01:52:49.000 Have faced certainly proceeds by countless years the October 7th. 0.99

01:52:55.000 So, then how would we explain why I'm called a parasite, a pedophile, a child killer, a rat, a vermin? 0.98

01:53:04.000 Why am I called those things? 0.98

01:53:06.000 I had nothing to do with the Israeli government.

01:53:08.000 Okay, but this is anecdotal, right?

01:53:09.000 I mean, what we're talking about is the general sentiment in the United States has changed pretty radically since the response of October 7th.

01:53:17.000 I've experienced it.

01:53:18.000 I've experienced it with people that I know, experienced it online, people that never talked about Israel.

01:53:23.000 Never had anything bad to say about Jewish people and now are just furious when they see what's happening in Gaza.

01:53:29.000 And now they see what's happening in southern Lebanon where their Christian villages are being bombed.

01:53:34.000 Were those people also mad at what happened to the 600,000 Syrians who were killed?

01:53:41.000 Which event is this?

01:53:43.000 In the Syrian civil war, about 600,000 Syrians were killed. 0.64

01:53:50.000 I don't know if they knew about that, but I think this is kind of a case of what aboutism. 0.96

01:53:50.000 Okay. 0.96

01:53:55.000 Right.

01:53:55.000 And I just, we could go to that and we could talk about that and maybe that should be publicized more.

01:54:00.000 But what I'm talking about is the people that I've encountered in the United States that really generally didn't have an opinion about Israel at all have had a very negative opinion about Israel because of the response to October 7th and because of what they've done to Gaza.

01:54:18.000 So let me address the what aboutism.

01:54:21.000 Okay.

01:54:21.000 By the way, I'm loving today's conversation has a different timbre to it, but it's keeping us sharp.

01:54:26.000 I like it.

01:54:27.000 So, thank you for keeping me on my toes.

01:54:31.000 Let's suppose that I had a rule in my head that says I only get incredibly irate and animated if an MMA fighter commits a crime.

01:54:46.000 But when I see the exact same crime committed by anybody other than an MMA fighter, I don't have the reflex to be upset.

01:54:56.000 Would it be what aboutism for you to say?

01:54:59.000 How come you got upset when the MMA fighter did this, but when the non MMA?

01:55:03.000 That wouldn't be what about him.

01:55:04.000 Because what you would be saying is, I want cognitive consistency from you, Gad, that if you're upset that an MMA fighter commits a crime, you'll be as upset when a non MMA fighter commits the exact same crime.

01:55:18.000 Could you illuminate me on this Syrian thing? 0.66

01:55:22.000 Yeah, so when the.

01:55:24.000 So I'm only vaguely aware of what happened.

01:55:27.000 So there was a civil war that was started in Syria, I think, in 2011.

01:55:34.000 That were the various Islamist groups were trying to overthrow Bashar al Assad.

01:55:42.000 And as a result of that dynamic, innumerable people, Muslim on Muslim, were completely ravaged to the tune of about 600,000.

01:55:54.000 Okay, so let's put that here.

01:55:56.000 So let's not call that whataboutism because you could easily say, I am angry whenever. 0.97

01:56:02.000 But it is whataboutism because we were specifically talking about Jew hedgerows. 0.86

01:56:07.000 Jew hatred in this country being ramped up post October 11th or October 7th. 0.81

01:56:11.000 I mean, it is what aboutism because we could address that. 0.76

01:56:15.000 Yes.

01:56:16.000 But this is one particular thing, one particular moment in history that has caused this extreme reaction, this anti Israel sentiment.

01:56:27.000 The guy in Iowa who has never heard of the Middle East but got rightly upset at what he saw in Gaza.

01:56:37.000 Why wasn't that guy?

01:56:40.000 If he is an honest purveyor in his moral calculus of any innocents being killed, I'm asking you, I pose that question to you.

01:56:51.000 When he sees the thousands and thousands of Yemenis that were killed, the children that were eradicated, much more than the tune of whatever happened in Gaza, every single individual, let me go on record.

01:57:03.000 You're talking about the drone bombing in Yemen?

01:57:05.000 What are you talking about?

01:57:07.000 There are many, many different ways by which Yemenis.

01:57:11.000 Have died as a result of the conflicts in Yemen.

01:57:14.000 There are a huge number of people that were killed in the fight between Sudan and the South Sudanese.

01:57:21.000 I mean, really, in the many hundreds of thousands, right?

01:57:24.000 So, if I am just an Iowa guy, my moral calculus operates according to the following rule Whenever I see innocent people being killed, it drives me crazy.

01:57:39.000 I am outraged.

01:57:40.000 Therefore, if that's the rule by which I navigate through the world, I will look at The October 7th victims and say, Those Jews didn't deserve this. 0.66

01:57:49.000 I'm pissed.

01:57:50.000 I will look at the Gazans that were killed who were innocent and I'd say, Those Gazans did not deserve it.

01:57:57.000 So far, so good. 0.93

01:57:58.000 Yeah, we agree. 1.00

01:57:58.000 Okay, I will look at the Syrians and say, That is not right. 1.00

01:58:02.000 I will look at the Ukrainians that were being butchered endlessly by Putin and say, That's pissing me off, and on and on, right? 0.97

01:58:11.000 But if it would appear that my calculus is abiding by the no Jews. 0.65

01:58:18.000 No news mechanism, then I have a right to say, how come you're focused only on when it seems that the mean Israelis are killing the beautifully peaceful Palestinians and your moral outrage never gets invoked across all of the panoply of much greater disasters around the world? 0.65

01:58:39.000 Why is that?

01:58:40.000 Well, I think initially in October 7th, people were very outraged at the attack on the Israelis.

01:58:48.000 They were horrified at what happened.

01:58:51.000 The videos that we saw were terrible, videos of people cheering in the streets when they were bringing the Israeli captives.

01:58:59.000 But then the difference between the capability of the Palestinians in Gaza versus the Israeli army, which is one of the most ferocious and capable armies in the world, and the devastation that they did to Gaza, the city, just the city alone, where you see apartment buildings, hospitals, everything just blown to smithereens. 0.68

01:59:21.000 There's a complete difference in power.

01:59:24.000 What you're talking about in Syria, I'm assuming this is a civil war between similarly armed people killing each other.

01:59:31.000 Well, this is the government versus militia, but sure.

01:59:33.000 Right.

01:59:34.000 But similarly armed people.

01:59:35.000 So, what makes. 0.59

01:59:36.000 You're not seeing that with Gaza and Israel.

01:59:39.000 With Israel, you're seeing United States funded Israeli military, which is insanely capable, destroying an entire city. 0.94

01:59:49.000 Fair enough. 0.97

01:59:50.000 I see how.

01:59:51.000 The images are very tough.

01:59:52.000 There's no question.

01:59:53.000 But the reality of the numbers is very tough, too, because we don't even know how many people are dead.

01:59:58.000 We could talk about the numbers if you want in a second, but let me ask you this.

02:00:03.000 If October 7th hadn't happened, I'm not being flippant.

02:00:07.000 I'm not playing games.

02:00:08.000 I'm really honestly asking you.

02:00:10.000 If October 7th had not happened, how many of the innocent Palestinians that tragically perished would have perished? 0.90

02:00:21.000 That's a good question. 0.98

02:00:23.000 Probably it would have never happened.

02:00:25.000 There probably would have been a bombing of Gaza.

02:00:27.000 You know, we could get really dark here because there's a lot of people that believe that.

02:00:32.000 It was allowed to happen so that they could have an excuse to attack Gaza.

02:00:37.000 But that goes to our earlier point about how it gets goofy, and I'm not the person to comment on that because I don't really know. 0.64

02:00:42.000 But there was stand down orders.

02:00:44.000 So we know that.

02:00:45.000 We know that some of, at least some of the army was told to stand down.

02:00:50.000 Well, I actually had the former director of the Mossad on my show.

02:00:56.000 And his name is Yossi Cohen.

02:00:58.000 And I was like, Yossi, what the F?

02:01:00.000 How does.

02:01:01.000 Right.

02:01:01.000 How did it happen?

02:01:02.000 And the best of my understanding, in terms of what I've told, is that. 0.98

02:01:08.000 You know, shit happens and someone falls asleep, metaphorically speaking, right? 0.98

02:01:13.000 And so it was a gigantic. 0.98

02:01:16.000 But, anyways, if you, not you, but if someone is of the conspiratorial mindset, there's nothing that I could share.

02:01:24.000 But speaking literally to the former director of Mossad, he said it was a catastrophic failure of where everybody is kind of asleep.

02:01:36.000 But my point is this.

02:01:37.000 Right, but let me stop you there.

02:01:38.000 Because if I was.

02:01:38.000 Please.

02:01:40.000 The former head of Mossad. 0.86

02:01:41.000 The last thing I would tell you is that, well, we allowed it to happen because we've been wanting to blow up Gaza for a long time and take it over and turn it into a big resort.

02:01:51.000 You would never say that, right? 0.88

02:01:53.000 Right.

02:01:53.000 And we also know that on record, Netanyahu has said that they fund Hamas so they can control the size of the flame because they don't want the democratically elected people to take over and turn Palestine into a state.

02:02:07.000 So you don't think there's something.

02:02:09.000 Israel left, if I'm getting my history right, they left Gaza in 2005, right? 0.72

02:02:09.000 Isn't that true? 0.72

02:02:16.000 Is that the right number?

02:02:18.000 Am I getting that right?

02:02:19.000 So from 2005 till 2023, or maybe 2007, so someone will correct me in the comments section.

02:02:27.000 For many, many years, Israel left and there was no problem in the region, right?

02:02:32.000 Is that true?

02:02:33.000 I don't know.

02:02:35.000 You would know better than me.

02:02:36.000 Well, there was no problem.

02:02:36.000 Okay.

02:02:37.000 Then there was a catalyst, an event happened.

02:02:41.000 Now we can debate.

02:02:42.000 Whether it was proportionate, whether it could have been adjudicated differently, we can discuss all that.

02:02:50.000 And all that, you can discuss it without ever worrying about being called anti Semitic.

02:02:55.000 It's totally within the fair bounds of having those conversations.

02:02:58.000 But what is true is that if Israel wanted to eradicate Palestinians, it would take them a lot less time than when you and I have been talking on the show by orders of magnitude.

02:03:15.000 It would take 15 seconds.

02:03:16.000 But they didn't do that, right?

02:03:19.000 They don't do that.

02:03:20.000 As a matter of fact, Johnson.

02:03:21.000 But they kind of have in Gaza.

02:03:24.000 Gaza is done. 0.53

02:03:26.000 There's almost nothing left of it.

02:03:28.000 So the numbers that I'm hearing.

02:03:29.000 You've seen videos of it, right?

02:03:31.000 You've seen what it looks like when they fly overhead.

02:03:32.000 We could show some videos.

02:03:34.000 So, okay.

02:03:34.000 Sure.

02:03:35.000 The most recent videos, they show the drone videos of flying over Gaza.

02:03:39.000 It looks like a nuclear bomb hit it.

02:03:41.000 They just did it slowly, they did it over years, just consistent, constant bombing, and there's almost nothing left of it.

02:03:47.000 Right.

02:03:48.000 And there's also been this crazy talk of putting resorts there.

02:03:52.000 You know, and Trump said, Yeah, he was saying that we're going to turn it into the, what did he say?

02:03:56.000 Something of the, you know, like Monte Carlo or Monaco.

02:04:02.000 Again, it's totally fair to discuss what constitutes a proportional thing and so on.

02:04:02.000 Something crazy.

02:04:02.000 Right.

02:04:09.000 But I take a broader view, which is Israel exists and you have two choices. 0.99

02:04:17.000 You can keep creating generations of your own. 0.99

02:04:21.000 Whose entire daily animation of their objectives is to eradicate that place.

02:04:30.000 That place, or you could recognize that every single millimeter on earth has at some point been owned by someone else.

02:04:39.000 I mean, is the definition of history not the accounting, ledgering of who owned what when?

02:04:39.000 Is that not true?

02:04:46.000 Now, in every other conflict that has ever existed throughout all of human history, there is a winner of that conflict and a loser, and people move on.

02:04:59.000 Okay?

02:05:00.000 Just hear me out.

02:05:01.000 Okay.

02:05:02.000 I. Lived in Lebanon.

02:05:04.000 I grew up in Lebanon.

02:05:05.000 We had to leave under imminent threat of execution.

02:05:09.000 It's very unfortunate.

02:05:10.000 We lost everything.

02:05:12.000 We moved on.

02:05:13.000 We made a life for ourselves. 1.00

02:05:15.000 Our home was stolen by Palestinian people. 1.00

02:05:18.000 I never held any animus towards Palestinians. 1.00

02:05:21.000 I moved on with my life.

02:05:23.000 One day I was interesting enough to have the privilege of appearing on Joe Rogan's show.

02:05:28.000 My daily animation is not to go and kill people for things that were done to us.

02:05:34.000 And very few people have had.

02:05:36.000 Things happen to them as what happened to us, right?

02:05:40.000 Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust.

02:05:42.000 It didn't create an endless litany of Jewish terrorists throughout the world trying to get back.

02:05:48.000 So, in every part of the world, we are now in Texas, that land was owned by someone else before the United States came along.

02:05:56.000 We are sitting, quote, on stolen land.

02:05:59.000 In Canada, we are sitting on stolen land.

02:06:01.000 It's called history.

02:06:03.000 Most people are able to move on and say, hey, the dice went this way or that way.

02:06:09.000 Let's Hold hands and let's build a better future. 0.83

02:06:12.000 You can't do that if canonically the Jewish state should not exist. 0.74

02:06:20.000 Doesn't Hamas say in their charter, every Jew that is anywhere, we will find him and get him? 0.61

02:06:27.000 So, did that make sense that they would be the leaders of that region? 0.86

02:06:31.000 Wouldn't it have been much better for them to train their kids to becoming neuroscientists and podcasters and classicists and physicians?

02:06:40.000 But that's not what they chose to do repeatedly for nearly 80 years.

02:06:45.000 The minute that that clicks and they say, you know what, you have this part, we have this part, let's shake hands and let's be one family, the problem will go away.

02:06:56.000 So I agree with you.

02:06:57.000 The images are very jarring, right?

02:07:00.000 I'm also a very empathetic, loving guy. 0.99

02:07:05.000 But I also know the reality, which is I've never heard Jews saying, let's kill all Muslims. 0.99

02:07:13.000 Always hear the opposite. 1.00

02:07:16.000 Jews are an existential affront to Islam. 1.00

02:07:20.000 Muhammad on his deathbed said, Promise me that you will rid Arabia of Christians, but really the Jews. 0.99

02:07:30.000 So, how could you have a coexistence between two people when one people wants to eradicate the other?

02:07:38.000 So, did Israel overreact?

02:07:40.000 I'll leave future historians to decide that.

02:07:42.000 What do you think?

02:07:45.000 I think that given what they were trying to achieve, they did the best that could possibly be.

02:07:51.000 So, as you know, the best they could possibly be would be to eliminate the entire city?

02:07:55.000 And turn it into rubble?

02:07:55.000 No.

02:07:56.000 There's been about 70,000 dead.

02:07:58.000 Is that the right number?

02:07:58.000 We don't even know.

02:08:00.000 I mean, that's the number that I've seen.

02:08:01.000 What's the accounting?

02:08:03.000 Who's to know how many people died? 0.93

02:08:04.000 Well, many of those numbers are coming from the Hamas. 1.00

02:08:06.000 That's true, too. 0.98

02:08:07.000 But if you just look at the destruction, the buildings that have been leveled, the sheer volume of destruction.

02:08:07.000 Okay.

02:08:15.000 There were two cities called Hiroshima.

02:08:18.000 And Nagasaki.

02:08:20.000 They were fully nice.

02:08:21.000 What about Israel? 1.00

02:08:21.000 And then we shouldn't want to bother them. 1.00

02:08:24.000 We didn't have to do that either.

02:08:25.000 And you could say that that was a horrific thing because Japan was about to surrender.

02:08:30.000 Well, and we were like, from the American, let's practice.

02:08:33.000 Let's see how these things work.

02:08:35.000 Again, that's the least.

02:08:36.000 Let's show you that we have nuclear bombs.

02:08:39.000 That's the least generous interpretation of that historic. 0.58

02:08:41.000 I think it's a pretty accurate demonstration.

02:08:44.000 I think it's something else.

02:08:45.000 Well, what have you heard?

02:08:46.000 I've heard that they did the calculus of if we.

02:08:49.000 And by the way, it could be a very cold, callous calculus, but what I've heard is that there is a very clear pro-caut.

02:08:56.000 Pro con thing where if we do this, this many people would die.

02:09:02.000 If we go on in the war and it takes that much more before they surrender, there'll be this many dead, drop those bombs.

02:09:10.000 Yeah.

02:09:10.000 It's possible.

02:09:11.000 It's possible. 0.64

02:09:11.000 So do you think that if Israel didn't kill 70,000 people and completely destroy Gaza, that more than 70,000 people would have died during the same time period? 0.64

02:09:20.000 No, I'm not applying that same calculus of Japan. 0.69

02:09:23.000 What I'm saying is images of destruction are very vivid to our brain, right? 0.52

02:09:28.000 They should be.

02:09:29.000 Don't you think?

02:09:30.000 But that doesn't mean that that's the information that I use to establish what is morally righteous.

02:09:40.000 What else can we use other than information?

02:09:43.000 We can use what is the existential calculus that animates each society.

02:09:49.000 One society says, we'll even help you build a better society.

02:09:53.000 Just please don't spend all your time screaming about eradicating every last one of us.

02:10:00.000 The other society says, I don't think so. 0.98

02:10:02.000 If we're ever strong enough to kill all, unfortunately, we were only strong enough to kill 1,200 of you. 0.99

02:10:10.000 And boy, that was orgiastically pleasing. 1.00

02:10:12.000 But if tomorrow, God willing, hey, maybe the Iranians have nuclear bombs, we can eradicate all you assholes, my God, the world will be a mess. 1.00

02:10:20.000 So this is Hamas saying that, right? 1.00

02:10:22.000 And the people that live in Palestine that were killed, the 70,000 plus people, how many of them do you think were Hamas?

02:10:31.000 Well, the numbers that I hear is that it was a one to one ratio. 1.00

02:10:34.000 Which apparently is a pretty good ratio.

02:10:36.000 And where are those numbers coming from?

02:10:39.000 I mean, like, you want me to give you the reference?

02:10:40.000 I don't know.

02:10:41.000 No, no, no.

02:10:41.000 I mean, is it coming from Israel?

02:10:43.000 Is it coming from Hamas?

02:10:44.000 Is it coming from Palestine?

02:10:46.000 So the one I'm going to use is from John Spencer.

02:10:50.000 Do you know who that is?

02:10:51.000 No.

02:10:51.000 John Spencer is a war, urban war researcher.

02:10:56.000 I think he's at, what's the military, where they train the military?

02:11:03.000 West Point.

02:11:03.000 He's a professor of.

02:11:05.000 Urban warfare. 0.67

02:11:06.000 He's come on my show, and based on whatever analyses that he's done, he's not Jewish, he's not uniquely pro Zionist.

02:11:14.000 Is that he's saying, and again, I see to whomever knows better about this than I do, I don't know all the details.

02:11:22.000 He said that the ratio of civilian to fighters killed in the Gaza war is better than most other comparable situations.

02:11:35.000 So Hamas had 35,000?

02:11:37.000 I think it's one to one.

02:11:39.000 So, Hamas had 35,000 militants in Gaza? 0.86

02:11:44.000 If the one to one number is right and 70, that's what it would be.

02:11:48.000 And so all those buildings needed to be destroyed because at least one out of one was.

02:11:54.000 So, let me ask you this.

02:11:56.000 Let's suppose I think it's totally reasonable that you'd be upset that all these people died innocently.

02:12:01.000 Well, I think most people that see it would be upset, right?

02:12:07.000 Fair enough.

02:12:09.000 Of how you would go about getting your hostages back given the reality.

02:12:16.000 So, give me a way.

02:12:17.000 How many hostages did they get back?

02:12:19.000 In terms of alive or dead?

02:12:21.000 Yeah.

02:12:22.000 I don't know the exact numbers, but is it something in the order of like 30, 40 alive and all the other ones were dead?

02:12:27.000 Does that sound like the right number?

02:12:29.000 I don't know.

02:12:30.000 Whatever it is, it could be 50, it could be 100, it could be 200.

02:12:35.000 So I am representative of Israel. 0.80

02:12:39.000 I need to get those people out. 0.96

02:12:40.000 Let's suppose that Hamas had said, here are all the people that we have kidnapped and we are returning them to you and putting down our arms. 0.91

02:12:50.000 Would Israel have caused the destruction that they would have caused? 0.88

02:12:53.000 That they did cause? 0.99

02:12:55.000 I don't know.

02:12:55.000 But what do you think?

02:12:56.000 Probably not.

02:12:57.000 Right.

02:12:58.000 If they did that.

02:12:59.000 So nothing happens in a vacuum, right?

02:13:01.000 It's not, there isn't something.

02:13:03.000 But does that just because they wouldn't have done that, does it justify what they did?

02:13:08.000 What does it say here?

02:13:09.000 Final release.

02:13:10.000 Total returns 168 hostages were returned alive, including eight rescued by the IDF.

02:13:15.000 The bodies of 85 hostages were repatriated after they were killed during their captivity.

02:13:22.000 U.S. deal broker that landed a ceasefire of.

02:13:26.000 In a swap for nearly 2,000 Palestinian prisoners, so they swapped some of them.

02:13:31.000 Well, let me actually speak about the swap issue.

02:13:33.000 I discussed this in Suicidal Empathy. 0.51

02:13:35.000 Sinwar, who was the architect of October 7th, do you know his background? 0.58

02:13:41.000 No, Sinwar was an ardent militant whose entire life has been animated with eradicating Jews, not Israel, all Jews from the world. 0.93

02:13:51.000 Because there's a hadith that says in Islam, the world will not stop until every Jew that is hiding behind the tree. 0.99

02:14:00.000 Is found and killed. 0.80

02:14:01.000 And they refer to that hadith from Islam, not radical Islam, Islam.

02:14:06.000 Right.

02:14:07.000 He was taken in one of those sweeps of Palestinian militants to prison.

02:14:14.000 He was diagnosed with a brain tumor, a deadly terminal brain tumor. 0.99

02:14:20.000 The Israelis, you know, the mean Israelis who are killing everybody, because the Hippocratic Oath, in their view, supersedes any other calculus, the The Israeli neurosurgeon doesn't say, F this guy, he's killed tons of my fellow co religionists, screw him, let him die. 0.98

02:14:42.000 They operate on him and they save his life, right? 0.99

02:14:46.000 So let me ask you this, Joe.

02:14:48.000 If you and I, let's put ourselves in the mind, right?

02:14:51.000 I was saved by the hands of the Jewish Israeli neurosurgeon, otherwise I would have died.

02:15:00.000 Then he was let go in one of those swaps. 0.84

02:15:03.000 Would that have not bought you sufficient existential empathy to say, probably I shouldn't then spend the rest of my life being the architect and repay the largesse of the Israeli neurosurgeon by doing October 7th? 0.50

02:15:20.000 Yet it didn't buy him that empathy, right?

02:15:23.000 So he was swapped in an earlier deal?

02:15:25.000 He was swapped in an earlier deal.

02:15:27.000 Jamie could look it up. 1.00

02:15:28.000 You could do Sinwar, S I N W A R. 0.97

02:15:32.000 He was one of the guys who you saw him in one of those rubbles and a. 0.92

02:15:37.000 Drone comes in and he's covered in rubble, and then they take him out, right?

02:15:41.000 Well, if you and I, if I could put myself in your mind, if we had been ardent haters of a group, and then that group had shown us tremendous compassion and generosity by literally saving our lives, that might have shut off my hatred to that group.

02:16:00.000 For example, Bridget Gabriel, the Lebanese Christian woman who grew up in the Lebanese Civil War, like I did. 0.88

02:16:08.000 Had always been taught as a Lebanese Christian that the Israelis are terrible and evil, they're the problem for the whole region. 0.91

02:16:15.000 But then she escaped to Israel, was welcomed in Israel. 0.87

02:16:20.000 She completely flipped because she saw that they were nice human beings that treated her well.

02:16:25.000 And then her brainwashing was no longer there.

02:16:28.000 Well, if I've literally taken a brain tumor out of your brain, in that brain of yours, could I have not bought a bit of existential empathy for the Jews?

02:16:39.000 It didn't.

02:16:40.000 What do you think of that?

02:16:41.000 Well, I think that person was probably deeply radicalized to whatever their ideology was.

02:16:48.000 And that wasn't enough.

02:16:49.000 Like saving them wasn't enough. 0.99

02:16:51.000 It gave them, it was probably Allah giving them another opportunity to kill more Jews.

02:16:56.000 So don't you think But that's just, you know, that's one person and one person saved them.

02:16:56.000 Exactly.

02:17:01.000 I don't think it necessarily changes the relationship between Israel and Palestine, particularly because Palestine was denied statehood.

02:17:09.000 It's not a country of its own.

02:17:12.000 It can't do things that other countries can do.

02:17:14.000 Do you know what Bill Clinton, who's not a Republican, said regarding?

02:17:17.000 Palestinian statehood. 0.67

02:17:19.000 He said, I'm paraphrasing him, I killed myself, bent myself backwards to give them almost everything that they wanted.

02:17:30.000 This is sort of the Oslo Accord.

02:17:32.000 And Yasser Arafat was not interested in a two state solution.

02:17:37.000 Let me ask you this if you were the head of Israel, how would you handle it?

02:17:41.000 You mean moving forward? 0.92

02:17:43.000 In my utopia, it would be to try to catch.

02:17:43.000 Yeah.

02:17:50.000 The brainwashing that happens straight out of the womb, where the type of animus that is shared regarding the Jews is so outlandish that it would make Hitler and Himmler squirm in unease.

02:18:07.000 If you can get rid of that brainwashing, you will learn to see the other as an equal human being.

02:18:14.000 Could I interject there?

02:18:16.000 Please.

02:18:17.000 Do you think that the bombing of Gaza and the destruction that's so clearly visible to everyone would actually.

02:18:24.000 Stop that.

02:18:25.000 Do you think that the bombing of Gaza would maybe make more people radicalized?

02:18:34.000 That would make more people want to attack Israel? 0.75

02:18:39.000 That would give them. 0.90

02:18:41.000 100%.

02:18:41.000 You're right that you are creating a new generation of terrorists.

02:18:45.000 But again, you're choosing to decide where to place the causal point.

02:18:51.000 Gaza existed fully peacefully.

02:18:55.000 For 20 plus years without anybody dying.

02:19:00.000 The day that they decided to do what they did resulted in a retaliation, which we can discuss whether it's good or not enough or too much.

02:19:11.000 That is true.

02:19:12.000 At the root of the problem is an open society that allows for the expression of all religions.

02:19:20.000 When I was in Israel two months ago, I was in, well, all over Israel.

02:19:26.000 I gave a talk in Tel Aviv and I gave a talk in Jerusalem.

02:19:29.000 I spoke more Arabic in Jerusalem than I did English or Hebrew or anything else.

02:19:35.000 To your point, I think Israel is only 73% Jewish. 0.77

02:19:39.000 Exactly. 1.00

02:19:40.000 Look that up, please. 1.00

02:19:43.000 I thought it was maybe 80%, but your number would even prove my point even better.

02:19:48.000 Yeah, I think I might be wrong, but it's not 100%, that's for sure. 0.99

02:19:53.000 And there are Arabic and Muslim communities in Israel that are tolerated versus. 0.98

02:20:00.000 Having a Jewish community in power. 0.99

02:20:03.000 Tolerated, fully embraced. 0.77

02:20:04.000 So I can show you the valedictorians.

02:20:07.000 Let's see.

02:20:08.000 Jewish population is the largest in the world.

02:20:13.000 78.

02:20:14.000 See, I said 80.

02:20:15.000 73.

02:20:16.000 Wait. 0.67

02:20:16.000 73% of the population is Jewish, including, look, right there. 0.67

02:20:21.000 Oh, right.

02:20:21.000 Israel Bureau of Statistics.

02:20:23.000 So I was right.

02:20:24.000 73% of the population is Jewish.

02:20:27.000 503,000 people living in the West Bank beyond Israel's self defined borders.

02:20:31.000 Recent updates of December 2025 show total population at 10,148,000, with Jews and others at 7,758,000. 0.98

02:20:42.000 Right.

02:20:42.000 So let's do a few analyses.

02:20:45.000 Many, many valedictorians of universities graduate, they're Muslim.

02:20:51.000 Some of them are in hijab.

02:20:53.000 That's happening in Israel.

02:20:54.000 You go to medical school, the valedictorian that's chosen is a woman in hijab.

02:21:00.000 Does that seem like it's animus?

02:21:02.000 In the Knesset, in the parliament of Israel, there are tons of Muslims that serve, right?

02:21:09.000 As I was walking around all over Jerusalem, everybody that I was interacting with was in Arabic.

02:21:16.000 They were fully.

02:21:18.000 Israelis who were Muslim, right?

02:21:21.000 I have tons of pictures with all of them.

02:21:23.000 Some of them recognized me.

02:21:24.000 There was no animus.

02:21:25.000 Why?

02:21:26.000 Because they've internalized the reality that I am part of a country that is made up of, it's a Jewish majority country, but it's a place where everybody has equal rights, right?

02:21:38.000 There are people who serve in the highest judiciary that are Muslim. 0.80

02:21:43.000 Is there an Islamic country where the opposite could be said?

02:21:47.000 I don't think so. 1.00

02:21:49.000 It's.

02:21:49.000 Also, interesting when you look at the statistics of the polling statistics of people that support the war with Iran in Israel versus the United States, and it's way more people support the war.

02:22:07.000 Obviously, I live in America and I'm immune to the effects of being surrounded by people that hate me and want to blow me up.

02:22:16.000 I could only imagine what that's like for the national psyche.

02:22:20.000 Of living in a place like Israel, being surrounded by.

02:22:25.000 Paradoxically, though, forgive me for interrupting you, Israelis score as one of the highest on the happiness scales. 0.88

02:22:34.000 So, in a sense, it goes against what you're saying.

02:22:36.000 And I think I've got an explanation, and tell me what you think of it.

02:22:41.000 When I am spending my entire existence, to your point, possibly being eradicated tomorrow, I don't have the luxury to debate.

02:22:51.000 What constitutes male or female?

02:22:54.000 It creates a laser focus about what's important in my life.

02:22:58.000 My kickboxing coach, my old kickboxing coach, Shuki, he's from Israel.

02:23:02.000 And I went over his house once for dinner.

02:23:05.000 And it was crazy.

02:23:06.000 Like they're dancing and playing bongo drums.

02:23:09.000 And I was, you know, obviously I'm American.

02:23:11.000 I was saying to him, I go, why?

02:23:13.000 I go, why are you guys so happy?

02:23:14.000 I was like trying to figure it out.

02:23:16.000 I go, is this just uniquely?

02:23:17.000 He goes, it's in Israel.

02:23:19.000 He goes, everybody's happy because.

02:23:22.000 You know, you could die any day.

02:23:24.000 So just party, party, party.

02:23:25.000 Have a good time.

02:23:26.000 And so you go there.

02:23:27.000 That was his mentality.

02:23:29.000 And I never forgot that because I remember thinking that. 0.63

02:23:32.000 And he went back to Israel.

02:23:33.000 He's there right now.

02:23:34.000 Have you been to Israel?

02:23:35.000 No.

02:23:36.000 You know what I suggest to you?

02:23:37.000 It doesn't seem like a good time to go.

02:23:39.000 It seems like it's a little dangerous.

02:23:40.000 I mean, in that sense, yes.

02:23:42.000 But go there and live out the vibe.

02:23:45.000 Look, it's an incredibly gay tolerant place, right?

02:23:49.000 Tel Aviv, short of San Francisco, New York, Montreal, it's one of the most queer friendly places.

02:23:56.000 It's very bohemian.

02:23:57.000 It's reggae music playing. 1.00

02:24:00.000 Israelis are, in French, you say bon vivant, good livers.

02:24:03.000 But it's also, Israeli society doesn't universally support the war either. 0.62

02:24:09.000 Exactly.

02:24:10.000 But that speaks to the fact that there is a multiplicity of realities.

02:24:14.000 It's an open society, right?

02:24:16.000 I mean, there are Muslim guys who will go in front of this Knesset and will say things that would never be tolerated in any other society. 0.92

02:24:27.000 So is Israeli society perfect? 0.98

02:24:29.000 No.

02:24:29.000 But is it the beast and the monster and the demon that you see as a caricature?

02:24:35.000 I mean, nothing could be further from the truth.

02:24:36.000 But do you think that perhaps the more right wing authoritarian?

02:24:42.000 Aspect of the Israeli government is a problem in how Israel is perceived in the rest of the world.

02:24:48.000 And this over response in Gaza, the way they're bombing southern Lebanon, that this is feeding into this.

02:24:56.000 Look, there have been governments in Israel covering the whole gamut of political orientations.

02:25:04.000 And while, to your point, I think there is greater animus towards Israel today than maybe in the past, I've always known there to be Israeli animus in many places.

02:25:14.000 For example, at my own university, Well, which I will be leaving shortly, Concordia has been colloquially referred to as Gaza University for 25 plus years.

02:25:25.000 Benjamin Netanyahu in 2002 was not able to speak there.

02:25:31.000 They shut him down and they canceled him.

02:25:33.000 And this is when he was then a private citizen.

02:25:36.000 Now, this is in 2002.

02:25:38.000 Why did they say they were shutting him down? 0.82

02:25:40.000 Well, because it's the Zionist entity and the same talking poise, right? 0.77

02:25:45.000 You just changed what is the. 0.89

02:25:47.000 Culprit.

02:25:48.000 So now we say it's the devastating images of Gaza, but 20 years ago it would have been an other story.

02:25:55.000 So the reality.

02:25:56.000 But that's that university.

02:25:57.000 I don't necessarily think that was universally thought of in terms of like if you went to all the other different schools.

02:26:06.000 No, you're absolutely right.

02:26:07.000 But now that I think comes from two sources. 0.92

02:26:10.000 The first source was when I told you earlier that the brainwashing that's going on American campuses where Jethro is now also wearing the kefiya. 0.83

02:26:18.000 But also the demographic realities. 0.96

02:26:21.000 Of the West in general, including the United States, are such that we've let in people from those societies at a much greater number than in the past, right?

02:26:31.000 Right.

02:26:32.000 So, I mean, you know the Pew survey? 1.00

02:26:35.000 Do you know Pew, P E W, right?

02:26:37.000 So, they're a nonpartisan survey company that, if anything, tends to lean more towards progressive.

02:26:46.000 They did a survey, a global survey of animus towards Jews, not Israel, Jews.

02:26:54.000 This was, I think, 2010.

02:26:56.000 And they had a whole bunch of Islamic countries that were polled.

02:27:01.000 Now, let's suppose I told you that we polled people in Indonesia or in Libya or in Jordan, and 10% expressed very serious Jew hatred. 0.75

02:27:12.000 That would be an arresting number.

02:27:14.000 You'd be like, wow, one out of 10 hates the Jews.

02:27:16.000 That's a lot.

02:27:17.000 Do you know what the average numbers were?

02:27:19.000 Just pick a number.

02:27:20.000 In which countries?

02:27:21.000 So, in many, but I'm talking now mainly the Middle Eastern countries.

02:27:25.000 So, not Indonesia or Malaysia.

02:27:28.000 Which also were not loving the Jews, but were not nearly as hostile towards the Jews.

02:27:33.000 I'm talking Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt, Syria, you know, those kinds of countries.

02:27:38.000 What was the average number?

02:27:39.000 And Jamie can pull it up.

02:27:41.000 And when the question was asked, how was it phrased?

02:27:44.000 I don't remember the exact words.

02:27:46.000 But it was like, do you hate Jews?

02:27:47.000 Not do you hate Jews, but do you hold favorable or disfavorable?

02:27:53.000 It's enough that there is animus, but not, I don't think the word hate was used.

02:27:57.000 And is it Israel or is it Jews?

02:27:59.000 No, Jews. 0.98

02:28:00.000 Just Jews in general.

02:28:01.000 Guess what the percentage was? 0.99

02:28:02.000 Like, just give me a not, like, hmm.

02:28:06.000 I would.

02:28:09.000 70%.

02:28:10.000 It's 95 and up.

02:28:12.000 Whoa.

02:28:13.000 Right?

02:28:14.000 So if we sampled a thousand people from Syria. 0.93

02:28:16.000 And it's hate?

02:28:17.000 They hate Jews?

02:28:19.000 Have a. 0.65

02:28:19.000 What's the term? 0.65

02:28:20.000 I don't remember because it's 70%.

02:28:22.000 Negative opinion, disfavorable, dislike, whatever the number, whatever it is.

02:28:28.000 It's a measure of your either proclivity, affinity, or disdain for the Jew, whatever the wording is. 0.86

02:28:35.000 If you get 95, 97, 98% of.

02:28:41.000 Polled people saying that they don't like the Jews, and now you let into your country, your host country, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of those people.

02:28:53.000 Do you think that Jew hatred is going to go up or go down?

02:28:57.000 So, in Quebec, for example, as I may have mentioned previously on the show, Quebec had a very open policy towards Islamic immigration, and the reason that in Quebec it was so is because the most important sense of personhood in Quebec.

02:29:14.000 Is that you maintain your linguistic identity?

02:29:17.000 We are French.

02:29:18.000 We don't want to be subsumed by the mean English language.

02:29:21.000 Yes?

02:29:22.000 So, therefore, since many of the immigrants coming from Islamic countries were also Francophone, in their infinite wisdom, the Quebec government said, hey, you know, here's a great idea. 0.85

02:29:34.000 There was a 1997 civil war between the Algerian government and hardcore extremist Muslims. 0.89

02:29:42.000 The latter lost.

02:29:44.000 So, they were fleeing from getting killed by the Algerian government.

02:29:48.000 Why don't you open the borders for them to Quebec? 0.77

02:29:51.000 The decapitations will happen only when they say bonjour to you. 0.84

02:29:56.000 So, given that they will address you in French before they behead you, don't worry about it. 0.57

02:30:01.000 I'm obviously being facetious, but the point is that hundreds of thousands of Islamic immigrants came to Quebec.

02:30:01.000 Let them all in.

02:30:10.000 I started seeing the changes a lot more women in hijabs, a lot more dangerous to go to campus, a lot more requirements for accommodations. 1.00

02:30:20.000 Prayer rooms, public prayer. 1.00

02:30:22.000 When you say dangerous, in what way?

02:30:25.000 Specifically to me?

02:30:26.000 Dangerous going to campus, in what way?

02:30:28.000 Well, I'm somewhat of a known entity who doesn't mince words.

02:30:33.000 And so I started getting a lot of death threats.

02:30:36.000 The first set of death threats I got were in 2017, where for that semester I had to follow a protocol to walk on campus with security.

02:30:47.000 They would lock the door so that the students could leave but not come back in.

02:30:51.000 So I had to check in with the security.

02:30:54.000 That lasted for about a semester, and I mean, literally, I would lecture and then I would be ushered out.

02:31:00.000 My wife would be waiting for me, and I would sort of let out a deep breath like sigh that thank god I survived another week.

02:31:08.000 Did you ever experience like people trying to get at you?

02:31:11.000 So, the only so all of those threats were online that necessitate, but then we had to file with Concordia a Montreal police report, so on.

02:31:22.000 In 2022, I had an in person threat, so a A guy came up to me.

02:31:28.000 I was walking with my then, so 2022, so four years ago, he must have been nine.

02:31:33.000 I was walking with my nine year old, 10 year old son, and this guy looks at me, he goes, Are you gatsad?

02:31:39.000 I said, Yes.

02:31:41.000 Then he kind of composes himself to kind of deal with the hatred he feels, and he goes, I'm not going to do anything to you out of respect for your son today.

02:31:52.000 And so then the detectives got the footage of that, you know, because it was outside of the building.

02:31:58.000 Yeah, I remember you telling me about that.

02:32:00.000 And then, by the way, I couldn't, they didn't want to show me a lineup of things, of possible things, because it would be racist to do so.

02:32:00.000 And then.

02:32:11.000 So, the process of a police lineup, which is the most fundamental mechanism of identifying a perpetrator, was viewed as racist because the guy who levied the death threat to me was black.

02:32:21.000 I think he was maybe Somali.

02:32:22.000 He looked Somali.

02:32:25.000 So, I took a two year leave from Concordia University and I'm now leaving in large part because it became. 0.76

02:32:32.000 Difficult for me, if not impossible, to be a high profile Jewish professor who supports the right of Israel to exist. 0.99

02:32:39.000 What do you think happens in the future to Concordia and just to Montreal in general with this influx of people? 1.00

02:32:48.000 It's a slow death.

02:32:50.000 You have to have the imagination to extrapolate into a distant future.

02:32:55.000 So if you today go to your friend who's got that steakhouse on that street, I don't know if you want to mention it, in Montreal, right? 0.99

02:33:03.000 Would you walk around and think that it's all Islamic? 0.99

02:33:06.000 Of course not. 1.00

02:33:07.000 But it's a drip, drip, drip.

02:33:09.000 It changes, right?

02:33:10.000 So, for example, until very recently, the Quebec government was fully tolerating the public prayers, Islamic public prayers, all over the place.

02:33:21.000 Until recently?

02:33:22.000 And now they passed a law banning it.

02:33:25.000 Well, why did you need to wait till then?

02:33:27.000 Why didn't you listen to me when I was standing on top of the mountain screaming into the void saying, This is what's going to transpire?

02:33:34.000 But do you understand that you have more of a.

02:33:38.000 An understanding of these things, more knowledge about these things, and to these people that are trying to get elected and that are dealing with their constituents, that this is a politically dangerous thing to bring up.

02:33:50.000 I get it.

02:33:51.000 But then you're engaging in suicidal empathy.

02:33:53.000 Well, it's also they're just, they have their own personal interests.

02:33:53.000 Yeah.

02:33:56.000 They're pragmatic.

02:33:57.000 I get it.

02:33:58.000 But, you know, the reason why I love, I mean, and I'm going to get threats for this.

02:34:03.000 The reason why I appreciate Trump is precisely because he implements things that most politicians wouldn't have the testicular fortitude to do.

02:34:13.000 But that's what you want in a great leader, right?

02:34:15.000 Most people come in, do their time, parasitize the system, and then leave having accomplished nothing.

02:34:22.000 The reason why Donald Trump has had not one, not two, but three assassination attempts is a testament to the fact that he is a danger to the status quo.

02:34:33.000 Why?

02:34:34.000 Because he does things. 0.99

02:34:35.000 Whether you agree with him or not, he's bold, he's fearless, he doesn't give a shit. 0.99

02:34:41.000 To your point, most politicians would rather go, la, la, la, I don't want to hear it. 0.99

02:34:45.000 Until it's too late.

02:34:47.000 The playbook is very clear. 1.00

02:34:49.000 Depending on the number of Muslims in a society, you can exactly predict the level of conflict. 1.00

02:34:58.000 And that statement that I just said holds true, notwithstanding the fact that most Muslims are perfectly lovely. 1.00

02:35:05.000 Both those statements are both veridical. 1.00

02:35:07.000 So when you are 0 to 2%, you're just a quiet, exotic minority.

02:35:13.000 When you're 3 to 5%, you become a lot more engaged politically. 0.96

02:35:18.000 When you become 6 to 10%, you start creating Sharia no go zones. 0.99

02:35:23.000 We don't want your dogs here. 1.00

02:35:25.000 This is not tolerated in our zone.

02:35:27.000 Look at Britain.

02:35:28.000 Look at France. 0.93

02:35:29.000 So, in the same way that I can predict the trajectory of diabetes, and no, I'm not saying that Muslims are, I'm drawing an analogy. 0.63

02:35:40.000 I am explaining a trajectory.

02:35:42.000 So, if you wish to protect the liberties that make the United States so uniquely wonderful.

02:35:49.000 In the full range of societies that have ever existed, recognize that all religions are not equally likely to be congruent with the American experience.

02:36:00.000 If you do, you'll survive. 0.58

02:36:02.000 If you won't, your future descendants will rue the day you were born.

02:36:07.000 All right.

02:36:08.000 Should we end on that?

02:36:10.000 Love being with you.

02:36:11.000 Love being with you too.

02:36:12.000 It was a great conversation.

02:36:13.000 Very lively.

02:36:14.000 Thank you, sir.

02:36:16.000 Suicide and Empathy is available now.

02:36:19.000 Did you read the audiobook?

02:36:20.000 I did.

02:36:21.000 And I constantly said, That Joe Rogan would beat the shit out of me if I didn't do it. 0.94

02:36:21.000 Yes. 0.94

02:36:27.000 I would not do that, but I would berate you slightly.

02:36:30.000 But I'm happy.

02:36:31.000 I'm happy that you did that.

02:36:32.000 Always good to see you, brother.

02:36:32.000 Thank you.

02:36:34.000 All right.

02:36:34.000 Bye, everybody.

The Joe Rogan Experience - May 13, 2026

Joe Rogan Experience #2497 - Gad Saad

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