00:02:38.760So maybe we can start with your transition from being a physician to becoming an Islamic expert, and then we can drill into these various topics.
00:02:58.640We actually met about a year before medical school and wound up, thank goodness, getting into the same medical school and got married during a lunch break in the first year of medical school.
00:03:08.760Uh, and, um, we were very tied to New York, uh, still have family there.
00:03:13.940And, um, we were in something called the couples match, um, where they try and match you for
00:03:19.060residency programs by geography so that, you know, one spouse isn't in California and the
00:03:24.980other, you know, in New York, if possible.
00:03:27.760And so we, we were able to do that in Rhode Island and we kind of fell in love with the
00:03:32.520state, uh, moved to a rural area and were here ever since.
00:03:36.400and um so she was literally pregnant with um our second child uh and a plane crashed into the world
00:03:46.820trade center she was um she didn't take much time off from work she would take off mornings
00:03:52.280and uh and then uh she she's trained as a clinical dermatologist but also a pathologist so she would
00:03:58.540she kept all her pathology responsibilities she cut down a little bit on her clinical workload
00:04:04.320So anyway, so she had some time in the morning where she was going to go in and she was walking on the treadmill.
00:04:10.780I think she's about six months pregnant or something. And a plane hits and she thinks it's an accident.
00:04:16.520And then she calls me back, whatever it was, an hour later or a half hour later.
00:04:21.140And the second plane hits. And obviously she was concerned it was not it was not an accident.
00:04:26.280And when I was, you know, we checked on family. And when I came home from work, I started home at work at night.
00:04:32.720National Public Radio was on, and I really had very limited understanding of Islam.
00:04:40.000I'd read some as a child about the Crusades, but even that bit of knowledge, God,
00:04:46.000I mean, I knew that the Crusades were a response to something.
00:04:48.860I didn't know about the institution of jihad, etc., which is why that was the first area I wanted to study.
00:04:56.360But I mean, the the the apologetic was just pouring on thick.
00:05:03.200And and then, of course, Bush, President Bush at the time made his statement, you know, Islam was a religion of peace.
00:05:09.420And and and it just it made not only did it not make sense to me, it actually annoyed me.
00:05:16.700And and then one striking incident, this actually brings me to Al-Azhar.
00:05:22.060when so al-azar which is really i i know there's this mantra that that islam is so decentralized
00:05:31.180etc etc but if you were to pick one institution and it's a it's an ancient institution at this
00:05:38.320point it was founded in the in the 10th century that for certainly for sunnis is is the nearest
00:05:44.260you're going to get to a vatican equivalent it would be al-azar university and its grand imams
00:05:49.600are the closest you'll ever get to a papal equivalent.
00:05:53.040And so they have, just like the Vatican has these papal nuncios
00:05:56.640that fan out across the world as kind of emissaries of the Vatican
00:06:00.400and do teaching and, you know, sort of preacher-in-residence kind of arrangements,
00:06:10.520And it just turned out by coincidence that the imam-in-residence for Manhattan
00:06:15.980at the Islamic Center of Manhattan was from Al-Azhar and was their emissary.
00:06:21.700And so after the attacks in the immediate aftermath, or in the immediate week after or so,
00:06:27.600he was very ecumenical sounding, and I didn't pay much attention to it.
00:06:33.240But then I learned about a month later that he had suddenly abruptly left New York
00:06:38.160and went back to Egypt and gave an interview on an Al-Azhar-affiliated website,
00:06:42.300which the Middle East Media Research Institute, Memory, translated right away because it was so inflammatory.
00:06:49.080And he had a particular animus towards Jewish physicians that they were, I mean, it was so, it was so, it sounded like crack pottery.
00:07:00.120And he was accusing in the immediate aftermath of the attacks that there were Jewish physicians,
00:07:06.600obviously speaking about Manhattan, which is where he was, that were poisoning Muslim children in the hospitals.
00:07:13.040And I would later learn that a lot of the invective, he was invoking these themes, which at the time I wasn't familiar with.
00:07:19.320But they were Quranic themes, which in this long translation that I just published, Tantawi develops at great length.
00:07:26.700You know, Jews as corruptors, Jews as schemers against Islam from its infancy, trying to basically abort Islam in the crib, so to speak, on and on and on.
00:07:44.260A whole, I mean, there are litanies, there are Quranic litanies of Jews' evil characteristics.
00:07:49.980And he was mentioning some of them, although I had no idea what the context was.
00:07:56.420I didn't know that they were pertaining to specific Quranic verses, et cetera.
00:08:00.960But I just felt that it was so shocking to me, and then juxtaposed to this apologetic
00:08:07.860that was pouring out of the media, that I just said, something's wrong here.
00:10:00.000It was supposed to be convert or die per Koran 9.5.
00:10:03.620The sort of less severe statute and its Quranic origins, Koran 9.29, did not apply to them because they were not, quote unquote, people of the book.
00:10:17.000However, in reality, I mean, India has always been one of the world's most populous places.
00:10:23.820It's just I mean, it's not funny, but it's this this some sort of humor in this.
00:10:29.440There's a report of one of the first Muslim invaders who goes into this area, which is now a part of Pakistan, Sin province, and he's supposed to be executing this edict, you know, convert or die.
00:10:43.160And he basically writes back, well, it's not practical. There's too many of them.
00:10:47.460I mean, it's just so so they were afforded grudgingly dimmy status.
00:10:52.780And this was a bone of contention for Muslim jurists across the century.
00:10:56.740Because remember, India was first invaded by jihad in the 8th century.
00:11:02.160And now we're talking centuries later, these debates are still going on.
00:11:06.220But in the middle of this anti-Hindu tract from the late 16th, early 17th century by Sir Hindi,
00:11:14.700and he was a Sufi, by the way, who was supposed to be also very non-violent, etc.
00:11:18.760um he it was it he makes this comment whenever a jew is killed it is for the benefit of islam
00:11:26.460so i did some more digging and could not find i mean there may be some but i could not find
00:11:31.460any evidence that he ever had contact with a jewish community uh given you know his geographical
00:11:37.900location in india um and it just struck me god that what is this coming from i i mean you know
00:11:46.060there's got to be, there's got to be some theological basis for this. And in fact, by that
00:11:51.820point, I wasn't nearly as naive as I had been. Now we're talking about four or five years after
00:11:57.7009-11. I was aware of academics, particularly Jewish academics, I must say, God, that basically
00:12:06.640argued there was no theological anti-Semitism in Islam. And whatever there might be was entirely
00:12:14.620borrowed from the West, and in fact, God, it was this logical conundrum some of them
00:12:22.040got into where they said, in fact, you really can't define anti-Semitism outside of a Christian
00:12:28.920context. And all of this, as someone like yourself that's trained in science, I was
00:12:33.880like, what are you talking about? I mean, you're giving these arbitrary definitions,
00:12:39.200and then you're opposing them from on high as a doyen of Islamic studies. And I'm like,
00:12:44.620This sounds ridiculous. And lo and behold, there was a vast corpus of theological anti-Semitism
00:12:52.900in Islam. So I mean, if I look at this book, it's obviously incredibly well researched. So if
00:12:59.980anybody says, you know, you don't have enough references, you don't, you know, you also have
00:13:04.900a translator who helped you. So all of the usual sort of delegitimization strategies would probably
00:13:12.780be eliminated. A couple of explanations, a couple of explanations, though, God. The translation
00:13:18.880itself, and you can appreciate this maybe in terms of your own knowledge of Arabic,
00:13:26.240the original PhD thesis, which came out, he defended it in 1966, and in that era it wasn't
00:13:32.200published until 1968, but now I can understand why, because it was immense. It was about 760
00:13:37.580pages in the original Arabic. So, that book that you just held up is about 870 pages, but 625 pages
00:13:46.460of it is the translation rendered into English. And yes, I mean, I did write a considerable amount
00:13:51.540of it, but most of it is simply the translation of this immense work. Fair enough. So, my point
00:13:57.320is this. You've written several, you know, highly sourced, you know, technical tomes so that no one
00:14:07.160can certainly argue i mean unless they want to argue well you're not from al-azhar university
00:14:11.220you don't speak arabic you're not a muslim right which is a lot more difficult to levy those
00:14:17.200charges against me because arabic is my mother time because i did grow up in the middle east
00:14:21.020but yes it is true that i don't have a phd in islamic studies from al-azhar university but i
00:14:27.120can also understand uh pythagoras's theorem even though i'm not from ancient greece and i don't
00:14:34.540speak, you know, Greek. So that notwithstanding, here's the conundrum that I see both of us
00:14:41.340facing. I was asked not too long ago, what is the greatest or most surprising phenomenon that I have
00:14:50.380been witness to in my study of human behavior for well over three decades now? And I had never been
00:14:57.640asked that question before, so I had to pause. And then I thought, oh, I think I've got an answer.
00:15:02.640It is the inability to get someone to change their opinion once that position is fully
00:16:24.180The grand imam of Al-Azhar University is actually a Mossad mole.
00:16:29.180and on and on and on. So how could I administer? So let's use language from my work, but that
00:16:36.160resonates with a physician. How can I get you to benefit from the vaccine, in this case,
00:16:44.600the mind vaccine of truth, if you won't ever show up to the center to have the mind vaccine
00:16:52.040administered to you? And if I administer it to you, you'll discount it as Zionist propaganda.
00:16:57.000So having said all that, do you feel optimistic that all of the brilliant work that you're doing will even move a single millimeter or iota of any of those folks?
00:17:11.600Not terribly, but I didn't, you know, in a sense, I mean, I guess I did write it, research it for some more open minded Muslims because I do believe they exist.
00:17:25.380But but honestly, God, I wrote it. I wrote it for I'm Jewish, too. I wrote it. I wrote it for our community because, you know, you you've coined this this term suicidal empathy.
00:17:39.220And I think when it comes to Islamic anti-Semitism, when it comes to Islam in general, I think our community, across its length and breadth, by and large, is guilty of suicidal apathy or suicidal denial.
00:17:56.620And again, God, I saw this in the, well now, after 25 years, the absurd contention that
00:18:08.460there was no theological anti-Semitism in Islam, and it was entirely sui generis after
00:18:16.140the European colonial period, and using the word virus, a virus that infected these otherwise,
00:18:25.240frankly, phylo-semitic Muslim societies.
00:18:29.240And so, so much of my work has been directed at dispelling what I think of very corrosive myths,
00:18:37.240particularly when, I mean, God, one of the other things that I find,
00:18:43.240there's a good medical term, and I use it probably too much, called pathognomonic.
00:18:47.240It just shows how deep, an example that shows how deep the pathology is.
00:18:53.240I listen now and I have Google Alerts set up for anti-Semitism and Jew hatred.
00:18:59.740And so every day things pour, obviously, into my mailbox in this critical moment that we're living.
00:19:06.980And all the presentations that I see, I can't even think of a single one off the top of my head,
00:19:15.880which try to orient presentations on anti-Semitism or Jew hatred.
00:19:19.900The lecturers, the speakers, the interviewees never show these remarkably comprehensive data that the Anti-Defamation League has collected over the last quarter century.
00:19:40.940Now, I'm not a fan of the ADL. It's unfortunately become basically an instrument of the left, with rare exceptions.
00:19:49.900It's very politicized, but I will say that over about a 60-year period now, they've honed
00:19:57.600an instrument which is very simple, and it's been through a few iterations, but basically
00:20:02.960it's an 11-question instrument, so it's easy to administer.
00:20:08.200And what it basically does, it presents to the respondent 11 anti-Semitic stereotypes.
00:20:14.020And then because they wanted the instrument to be, you know, specific, not not not necessarily so sensitive.
00:20:20.540So they wanted it to to not have false, positive information.
00:20:25.800You have to you have to agree with at least six out of the majority of these anti-Semitic stereotypes.
00:20:33.780And then you become an index case of extreme anti-Semitism.
00:20:39.080And I agree with that definition because, you know, six is quite a lot already.
00:20:42.420I shouldn't agree with any of them if you're more, you know, more normally inclined.
00:20:48.080And then they just tally up how common that is in a given population, whether that population is a country.
00:20:53.480Then sometimes they'll break it down by some of the demographics of the country.
00:20:57.220Well, the first set of data that I saw actually was as I was working on the initial edition of the legacy of Islamic anti-Semitism.
00:21:06.060and it was actually it was a secondary analysis of a survey that the ADL had done apparently in
00:21:12.980Europe in 2004 and it was about 10 European countries mostly Western European countries
00:21:19.800and there had been a Muslim subsample now you know it was it was the Muslim subsample as I
00:21:28.020recall was a little small so you could argue that you know maybe the estimates are a little unstable
00:21:34.020little uh little um there's there's some uh question as as as to as to how valid they they
00:21:41.800might be but the signal was so strong you know as as someone as an epidemiologist and you're
00:21:47.440you're used to like oh this is this has a an odds ratio of 1.5 wow the question was the basic
00:21:56.340question and by the way this is this is very good for the whole anti-zionism issue now which is being
00:22:02.860pushed to the forefront for good and for bad. The whole question was, did anti-Israel sentiment
00:22:10.140predict this six out of 11 or greater score on the anti-Semitism? And of course it did. And this
00:22:17.460was originally done in, the data originally collected in 2004, and they were being analyzed
00:22:22.620now on a paper that was published in 2006. But there was hidden in there was an analysis where
00:22:30.800the Christian population of Europe is the so-called referent group. That's the one that you're
00:22:37.520comparing to. And then the experimental group was the Muslims. And in a table tucked away with,
00:22:47.640you know, not just like a crude sort of prevalence, they actually did what's called
00:22:52.780a multivariable logistic regression analysis. And they adjusted for all these factors that
00:22:59.100could distort or in our language would be confound the relationship. The odds ratio
00:23:07.400blew up to almost eightfold. And I was like, well, why? First of all, I was thinking to myself,
00:23:13.080why isn't that the main finding in the paper? And then I said, okay, maybe they're worried to
00:23:17.160have a smaller Muslim population, whatever it was. But it just, I'm in the process of working
00:23:22.240on the legacy of Islamic anti-Semitism. And I'm like, I've got to start looking into more
00:23:27.560polling data. And I was kind of rushed to get, I wanted to finish the book and just get done with
00:23:32.300it. But that seed stuck in my mind. And when I did an updated version in 2020, and now in the
00:23:38.720introduction to this new, I did an updated version of The Legacy of Islamic Anti-Semitism. And then
00:23:43.200I did a long introduction to this new book, A Modern Quranic Conf Against the Jews. I got into
00:23:49.680more polling data in the introductions to both of those books. And God, it's, so one of the things
00:23:57.420the ADL did, so obviously I'm talking initially about 2006, by 2014, they did a massive study,
00:24:06.040102 or 103 countries across the world, and applying the same instrument, you know, the
00:24:11.780prevalence of extreme anti-Semitism, et cetera, et cetera. The 16 most, and it won't be surprising
00:24:16.980to you who grew up in Lebanon, but the 16 most anti-Semitic countries in the world by far were
00:24:23.000all from the Middle East and North Africa. They repeated that survey after, well, they finished
00:24:30.600it after October 7, 2023. But it was basically a 2024 data. And that came out at the beginning of
00:24:40.2802025. It looked, if anything, worse. It was now the 19 most anti-Semitic countries in the world,
00:24:49.080were Muslim countries and beyond the Middle East and North Africa.
00:24:52.820So that the prevalence of extreme anti-Semitism went from 64% to 97%.
00:24:58.080And oh, by the way, the second most anti-Semitic country in the world
00:25:02.840was a country we've been told is non-Arab and has a more tolerant Islam, Indonesia.
00:25:08.80096% prevalence of extreme anti-Semitism.
00:25:12.920And then you can peel it back and start looking at
00:25:15.440does this travel with Muslim diaspora populations
00:25:44.660But the last data from France was up to 62%.
00:25:48.080And in the United States, God, I won't bore you any more with this, but the last thing is the United States.
00:25:54.680There was apparently, you wouldn't know this because the ADL never published the results, but a colleague of mine at the University of Indiana got the raw data from the ADL.
00:26:03.060And he published them in a paper in 2023, Gunther Jekyll, who's now the acting chair of Judaic Studies at Indiana University.
00:26:12.520um he he published sort of a tuck away in this long paper uh they did they surveyed 3 600 non-muslims
00:26:22.160in the united states in 2017 um and an oversample of 805 muslims the prevalence again same scale
00:26:29.460the prevalence of extreme anti-semitism and you know the u.s is a much more philo-semitic country
00:26:34.080was only six percent amongst the non-muslims but it was 38 amongst the muslims okay so that
00:26:42.500Notwithstanding that we know that all of the Islamic texts are laden with Jew hatred.
00:26:47.740As a matter of fact, Bill Warner, whose work I'm sure you're familiar with, did a content analysis showing that there is more canonical Jew hatred in Islamic texts than, wait for it, wait for it, Mein Kampf.
00:27:03.640So the Nazis are less Jew-hating than Islam.
00:27:09.780Now, sure, we can go to all of your wonderfully sourced books and so on, but again, humans are a storytelling animal, so oftentimes personal narratives end up being a lot more sticky and impactful.
00:27:23.060I've often said, and it's worth repeating here, that the Western mind is incapable of understanding what Islamic Jew hatred looks like.
00:27:36.120Because it is at a, it's not even an epistemological level, it's at an existential level that the average Westerner, even if you grew up in the era of slavery, it would not compare to how the Jew is perceived in Islamic countries.
00:27:54.600So let's take pluralistic, modern, Paris of the Middle East, Lebanon, where I grew up.
00:28:00.840Every single calamity imaginable that happens at the individual or collective level is flippantly
00:28:16.360If they wanted to release the cure, they could do so.
00:28:20.120but your wife is needlessly suffering from diabetes because the Jews are too greedy.
00:28:25.520Your wife cheated on you. Who created pornography? It's the Jews. They probably infused her with
00:28:33.000these libidinal drives when she saw the sexy gardener working in your backyard. So who caused
00:28:40.060the sharks to attack the tourists in Sharm el-Sheikh in 2010 in the tourist town in Egypt.
00:28:50.680Well, it turns out that those sharks were Jewish sharks, Zionist sharks that had been trained by
00:28:56.600the Mossad to have sort of a fatal blow on the tourism industry in Egypt. Now, this is not said
00:29:05.040by some quack. It's said when you get into a taxi, it's said in your favorite telenovela on
00:29:14.700television, it is said in the news. So the extent, the ubiquity of Jew hatred is astounding. So to
00:29:24.300your point about all these different polls, it's not difficult to then see that when Pew, for
00:29:30.000example, comes out with a survey showing that of the countries that were surveyed about Jew hatred,
00:29:36.380to your point, 95, 97, 98% of the people polled exhibited profound hatred of the Jew. Now,
00:29:47.800I love that you used odds ratio, by the way, because I've used exactly that point when I talk
00:29:52.920about, say, in science, if you publish a paper with an odds ratio of 1.2, that means the
00:29:59.200experimental intervention was 20% more effective than the placebo. Hooray! But here we're not
00:30:06.960talking about 1 to 1.2, or as even you said, 1 to 8, which is 800 times. It's even bigger than
00:30:14.320that, some of the data I've seen. But again, to my earlier point, Andrew, la la la, I don't want
00:30:20.480to hear your evidence. So as the guy who spent 30 plus years trying to inoculate people against
00:30:29.000these mind viruses, I hate to say it, I'm not sure if I'm changing enough minds, given how
00:30:36.760quickly the monster is coming for you. So can we be optimistic? Or are we just two Jewish guys
00:30:44.440talking while waiting for our eventual demise? Yeah, it's a frightening proposition.
00:30:51.540I, you know, in first of all, I want to say that that Tantawi abides by some of these kind of I mean, you know, as as the as the grand imam of Al-Azhar University.
00:33:49.380By the way, Marcus Aurelius, I had to research this. I wasn't familiar with it. Absolutely no evidence that he slaughtered Christians. They began slaughtering Christians after his reign. Decius, I think, was the first one. And, you know, no evidence that the Jews were involved with either of those instances.
00:34:11.160But there's also, this was kind of, again, sort of comic relief, I guess, as an American. The last, literally the last words in this endless morbid thesis are what's come to be known as the Benjamin Franklin prophecy nonsense, which I believe now probably first emerged in the 1930s, Nazi related, etc.
00:34:36.140which is the claim that Benjamin Franklin foretold that the Jews were going to, you know, corrupt the United States and leave it in the wrong direction, lead it in the wrong direction.
00:34:47.160And so Tantawi calls it, first of all, calls him President Benjamin Franklin.
00:34:54.820And it's at the feast of the Constitution in 1789.
00:34:59.920So you've got this and it's interesting.
00:35:05.720he's he's got this great erudition when it comes to islamic studies there's no question about it
00:35:11.580he was he was one of the great commentators of the modern era besides this phd thesis he went
00:35:16.300on to do a full about 10 volume quranic commentary on the entire uh uh quran um but but i mean the
00:35:23.960the level of amateurishness and and and craziness when it comes to analyzing the others history
00:35:31.680is just is just is just breathtaking so let's let's do a quick psychological analysis of so
00:35:38.020we can talk about the canonical roots of jew hatred and as i said there has never been
00:35:44.880in recorded history anything remotely resembling the orgiastic and existential existential jew
00:35:52.400hatred in islamic sources that's about as clear as gravity but i'm going to propose so now two
00:35:59.360questions. Number point one, do you think that the root of that stems from, so Muhammad is going
00:36:06.260around trying to convert everyone to his way of thinking, I am the final prophet, and then you've
00:36:13.160got these really annoying Jews that go, nah, thank you, we're good. And while others fell in line,
00:36:19.060those uppity, obnoxious Jews refuse to heed my call, heed my message, and therefore that then
00:36:27.980serves as the eventual animus. Is it as simple as that from your perspective, or is there
00:36:35.160something else that explained why there is such canonical Jew hatred in Islam?
00:36:40.740No, I think, again, God, you have to remember, we're relying for all this material. We're relying
00:36:48.040entirely on the Muslim sources, certainly for the actual, you know, the life of Muhammad,
00:36:54.040the earliest origins of Islam, we don't have any other narrative.
00:37:00.940So we don't know the veracity of virtually any of this.
00:37:05.600But if we stick to their narrative, the way they tell it in the traditions, in the biographies of Muhammad, in the Quranic commentaries,
00:37:15.560Yes, that's that's very plausible. And in fact, it was picked up by, you know, by very good Jewish scholars of Islam in the in the in the 19th and early 20th century that Muhammad was basically disappointed and became very, very angry.
00:37:33.140And then, you know, one thing led to another.
00:37:35.900I mean, he orchestrated political assassinations and then waged, you know, these proto-jihad campaigns against the Jews of Arabia.
00:37:45.000And used, you know, he himself used the Quranic epithets.
00:37:48.160You know, he used the apes and pigs epithet before he subdued the Banu Quresa.
00:37:53.460Some argue that, again, some of the literature says he used it again against the Qaibar Jews.
00:37:59.180So, yeah, I think I think there is this disappointment.
00:38:02.380But, you know, as a psychologist, I mean, you know, there there is a study of envy, of of of of disappointment.
00:38:13.940So let me let me let me come in there because that's going to be now my set.
00:38:17.100So my first explanation is what I just said.
00:38:19.700You're not coming around to seeing me as the final messenger and therefore I hate you.
00:38:24.180Here's a second one that is actually rooted in the architecture of the human mind, and not necessarily in Islamic sources. And it's one that I've been promulgating, you know, recently as sort of the inerrant and ubiquitous form of Jew hatred, irrespective of which theological source it comes from.
00:38:46.760So in psychology, there's this principle called the self-serving bias. The self-serving bias is
00:38:54.060the idea that when people navigate through their lives and they need to attribute or ascribe
00:38:59.560successes and failures in their lives, they typically ascribe successes internally and
00:39:05.860failures externally, right? So I did well in Professor Boston's internal medicine exam because
00:39:14.120I'm smart and I studied hard. And if I do poorly on the exam, well, I did poorly on the exam because
00:39:20.120Professor Boston is an asshole Jew who doesn't treat people fairly. I'm attributing successes
00:39:26.720internally, failures externally. So now you've got these Jews that, to use Amy Chua's term,
00:39:35.080she's the professor at Yale who's the mentor to J.D. Vance, she uses the term market-dominant
00:39:41.100minorities, of which the Jews are the most common example throughout history, very minuscule group
00:39:48.040in many different ecosystems, always punching multiple weight classes above their weight,
00:39:55.060right? So the Jews might constitute 0.5% in a society, but yet they are the main judges and
00:40:03.700the top professors and the top lawyers and the top physicians. Well, if I am in that society,
00:40:10.760and I'm one of the 99.5% of people, many of whom may not be as successful as those demonic Jews,
00:40:18.040then it becomes very easy for me to blame my failures onto them. Why didn't I make it as a
00:40:24.140Hollywood actor? Well, who controls Hollywood? It's the Jews. If they weren't the gatekeepers
00:40:30.060that didn't see my thespian brilliance, then I would have made it and I would have been the next
00:40:35.140Avenger leading role, male role figure. And so do you think, keeping aside, of course,
00:40:42.740Islamic-based Jew hatred is something that you're a specialist in, and it absolutely explained
00:40:49.080Islamic-rooted Jew hatred. But it doesn't explain the Jew hatred that we see from countless other
00:40:56.660people who don't come from Islamic backgrounds. So what do you think of my self-serving bias
00:41:03.580and using the Jew as the culprit, both of my individual and collective failings.
00:41:10.240Oh, I think it's very logical sounding.
00:41:14.660And, you know, we have in all these societies in the diaspora,
00:41:26.300part of it, I think, is almost a protective mechanism.
00:41:30.440Because of the discrimination, there's been a lot of focus and a lack of opportunities that others had in these societies, in European societies, in Muslim societies.
00:41:49.260Okay, you call us the people of the book?
00:41:51.180Well, that's basically the only opportunity we have.
00:41:53.680So, you know, and it's, I think it's had some positive impacts in terms of theoretical sciences, literature, art, etc. But then that too becomes resented.
00:42:10.440you know it's it's it's it's um do you remember the famous uh exchange i recently actually ended
00:42:20.220a plenary that i gave in jerusalem actually at a global anti-semitism conference uh in late january
00:42:27.820and i you can actually go and watch the my lecture uh on my youtube channel uh at the end of the
00:42:35.180lecture i quoted a exchange with thomas soul i'm assuming you're familiar do you know oh yeah yeah
00:42:42.860and i watched your lecture okay so you know but i want to hear this i want to hear it again so
00:42:48.140thomas soul is sitting there i think it was uh with a general i can't remember who was interviewing
00:42:54.540him but in any case he was asked so you know professor soul what would it take for the jews
00:43:02.460to no longer be hated, or I'm paraphrasing the sentiment. And he pauses for a second and gives
00:43:08.820arguably the most pithy one-word answer ever, fail, right? If the Jews were to collectively
00:43:17.960fail, then they wouldn't have this bullseye on them. And then if you remember at the end of my
00:43:24.580talk, well, I said, well, then I guess we are doomed to be always hated because we shall never
00:43:31.300give in, and we shall always succeed. And so it looks like we are doomed to always be hated,
00:43:37.400Andrew. What do you think? Yeah, and I think the extension of that would be that, you know,
00:43:45.840why do we succeed by and large? Because not succeeding itself becomes an existential threat.
00:43:54.240You know, not succeeding. If Israel didn't take some of its genius and develop defensive mechanisms, anti-missile systems, etc., develop nuclear weapons, let's be honest, as a deterrent, unlike its neighbors, as a deterrent, it wouldn't exist.
00:44:19.420do you think that it is possible since you know you've immersed yourself so much in all of the
00:44:26.500islamic you know original canonical texts do you think there is the possibility of the light of
00:44:33.820reformation i think i know the answer to this but maybe you've got a better answer so let me give
00:44:41.000the background to this so as i mean you know this but some of our listeners may not know in islam
00:44:45.140you've got the concept of abrogation, right? So in an earlier verse, I say, hey, you've got your
00:44:51.100religion, I've got mine. Look, it's all hippie. Islam is a religion of peace. Later on, right,
00:44:56.000this is Meccan period, then later Medina, I change my message of proselytizing, it becomes a lot less
00:45:02.900tolerant, a lot more people then sign up to join the club. And then like any good marketer, I double
00:45:09.600down on all of the the violence and subjugation and killing and so on and pillaging well then
00:45:16.160there's a there's a canonical problem how can we reconcile these two contradictory you said
00:45:22.040a earlier and you said not a later hence through the magic of abrogation the later verse abrogates
00:45:28.640the earlier verse is there a way for example for us to use the magic wand of abrogation and have
00:45:36.140some new modern grand imam of al-Azhar University come by and say, I hereby with this wand abrogate
00:45:44.680all the craziness and it truly will now be moving forward only a spiritual Islam and the 90-95% of
00:45:53.980it that is political Islam is hereby abrogated. Is this possible or am I dreaming in technicolor?
00:46:00.920It doesn't seem to be possible in our lifetimes. And about abrogation, getting back to the book, Tantawi is very adamant that not acknowledging abrogation, not only as a Quranic directive.
00:46:23.960There's two Quranic verses, one in the second surah, one in the 16th surah, that lay out the principle of abrogation, and then the jurists elaborate it.
00:46:33.420Tantawi, one of our sins as Jews, is that we don't acknowledge abrogation.
00:46:39.800And what he's driving at is not just, you know, Quranic abrogation per se, or the jurists' conception of it,
00:46:46.200But we don't acknowledge the fact that other than the few Jews, and he acknowledges there's a few Jews, that convert to Islam, our religion has been abrogated.
00:46:58.400And so that's a tough thing to reverse.
00:47:07.060If there's going to be any hope of a real, really not more of a reform, a renaissance, Islam still hasn't gone through a renaissance in many respects, it's particularly on the issue of Jew hatred or Christianophobia, for that matter.
00:47:23.800I think it starts with the populations that are subjected to these hatreds to speak about it.
00:47:30.060You know, the last envoy before Mr. Kaploon, the professor from Emory, Deborah Lipstadt, was the U.S. anti-Semitism envoy.
00:57:05.580So as long as I can add as many possible suffixes with isms on it, that makes it distinct
00:57:12.700from the root word islam so it's distinct from it islam is gorgeous and beautiful it's the ugly
00:57:20.080variant of it which has nothing to do with islam that's the bad part i even know some folks very
00:57:27.400high profile folks that have completely fallen prey to the schenard what are your thoughts on
00:57:33.440this is there a distinction between islam and islamism and if there isn't can we ever hope
00:57:39.020to get people to understand what Erdogan did, understood, which is there's only Islam.
00:57:45.040Exactly, exactly. I was going to say, and I think whenever Erdogan made that comment,
00:57:50.900I wrote an essay about it in 2009, you know, Islam or Islamism, Islamic or Islamist, you know,
00:58:01.820And that, yes, and by the way, as many of those ism tweets that you put out there, I try and retweet.
00:58:11.560But basically, first of all, you know, historically, God, Islamism was what you said as a synonym for Islam for many years.
00:58:22.760I mean, scholars, you know, in the 19th century, in the early 20th century, they were studying Judaism.
00:58:29.100they were studying islamism they were studying they were studying catholicism they were studying
00:58:34.180islamism they're studying communism exactly i i mean and and uh oh there's an there's a great
00:58:41.240one for communism but but um um absolutely i i mean so you're the arabic linguist certainly
00:58:47.680compared to me if you're not a formal linguist um my understanding from all the translators i've
00:58:52.020worked with over the last 25 years is is that there's no unless there's some neologism there's
00:58:57.140no Arabic word that differentiates Islam and Islamism. So that's an important linguistic
00:59:04.280consideration. But I think it's used, and I've heard people tell me this privately,
00:59:12.600that basically agree with you and I. But if they refer to Islam as opposed to Islamism,
00:59:18.760or if they say it's Islamic as opposed to being Islamist, that they will be called a greasy Islamophobe and kicked out of polite society or kicked out of the academy.
00:59:33.000That's the problem, right? Because, look, I know a guy who has dedicated his life to fighting against Islam, and he's very, very well versed.
00:59:43.980he comes from that region. And so privately, I wrote to him and I said, what's with this bullshit
00:59:50.000man of you doing the Islamism stuff? And he goes, No, I know, I know, Professor. But the thing is,
00:59:56.000my lawyer said that it would be imprudent for me. I mean, but you can't fight such an existential
01:00:04.180battle while always being tepid and, you know, cautious, you either fight it or you don't. So
01:00:12.700if we can't get the people who are avowed fighters against islam to say the word can we ever hope to
01:00:21.260win andrew no no we can't i mean we we they they that's why that's why i've refused to to ever use
01:00:29.660that word other other than in in some sort of explanation of why it's it's so inadequate and
01:00:36.120and dangerous actually as as you've as you've just put it but there is an interesting you
01:00:41.160You brought up communism. I was unaware of this. I thought it was a, so I will say, I read this very good paper by Bernard Lewis from the 19, the great, the Doyen, who, by the way, a lot of problems. Maybe we could talk about that someday.
01:00:57.260didn't really get the treatment of non-Muslims under Islam.
01:01:17.160And he mentioned that there was a quote-unquote humorist
01:01:21.300that said, trying to get at the similarities between Islam and communism,
01:01:27.260And that as if they had basically, you know, modified the Shahada, the profession of faith, there is there is no God and Karl Marx is his prophet.
01:01:36.780And so Lewis attributed it. And I thought it's kind of funny. Well, it turns out he was wrong. Bernard Lewis was wrong about that.
01:01:46.460Because I was got curious about which comic, which comic, where did it come from? He was wrong. It was actually very serious.
01:01:53.160Pre-Bolshevik Revolution, these communist clubs, socialist clubs in Europe, particularly in Germany, I found, and in England, that was their credo.
01:02:06.520To join the club and become a member, it wasn't a joke.
01:02:10.880You had to say there is no God and Karl Marx is his prophet.
01:02:15.260Well, to your point of, in this case, communists using the variant of the Shahada to, you know, to proclaim their commitment to the ideology, a little failed artist with a small mustache, when you ask him who is the, which is the religion that he most respects, it was certainly Islam, which was a masculine, muscular religion in his view.
01:03:01.060Like that statement is more ridiculous than saying
01:03:04.600there is no proof that gravity exists.
01:03:07.580And usually I'll pull out exactly this Mufti
01:03:10.800and say oh yeah let's look at some of his stuff and then suddenly poof they disappear so again
01:03:16.440i'm going to go back to my earlier point because i i mean on the one hand i want to end our
01:03:20.540conversation in an optimistic way but what i'm about to say again is going to be pessimistic
01:03:25.680how can you in light of all of the evidence that folks like you and i and others try to call in
01:03:34.060order to make the case for our positions. If most people choose to bafflingly ignore it,
01:03:42.120is it just we are living on borrowed time and eventually we will all become Islamic? Or do you
01:03:49.280think there will ever be a catalyst that will cause the West in general and the United States
01:03:55.260in particular to wake up from their suicidal empathetic stupor and start implementing the
01:04:01.460autocorrective measures please give us some hope doctor i there there are these fits and starts
01:04:09.420i'll put it this way god so for example when i first got interested in islam um someone that i
01:04:15.300that i found helpful uh was a he's still around he's still he's still a commentator was a maronite
01:04:20.920christian uh and his words turned out to be completely true and prophetic he said that
01:04:26.160after 9-11 he said andy there'll be about a six-month window where we'll be able to speak
01:04:31.000honestly about islam and then it'll close and and and and so it seems like you know and then
01:04:36.260and and maybe i don't know the the the the the madrid train bombings a little bit is this bodice
01:04:42.080yes yes yes go ahead since he's lebanese otherwise i wouldn't have uh breached that
01:04:51.240confidence yeah but um no while it has turned out to be correct and and you do see you know
01:04:56.680Maybe after October 7th, there was some more honesty, but it's not enough.
01:05:02.320And that's why, God, I don't know if it works against the mind virus as an inoculum.
01:05:09.160But I'm kind of a plotter when I do things very, very, very slowly and plot along with these tomes and everything.
01:05:19.420I just feel like, again, if you could marry what memory does and what some others do with advocacy organizations, not just Jewish advocacy organizations, because there's a lot of Christianophobic material that's preached in mosques, too.
01:05:34.540The repetition of coming out with a press release every week or every other week, that would probably be the longest interval you'd have to wait, you would hope that the weight of that evidence would start to open up some minds.
01:05:51.120If organizations that are known to be, you know, ecumenical, interfaith, whatever it is, would just say, enough, enough, every week you're on our list every week, you know, this mosque in Michigan, this mosque in New York, this mosque in California, this mosque in Florida, anti-Semitic, anti-Christian, every week with a press release, I don't know, maybe that would have some impact.
01:06:17.600If in their interfaith dialogue, they would say to Ahmed Al-Tayyab, I watched your sermon on national Egyptian television. It was revolting. Why are you doing this?
01:06:28.660Right. Let me ask you this. Do you think, so I mentioned the possibility of autocorrective steps, the granddaddy of autocorrective steps, and we can discuss whether that's feasible, whether it's just or not.
01:06:44.360Now, the ultimate autocorrective step would be to argue that any ideology, including one that calls itself a religion, that is antithetical to the foundational principles of, in this case, say, the United States, could not be granted the protection that is afforded under the First Amendment, freedom of religion, and so on.
01:07:06.360And so you could literally say, we are hereby banning this ideology.
01:07:12.760It could be communism, which is technically not a religion, right?
01:07:17.040I mean, it's kind of a secular religion.
01:07:19.300It could be any ideology that is fundamentally, existentially contrary to our foundational
01:07:27.380principles, so that if it actually became majority, it would eradicate all of the liberties
01:07:33.100that it used in order to gain ascendancy.
01:07:36.360Could you ever foresee, if you played, you know, great chess players can look 20, 30 moves down the chess tree to be able to guess, you know, what's the optimal move to make.
01:07:48.080If you were to take that trajectory, can you ever see a world where the United States or the rest of the West would do that?
01:07:55.500Or that's never going to happen. So our best bet is to find a way to reform Islam. Otherwise, we shall all be speaking Arabic, inshallah, soon.
01:08:08.900I mean, okay, so you see these, like, these, these inchoate efforts, this anti-Sharia caucus, which is slowly growing.
01:08:19.100Yeah, you know, I mean, you know, but, but, but, but that's considered cutting edge, guys.
01:08:25.360I know. I know. That's considered. Or we ban the Muslim Brotherhood. But the next day when the Muslim Brotherhood files papers calling it the little girls of Muslim sisters, the Muslim sisterhood, that's perfectly legal.
01:08:41.120The trans Muslim sisterhood. Trans Muslim sisters. That's legal. We're just banning the Muslim Brotherhood. Those guys are really mean.
01:08:48.720look the only hope i see is is having more conversations like this as at least as a
01:08:55.580beginning i i so people begin to understand and by the way you know it's depressing to think back
01:09:01.600on the legacy of communism because a lot of these in the united states certainly a lot of these
01:09:07.160debates were had in the 1950s um and and the the conservative side but in my estimation
01:09:14.720the side that saw things realistically lost. They lost. And, you know, we were left with
01:09:23.420normalizing a lot of seditious ideas and not saying that, you know, the Constitution is not
01:09:35.060a suicide pact. Apparently, to a certain extent, it is. Yeah, I hear you. Personal question. Do you
01:09:42.040ever foresee writing a book that is not related to islam is within the fiber of your personhood
01:09:49.580is there a novel is there a book on internal medicine on epidemiology or is andrew fully
01:09:57.420locked onto islam forevermore well it's funny you should say that god because covid forced
01:10:03.460upon me a hiatus from my work on Islam. And I don't know if I'll ever get back and compile it
01:10:12.400all together in a book form. But I was so distressed at what I saw as an epidemiologist
01:10:18.460as the violation of fundamental epidemiologic principles. And I became friendly with people
01:10:24.880like Jay Bhattacharya, who I was so thrilled to see become the head of the NIH. We actually wrote
01:10:31.780an amicus brief together um so i i had i had several years away from from from all of this
01:10:38.840um and it ultimately forced me to retire you know from from from medicine so you don't you don't
01:10:44.360practice at all as no no no i don't even do i don't even do research occasionally you know
01:10:50.180people that remember me will ask me questions about some data sets that i have and you know
01:10:55.240so sort of like an as an emeritus i'll be invited to be on a paper and review it and stuff like that
01:11:00.160But again, I found the response. I wound up being I wound up being a legal advisor to parents that were suing against mask mandates, to parents that were suing against having completely healthy kids who had one or two or three bouts of COVID.
01:11:17.020And it was like a cold to them. But yet they were being forced as part of a divorce, which was manipulation to begin with, to one spouse, one of them inoculated almost just to spite the other.
01:11:27.840You know, so I got involved for several years with that kind of work, and it did move me away. I basically stopped doing my work on Islam for a couple of years, and then October 7th drew me back into it. So that's what happened. Like the mafia, you know.
01:11:44.720I was going to say, just like pull you back in. Does your wife and family members support your work? Or do they say, as my wife used to tell me, could you please stop it with this Islam stuff? You have a busy, stressful life. We don't need more stress. Can you keep quiet? And I said, guess what? You married me because of those attributes. So to now ask me to shut up would go contrary to who I am.
01:12:10.260So what's the dynamic of that work that you do in terms of the family dynamics?
01:12:16.940It's it's it's evolved over the years, I'll say for the better, for the better.
01:12:23.460My wife is incredibly supportive. And what what she's what she enforces, though, because it affects her, too, because she can't you know, she's she's in an academic institution.
01:12:33.840She loves her work. She's still very involved in in teaching and she does some clinical research.
01:12:39.940But she has a huge patient population that she follows. She just she just, you know, and it's a shame. It shows you how the academy is. She can't say anything. She thinks very similarly to the way I think she may not be quite as conservative, but she's extremely supportive, including, you know, financially supportive now since I'm since I'm retired and of my work.
01:13:02.460My kids are great. Again, they're not going to be outspoken about these issues, but they get it. They support the work. They understand it. They'll come to hear me speak. So, no, I feel blessed in that sense that I am supported.
01:13:20.160But I also see what we're up against, what they're up against, because they really don't feel, as supportive as they are privately, they do not feel that they can speak about these issues publicly, which is a huge compromise as far as I'm concerned, in a country that's supposed to have free speech.
01:13:39.940well i'll end it in this way uh i and i i'm going to speak on yeah okay yeah my wife is reminding
01:13:46.760me that we have a meeting with my publisher and soon uh so uh one of the reasons why when my wife
01:13:53.820would tell me you know can you take it easy and i've said to her but i've also said it publicly
01:13:57.740that at the end of the night when i put my head on the pillow i'm my harshest critic in that i set
01:14:06.580the bar of personal conduct very highly. And I need to make sure that I meet it in order for me
01:14:12.180not to have a bout of insomnia. So if I were to be tepid in speaking out or modulate, or I mean,
01:14:19.780I mean, you, you're familiar with my work, I'm probably the least modulating guy. I mean,
01:14:25.240I'm professorial, but I will never refrain from saying a syllable, because then I would feel that
01:14:32.380I was being fraudulent. And I suspect, and you'll correct me if I'm wrong, that you probably,
01:14:38.060what compels you is a similar dynamic with yourself, which says, look, even if nobody
01:14:43.220reads this massive book and is shaped by it, you know, for the better, at least I've done my part
01:14:50.600and I can go to bed at night feeling good that, you know, I did my part and it's up for others
01:14:57.140to decide whether they want to jump on board or not. Does that capture well sort of your own
01:15:01.740internal struggle these issues it absolutely does except except for the part about about the sleep
01:15:07.440uh oh it's easy for you to sleep i still wake up sleep thinking about these issues even though i
01:15:13.960feel i've done what i could fair enough fair enough fair enough uh what a pleasure it is to
01:15:19.500talk to you i wish we could talk some more but now i gotta head off to see how i could promote
01:15:24.420although it's already receiving global buzz suicidal empathy uh what a pleasure to have you
01:15:29.960Thank you. It's a big one. I needed to do weights in order to pick this up, but go check it out. If you want sourced material to defend your positions about Islamic-based Jew hatred, check out this book by Andrew and some of his other books, which I look forward to receiving those books. Thank you. Please come back anytime. Stay on the line so we can say goodbye. Take care, Andrew.