The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - February 02, 2026


Global Jew-Hatred and the Shingles Virus - My Keynote Address in Jerusalem (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_962)


Episode Stats


Length

17 minutes

Words per minute

143.72101

Word count

2,448

Sentence count

146

Harmful content

Misogyny

4

sentences flagged

Toxicity

21

sentences flagged

Hate speech

27

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

Dr. Gad Saad speaks about his experience with Jew hatred in his childhood in Lebanon and Canada, and how it re-emerged in the late 1980s in the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.000 And now we thank Dr. Gad Saad for coming to Israel with his family and agreeing to speak with us before the publication of his upcoming book, Suicidal Empathy, Dying to Be Kind. Dr. Saad, please.
00:00:30.000 Hello, everybody. Glad to see you all here.
00:00:44.240 So today what I thought I would do is explain how Jew hatred is akin to a latent virus. 0.87
00:00:53.060 A latent virus is one that can infect a human being, but then it can lay dormant for many, many years.
00:01:01.860 And there is something that triggers its resurgence.
00:01:05.380 So, for example, for many of you who are in your 50s or 60s, you've heard about the shingles virus.
00:01:12.760 The shingles virus lays dormant in you.
00:01:15.200 And then when you're in your middle age, it could flare up and cause some serious complications.
00:01:20.220 And so I'd like to demonstrate how, in my own life, I've experienced the shingles virus of Jew hatred, 0.99
00:01:29.420 first beginning in the Middle East, in Lebanon, and continuing in Montreal, Canada.
00:01:37.040 But between those two periods, from the 1970s to more recently, the shingles virus of Jew hatred lay dormant for many, many years.
00:01:46.540 But now it is so, so flaring up that I long for the warm days of the Lebanese Civil War, 1.00
00:01:54.640 given some of the realities that I face in Montreal.
00:01:58.940 So let's begin with my background.
00:02:03.080 I was born in, by the way, usually if I didn't have an injury, I would be walking everywhere.
00:02:07.340 I'm a very animated speaker.
00:02:08.880 So you'll forgive me if I'm a bit more restrained in my movements.
00:02:12.420 I was born in Beirut, Lebanon.
00:02:15.760 We were part of the last generation, last group of Lebanese Jews that had steadfastly refused to leave Lebanon.
00:02:25.120 And this is exactly where the shingles virus is a really apt metaphor. 0.99
00:02:29.440 Because people say, well, but you had a great life in Lebanon.
00:02:32.780 Well, yes, we had a great life until we had to put on running shoes and run really fast to avoid being executed.
00:02:38.960 That said, though, even though Lebanon was referred to as the, colloquially as the Paris of the Middle East,
00:02:47.240 it wasn't as tolerant as you would think.
00:02:50.000 So let me give you some examples of the tolerance that we faced in Lebanon.
00:02:55.800 In 1970, when I was five years old, Gamal Abdel Nasser, the pan-Arabist president of Egypt, had just passed away.
00:03:05.300 And he was revered in much of the Arab world.
00:03:08.640 And as often happens in the Middle East, when somebody dies, people take to the street and they do all these big lamentations.
00:03:17.820 As they were proceeding down my street, thousands of them, what's the thing that they were singing or screaming? 0.98
00:03:25.460 Death to Jews, death to Jews in Arabic. 0.99
00:03:28.200 And as a five-year-old, I was confused. 0.99
00:03:31.760 I turned to my mother, why are they singing death to Jews because some guy died in Egypt?
00:03:36.340 She said, just keep quiet, put your head down. 0.91
00:03:38.220 So that was my first experience of Jew hatred in tolerant, progressive Lebanon.
00:03:45.540 Fast forward to about two years before the Civil War.
00:03:48.280 Our teacher asked us to each get up and say what we wish to be when we grow up.
00:03:54.260 I want to be a policeman.
00:03:55.920 I want to be a nurse.
00:03:57.460 I want to be a soccer player. 0.99
00:03:59.120 And a kid gets up and says, when I grow up, I want to be a Jew killer. 0.98
00:04:04.060 To everybody's applause and laughter. 0.76
00:04:08.060 My brother, David, who's 10 years older than me, was the Lebanese Euro champion for several years in a row.
00:04:15.120 And that brings great shame in Lebanon for a Jewish guy to be constantly winning all these athletic competitions. 0.75
00:04:23.120 And so he was approached by some men.
00:04:24.820 This is before the start of the Civil War.
00:04:26.940 He was approached by some men who told him that it was time for him to retire, lest he may face some unfortunate accident.
00:04:36.820 And he ended up leaving Lebanon to pursue his career in Paris, France.
00:04:41.940 This is before the Civil War.
00:04:43.260 Now in 1976, we had already emigrated to Montreal, Canada.
00:04:48.480 And coincidentally, the Olympics that year happened in Montreal.
00:04:53.260 It was the 1976 Montreal Olympics.
00:04:55.740 And my brother ended up representing Lebanon in the 1976 Montreal Olympics.
00:05:02.640 So the same Jewish guy who, in 1973, had to leave Lebanon because he suffered from the dreadful disease of being Jewish, 1.00
00:05:12.600 we could forgive the fact that he's Jewish once he represents Lebanon.
00:05:16.180 That's what we mean in progressive Paris of the Middle East.
00:05:19.700 On one of their return trips to Lebanon, my parents in 1980 were kidnapped by Abu Nidal's group, Fatah.
00:05:29.420 And so many of the tragic stories that, of course, we all heard about post-October 7th is what my childhood was like in progressive, tolerant Lebanon.
00:05:41.960 So this is the sort of world that I come from.
00:05:46.440 I'll just mention one quick story and then I'll move to the present Jew hatred that I have faced.
00:05:52.000 As we left the Beirut International Airport to emigrate to Canada,
00:06:01.800 and as the pilot gave an alert that we were now outside of the Lebanese airspace,
00:06:10.900 my mother takes out a Star of David, puts it around my neck and says,
00:06:15.980 now you could wear this, not hide your identity and be proud of who you are.
00:06:19.980 Now hold that thought, because 45 plus years later, about two weeks after October 7th,
00:06:29.500 my son had just returned from a soccer match in Montreal, in the east end of Montreal,
00:06:36.280 where there's a particular prevalence of a particular demographic group.
00:06:40.600 And as he picked me up with my wife, he said to me,
00:06:43.820 Daddy, if you had come to watch me play soccer where I play today,
00:06:48.100 and if you were wearing a Star of David, you'd be dead.
00:06:52.120 So in 1975, I left Lebanon so that I can finally wear a Star of David.
00:06:59.260 And in 2023, I better take off a Star of David.
00:07:03.720 And yesterday, as a symbolic gesture, we went to the Jerusalem Souk,
00:07:09.080 and I bought a Star of David from Jerusalem.
00:07:17.240 Just to give you a sense also of my more ancestral family in terms of Jew hatred, 0.92
00:07:25.880 some of my grandparents escaped Syria because of Jew hatred.
00:07:31.520 We escaped Lebanon because of Jew hatred. 1.00
00:07:34.060 My brother-in-law's family are Alexandrian Jews.
00:07:38.960 They escaped Egypt in the 50s because of Jew hatred.
00:07:43.060 My wife's family, their ancestors escaped the Armenian genocide.
00:07:48.660 Their family, too, also left Lebanon.
00:07:51.460 So within my own family's narrative and that of my wife,
00:07:56.260 we've ran away from Turkey, from Syria, from Lebanon, from Egypt.
00:08:02.160 But then we had finally made it to Canada.
00:08:05.600 And for the next 25, 30 years, there'd be little peppering of minor Jew hatred.
00:08:12.460 But it was generally a good place to live.
00:08:16.240 But then in around 1998, late 90s,
00:08:19.960 I started noticing what I colloquially and satirically refer to as freedom veils.
00:08:26.240 Those are the wonderful, noble, emancipatory, sartorial designs that Islamic women wear.
00:08:33.860 And the first woman I saw, I thought, okay, that seems okay. 1.00
00:08:37.580 But from 1998 till today, if I walk out of my house,
00:08:43.000 30, 40, 50% of the women that I'll come across will be veiled. 0.97
00:08:49.360 But what's the big deal, Professor Saad?
00:08:51.680 It's just an exotic headscarf. 1.00
00:08:54.360 No, there is a meaning to that headscarf.
00:08:56.980 And you don't have to be a fancy professor to predict that demography is destiny
00:09:01.960 and things are going to go bad for Jews once certain other ideologies take over.
00:09:08.380 My home university is at Concordia University, for those of you who may have heard of it.
00:09:14.100 It's the university that cancelled Prime Minister Netanyahu in 2002.
00:09:21.480 Before it was cool to be cancelled, he was cancelled 24 years ago.
00:09:26.200 My university has been referred to as Reza University for 25 years.
00:09:31.800 So imagine a public figure such as myself, who really doesn't mince words in my defense of the Jewish people,
00:09:42.020 my defense of Israel, my antipathy towards many of the canons of Islam, 1.00
00:09:47.520 now having to walk on campus to lecture.
00:09:51.040 Well, it was no longer possible.
00:09:52.900 So in the 21st century, a professor, a Jewish professor in Montreal, Canada, has to take a leave.
00:10:02.460 I'm now on a two-year leave, but it might, inshallah, become a permanent resignation soon.
00:10:09.240 I'm on a leave because it's too dangerous for me to be at Concordia.
00:10:15.380 So that gives you a bit of the type of Jew hatred that unfortunately I've had and my family has had to face.
00:10:26.140 But now what I'd like to do is quickly shift to some of the psychological reasons
00:10:31.040 why Jew hatred is so alluring to the architecture of the human mind. 0.92
00:10:36.400 Of course, we could talk about theological-based Jew hatred in Christianity or in Islam. 0.65
00:10:42.020 We can talk about the far-right having Jew hatred in their heart and so on.
00:10:47.280 But I'd like to talk about other forms of Jew hatred and why they exist, which you may not be familiar with.
00:10:53.940 The first type of Jew hatred that I'm going to talk about is arguably the one that I detest the most. 1.00
00:11:00.340 And that's the self-loathing Jew who hates Jews and who takes positions that are perfectly suicidal, hence suicidal empathy. 0.95
00:11:09.960 And for those of you who are familiar with my work, or maybe those who are not, you'll learn here, 0.98
00:11:15.960 I refer to such Jews as wood cricket Jews. 1.00
00:11:20.740 And why do I refer to them as wood cricket Jews? 1.00
00:11:23.400 This comes from the field of neuroparasitology.
00:11:26.720 A wood cricket is an insect that detests water.
00:11:31.140 It wants nothing to do with water.
00:11:32.560 But when it is parasitized by a hair worm, it's a brain worm, the hair worm needs the wood cricket to jump into water, happily commit suicide,
00:11:46.260 in order for the hair worm to complete its reproductive cycle. 0.99
00:11:50.640 So the hair worm has literally hijacked the brain of this animal to suit its reproductive interest.
00:11:59.520 Well, hashtag queers for Palestine are the ultimate wood crickets. 1.00
00:12:05.160 Gabor Mate, the degenerate imbecile, is the perfect example of a wood cricket. 0.99
00:12:10.580 Gabor Mate, as I explained in my lecture in Tel Aviv a few days ago, for those of you who don't know who he is, 0.99
00:12:17.840 he's an addiction specialist in Canada who basically says that I have been a Holocaust survivor,
00:12:26.940 because that way he's got the credentials, the experiential credentials, to prepare you for what he's about to say.
00:12:33.240 By the way, his Holocaust survivor story is that when he was six months old, he was given to a Christian family to be protected.
00:12:42.560 Well, six months old babies cannot consciously survive anything.
00:12:46.440 They're not cognizant of what's happening to them.
00:12:48.560 But he uses that to then say, I'm Jewish, I went through the Holocaust,
00:12:53.500 and I'm here to tell you that the Nazis are nothing compared to how Nazi-like the Israeli state is. 0.88
00:13:03.240 But had Gabor Mate, the wood cricket, been at the NOVA festival, and had he been kidnapped,
00:13:11.620 I think that he would be praying for those Nazi IDF soldiers to come and rescue them. 0.58
00:13:17.220 That's what a wood cricket is. 0.99
00:13:23.100 And the world that I inhabit, which is the university ecosystem, is laden with wood crickets.
00:13:30.940 Not only Jewish wood crickets, but oftentimes, academics tend to be very much on the left,
00:13:37.700 and being on the left is more likely to cause you to become a wood cricket.
00:13:42.760 For those of you who don't know the famous novella by Franz Kafka,
00:13:46.900 who was himself a Jewish author from the Czech Republic,
00:13:50.160 he wrote a great novella called The Metamorphosis,
00:13:52.820 where a guy wakes up one day, and he's an insect.
00:13:57.540 And now his family has to interact with him,
00:13:59.960 no longer recognizing that he's a human being, but an insect.
00:14:03.220 Well, I'm here to tell you that 100 plus years after Franz Kafka's famous book,
00:14:08.680 academia is filled with nothing but wood crickets.
00:14:11.520 Second point about some of the psychological reasons why
00:14:14.640 Jew hatred will regrettably maybe never go away.
00:14:19.380 Well, there is something in psychology called the self-serving bias.
00:14:23.640 The self-serving bias is how we attribute successes and failures in our lives.
00:14:29.560 Most people attribute successes internally, right?
00:14:33.000 I did well in my business because I'm a smart entrepreneur.
00:14:37.300 It's because of my talents that I did well.
00:14:39.860 And we attribute failures externally. 0.99
00:14:42.380 I did poorly in my business because customers are too dumb to understand my brilliance, right? 0.92
00:14:48.960 And that's a way to protect yourself as you go through life. 0.96
00:14:52.040 Well, imagine if you can always find the ultimate external culprit
00:14:57.200 for all of your individual and collective failings, right? 0.91
00:15:01.260 And it's the Jew. 1.00
00:15:02.940 Why did I not make it as an actor? 0.95
00:15:05.360 Well, because it's the Jews that control Hollywood. 1.00
00:15:07.940 Why is it that I didn't get a mortgage for my house?
00:15:10.780 Who controls the banks? 0.94
00:15:12.020 It's the Jews. 1.00
00:15:13.280 By the way, did you know that in 2010, very close to here, in Sherem al-Sheikh, in Egypt,
00:15:19.020 there were some shark attacks?
00:15:21.400 Well, the wonderful Egyptian Mukhabarat, which like the intelligence services,
00:15:26.600 concluded that those sharks were Zionist sharks.
00:15:30.460 This is not a joke.
00:15:31.720 This is not a joke.
00:15:32.460 You can go and find it. 0.88
00:15:33.860 2010, Sherem al-Sheikh attacks, Jew sharks. 0.80
00:15:37.880 Because the Jew sharks would then damage the tourism industry of Egypt. 1.00
00:15:44.340 This is what I call six degrees of Jew. 1.00
00:15:46.500 For any calamity around the world, I give you up to six causal links to explain why it's the Jews' fault. 1.00
00:15:54.260 So if an Amazon, if a frog in the Amazon dies, you've got six steps.
00:15:59.380 How do we blame it on Mordechai?
00:16:00.720 I will end because I'm looking that time is up, although they told me I could go a bit longer.
00:16:07.600 Thomas Sowell, for those of you who don't know that, he's still alive.
00:16:11.980 He's 95 years old.
00:16:13.520 He's a fantastic economist.
00:16:14.880 He is the model of what professors should be like, but he so hated academia that in the early 80s, he said, I'm out of here.
00:16:23.060 He became a fellow at the Hoover Institution.
00:16:26.300 I've been petitioning behind doors for him to get the Presidential Freedom Medal from President Trump.
00:16:33.680 Well, Thomas Sowell was once asked, what's it going to take, Professor Sowell, for the Jews to no longer be hated?
00:16:42.600 And he paused and he gave one of the most brilliant one-word answers.
00:16:47.880 He said, fail.
00:16:49.540 In other words, for people to stop hating the Jews, we need to fail.
00:16:54.580 And I'm here to tell you, regrettably, that we shall always be hated because we shall always persevere and we shall always win.