The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - June 25, 2024


Global Jew-Hatred - Fireside Chat and Audience Q&A at Tafsik Event in Toronto (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_690)

Topics
demography and Islamism death threats social media freedom of speech democracy
Hosted by
Gad Saad
Mentioned
Salman Sima Netanyahu Dylan Mulvaney Douglas Murray Elon Musk Ayaan Hirsi Ali Jacques Derrida Danny Burmaui Ryan Belrose Donald Trump Raheel Raza James Bond Elon Levy Israel Gassad Ahmed Messi
Global Jew-Hatred - My Lecture at Tafsik in Toronto (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_689) My Chat with Douglas Murray (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_691)

Episode Stats


Length

37 minutes

Words per minute

153.45

Word count

5,682

Sentence count

435

Harmful content

Misogyny

12

sentences flagged

Toxicity

62

sentences flagged

Hate speech

33

sentences flagged


Summary

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

On October 7th, a group of Jews lost their lives in a terrorist attack in the streets of the city of Tel Aviv, and the world reacted in horror and disbelief. Anti-Semitism rose to new heights in the wake of the attack. Why is there so much hatred directed towards the Jewish community, especially when we are the victims? Why do people hate us so much, and how can we stop it?

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 .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Once again, the Jewish community is facing a surge of global hatred,
00:00:06.160 particularly escalating after October 7th.
00:00:10.260 Why does the tragic event of October 7th evoke such intense animosity
00:00:18.080 towards us when we're the victims?
00:00:22.540 Exactly.
00:00:23.460 Well, I mean, that's why when I said earlier 0.80
00:00:25.420 that there is something uniquely diabolical about Jew hatred, 1.00
00:00:30.080 that's why, remember, I prefaced it by saying all bigotry is bad, 0.98
00:00:34.100 but the machinery of the Jew-hating virus 0.99
00:00:37.980 is truly this kind of perfect virus to eradicate your soul. 0.98
00:00:44.160 Because, as I said, there is no amount of information 0.97
00:00:47.080 that I can ever share with the Jew-hater where he can find his humanity. 0.98
00:00:52.700 Anything that I share, even when I'm a victim, proves how diabolical I am. 0.94
00:00:57.140 So, for example, many of the Jew-haters have said that 0.64
00:01:00.300 I often refer to my tragic history in Lebanon.
00:01:04.940 Well, first they say I made it up, right?
00:01:07.720 My parents being kidnapped is made up.
00:01:10.960 We were never hated in Lebanon.
00:01:12.760 We didn't leave.
00:01:13.500 So this whole thing is made up.
00:01:15.520 Now, if it's not made up, I'm exaggerating how bad it was
00:01:20.300 because it allows me to garner sympathy points.
00:01:23.380 So there is never a context where the person who hates me says,
00:01:27.960 you know, on this point, I'm with you.
00:01:29.480 Let's hug it out.
00:01:30.700 Anything that I present is further proof of how parasitically evil I am.
00:01:35.440 And so that's what you saw after October 7th. 0.72
00:01:38.420 And they're the ones that created, you know, the don't victim shame unless they're a Jew. 0.87
00:01:45.320 Right.
00:01:46.100 Right.
00:01:46.740 And, you know, I mean, I've had many conversations with Islamic folks,
00:01:51.520 and they'll say, show me where in our canonical sources there is Jew-hatred.
00:01:58.420 And so I go, okay, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here. 0.99
00:02:03.920 And there's like 74,000 things, and then the answer will be fucking Jew. 0.99
00:02:09.820 So you asked for evidence. 0.99
00:02:13.240 I politely retorted with evidence, and your answer is, so that speaks to,
00:02:19.980 remember when I opened up today's talk where I said when I was asked
00:02:23.260 what was the singular most surprising finding about human nature
00:02:28.180 that had surprised me the most, and I said the inability of people
00:02:31.400 to change their minds in light of incoming evidence.
00:02:34.700 Well, no one commits that cognitive bias more than the Jew-hater.
00:02:38.860 Because there's no way for me to ever meet you in a place
00:02:41.720 where we can have a shared sense of meaning,
00:02:45.380 where I can bring my data, you bring your data,
00:02:47.700 and we tough it out, and then we hug it out.
00:02:50.400 There is nothing that I could present that redeems me in your eyes.
00:02:54.900 So that's why it's a unique form of hatred.
00:02:58.500 In your bestseller, The Parasitic Mind,
00:03:01.540 you explore the concept of parasitic ideas that affect, excuse me,
00:03:06.460 and manipulate human thinking.
00:03:08.540 You argue that these parasitic ideas,
00:03:10.980 often rooted in postmodernism, social justice ideology,
00:03:14.120 political correctness, hinder rational thought and critical thinking.
00:03:17.520 You also suggest that these ideas have infiltrated academia, media, society,
00:03:22.740 leading to irrational beliefs and behaviors.
00:03:25.580 What are the three most dangerous ideas,
00:03:28.900 and how do they affect the rise of global anti-Semitism?
00:03:32.900 So the parasitic idea that I refer to as the granddaddy of all parasitic ideas
00:03:40.040 is postmodernism.
00:03:41.640 Because it is the one that purports that there are no objective truths.
00:03:47.820 So once you reject the possibility that there is such a thing as a universal truth,
00:03:54.000 that there are deontological moral codes,
00:03:57.720 so once you allow an extreme form of relativism to creep into,
00:04:02.920 then it's perfectly anti-scientific.
00:04:04.920 That's what allows them to say,
00:04:07.200 you can't let genitalia decide what is man or woman. 1.00
00:04:11.120 Up is down, left.
00:04:12.200 Now what allows this to flourish is postmodernism.
00:04:16.160 Maybe I could tell you a quick story.
00:04:18.720 It'll take about two, three minutes.
00:04:20.100 Is that okay?
00:04:20.920 Some of you may have heard the story,
00:04:23.060 and if you have, that's okay.
00:04:24.660 It's fun to hear it again.
00:04:25.640 And if you haven't, enjoy.
00:04:27.860 So in 2002, I'm answering now the question of all these parasitic ideas,
00:04:32.960 which is the worst one,
00:04:33.980 and I'm going to demonstrate why postmodernism is the worst.
00:04:39.340 So in 2002, one of my doctoral students had just defended his doctoral dissertation,
00:04:45.900 and so we were going out to dinner to celebrate.
00:04:50.000 It was myself, my wife, him, and he was bringing a date.
00:04:56.240 So a few hours before the date, he called me up to give me a heads up.
00:05:01.520 He said, oh, I just want to tell you that the lady that I'm bringing with me tonight 0.79
00:05:06.020 is a graduate student in cultural anthropology, women's studies, and postmodernism. 0.99
00:05:12.140 I said, ah, okay, so the holy trinity of bullshit. 0.99
00:05:18.440 So I said, oh, no, okay, I get it, I get it. 0.99
00:05:21.140 You want me to be on my best behavior.
00:05:23.260 No worries.
00:05:24.380 Mom's the word.
00:05:25.400 We're going to have a great night, which, of course, was a complete lie.
00:05:30.080 So about halfway through the evening, I turned to this lady, and I said,
00:05:34.320 oh, I hear you're a graduate student in postmodernism.
00:05:38.540 She goes, yes, yes.
00:05:40.780 There are no objective truths, yes?
00:05:43.100 She goes, yes, no objective truths.
00:05:44.860 I said, well, I'm an evolutionary psychologist,
00:05:46.840 so I do rely on the premise that there are certain human universals.
00:05:52.120 Do you mind if I propose a human universal, and then you can maybe tell me how you think
00:05:58.380 it's not a truth?
00:05:59.500 She goes, yes, go for it.
00:06:00.860 Now, this is 2002, so this is before the whole transgender craze. 1.00
00:06:04.120 This is 22 years ago.
00:06:05.380 I said, is it not true that within Homo sapiens, only women bear children? 0.94
00:06:12.320 You know, we're a sexually reproducing species with two phenotypes, male, female.
00:06:15.760 I didn't actually say that.
00:06:18.580 I'm saying it here.
00:06:20.180 She said, no, it's not true that only women bear children. 1.00
00:06:24.180 I said, it's not true.
00:06:24.920 How is that?
00:06:26.000 She said, well, within some Japanese tribe off some Japanese island,
00:06:34.380 within the folkloric mythological realm, it is the men who bear children.
00:06:40.740 So by you restricting the conversation to the material biological realm,
00:06:44.960 that's how you keep us barefoot and pregnant. 1.00
00:06:47.140 So once I recovered from the mini stroke that I had,
00:06:50.200 I then turned to her and said, okay, maybe it was too contentious, too corrosive,
00:06:59.300 too poisonous to say something as controversial as only women bear children. 0.87
00:07:04.480 So let me pick a slightly less controversial example.
00:07:06.920 Is it not true that since time immemorial sailors, you know, we come from Phoenicia, right?
00:07:13.260 Lebanese are originally Phoenician.
00:07:15.320 A lot of mercantilism and navigation, right?
00:07:18.680 Sailors.
00:07:19.560 So is it not true that since time immemorial sailors have relied on the cosmological premise
00:07:25.500 that the sun rises in the east and it sets in the west?
00:07:29.280 So there she used a variant of postmodernism called deconstructionism.
00:07:34.660 Jacques Derrida, language creates reality.
00:07:37.680 So she said, what do you mean by east and west?
00:07:40.920 And what do you mean by the sun?
00:07:43.020 That which you call the sun, I might refer to as the dancing hyena.
00:07:47.500 I said, well, fine.
00:07:48.300 The dancing hyena rises in the east and sets in the west.
00:07:51.460 She said, well, I don't play those label games.
00:07:54.540 Now, why have I repeated that story a million times?
00:07:59.020 Because it perfectly captures how insanely corrosive that is.
00:08:04.140 This is a graduate student at a leading university sitting with a professor, and we can't find
00:08:11.360 the shared meaning to say, yes, only one of the two phenotypes within the sexually reproducing
00:08:18.240 species produces kids.
00:08:20.200 And there is such a thing as the sun.
00:08:22.800 So once we can't do that, this is why in the parasitic mind I refer to it as intellectual
00:08:28.420 terrorism, right?
00:08:30.160 Because that's what it is, right?
00:08:31.480 The 9-11 hijackers flew planes onto buildings. 0.99
00:08:36.220 Postmodernism flies planes of bullshit onto our edifices of reason. 0.99
00:08:41.160 That's what it is. 0.99
00:08:42.040 And so you end up with thousands and thousands of students who not only are completely brainwashed
00:08:49.260 so that they, how could you be a scientist if you don't believe that there's a truth
00:08:52.720 to be discovered?
00:08:53.780 Now, truth in science is provisional, right?
00:08:56.400 What we thought was true 300 years ago, we revise, we update with evidence.
00:09:02.460 But we certainly go with the premise that epistemologically speaking, that there is a truth.
00:09:07.860 Once you get rid of that, then all the other parasitic ideas can easily flourish.
00:09:12.900 So that's why postmodernism is the granddaddy.
00:09:16.740 Imagine her calling Belle Canada.
00:09:18.620 And saying, hi, my phone's not working.
00:09:23.180 I don't know what you mean by phone.
00:09:26.120 They do apply labels in their life.
00:09:28.960 Right, exactly.
00:09:29.860 But in theory, nothing exists.
00:09:32.620 Well, nothing exists. 0.99
00:09:33.820 Well, how about when they take the plane to go to their bullshit postmodernist conference? 0.92
00:09:38.700 That plane is based on certain principles that appear to be universally valid. 0.98
00:09:43.440 So painful.
00:09:44.100 So you advocate for a return to reason and logic.
00:09:49.400 I wish everybody would, an evidence-based thinking to combat spread of parasitic ideas.
00:09:57.200 What is the first step?
00:09:59.620 Like, even just now in your presentation, you said, you know, we got to wake up, we got to wake up, we got to do something.
00:10:04.480 What something?
00:10:05.380 There are many different things.
00:10:08.900 As I said, you can be engaged in the debates, right?
00:10:12.740 What allows these ideas to flourish is when they don't get blowback, right? 0.99
00:10:17.380 So if I'm a professor and I get up and I say, you know that women can have penises, right? 1.00
00:10:22.480 That's progressive science. 0.99
00:10:24.200 But by the way, I've had heated exchanges on social media with gynecologists. 0.74
00:10:31.340 I mean, you don't need gynecologists to confirm whether only women have a cervix. 1.00
00:10:37.720 But let's use the imprimatur of them being gynecologists. 0.99
00:10:41.220 They chastised me for saying that Dylan Mulvaney, you know, the woman, Dylan Mulvaney, with a penis and testicles, that it was ridiculous that I was saying that this was a man. 0.99
00:10:56.040 And they literally pulled the card, well, you didn't go to medical school. 0.99
00:11:00.160 Exactly, because the 117 billion people who've existed on earth until 15 minutes ago seem to be able to get through the conundrum of choosing a sexual partner of the right sex.
00:11:15.360 But 15 minutes ago, a gynecologist explained to me that in progressive medicine, that's absolutely false. 1.00
00:11:21.940 So if that person, if I am a student in that class with that idiot, I'm going to say, are you insane? 1.00
00:11:29.740 Are you on crack? 1.00
00:11:31.180 Right? 1.00
00:11:31.560 So now, you don't have to be so spicy, but just don't let bullshit flourish. 0.99
00:11:36.800 Stop it at its source. 0.91
00:11:38.260 So if you do nothing but that, it already makes it harder for bad ideas to proliferate.
00:11:43.880 You hear that, everybody?
00:11:45.360 You have kids at home?
00:11:48.660 Teach them. 0.99
00:11:49.620 Explain to them that the professors are all psychotic.
00:11:51.940 Or just don't send them to university in Canada. 0.53
00:11:54.180 That's another option.
00:11:56.080 Many argue that Israel existed in the 1930s, the Holocaust wouldn't have happened.
00:12:03.620 A lot of people say this, for obvious reasons.
00:12:07.860 What do you say to the Jews who are more aligned with their political agenda and their political affiliation with the left or the right, the left,
00:12:17.380 over their own Jewish identity?
00:12:21.260 And if Israel were to disappear, what do you think would happen to the world Jewry?
00:12:31.040 The existential crisis with Jews is a perennial problem that will always be there. 1.00
00:12:36.040 It's always nice to know that Israel exists, because if I can't turn anywhere, at least I know that I can go there.
00:12:42.460 So in that sense, there's an existential buffer.
00:12:45.000 But whether Israel exists or not, the cancer of Jew hatred is just definitional to so many people.
00:12:54.620 Now, I could tell you, in an Islamic context, in the Middle East, so some of you have heard me propose the game sixth degree of Jew. 0.89
00:13:05.140 Do you know?
00:13:05.380 So the sixth degree of Jew is, I give you any calamity, and you've got up to six degrees of causal link to blame it on the Jew. 0.97
00:13:14.440 So if I say, an Amazonian fraud just died in the Amazon, blame the Jews, go. 0.97
00:13:20.640 And usually people come up in fewer than six steps.
00:13:24.280 Well, in the context of the Middle East, here is usually how the interaction goes.
00:13:29.360 Hi, Ahmed. 1.00
00:13:30.540 Hi, let's kill the Jews. 1.00
00:13:33.140 Right? 1.00
00:13:33.300 I mean, of course, I'm being a bit facetious.
00:13:36.580 So now that reflex exists whether Israel exists or not.
00:13:42.720 So it really is a battle for the soul of people. 0.99
00:13:46.840 If I am taught from the age of zero that my central definitional identity is to hate the diabolical, parasitic, scheming Jew, 1.00
00:13:57.600 then it's not surprising that I'll grow up to be like that. 0.97
00:14:00.140 By the way, when I teach consumer psychology, one of the lectures we talk about, when is it moral to target children in advertising?
00:14:10.320 And usually the moral and developmental argument is that you could only target children when they've reached the cognitive developmental stage where they know that they are being persuaded about something.
00:14:25.600 When they don't know that, they can't erect a cognitive and emotional defense against your persuasive intent.
00:14:33.460 So from this side of the mouth, we say, don't target children to sell them cereal until they're 12. 1.00
00:14:41.600 But from this side of the mouth, when the baby comes out of the womb, you go, don't forget, Jews should be killed. 1.00
00:14:49.160 Right? 1.00
00:14:49.380 And that's just part of my religion.
00:14:51.040 So it's OK.
00:14:51.560 So that's the problem is that you need to have a cataclysmic change in how people educate their children that it doesn't become natural for people to hate the Jews.
00:15:03.100 I think also what we're seeing here, especially in our country, we're seeing the defense of Islamists and Islamism more than Islam.
00:15:12.140 Islamism is the religion, Islamism, Islamist is the political kind of arm of that. 0.57
00:15:18.080 And you see that the Islamists are the ones that are getting the Marxists and the socialists and the communists. 0.99
00:15:26.080 Do you see that getting worse?
00:15:28.380 I mean, we're seeing in the rallies, the numbers seem a little smaller.
00:15:31.500 We've gone to the encampment.
00:15:32.900 Some of our friends here, Salman Sima, he's one of my closest allies, Daniel Borman, a few others.
00:15:38.100 We went there and we blasted the national anthem at 3 in the morning.
00:15:42.840 And another friend named Ryan Belrose, who is one of the leaders of the Métis Aboriginal groups, who's six foot four.
00:15:55.480 And there was about, what, five of us?
00:15:57.640 And we just stood there and we were surrounded by about 100 of them, 140 of them.
00:16:01.540 But even their numbers are starting to dwindle.
00:16:03.680 We saw yesterday the UJA walk.
00:16:05.440 There was like none of them.
00:16:07.200 Where do they all go?
00:16:08.500 They all just, I'm bored.
00:16:10.340 I don't want to do this anymore.
00:16:11.480 Sorry, the ones defending our cause or the ones against it?
00:16:15.120 Again, so yesterday there was close to 50,000 people that showed up for the Walk for Israel, the biggest ever.
00:16:20.620 And I'm like, oh, this is, you know, everyone's getting nervous.
00:16:22.900 Everyone's nervous.
00:16:23.500 What's going to happen?
00:16:24.200 And I'm like, this is it?
00:16:25.980 Right.
00:16:26.240 These little, like, white kids in Kefias, no way, like 35,000?
00:16:29.940 No, but two points, if I may.
00:16:32.040 Number one, demography is truly destiny.
00:16:35.060 And so it's only a matter of time where this meeting becomes impossible to hold once the demographic changes are beyond a certain point.
00:16:45.780 Right.
00:16:46.240 So, you know, zero to 2 percent, we're just an exotic minority with cool hair scarf.
00:16:52.520 Three to five percent, we're a bit more politically engaged, but we're peaceful.
00:16:56.380 We're loving.
00:16:57.340 Six to 10 percent, we set up Sharia zones and so on. 0.98
00:17:00.880 Once you get past a certain point, it's finished.
00:17:03.380 So, you know, the Taliban, when they were asked about time, they said the Americans wear all the watches, we have all the time in the world, right?
00:17:13.700 So demography is truly destiny.
00:17:16.300 And once you pass a certain tipping point, I promise you, this won't be able to happen.
00:17:21.280 Right now, the numbers are still that you can do it and you can feel secure in the dynamics of the numbers.
00:17:26.720 In five years, 50 years, 100 years, you won't be able to do that.
00:17:29.960 So that's number one.
00:17:30.600 Second point, if not to go against what you said, there is no Islamism versus Islam.
00:17:38.240 Islamism is the great part of Islam.
00:17:42.380 Usually you talk about it as if Islamism is some variant that has nothing to do.
00:17:48.460 It's, you know, Islam is here.
00:17:50.720 No, about 10 percent of Islam is the spiritual element, right?
00:17:55.120 Sufis are very spiritual and they wouldn't harm a fly.
00:17:59.160 But Islam itself is Islamism. 0.99
00:18:03.060 It's a political doctrine of supremacy.
00:18:07.120 We will have peace in the world when we are all united, inshallah, under the flag of Allah, right?
00:18:13.960 So it is Islamism. 0.98
00:18:15.920 They're indistinguishable.
00:18:17.000 So it's not a good idea to constantly create a false schism between these two.
00:18:21.580 They're one of the same.
00:18:22.340 How important is it to try to gain awareness from a lot of our Muslim allies?
00:18:36.480 There's many people in the community who are Muslim who are, you know, the people like Raheel Reza.
00:18:42.480 Even Salman, you know, Salman Sima, he's Muslim.
00:18:47.120 They stand with us.
00:18:48.100 They understand the importance.
00:18:49.220 How do we encourage more people to kind of see through this facade?
00:18:54.880 Specifically from the Muslim community?
00:18:56.820 I'll begin by saying that some of the staunchest defenders of the Western tradition are typically immigrants. 1.00
00:19:05.460 Now, in some cases, they might be of a Muslim background, Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
00:19:10.400 In other cases, they're not Muslim.
00:19:13.160 I'm not Muslim, but I'm from the Middle East.
00:19:15.020 And the reason is not because, you know, we're more prophetic.
00:19:18.820 It's because we've sampled from the full panoply, from the full buffets of societies,
00:19:24.200 so that we know that the Western tradition is not the default value.
00:19:28.440 And therefore, when we come to the West, having sampled what's out there,
00:19:32.620 we say, guys, you better be careful because we come from there and we know what's going to hit you.
00:19:37.560 And so it's not surprising to me that some of the biggest champions of the West, of Israel,
00:19:44.040 might be Islamic or immigrants from a non-Islamic background.
00:19:49.700 Again, because we know what's out there.
00:19:51.880 The average Canadian or American thinks that that's what the world is,
00:19:55.960 whereas in reality, the West is an anomaly.
00:19:58.720 It's a bleep in history.
00:20:00.380 Much of history is not what the West is made of.
00:20:03.500 That's interesting.
00:20:05.460 I'm going to skip that because I think you kind of covered this.
00:20:07.840 How do you personally stay informed and engaged with developments in the Middle East?
00:20:14.720 What's your go-to?
00:20:16.520 Well, I'm a...
00:20:17.160 And don't say Twitter because you're friends with Elon Musk, okay?
00:20:19.840 Like, really, where do you get your information?
00:20:22.800 There are stories that I could tell you about me and Elon that, of course, I will not share, but...
00:20:27.820 That's my next question.
00:20:28.800 You're going to have to share with everybody here because that's what we're doing today.
00:20:31.500 You know, I've taken out a text, I show it to my wife, and I go, you're married to the real James Bond.
00:20:41.600 Because it really, my life is really...
00:20:44.620 But, you see, for all of the costs that I incur, the death threats, the...
00:20:49.580 But it has allowed me to get to know and be exposed to people.
00:20:56.780 Not just the Elon Musk.
00:20:58.120 I mean, I've got to know my musical hero from my childhood, the lead singer of a group called The Stylistics,
00:21:05.740 which is a part of a group called...
00:21:07.540 Do you know the group?
00:21:09.400 So, they're part of a genre of...
00:21:12.680 It's called the Philly sound.
00:21:15.180 The gentleman is about 20 years older than me.
00:21:17.800 Well, he became a fan.
00:21:19.120 I became friends with the owner of Inter Miami, the team that Messi plays for, right?
00:21:27.440 Now, I say this not to name drop, but because with doing what I do, which is not be a stay-in-your-lane professor,
00:21:34.800 it has allowed me to have such a rich...
00:21:38.300 So, if for no other reason, if you don't want to get engaged because you want to save the West,
00:21:43.260 which should be a good enough reason, there are great benefits to being out there.
00:21:47.700 Yes, there are death threats and you might get fired, but you get exposed to people like I am here today
00:21:53.120 that had I just been a stay-in-your-lane professor, I wouldn't have had one millionth of the influence that I have today.
00:22:00.200 That's amazing.
00:22:04.600 No, don't ask me any more questions about Elon Musk.
00:22:07.120 We'll talk about that later.
00:22:10.360 I wanted to ask you, this is really one of the second-last kind of questions because we've got to wrap it up,
00:22:16.280 but you're going back to teaching in an insane environment of hatred.
00:22:24.640 I know what people say to you.
00:22:26.340 I know the emails, like you shared some, and I've seen it.
00:22:28.680 Are you scared?
00:22:30.820 I am.
00:22:31.800 So, I'll tell you a few stories.
00:22:34.880 Last, so this semester I was on sabbatical, so I wasn't teaching.
00:22:40.200 Last semester, so when October 7th happened, I was still in classes.
00:22:46.000 My wife was so concerned for me that she was coming on campus with me,
00:22:51.880 walking behind, you know, she's a beautiful five-foot, she's not very, you know, she's not an imposing-looking person,
00:22:59.080 but she just wanted to at least have a buffer so that if someone's going to come and knife me,
00:23:04.500 she's the last person behind me.
00:23:06.460 She would come to the lecture, sit by the door, just to see if anybody was going to come in.
00:23:13.740 Now, the fact that she has that reflex gives you a sense of how dire the situation is,
00:23:20.420 and yet I get the administrator telling me, Jew hatred?
00:23:23.720 There is no Jew hatred here.
00:23:24.960 There is absolutely no Jew hatred.
00:23:26.860 So, yes, I am very concerned.
00:23:28.660 Again, look, I was telling someone earlier that, you know, out of 100 people I meet, 99 are perfectly lovely,
00:23:36.060 but it just takes one person to come at me out of the blue,
00:23:39.740 and the demographic reality at Concordia is so outrageous today
00:23:44.300 that it just takes one guy who's super offended at something that I tweeted, and I'm dead.
00:23:50.420 Oh, God, okay.
00:23:55.200 Yeah, because we're, you know, even as a small little organization, we get threats,
00:23:59.660 and we're dealing with it.
00:24:01.380 I think to myself, people like you, people like Douglas Murray, Elan Levy, whoever,
00:24:06.100 how do you deal with it?
00:24:07.440 How do you mentally deal with it?
00:24:10.740 Is it just with levity?
00:24:12.600 So, levity is actually, so there are two reasons why, if I think about it, why humor appeals to me.
00:24:20.260 I mean, it's just, it's part of my nature.
00:24:22.660 Number one, it's a very powerful persuasion technique.
00:24:27.060 So, oftentimes when I get approached by fans in the street,
00:24:30.340 and I almost feel offended by it, it won't be, oh, I love this paper you wrote, or this.
00:24:36.280 It'll be, oh, I love when you don the purple wing and you self-flagellate.
00:24:41.220 But what that shows is that humor is memorable.
00:24:46.020 Humor changes people's opinions, right?
00:24:48.680 And so if I'm in the game of trying to change opinions,
00:24:52.180 I will use anything within my arsenal of weaponry to try to convince you.
00:24:57.260 Sometimes I'll be professorial, sometimes I'll be funny,
00:25:00.060 sometimes I hide under the desk to pretend I'm feigning that Donald Trump came to power.
00:25:05.020 So I'll use anything within my power to hopefully get the message across.
00:25:08.760 But I also use levity as a pressure cooker valve for me. 0.99
00:25:13.420 If I don't make fun of this, then I might as well put a bullet in my head, right? 0.99
00:25:16.940 Because what's the point? 0.98
00:25:18.480 So I think it's for these two reasons.
00:25:20.640 It's persuasive, and it helps me cope with it.
00:25:23.020 I should also add that something that really helps me is having the sanctity of a happy home
00:25:30.400 so that the world out there is ugly.
00:25:33.840 Once I enter my home and it's just my children and it's my wife,
00:25:37.840 if that were not there, I think it would make it a lot harder.
00:25:41.380 Because then I'm fighting everywhere, right?
00:25:43.020 But if I fight out there, but then it's delimited, and here it's Shangri-La,
00:25:48.220 that helps me be grounded.
00:25:51.600 Yeah.
00:25:56.640 So when are you moving to Florida, Texas, or Israel?
00:26:00.300 Yes.
00:26:00.960 So let's take each and turn.
00:26:02.120 I heard you said you were going to be leaving.
00:26:03.780 You want to get out of here.
00:26:04.760 I am.
00:26:04.860 I'm desperate.
00:26:05.420 So if any rich billionaire philanthropist want to offer me an exit strategy,
00:26:11.580 I'll be waiting for you.
00:26:13.660 Florida almost came to fruition recently because there is a small college
00:26:21.880 that some of you may have heard of on the west coast of Florida
00:26:25.280 that historically was quite woke.
00:26:28.320 But recently, the DeSantis gang came in and kind of de-woke-ified it.
00:26:33.660 And so they were very interested in making me a tenured offer, a professorship.
00:26:41.180 But as so often happens with these things, it failed because of money.
00:26:46.260 They weren't able to meet my demands.
00:26:48.600 So that's Florida.
00:26:50.840 Texas, there are things in the works.
00:26:52.780 I can't talk about them.
00:26:53.720 We'll see.
00:26:54.820 And Israel, you know, when we were leaving Lebanon,
00:27:00.380 my parents were having a fight in terms of where we should go to.
00:27:05.700 My mother wanted to move to Canada because we already had an aunt there 1.00
00:27:09.800 and because we spoke French from Lebanon and Montreal is French-speaking.
00:27:15.100 My dad was very keen on moving to Israel.
00:27:18.800 My mother won that argument. 0.71
00:27:21.040 And the reason for it is because she didn't want all the kids to serve in the military. 0.99
00:27:26.660 Now, I'm a parent, so I'm almost thinking, even as much as I am, you know, pro-Israel and I'm a fighter,
00:27:34.960 I don't know if I like the idea of my son or daughter walking into Gaza 0.58
00:27:39.180 to try to deal with the noble, peaceful ones.
00:27:42.120 So we'll see.
00:27:43.080 It's horrifying.
00:27:44.220 Okay.
00:27:44.620 We want to take maybe just a couple of questions because it is getting late.
00:27:47.780 If anybody has a few questions or anything they want, just come to the front here.
00:27:51.080 I'll give you the microphone.
00:27:52.540 And we'll just do a few.
00:27:54.100 We don't want to spend an hour.
00:27:56.300 It's warm in here.
00:27:57.940 Anybody?
00:27:58.740 Go ahead.
00:27:59.080 I think we'd all agree it was a really entertaining and interesting discussion tonight.
00:28:13.460 I wanted you to speak, if you could, to the performative role of social media
00:28:18.800 and how the parasitic mind is kind of amplified by this desire to see more better, more just,
00:28:29.680 more everything than your neighbor.
00:28:34.740 So virtue signaling is, of course, something that many people succumb to.
00:28:43.000 But social media can be used for good or bad, right?
00:28:46.360 So for all of the virtue signalers that are using social media to do the performative stuff
00:28:52.140 that you're saying, there are others like me or maybe Douglas Murray that are using social media
00:28:57.040 to also spread our message, right?
00:28:58.780 I would have never had the voice that I had had I restricted my voice to only publishing
00:29:03.660 and peer-reviewed articles in academic journals.
00:29:07.200 20 people would have read them.
00:29:08.780 So social media is not inherently good or bad.
00:29:12.360 It can be used for nefarious purposes or it can be used for very good purposes.
00:29:16.360 So I'm just coming back to the question you just answered.
00:29:20.920 Previously, with prior technological foundations for communication,
00:29:26.200 there was always a gatekeeping role for the state.
00:29:30.900 When you remove that and when you have these forces coming together
00:29:35.680 and really being parasites on social networks, you know, like X,
00:29:41.920 that's very threatening to democracy.
00:29:48.180 So I'm just wondering how you balance that.
00:29:50.700 How do you?
00:29:51.480 So maybe I'll answer it in the following sense.
00:29:55.620 What are my views about how absolutist freedom of speech should be?
00:30:00.640 And this may surprise the crowd here.
00:30:04.200 I'm so much of a free speech absolutist that I believe in the right of Holocaust deniers 0.73
00:30:10.080 to spread arguably what is the most insulting and offensive thing that you can say,
00:30:16.100 which is I reject that the Holocaust ever happened. 0.84
00:30:19.300 It's historically clearly validated.
00:30:22.200 It was a horrifying historical event.
00:30:24.260 What could be more offensive than saying it never happened?
00:30:28.040 Yet in a free society, you have to tolerate the falsehood spreaders. 1.00
00:30:33.100 You have to tolerate the imbeciles. 1.00
00:30:34.580 You have to tolerate the racists. 1.00
00:30:36.480 And so in that sense, I don't think that there is a place for the government to come in and say,
00:30:41.140 because then that truly is a slippery slope, right?
00:30:43.860 Don't criticize Islam because that marginalizes Muslims.
00:30:47.480 Well, no, then we're dead, right? 0.91
00:30:48.940 So you can criticize Judaism. 0.99
00:30:52.640 You could say it's a crock of nonsense. 1.00
00:30:55.100 You could say Israel is a genocidal state. 0.92
00:30:57.680 Hopefully, I come up with better arguments to counter you.
00:31:00.360 What you can't do is say, let's meet at the corner of Yonge Street and Seventh, 1.00
00:31:05.880 and when they're coming out of the synagogue, let's kill those Jews. 0.97
00:31:09.120 So it really is a case of as long as you don't involve in what is a reasonable, 0.99
00:31:14.160 direct incitement to violence, all bets are off.
00:31:16.720 You could say whatever you want, I'll hopefully beat your arguments.
00:31:20.740 You have been a professor at Concordia University since the 90s, according to Wikipedia.
00:31:25.440 94.
00:31:27.000 94.
00:31:27.680 Can you talk about the violent riots in Concordia back in 2002, 20 years ago,
00:31:33.960 that resulted in the cancellation of Netanyahu's speech there, as well as property damage,
00:31:40.820 and compare that to what's been going on at the same campus now post-October 7th?
00:31:44.680 What's changed was the same, which time was worse for Jews to be on campus at Concordia, 0.73
00:31:50.920 20 years ago or today, and how safe will Jewish students be in Concordia 20 years from now?
00:31:56.940 Right.
00:31:57.700 So let me first address the 20 years ago with Netanyahu.
00:32:01.160 At the time when Netanyahu came to Concordia, I had taken a two-year visiting professorship at University of California, Irvine.
00:32:10.440 So I wasn't at Concordia, and boy was I thanking the stars that I wasn't there in 2002.
00:32:16.120 And the plan was to never return to Concordia.
00:32:18.380 In terms of is it more dangerous for Jews then or now, definitely now, and it will be more dangerous in 20 years. 0.84
00:32:27.080 Now, that's not so much specific to Concordia.
00:32:29.480 I mean, there are unique dynamics at Concordia, but again, it refers to what I mentioned earlier, demography is destiny.
00:32:36.160 Look, 25 years ago, I literally remember, I mean, not to the day, but roughly to the year, the first time I ever saw a woman wearing a freedom veil, that's what I call it,
00:32:51.320 was because nothing is more liberating than erasing the identity of women because you liberate them from the male gaze.
00:32:59.520 That's what you learn in feminist studies classes at Harvard. 1.00
00:33:03.760 But anyways, so in 1998, I think, was the first time that I saw a veiled woman in Montreal.
00:33:10.920 And I remember it was an interesting thing because I had gone from 1975 to 1998 having never seen a single veiled woman.
00:33:22.880 Since then, if I walk out of my house, out of the first 20 women that I see, 12 will be veiled. 1.00
00:33:33.080 And that will hold true anywhere in Montreal.
00:33:37.160 So, is it going to be safer in 20 years for Concordia students?
00:33:42.020 No, but that's not because Concordia is specific.
00:33:44.980 That's because of Montreal, Quebec, Canada, because of the immigration policy.
00:33:48.880 My question is, with the Middle East, you had mentioned that Jew hatred is ingrained, has always been ingrained in Middle East culture, okay?
00:34:00.240 And that has affected, that has now spread to the West.
00:34:05.280 What did some place like the UAE do where they were able to change the culture where now, as a Jew, I feel safer walking through Abu Dhabi and Dubai than I do anywhere in Europe?
00:34:18.380 Because the people at the top of that society have taken a very strategic and pragmatic decision to try to quell that, right?
00:34:29.000 But they're certainly not relying on canonical sources to support that.
00:34:34.400 They've said, look, we have to have an openness to the world, and you're not going to be able to be fully open if you keep being mired in that Jew hatred.
00:34:44.000 And to their credit, they've opened up.
00:34:46.300 And so, to my earlier point, if there is a way, so, for example, I've often heard all sorts of Islamic reformers, and you might have even mentioned some of those names.
00:34:55.100 I love the sentiment of trying to reform Islam. 0.95
00:34:59.280 You know what is the chances of that succeeding?
00:35:02.260 Zero.
00:35:02.720 Because in Islam, the lens of reformation can't take hold, because every letter and every syllable is the inerrant final word of God, to never be changed in perpetuity. 0.91
00:35:18.680 So how can you reform that which is perfect?
00:35:20.660 So literally, the only way you'd be able to reform Islam is if someone comes up with a new, do you know what abrogation is? 1.00
00:35:29.380 Does anybody hear?
00:35:30.500 So abrogation is the, so in the Quran, you may have two statements, A and not A.
00:35:39.320 How could the two statements be contradictory?
00:35:41.480 Well, the way you solve that is through abrogation, meaning the later statement abrogates the earlier statement.
00:35:49.520 So the only way you could reform Islam is if someone magically comes up with some new abrogation that abrogates all of the baked hate inside the Quran, 1.00
00:36:01.720 and then you could have something like the UAE take a fool everywhere. 0.99
00:36:06.620 But until that happens, until you raise your children straight out of the womb to hate the parasitic Jew, we're in trouble. 1.00
00:36:14.240 Thank you, everybody. 0.99
00:36:15.300 We can't keep going with questions.
00:36:16.880 It's getting a bit late.
00:36:17.680 I appreciate you guys standing here.
00:36:19.240 I want to thank everybody for coming.
00:36:20.680 I want to thank Gassad, our guests.
00:36:23.220 Thank you so much.
00:36:24.800 Thank you, sir.
00:36:27.320 That was good.
00:36:28.180 Thank you so much, everybody.
00:36:29.340 Thank you.
00:36:31.720 Thank you.