Ghat Saad weighs in on an anti-Woke Professor Michael Rechtenwald's attack on Israel's use of disproportionate force in the Gaza conflict, and offers his perspective on the concept of "proportionality."
00:00:00.600Hi everybody, this is Ghat Saad. Sunday evening, two days after my birthday. I had hoped very much to be away from all of the craziness on social media.
00:00:14.260I was successful in doing it for the day of my birthday, Friday, October 13th, but since I've been sucked in to all sorts of issues.
00:00:24.600So today I thought I would just weigh in or summarize some of the positions that I took today on social media and maybe expand on some of these.
00:00:33.980So first I had an exchange with Michael Rechtenwald, who is very much of an anti-woke professor.
00:00:42.540He's been on my show and I recently went on his.
00:00:45.320And I had put up a survey where I asked people, you know, if you had to choose between living in Gaza or living in Tel Aviv, let's say, which would you prefer?
00:00:59.400And of course what I meant by that is not today if you had to move.
00:01:03.180I meant it as a which of the two societies and the values that are enshrined within those two societies would you prefer to be a part of?
00:01:11.500But Michael apparently chose to ignore what the obvious gist of my question was, and he answered in a rather aggressive manner, given the fact that we know each other personally, and I consider him certainly a friend or friendly.
00:01:28.520He said, you know, what is this sophistry, you know, the Palestinians are being eradicated in concentration camps, and it's a, you know, disproportionate force that Israel is using and so on.
00:01:42.780And so I had responded to that, and which got me to weigh in very briefly on the issue of proportionality.
00:01:50.520So just generally speaking, so let's suppose that someone attacks you with a, you know, a bunch of people attack you with knives or with a samurai, and you have a gun and you shoot them.
00:02:04.820Then should people say, well, that wasn't really fair because they came at you with a machete, with a Molotov cocktail, but you attacked their Molotov cocktail making factory with tanks.
00:02:18.400That's unfair. That's not proportional.
00:02:21.440So that's one kind of comments that you often hear in this discussion in the current conflict in the Middle East.
00:02:29.420You know, Israel's got air force, and they've got all kinds of heavy weaponry, and it's unfair that they would be using it to, you know, attack those who seek to exterminate them.
00:03:02.540But for now, let me pose the following three questions.
00:03:05.100So number one, should Israel kill and rape an exact equal amount of people within each demographic group?
00:03:10.820So if 40 women were raped in the music festival, Israel should go to Gaza, find a similar music festival, and rape 40 women there, in which case it will be equal.
00:03:25.040Number two, should Israel not level any buildings because Hamas did not destroy many buildings?
00:03:33.440So one thing that you see is there's all this destruction of infrastructure in Gaza, and then people say that's so lacking in proportionality.
00:03:41.740You're leveling all of these buildings.
00:03:45.160So should they only go in on paragliders to use the same kind of weaponry and arrive at the same number of killings or rapes or killings of babies?
00:03:55.640And then number three, I said, more generally, what is the exact calculus by which the proportionality will be quantified?
00:04:01.840How do we, of course, no one ever talks about proportionality for any other conflict, but Israel has to be held to a truly impossible moral standard, right?
00:04:12.320So if they're constantly attacked, they retort or they reply in a way that results in greater losses on the other side than they are being lacking in proportionality.
00:04:26.660And then some super fancy, you know, students look at my list, writes and says, for God's sakes, you don't even understand the concept of proportionality.
00:04:36.540And he gives me some philosophical treaties about what proportionality means in a militaristic sense.
00:04:46.400I have socks that are substantially more cognitively acute than the guy who is taking me on some, I don't know who he is exactly.
00:04:55.620But the way people use proportionality colloquially is exactly how I was responding.
00:05:03.340Why are you leveling a whole bunch of buildings?
00:07:36.260The Mossad is too sophisticated to not have known about the attacks.
00:07:40.100They are in on it as this will allow Israel to met huge misery on residents of Gaza.
00:07:44.720The Jews are so diabolical and so shifty, so crafty, that how could there have been such intelligence failure from the Mossad
00:07:55.080so that these guys could come in and, you know, butcher 1300 people.
00:07:59.880The only way that that could have happened is because they wanted this to happen so that then they could go in and now really seek revenge on the people in Gaza.
00:09:56.660Because, what do you expect people to do when they have been, you know, ethnically cleansed for the past 75 years?
00:10:03.880Even though the population gets higher, and even though they are in concentration camps, where, from what we know, the obesity rate is very high.
00:10:14.480Usually, in concentration camps, you think of people who are malnutritioned, who don't have food, who can't.
00:12:33.960If Jews are despised across countless countries and many time periods, perhaps they are the problem.
00:12:42.060So I received tons from both noble people and from, you know, the traditional white nationalists and neo-Nazis and so on saying, usually they give the number 109.
00:13:32.100The Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, way before the Israeli state was created, was hooking up with his buddy Adolf Hitler.
00:13:41.540I shared a thing from the Hoover Institution from earlier, you know, from Stanford University, where he's hooking up with Hitler to, you know, finalize the Jewish problem, you know, in Palestine, before Israel was created.
00:13:55.600So the Grand Mufti must have had this incredible ability to foreshadow the future, and he was preempting the final solution in the Middle East of eradicating the Jews before the Israeli state came to be.
00:14:10.040So that one would have to explain, how is it that the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who was a massive genocidal Jew hater, was hooking up with Hitler to try to solve the Jewish problem before the creation of Israel?
00:15:34.460Palestinian misery has nothing to do with its leadership.
00:15:38.860So, the idea is, there's, I can't, I don't know the exact number, but it's many, many, many, many, many billions of dollars that have been given to the Palestinian cause.
00:23:47.760So if we look at the map in the region, never mind other parts of the world, in that region, the much, much broader map, and you look historically at the societies that constitute countries there,
00:24:04.500Is there a religion in the area that has engaged in breathtaking conquests of colonization?
00:24:58.080Then how come the other forms of colonialism in that region that cover a much broader landmass, much larger number of cultures, much number of groups of people,
00:25:12.020why is that not something that you fight against or talk about?
00:25:17.940Finally, what I wanted to talk about is, and here I'm kind of torn.
00:25:22.980I saw a ongoing debate or kind of sniping back and forth between Megyn Kelly, whom I love dearly.
00:25:33.660She's fantastic in every possible way.
00:25:36.000And Candace Owens, who is someone who's been on my show.
00:25:39.000And they were fighting over something that Bill Ackman, some of you may know him.
00:25:44.640He's a hedge fund billionaire who basically was arguing that, you know, companies should take note of all of the students who have signed on to the Harvard,
00:25:57.160you know, the 31 associations of students that sort of were not condemning what happened with Hamas and so on.
00:26:04.740And he's saying, hey, just make sure to not hire such students because, you know, maybe you don't want people who hold those views.
00:26:14.340And then Megan and then Vivek Ramaswamy, who's also been on my show, maybe I'll talk about him at some future time, came out and, you know, was equivocating.
00:26:30.040Well, you know, we don't want to be cancel culture.
00:26:32.460And, you know, this is maybe a form, you know, people change.
00:26:35.520And these are just kids who, you know, are navigating through these issues.
00:26:39.040And then Candace Owens was of that opinion as well.
00:26:42.240She said, well, look, I used to be very different in my political views and now I've grown up and changed.
00:26:48.500So we need to afford people an opportunity to change.
00:27:28.540Cancel culture is saying, hey, you took a position pro this or anti that.
00:27:34.380Well, I'm going to now go and occupationally harass you and make sure that you're fired.
00:27:38.700I'm going to make sure that you can't speak because your position is so beyond the pale that you shouldn't ever be afforded, you know, that little thing called freedom of speech.
00:27:50.280But frankly, it's a tough issue because I can truly see how we need to allow people the opportunity to change.
00:27:59.280But people could hold certain positions that are so execrable in their nature that you may not want to be associated with them.
00:28:07.340So anyways, let me know what your thoughts.
00:28:09.920Again, I weigh in on all these issues from a truly, I hope, dispassionate perspective.
00:28:17.840Yes, of course, I do have family in Israel.
00:28:21.660Yes, of course, I've got my personal history.
00:28:24.140But I'm someone who has theory of mind.
00:28:25.980I recognize that suffering is not restricted to the Israelis.
00:28:29.600It's not restricted to the Palestinians.
00:28:33.100Any person who's innocent and suffers, who suffers a loss that is meted on them when they're completely innocent of what's happening is a tragedy.