Dr. Ghat Saad is a professor of marketing, an evolutionary behavioral scientist, and the best-selling author of The Parasitic Mind, a book that explains how dangerous ideas spread like mental parasites and damage our society from the inside. He also wrote the upcoming book, Suicidal Empathy, where he shows how blind compassion and political correctness can actually destroy a nation s ability to survive.
00:03:22.500You know, people usually construe Lebanon or old Lebanon as, you know, the Paris of the Middle East.
00:03:29.160And it's a place of tolerance and progressivism and so on.
00:03:33.080I mean, the answer is yes, but in the context of the Middle East, right, we tolerate you until we decide not to tolerate you, right?
00:03:41.760You're safe until you're no longer safe, just like a heart attack, right?
00:03:45.040You're walking and jogging and you're perfectly healthy and then, oops, you're dead.
00:03:48.960And so that's really what happens to usually all dimmis in the middle, in Islamic lands.
00:03:57.020Dimmi, for your viewers who may not know, is a Quranic concept, an Arabic term, that refers to religious minorities that are not even second class, third class citizens under Islamic rule.
00:04:11.960Look how nice we are as Islamic overlords.
00:04:15.160We tolerate you and we don't kill you and you just have to mind your business.
00:04:29.660And so, of course, eventually that all your welcome always runs out and then you have to put on really good running shoes and outrun those who want to behead you.
00:04:40.420But I discuss in The Parasitic Mind, in the first chapter, so that people get a sense of what it is to grow up as a religious minority in the Middle East, I explained how endemic Jew hatred was, even in a place like, quote, modern Lebanon.
00:04:56.940So I tell the story of when that was probably the first time that I ever saw or I remember Jew hatred when Gamal Abdel Nasser in 1970, the Egyptian president passed away.
00:05:09.160He was really revered in the Middle East because he was a pan-Arabist.
00:05:14.360He's trying to unify all the Arabs into one group.
00:05:19.120And so he was loved even, of course, in Lebanon.
00:05:21.600And when he passed away, as often happens in the Middle East, people take to the streets and they scream and they protest and they lament and so on.
00:05:29.260And as they were coming down, you know, in the hundreds, if not thousands down our street, they were screaming, you know, death to Jews.
00:05:38.240And so I'm a five-year-old boy and I'm looking at my mother.
00:05:41.180I'm saying, well, why are they screaming death to Jews?
00:05:52.680We're still very far away from the Lebanese Civil War, which would only happen five years later.
00:05:58.100Another time I was maybe eight or nine, so about a year or two before the start of the Civil War, the teacher asks everybody in the class to get up and tell the class what they want to be when they grow up.
00:06:14.600And a kid gets up who knows that I'm Jewish because we've been in the same class for many years, gets up and says, when I grow up, I want to be a Jew killer.
00:06:28.100Now, these seem like banal little incidents, but it gives you a sense that within the DNA of these societies, it is perfectly banal and okay to, you know, exhibit Jew hatred.
00:06:41.420Now, that doesn't mean that every second of every day you were being attacked for being Jewish, but you certainly, you know, knew that you were biding your time.
00:06:49.900I'll tell one other quick story and then we could come back to it if you'd like.
00:06:52.760One of my brothers was a Lebanese judo champion for many years in Lebanon, and this is before the Civil War.
00:07:01.480And he was visited by some men at one point who explained to him that it was time for him to retire because, you know, we wouldn't want some unfortunate accident to happen to him.
00:07:11.480Because, of course, it's shameful for a Jew to be winning all these championships in the Middle East.
00:07:19.140Of course, he didn't want to accept this.
00:07:21.580So he ended up moving to France to pursue his judo career and his studies.
00:07:26.580And in 1976, he joined us in Montreal when we had emigrated.
00:07:31.160That year, the Montreal Olympics were happening.
00:07:34.320Well, the Olympics were happening in Montreal.
00:07:36.040So he ended up representing Lebanon in the Olympics in judo.
00:07:41.260So three years earlier, he suffered from the terminal disease of being Jewish.
00:07:45.760And three years later, we will forgive the fact that you're Jewish as long as you wear the Lebanese flag.
00:07:53.400Why do you think there's this ridiculous Jew hatred in places like Lebanon, which was, I assume, majority Christian at the time you lived there, right?
00:08:52.760Because there are people who are not very wedded to their Islamic faith or their Christian faith that also will exhibit huge Jew hatred.
00:09:00.280And so I offer the following psychological explanation.
00:09:02.920There is a phenomenon in psychology called the self-serving bias, whereby when you're trying to attribute successes and failures in your life, you attribute successes internally and failures externally, right?
00:09:18.820So I did well on the exam because I'm smart and I studied hard.
00:15:54.060And that there's only one part of that is understood to be as, you know, the violent proselytizing of everybody else to conform to the glorious, true, noble faith, right?
00:16:06.720But everybody, if they are in the least bit honest, understands that jihad is the goal of Islam.
00:16:16.440Look, any religion, any ideology is made up of a set of doctrines.
00:16:22.740In the same way that DNA has certain instructions to carry out life, right?
00:16:31.540If you wish to solve this particular problem, here's the computer program.
00:16:35.660You put an input, it gives you an output.
00:16:37.700So if we want to understand what are the fundamental drivers of Islam, we don't have to guess.
00:16:46.300We don't have to listen to your professor of Near East Studies at Columbia University.
00:16:51.200We can go to the original text and study what it says.
00:16:54.380Well, Islam technically is a religion of peace.
00:16:58.820And let me explain what it means by that.
00:17:00.960We are going to have peace when the entire globe, every inch of the world, is united under the unifying flag of Allah.
00:17:12.740In which case, we will have peace because we will all be noble Muslims.
00:17:18.080So in that sense, it is seeking peace, except there is a small asterisk in going to that peaceful end result.
00:17:26.620We might have to kill a couple of hundred million people.
00:17:29.460But actually, we were very kind because we did put the sword to your head and made you a very compelling offer.
00:17:36.680Either convert or live as a dimmi or lose your head.
00:17:42.080So it's not as though we didn't give you many alluring options.
00:17:45.420And there is 1400 years of history of that, right?
00:17:50.460Israel is a colonizer, which of course it isn't.
00:17:53.880But imagine Islamic people are telling Israel that it's a colonizer when Islam is the greatest colonizer in the history of recorded world, right?
00:18:08.460There are 56 current countries that are part of the OIC, Organization of Islamic Cooperation.
00:18:16.220These 56 countries that constitute a very large territory of the world, that constitutes one-fourth of humanity, right?
00:18:25.280Each of those countries, once upon a time, had 0% Islam.
00:18:33.000Then you closed your eyes, you opened your eyes, and depending on which country, it's 99.9% Islamic.
00:19:27.200Well, I'm glad you mentioned Al-Andalus here because that's a typical example I use to explain the concept of Dar al-Harab and Dar al-Islam, right?
00:19:41.680So there is the house of Islam, and then there's the house of war.
00:19:48.100Any land that is currently Islamic is under the dominion of the house of Islam.
00:19:54.260Any land that is not under the dominion of Islam is literally, canonically, under the house of war.
00:20:02.640Now, that could come in one of two forms.
00:20:04.560It could come in the form of a country that we've never conquered, Australia, but I'll show you how they actually even play games there.
00:20:15.000Or places that were under our dominion, which we have since lost, which then becomes a theological injury, and we have to gain it back.
00:20:26.580So, yes, Israel might have been the ancestral land of the Jews, but for a very long time, it was no longer under Jewish dominion.
00:20:37.100And as a matter of fact, there were, of course, periods where it was Islamic rulers that ruled that land.
00:20:42.060Therefore, theologically, when they say it is ours, according to their theological text, that's perfectly true.
00:20:50.100Andalusia, which is in current Spain, was conquered by the Moors et al, and therefore, it belongs to them.
00:20:59.140Now, Australia and United States, technically, you may think they haven't been conquered by Islam, but they always come up with ways to demonstrate how they are the true original indigenous people of that land.
00:21:17.140So, for example, did you know that California, California, is caliph, caliph, right?
00:23:07.420So, it really is a slightly longer story.
00:23:11.260So, let me backtrack and then I'll come to Suicidal Empathy.
00:23:14.200So, my original training as an academic, as a scientist, was in applying evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology to study human behavior.
00:23:36.600And so, I was marrying biology, psychology in specific behavioral fields.
00:23:43.420And very quickly in my academic career, I started noticing that many of my social sciences colleagues were very hostile to what I was trying to do because they were arguing that, no, no, no.
00:23:57.400Biology and evolutionary theory applies to the dog.
00:25:02.980And over the next 30 years, I saw the attack, the war on reason that was happening on university campuses.
00:25:11.480So, that led to my writing, my 2020 book called The Parasitic Mind, where I was arguing that in the same way that many animals, including humans, could be parasitized by actual brain worms, right?
00:25:26.760So, for example, a wood cricket, an actual insect, the wood cricket, it detests water.
00:25:32.500But when it is parasitized by a hair worm, the hair worm needs the wood cricket to jump into water to commit suicide because it needs to complete its reproductive cycle in water.
00:25:44.960So, once that poor wood cricket is parasitized, it is hijacked.
00:25:50.580Now, it is the hair worm that is controlling its behavior all the way to the point of suicide.
00:25:57.660So, you'll see how it comes to suicidal empathy.
00:26:00.180So, then I argued in The Parasitic Mind that human brains could not only be parasitized by physical brain worms, they could be parasitized by ideological brain worms.
00:26:11.840And so, I describe all those idea pathogens, and then I offer a mind vaccine to protect yourself against the hijacking of your capacity to think.
00:26:22.400So, parasitic mind explained what happens to our cognitive system when it is parasitized.
00:26:32.060We are both a thinking and a feeling animal.
00:26:34.780So, if I want to fully hijack your ability to think, I also have to hijack your emotional system, hence my forthcoming book, Suicidal Empathy.
00:26:47.000And so, here, let me now explain what Suicidal Empathy is.
00:28:45.600And for most phenomena, the optimal is somewhere in the middle, right?
00:28:50.720So, empathy is fine as long as it is applied in the right amount, in the right situation, to the right targets.
00:28:59.680If that breaks down, you end up with suicidal empathy.
00:29:03.880And that's exactly what my next book is about.
00:29:06.040It looks at a bunch of domestic policies and foreign policies, and it argues that they all stem from the same singular cause, suicidal empathy.
00:29:17.060Speaking of empathy, and I speak about this all the time, the reason why I think the Israelis, the Jews,
00:29:25.220why we're losing the propaganda war is because we're not empathetic enough.
00:29:30.280We think that if we show reasoning and logical facts to people around the world, that will make them align with our point of view.
00:29:38.040On the other side, we have the Palestinians and the Arabs and the Muslims of the world, who all they show to the world, all they show is dead children and dead women and dead elderly and blown up limbs and all these things.
00:29:54.160And people, if they have to choose, and I've read this in a book of Mehdi Hassan, saying, if you present a logical argument, and nine out of the ten things that you will present to me are factual,
00:30:08.320and then I will debate you and I'll present mostly emotional aspects, I'll beat you every single time.
00:30:14.040Because people don't reason with logic, they reason with emotion.
00:30:18.800And that's why I think the Israelis and the Jews are not so good at explaining to the world what's actually happening, because we're not showing the empathetic side.
00:30:26.360I don't know if that's exactly what your book is about, but it just touches it a little bit, in my opinion.
00:30:30.920I mean, I'm not using empathy in the way that you're using the term, but the gist of your argument is exactly right.
00:30:38.700I recently had the former director of the Mossad on my show.
00:30:45.780Yeah, and further supposedly proving that I am the real true head of the Mossad, as everybody on the internet says.
00:30:54.360Apparently, for the past 32 years, I've been faking pretending to be a professor.
00:31:00.560That's just so that all of the gullible people can actually think that I'm a professor.
00:31:05.300But my real, real job is that I am orchestrating the Mossad from my home in Montreal.
00:31:12.420That's the kind of stupidity of people.
00:31:14.360But anyways, I was speaking to Yossi Cohen, and I told him, you know, the Israelis are, to your point, the Israelis are fantastic with their commandos and the air force and the intelligence and the Mossad.
00:31:29.660But when it comes to winning in the propaganda war, boy, do you suck, right?
00:31:35.560So to your point, and that, by the way, I think I dare say that I understand it a lot better than even most Israelis who live in the Middle East, because they're not as well versed in Arabic culture as I am, right?
00:31:53.720So, and this, by the way, is something that I talk about in Suicidal Empathy, so I might be able to join some of its content with what you were saying.
00:32:02.360So I introduced the term in Suicidal Empathy called cultural theory of mind.
00:32:08.800So theory of mind is me being able to put myself in your mind in order to be able to have a good exchange.
00:32:16.860Cultural theory of mind, I argue, is the same phenomenon, but at the cultural level, meaning, so I argue that the West lacks cultural theory of mind, because when they exhibit kindness, compassion, tolerance, empathy towards folks that come from those regions,
00:32:39.900they think, because they think because they lack cultural theory of mind, that the recipient of that kindness and empathy will say, thank you, Habibi, I really appreciate it, let me now reciprocate.
00:32:53.580No, they read it as compassion, weakness, empathy, weakness, kindness, weakness, magnanimity, weakness.
00:33:04.980So that's why it's, we're talking in parallel to each other, because every act that I do, you are interpreting it in a completely different way.
00:33:15.500And I hate to say it, I think in many instances, the Israelis suffer from the exact same lack of cultural theory of mind, right?
00:33:23.860If we say it, if we only do the life-saving surgery on Sinwar and save him, I mean, he was going to die a horrible death.
00:33:35.820I now come in, the dirty Jew, neurosurgeon, and I save you.
00:33:42.560Any sense of humanity would say, if nothing else, I have now bought your reciprocal kindness, your reciprocal appreciation forevermore, right?
00:33:56.940Many people who hated the Jews meet Jews, go to dinner with them and say, oh my God, I was always taught that Jews are monsters, but now I know better.
00:34:05.200But Sinwar didn't do that auto-correction, right?
00:34:09.180And when he was saved, he said, perfect, I will now repay you by killing more of you.
00:34:16.220That's because lack of cultural theory of mind.
00:34:19.040So all this to say, your intuition is exactly right, Sahar.
00:34:23.820If you would be the prime minister of the United States or of Canada or of the United Kingdom or friends and all these countries that are slowly importing more Islamists from different countries
00:34:34.100and just allowing it to happen, what would you have done to change the situation that's currently going on as a leader?
00:34:42.020Well, I would certainly have never allowed the immigration patterns to be in the form that they took, right?
00:34:49.240I despise having to always do this preface, but I will do it for the imbeciles who might not otherwise understand.
00:34:57.100Most people of any group are perfectly lovely.
00:35:01.340There are really nice Jews and there are pedophile Jews.
00:35:38.620Therefore, we can look at history and say when Islam comes into a new society, a society that had heretofore not been under Islamic majority,
00:35:49.680one of three things can happen, as I've explained many, many times before.
00:36:27.960If more Islam comes into a society, only one of three things can happen.
00:36:33.640There could be more love towards the Jews, there could be no change of love towards the Jews, or there could be a lot less love to the Jews.
00:36:44.420So when we let in millions and millions of people in Sweden, in France, in Denmark, in Italy, in Spain, in Britain, in Canada,
00:36:57.440did we need fancy Professor Gadsad to explain to us what would likely happen with Jew hatred?
00:37:06.340Because now all the politicians are going, I don't understand where this Jew hatred is coming from.