My Chat with Hillel Neuer, Executive Director of UN Watch (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_814)
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1 hour and 3 minutes
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178.06845
Summary
UN Watch Executive Director Hillel Neuer shares his story of how he became a civil rights lawyer, and how he got into the field of human rights advocacy. He talks about how he came to be involved in the fight for human rights and democracy, and what it means to be a Jew in the 21st century.
Transcript
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Hi everybody, this is Gadsad. Unfortunately, I now have to wear glasses even when I look at my guests
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because that's what happens with the degradation of your visual system. Today I have Hillel Neuer
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Neuer with me. How are you doing, Hillel? I'm well. How are you? Very, very, very well. I've been a
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fan of your work since I first saw you in that unbelievable speech about, what, six, seven,
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eight years ago now. Algeria, where are your Jews? But before I cede the floor to you, let me mention
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to the folks who may not know who you are, you're a civil rights lawyer, executive director of UN Watch,
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which is where I first became familiar with your work. You're the founding chairman of the Geneva
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Summit for Human Rights and Democracy. Now, this I may be misspeaking, but you may be the first
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alumnus of Concordia University, which is my home university. We can get into some of the dynamics
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there. And this I just found out. I think I already knew about your Concordia affiliation.
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You're a past employee of the Canadian Institute for Jewish Research, where I serve on the academic
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advisory board originally headed by Federer Krantz. Am I missing anything, Hillel? Or do you want to
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add anything to your intro? No. First, it's great to be here. And we need you as a defender of Western
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civilization. And so we're, we live in different places now, although indeed, I'm from Montreal,
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and I graduated from the university where you've been teaching for many years. I think we missed each
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other. Did I see that you arrived in 94? I arrived in 94. Exactly. When did you finish?
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Missed you by a year. I missed you by a year. Not that I knew much about beyond my little world,
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which was the great Professor Krantz. He had the Liberal Arts College, which he created,
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which was a terrific, great books program. In a university, which I'm sure we might get to it,
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but a university has a lot of problems. One of the pearls for humanities folks like me was the
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Liberal Arts College at Concordia University, the terrific, great books program, sort of boutique.
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program that Professor Krantz created. And actually, I just was in Jerusalem recently,
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and I met a graduate from there also. So, so maybe this won't sound nice, but there's a few
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good folks at Concordia, or from Concordia. And I'm glad that we meet. And I'm sure you're also the
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first, you know, show that I've done from from a faculty member from Concordia. So it works both
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ways. And I'm glad that we found each other. That's wonderful. So maybe we could start with
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UN Watch. And then, you know, there's many places we can go. But just tell us what is UN Watch? How
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did it start? How did you get involved? And give us the whole scoop. Sure. So UN Watch was founded by
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a great American. And you called me a civil rights lawyer, which is legitimate. But this person was a
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civil rights lawyer, by which I mean, he was there from the founding of the civil rights movement in
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the United States. Morris Abram was a lawyer who grew up in a small town in Georgia, a place called
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Fitzgerald, Georgia, a real small little place in the deep south. And he became a lawyer, he actually
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worked on the Nuremberg War Crimes Tribunal, you know, after the war, as a young lawyer, I think he
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worked with Justice Robert Jackson, if I'm not mistaken, and then came back was a lawyer in
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Atlanta and began in the 1950s to help a young unknown preacher, activist named Martin Luther
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King. Wow. And in the 1960s, it was it was in already to be with Martin Luther King. The 1950s
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in Atlanta, if you were a lawyer, you were not getting any points, you were not winning any clients
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if you were helping that troublemaker who was getting thrown into prison. So Morris Abram helped him get out
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of prison. He connected into the Kennedy family. And in the 1960s, Morris Abram was one of the leading
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civil rights figures, certainly who wasn't black. There's a photo of LBJ called a conference on civil
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rights at the White House in 1965. And there's a picture of about four or five African Americans,
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including Martin Luther King, the leaders of the civil rights movement. And there's a tall white guy,
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Jewish, named Morris Abram. So he did many great things, served presidents in different
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ways, and eventually was made U.S. ambassador to the United Nations headquarters in Europe,
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which is in Geneva. So he saw what the U.N. was about. He was someone actually who believed in the
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U.N. In the 1960s, he had served on a U.N. committee and helped draft the Convention Against
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Racism in 1964. So someone who was very much part of the idealistic phase of the U.N., talking about
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Eleanor Roosevelt, founding chair of the Human Rights Commission, René Cassin, vice chair of the Human Rights
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Commission, Morris Abram. There are these figures who were part of the founding idealism of the U.N.
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But then Morris Abram saw it in the late 80s, when the Soviet Union had already corrupted it,
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turned the, quote, non-aligned movement, the third world, against the West, and especially against
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Israel. And when he retired in 1993, he decided to stay in Geneva. And he had the idea, together with
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others, including one of my mentors, Professor Erwin Kotler, to create U.N. Watch. So they created
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U.N. Watch in 1993. It always had a hybrid focus, a particular focus on fighting anti-Semitism and
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demonization of Israel, and a universal focus. Morris Abram was not only a civil rights lawyer,
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he also was a Jewish leader. He was head of the American Jewish Committee, the Soviet Jewry movement
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in the 1980s. So U.N. Watch has always had a dual focus, fighting the obsession with demonizing
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Israel, which takes up a large part of the U.N.'s time, and speaking out for human rights to see that
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the United Nations would work. So that's U.N. Watch. I joined, he died in 2000, and I joined four years
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later. I joined in 2004, so I never got to meet Morris Abram. But I've been there now 21 years, and
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that's more or less what we do. And trying to hold the U.N. to account and bringing human rights
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victims to testify, it's a big part of what we do. So if you were to allocate 100 points
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to reflect how much of your time, you meaning you, Hillel, but you being...
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Yeah. How much of your time are you spending specifically on the Jew question versus all
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other civil rights issues? How would you allocate those points?
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You know, it depends on the time. If you say it in the space of a year, it might be 50-50.
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Yeah, yeah. Like we had our just, we just held, you mentioned the Geneva Summit for Human Rights
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and Democracy. We just held our 17th annual conference. It's turned into a really high-class
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event. We have about 700 people, this year we had even more, attending in Geneva. And
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we have the leading figures on human rights in the world's worst democracies. So we're
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allocating our time. We are not focused on Canada or Switzerland, places that have issues,
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every country does. We're focused on the worst dictatorships. And every year we bring folks
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who were in prison in China, Russia, Syria, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, Zimbabwe, Eritrea, and
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other dictatorships. And we just held, we just hosted Edmundo Gonzalez, who is the real president
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of Venezuela. In the ballot that was held in July, Nicolas Maduro faked it. And the real
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president was Edmundo Gonzalez. We brought him. We brought Vladimir Karamurza, a hero in Russia
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who dared to speak out against Putin, was poisoned twice, went back to Russia. They threw him in the
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gulag. He was left to die. I'm talking about April, 2022, right after the invasion. He went
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back to Moscow, spoke out on CNN against Putin's war crimes. They took him away hours later from his
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home in Moscow, threw him into a Siberian penal colony, isolation, solitary confinement. By a
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miracle, he got out in August in a prisoner swap. And we were able to bring him and reunite him with his
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wife on stage, which was really quite a moment. So that's the kind of work. We just did that a month
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ago. Wow, that's amazing. So in the parasitic mind, I talk about in chapter eight, I talk about
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activate your inner honey badger, which is a term that I use. I think most people would know what
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I'm referring to. But for those who may not, the honey badger is reputed to be the fiercest animal in
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the animal kingdom. It's the size of a small, medium sized dog. And yet it could withstand
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attacks or approaches by, you know, six adult lions. And I say six, because there's a footage on
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YouTube, where you see six lions saying, Okay, I don't want any part of that. And so when I when I
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say activate your inner honey badger, I'm not, of course, imploring people to get violent, physically
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violent. But I say, you know, stand tall, defend your principles. Now, I suspect that all the people
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that you invite to this Geneva summit would easily fit under the rubric of being honey badgers. So in
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your years of work, is there something that you see that is common to all of these extraordinary
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individuals that we can bottle and then use as a perfume on people to implore them to be a bit more
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courageous? Because these are guys who are being sent to the gulags in Siberia, who could be killed
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tomorrow by ISIS, real courageous people. And yet I receive every day, Hillel, emails from someone
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where they say they're too afraid to speak in the West. And not to, you know, to minimize whatever
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their, you know, threats seem to be. They are astoundingly lesser than the people that you would
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typically invite. And yet they stand up and stand tall. So what is common to these people that the rest
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of the folks may not have? You know, it's a great question. Because when you're with these people,
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I mean, someone who flies back into Moscow a month or two after the invasion, because he believes it's
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his destiny to speak out, and he's not crazy. He's one of the most brilliant intellectuals I know.
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There is something that you want to bottle. And I don't know what it is, obviously, to state the
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obvious. Maybe it's almost a tautology. But they're extremely principled people. So that's, that's, that's,
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that goes without saying. But what makes them so principled? I don't know. Some of them, I can't say
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it's, it's, some of them are, are Christian, are, are people of faith. But I don't know if it's all of
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them. You know, recently, I met a few people who I didn't know if they were religious or not. And I found
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out, oh, this one is religious, and that one's religious. And certainly, if you're in prison, obviously,
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it helps if you have a powerful faith of some kind. No question about that. I don't know yet.
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I don't know what it is. But I do know that there's so many terrible things that I have to deal with at
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the UN. You walk into the room, and you're in an Orwellian universe. And we can talk about that.
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So a lot of the stuff that I'm dealing with is very nasty. And if I'm the honey badger, it's because
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I am in the lion's den. And they're, they're very nasty. I just, I've just walked out of the Human Rights
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Council last week. I was accused of being Mossad, because I called out a supporter of terrorism.
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And the Palestinian ambassador interrupted me, didn't have anything to say. He just said,
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Mr. Chair, stop him. He's Mossad. All right. What I what I could have said and didn't, I, you know,
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could have raised up some some device and said, you know, Mr. Ambassador, I don't think you want to
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use this today. But I chose not to do that. But one of the great things of my job is when I meet
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these people, because you just sit with someone like that. And, and they're extraordinary, whether
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they're from China, a young woman who stood up in Shanghai, and lifted a white piece of paper,
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meaning a blank piece of paper, minutes later, they took her away. In China and Russia, if you lift,
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just stand there, lift up a blank piece of paper, they take you away. So those kinds of people,
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it's something extraordinary. I think, I think what I'm, I'm going to answer the question that I
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asked you, and I think it's logical. But I think it's probably the following that they all have in
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common. When you go to bed at night, and you are in the privacy of your thoughts, I think every single
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one of them would feel that had they not spoken out, they would feel fraudulent. In other words,
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they have a personal code of conduct that is so exacting, that they would feel false,
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if they did not speak out. Now, again, in a sense, that is tautological, because I'm saying
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the reason why they are so courageous is because they are so courageous and principled. But I think
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that's what it is. Now, if I can, I don't mean to incorporate myself into this, because, but people
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ask me, well, how come you take all the risks that you do, and so on? Well, frankly, that's because
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that's my answer to why I do it. I can't do otherwise. Because if I modulate my speech,
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I feel that then I'm being fraudulent. Other people may not know it. But I would know that
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I could have spoken out and chose not to. And therefore, that would be akin to being a charlatan.
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I can't live with myself. If I do that, I would have bouts of insomnia. Therefore, I must speak
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out. And again, I'm not facing the threats of being sent to the gulag. But of course, I'm sure
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you do too. We receive tons of death threats and so on. So it's certainly not minimal that the types
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of threats we take, or you could be fired or this or that. So I think that's probably it. It's a,
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as you said, it's a code of conduct that is so principled that they can't do otherwise. What do
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you think of that? Yeah, no, that makes sense. And, and these people are rare, you know, I've met them
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in other contexts, just in life, someone you, a roommate who, I don't know, he, the light went
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out, and he was sharing an apartment with me. And he said, you know, he wanted to give me the 50
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cents of the light bulb, because he, and it was, it sort of seemed ridiculous. But you could see for
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him, if he felt that he used something of yours that cost a certain amount of money, he really
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cared about it. Most people would say, not that they're not principled, just like it doesn't really
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matter. But some people who are principled, these little things really matter. Like you said,
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they can't live with themselves, they wouldn't be able to go to sleep at night. So
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now, do you think that prior to you entering the proverbial lions, then if I would have asked you
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in 1990, are you a honey badger? Because you certainly are a honey badger. Now I grant you that
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official title. Would you have said in 1990, Oh, I'm a honey badger? Or is this something that
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you discovered that inner voice of courage, as you tackled your new role?
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Yeah, to be frank, the probably the first place that I encountered that challenge
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to be confronted by a majority that's maybe hostile, was actually at Concordia, you know,
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and I with, you know, because I grew up, I went to a Hebrew school in Montreal, I went to the Hebrew
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Academy, it was a great school. And I was like everybody else that was Jewish. And so
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in most things, there wasn't there wasn't a huge issue where I had to speak out on of the kinds
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that we're talking about. But when I went to Concordia, it actually prepared me for the UN
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is that there was this alliance, I was there from 88 to 93. And there was this alliance of the radical
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left. And those, I guess they were maybe Islamists or from the Arab world, anti Israel forces. So you
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had radical left from at the time, the gay lesbian radicals, and the various intersectional groups,
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they weren't using that term quite yet in the late 80s. But I remember there was a student newspaper
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called link. And I would write an article and I would go to their office and they say, Oh, yeah,
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okay, that's the inbox, you put it there. And the the radical left woke person at the time,
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I realized after, you know, several times, they were throwing it in the garbage, my submission.
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And actually, Professor Kranz had launched a publication called Dateline Middle East,
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where people like me who cared about the Middle East could never get published in the student
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newspaper. And we created our own magazine. So my journalism began began then. But to answer your
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question, certainly there on campus, where it was nothing like what's happened in more recent years.
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And I know you've been through some horrible things in recent years. So it was nothing compared to them.
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But, but when we walked on campus, and there was a huge sign saying the star of David is the swastika
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equal swastika, you know, the symbol of Judaism equals the Nazi swastika, that kind of thing was
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happening. And whether it was in class, or just in the mezzanine of the hall building, to to speak out,
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I would be at a table and speaking out against activists, radicals. I remember one time, a young
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man from the Arab world came up to me, I was at a table putting out some materials, maybe from our
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publication, whatever it was. And this, this, this Arab young guy was talking to me. And he said,
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you know, Israel, the Zionists, they want to control everything from the Nile to the Euphrates and
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saying things that are ridiculous. And so where did you get that? And he pulled out of his shirt
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pocket, I'll never forget, a publication called the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And it was,
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I think it was published in Beirut, if I'm not mistaken. And I looked at it. And I was in shock,
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because something I heard about, you know, this is sort of the great anti semitic conspiracy theory
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tract of, of the last century, 1920s, a bit before, and to see someone on campus with it.
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And it was, yeah, it was published, I think it was published in Beirut, maybe the Palestine
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Information Office, don't remember exactly who. And I'm looking at someone, he was basically a young
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Hamas guy. And so that, that was the scene on campus. So then, and whether it was in student
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politics, I remember in the student association, the radicals were there. And yeah, so that that's
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where it began. That's where I was confronted with a kind of radicalism. There was a price wasn't a
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huge price, I wasn't being thrown in the gulag. And, and that's where I, I honed my activism
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skills, and maybe, and maybe moral compass, I don't know. Although I'll just, I'll just finish
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with this is that I give credit to my, of course, to my family and the values they taught me and
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everything. But my first bit of activism, I was about nine or 10 years old. When Anatoly Sharansky,
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as he was then called, we're talking about 1978, 79, was being arrested and thrown into
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the gulag. And there were these huge demonstrations. You came to Montreal in 75?
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Yeah. So I don't, were you aware of those, those marches that would happen downtown Montreal?
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Not at that time. Yeah. So there were these marches, and it was in front of the Soviet consulate,
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right above Dr. Penfield and Avenue du Musée, very steep.
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It was a Soviet consulate, and we had hundreds, thousands from the Jewish community were there
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regularly, and, and with freezing cold, minus 30. And you're standing there, and we would say
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one, two, three, four, open up the iron door, five, six, seven, eight, let our people emigrate. And we
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would march on St. Catherine Street. So that's just a little bit of the activism.
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Wow. I mean, you mentioned earlier, in your, in your answer to your, you sort of your first
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honey badger, you know, mindset at Concordia, the, the union between the radical sort of woke
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leftists, and yes, you're right, they didn't use the term woke back then, and the, you know,
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the, the Islam related, you know, anti, anti Jewish sentiments. Now, there's a third group. So I
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always say that there are three, there's the academic left, there is the, you know, Islam
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related Jew hatred. And then of course, there's the folks on the right, right, that Jews will not
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replace us. If you were to take those three separate sources, which of course, oftentimes
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they'll, they'll get into bed together to, you know, or giastically engage in Jew hatred.
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Which of these, you know, is the champion of Jew hatred at the United Nations? Is it coming from
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Algeria and Pakistan and Yemen? Or is it coming from Francesca Albanese, who I'm assuming is coming
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at the, her Jew hatred through a sort of an academic left perspective? Give us the dynamics of those
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three sources of Jew hatred, as manifested in the UN? It's the same alliance at Concordia, which,
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which was the, it was the the radical left, who claimed to believe in gay rights, who claimed to
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believe in women's rights, and then make this, this completely irrational alliance, this red green
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alliance with those whose, whose very purposes are the complete opposite of that, whether it's, you
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know, like Jeremy Corbyn saying, my good friends from Hamas and Hezbollah, and for what his stated
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purposes are, they, they, they are promoting the exact opposite. And the one thing that unites
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them is they both hate the Jews, and, and more particularly, Israel as the embodiment of the
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Jews. So at the United Nations, that's what we see. And people don't understand the extent of that
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alliance. You know, the, the right wing anti-Semitism, which we're seeing today, perhaps more than ever
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online, that's coming out, let's say, in America and white supremacists, not in other ways, doesn't
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really manifest, manifest itself at the UN, there's very few countries I can think of, offhand, I can't
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think of one, maybe there's, maybe there's some in Eastern Europe, perhaps, I don't know, but that are
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even close to, you know, expressing that, I guess, yeah, maybe now in Europe, a little bit, you have some
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right wing circles that have some fascist, you know, history and some leanings. But in terms of governments,
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most of the governments are, are center left, some might be conservative, but the, the left ethos is
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very strong among the governments, then, of course, 56 Islamic states. So, but the alliance that you see
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at the UN, especially at the Human Rights Council, or I am, is completely bizarre. You mentioned
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Francesca Albanese. So she is the UN special rapporteur on Palestine, appointed by the Human Rights
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Council. And in her case, excuse me, and those of her peers among the rapporteurs, there's about
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55 mandates, meaning there's a position called special rapporteur on Palestine, on North Korea,
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about 14 or 15 countries have a monitor, a special rapporteur. So that's about 15 mandates. And then
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there's about 40 mandates that are thematic, the rapporteur on torture, on free speech, sort of classic
00:23:41.700
civil rights, but then on, on social justice things, climate and, and various anti-Western
00:23:48.120
mandates. One of them is called unilateral coercive measures, which means sanctions. Cuba and Iran
00:23:54.480
created a mandate to condemn Western sanctions. So there's about 55 mandates. Some of them have five
00:24:02.480
people, like a working group on arbitrary detention is five people. There's about 80 people altogether who
00:24:07.400
could have the title independent expert or special rapporteur or something of that nature.
00:24:11.700
And what unites many of them, not all, but they're typically from the West. They're typically,
00:24:18.880
Francesca Albanese is a jurist who grew up in Italy, in Ariano Irpino, in the province of Avellino in
00:24:27.600
Italy. And she comes very much from the left, from the radical left. And many, many of the rapporteurs
00:24:34.440
are like that. They're academics on the far left, but to get appointed, right? So you're sitting in
00:24:40.260
Italy or you're sitting in the United States or, or in Europe, somewhere else in Europe, and to get
00:24:45.820
appointed by the human rights, I'll never be appointed. I'm there a lot. I know how it works.
00:24:49.580
And, and many people in Geneva, they want to get appointed to those things. To get appointed,
00:24:53.620
you mentioned Pakistan. Pakistan's one of the leaders of the OIC, the Organization of Islamic
00:24:57.820
Cooperation, 56 Islamic States. You want to get appointed, you need them on your side. Okay.
00:25:04.180
You need the African group, you need the Asian group, but the Islamic countries are very powerful.
00:25:09.360
And so is China and others. If you want to get appointed, you, you're, they, they are the gatekeepers.
00:25:15.800
So why would they appoint radical left professors? Well, they have something in common.
00:25:20.600
Amnesty International and that whole mindset that one of their main targets is the West,
00:25:27.540
capitalism, Western society, America, Israel, and, um, guess what? The 56 Islamic States and other,
00:25:35.500
and the Chinas and the Venezuelas, their main target at the UN is the West and Israel. So the,
00:25:42.120
if you're a radicalist professor, it's the, um, most oppressive regimes, the most Islamist regimes
00:25:48.420
are going to want you as you get there. And that's the Alliance is you're both, you're both attacking
00:25:54.140
the West. Amazing. I'm going to actually, people may not understand the empirical reality. This is
00:26:01.120
from, from UN watch. Now I don't have the updated data, but I've got the, the expert who can update
00:26:06.420
the data for us. So from 2006 to 2015, now, anybody who's listening to this, fasten your seatbelts,
00:26:13.880
Israel, 62 condemnations, the rest of the world, you know, North Korea, Yemen, China, and so on,
00:26:24.200
the rest of the world, 55. So based on that metric, Israel is more diabolical and it is justified
00:26:32.320
to condemn them than all of the other nefarious actors in the world. Iran, Syria, North Korea,
00:26:39.340
China, Russia, Venezuela, that's the human rights council. Right. So I'm, I'm presuming Hillel that
00:26:45.900
the numbers from 2015 till today, the dynamics have not changed, correct? Yeah. Most, mostly the
00:26:53.400
same. The obsession with Israel remains, uh, there continues to be at every meeting of the UN human
00:26:59.120
rights council. There's one day on the world agenda item four. You can talk about human rights
00:27:03.820
situations around the world. If our Canadian ambassador or the American ambassador, the
00:27:09.820
French ambassador wants to talk about Syria, Iran, North Korea, you can do so under agenda item four.
00:27:15.240
And a few days later, there's agenda item seven, which is Israel. And, uh, no other country in the
00:27:21.040
world has its own day, its own agenda item, not Iran, not Syria, not North Korea, not Russia bombing
00:27:26.880
Ukraine, Ukraine, only Israel, imperfect liberal democracy, a beacon of light in a benighted region
00:27:33.820
that stretches from North Africa to the Gulf and to Iraq and Iran. Um, that tiny country, barely 10
00:27:41.620
million people gets its own day equivalent with the whole world to demonize the Jewish state. Yeah.
00:27:48.640
How do you maintain, I mean, I've seen you interact, you're, you're, you know, you're,
00:27:54.440
you're very proper, you're, you're serious, you're austere. Do you sometimes sort of in the
00:28:00.360
recesses of your mind want to pull out your hairs? I mean, because you're, you're incessantly dealing
00:28:05.720
with this tsunami of hate. How do you, what, what, what is your secret? Right. So look, there,
00:28:10.920
there are no doubt there are terrible moments and frustrating moments and so forth as a whole. Um,
00:28:17.800
I wouldn't say I'm immune, but I understand when I walk in the room that I'm entering a dystopian
00:28:23.820
universe. And, um, and it's very, it's very odd feeling because you're, I'm, I live in Switzerland.
00:28:30.480
It's a beautiful country and it's a great democracy. And, um, you walk into the United Nations,
00:28:37.320
the Palais des Nations in Geneva, which is the old League of Nations. And you're now in a different
00:28:41.660
universe. You're now in a universe where the Chinese ambassador is very important. And he represents
00:28:46.200
the murderous regime in, in Beijing and the Russian ambassador who represents the KGB dictator,
00:28:52.720
who didn't very important. And when I speak, um, there's all these people trying to censor me. I
00:28:58.440
did, I think it was maybe two years ago. I was at the human rights council and you walk out,
00:29:04.220
they have, uh, sometimes exhibits and the exhibits are, are propaganda displays. So if Iran is being
00:29:10.940
reviewed for its every four or five years, a country has to get reviewed for three hours.
00:29:14.920
So when it's Iran's turn to be reviewed, they will put up a huge exhibit for a week of, um,
00:29:22.200
women's fashion, contemporary women's fashion in Iran. Okay. Which will be magnificent Persian
00:29:27.960
dresses, which are relatively modest, but the Iranians tell me that you couldn't possibly wear
00:29:34.420
them because it's too colorful to wear in the Islamic, uh, regime and magnificent Persian dresses.
00:29:41.200
And, you know, Iran is a country, uh, that, uh, beats, blinds, poisons, rapes, tortures women
00:29:47.400
who dare to stand up and speak out for their right to, to be free. So that is typical. And so I was
00:29:54.640
there and I had my, I said, okay, this is ridiculous. I took my phone and, and I started recording and
00:29:59.760
said, Hey everyone, I'm here at the human rights council. And behind me is this Iranian women's fashion
00:30:04.400
exhibit for a week, which has to be allowed. Someone at the UN has to give, give it permission.
00:30:09.880
And I put it up on the internet and, uh, I don't know if it went viral, but it got a,
00:30:13.920
it got a fair amount of likes about a day or two later. I got a letter from the UN saying you are
00:30:20.880
in violation. You are not allowed to record in that space. If you do it ever again, we're going to take
00:30:26.300
away your badge and you're out. Now keep in mind when I've made complaints of bad things that have
00:30:31.100
happened to me, intimidation and threats. What's going on? Sorry. It was, uh, it was a call and let
00:30:40.820
me just turn something off. Sorry about that. Um, uh, I was, uh, it's the UN. They, I, when the name
00:30:48.680
was mentioned and they, they're, they're on it. They're listening. They're listening. They're
00:30:53.200
listening. Big brother. So, um, yeah, so I, a day or two later, I got this, this sort of, um,
00:30:59.900
this order, uh, without any due process, without saying, uh, and they said some kind of rule.
00:31:05.700
You're not allowed to use professional equipment. I didn't use professional equipment. Maybe, maybe I
00:31:09.120
had at these. Okay. Um, and they're like, you can't use professional equipment, but you did it's
00:31:13.640
against the law. You, and the very harsh. And it was clear that, uh, that Iran had complained. And
00:31:19.800
when I complained about things happening to me, terrible things happening again,
00:31:23.200
with China intimidating me or one of our Chinese, uh, human rights heroes, it will take them,
00:31:29.580
if we're lucky, half a year to respond, looking into it, looking into it, you know, the UN,
00:31:35.100
the bureaucracy, but, but vice versa, the censorship. So then you realize that, wait a minute, I'm,
00:31:39.780
I'm in this dystopian universe. So what I wanted to say is that, um, generally when I'm at the UN,
00:31:45.200
I, I am able to say, I have 90 seconds. Used to be three minutes, kept cutting it down. Now I get 90
00:31:51.640
seconds when, when they let me speak and everything else is nonsense. And kind of, I can like,
00:31:58.060
you know, you, they now have these computer programs where you record yourself and you push
00:32:02.440
a button, you could remove out all the, the noise that all, you can move out all the noise.
00:32:06.680
So I kind of push a button and I move out all the noise. And like, I have 90 seconds to speak
00:32:10.560
the truth. I'm going to use every nanosecond. You'll see sometimes the end of my speech, I'll say,
00:32:15.920
Mr. President, so I see there's three seconds left. I'm not giving the Chinese regime one second.
00:32:21.380
I get my 90 seconds. So I'll, I, now I own the room and I'll wait. I'll say, thank you. So,
00:32:28.180
so I, I'll, I'll just, I'll just to finish what, what, the way I compare it is, uh, for a surgeon,
00:32:33.580
you know, when, when someone, God forbid has been shot and there's blood and guts everywhere
00:32:37.720
and they call on the surgeon and he goes to the operating table, me, I would see blood,
00:32:41.700
I'd faint. I'd be out. Okay. But the surgeon, he goes in there and he can't faint. He has to
00:32:47.600
get out the bullet and save that person. So when he's there, he's laser focused on that one thing.
00:32:51.680
And so in my work at the UN, that's what I try to do. I can't say it always works,
00:32:55.080
but I try to just focus on, on giving my thing and, uh, and not being, uh, horrified by the horrible
00:33:00.940
things that are there. So let me ask you this. Uh, I've been asked recently on a show, maybe about
00:33:06.900
a year ago by a show hosted by a British, British psychiatrist in all my career, uh, which is now
00:33:14.400
longer than three decades as a professor, what has been the single singular phenomenon that has
00:33:20.240
most surprised me about the human condition, which I had never been asked that question before. And so
00:33:24.960
I paused for a couple of seconds. I said, well, I guess probably the fact that it is almost impossible
00:33:32.760
to change a person's opinions once they are solidly anchored, which is a very difficult to admit,
00:33:41.460
a thing to admit, because I'm in the business of trying to persuade people. And yes, of course,
00:33:47.680
I often will get someone who said, you know what, I, you know, I voted for Justin Trudeau. I should
00:33:52.380
have listened to you, but now I've, I've, I've learned from my errors and I, you know, I've changed my
00:33:56.740
behavior. So in your case, you certainly are facing that difficulty, which is,
00:34:02.760
can I get, nevermind Francesca Albanese, but anyone that you're navigating within that ecosystem,
00:34:10.700
that dystopian ecosystem that you spoke of, can you ever hope to change any of their positions?
00:34:17.720
Or are you not even really speaking to them? You're speaking to the outside audience who hopefully
00:34:22.960
watches your viral clip on Algeria, where are the Jews? What's the metric that allow, other than sort
00:34:29.460
of, you have this internal purpose and meaning, which is, look, I'm doing something that is obviously
00:34:33.560
important. But in terms of concrete metrics, what do you use to be able to say, here is where I was
00:34:40.140
and here is how we've improved? Is there such a metric? Yeah. So our metrics are, for example,
00:34:47.540
working with diplomats to try to change votes. And there's, there's, whether it's on the Israel
00:34:54.560
things, not to pass resolutions that support Hamas and Hezbollah terrorists, and their Islamic regime
00:34:59.920
paymasters in Tehran. And sadly, for the past two decades, there's all these resolutions, which
00:35:07.760
could have been written by Hamas and Hezbollah. And that's why actually the founder of Human Rights
00:35:13.220
Watch, a great man who passed away a few years ago named Bob Bernstein, he was the head of Random House
00:35:18.380
Books, and then a leading publisher in New York, and began to publish Soviet dissidents, and then
00:35:25.520
created something called Human Rights Watch, okay, back, let's say, in the 70s, and which was founded
00:35:32.380
to speak out for those who were voiceless behind the Iron Curtain or in dictatorships. And then he,
00:35:39.720
and then he hired someone named Ken Roth, who was the director for decades of Human Rights Watch.
00:35:43.900
And then Bob, who was, he was a layperson, he was the chair. Ken Roth was the highest salaried staff
00:35:52.400
member. And Bob realized over the years that Human Rights Watch kept putting out reports that were
00:35:58.200
basically enabling and empowering Hamas and Hezbollah. Every time they would attack Israel, there'd be
00:36:03.480
some 50 page Human Rights Watch report, saying how whatever Israel did to defend itself against rockets or
00:36:09.740
other terrorism was a violation of international law and human rights and war crimes and so forth.
00:36:15.500
And he wrote an article in 2009, saying that this is not the organization that I, this was not the
00:36:23.880
purpose of my organization. And so just coming back to your question about metrics, where part of the
00:36:33.220
work that we do is diplomacy, trying to convince countries to do the right thing. And from time to
00:36:37.300
time, you can say, it's not like you're going to change their minds, but a few things can happen.
00:36:41.860
Sometimes you can meet a country where a diplomat, an official, where they're actually on your side,
00:36:46.940
but they didn't have, they don't have the information you do. They didn't know that,
00:36:50.200
you know, there's always an appointment coming up, an election of small kind, an appointment for some
00:36:55.360
post. And those who want the post to know about it. And there's sometimes a very small group.
00:37:01.020
And it might be the Canadian government, could be the Dutch government, it could be the American
00:37:04.780
government may not have been focused on it. And so sometimes their, their position is actually
00:37:09.140
with you and, but you can alert their attention to something and you can mobilize them. So there
00:37:14.820
are things like that. And from time to time, some governments change their positions. That's one
00:37:18.240
metric is if you can help persuade governments to do the right thing. Second part of what we do is
00:37:25.140
educating public opinion. So that's a big part of our work. And here we come to the issue that you
00:37:30.560
identified about changing minds. We know that in a given year, UN Watch were quoted about a thousand
00:37:35.960
times in the media. So certainly when we come out with the story, Iran elected to Women's Rights
00:37:41.980
Commission, things like that will go viral, which the UN buries. It's a simple thing. You'd think
00:37:46.700
everyone knows that they don't. It's a buried in a report. Oh yeah, the, the, the economic and social
00:37:54.540
council met and they elected the new members and Islamic Republic of Iran was elected. No headline.
00:38:00.600
The journalists whose job it is to cover the UN will never write about it. The Reuters, AP, AFP,
00:38:06.500
BBC, the leading media that are at the UN, primarily in New York, but also in Geneva, they typically do
00:38:14.740
not put out stories that are critical of the UN or that expose the UN to shame because either self
00:38:21.200
selection, they've working there because they have the UN as part of their ideology, or it's it,
00:38:27.760
there's an understanding that it's bad for your career. If you write stories like that, you will
00:38:32.240
lose access to the UN spokesman. You might lose the office that they've given you. Um, and so
00:38:36.920
journalists have told me, so that's a great story, but I can't, can't touch it. Maybe I'll give it to
00:38:41.820
my colleague in Paris. Maybe they can write, but I can't. So, um, but, uh, but we, we will get out
00:38:50.040
that story and it'll be, it'll be often not the UN reporters. It'll be the regular reporter for Time
00:38:54.560
magazine or whoever, who might cover that. So we're in the news about a thousand times a year.
00:38:57.980
That's something we certainly look at and social media where, you know, if you got tens of millions,
00:39:03.060
hundreds of millions of views, I don't know if we have hundreds of millions, but certainly
00:39:05.620
tens of millions of views, um, then that's some kind of impact. You hope you're changing opinions.
00:39:12.100
You know, I remember I met, uh, we brought the son of Hamas, Mossab Hassan Youssef.
00:39:21.360
We, we, the same year where I gave that speech, Algeria, where are your Jews? That was in March,
00:39:25.660
2017 in September, Mossab came. It's another amazing speech, which if people haven't seen it,
00:39:30.780
you should check it out. Um, incredible, I think it was 90 seconds and silenced the room. And it was
00:39:37.300
just amazing. Need to see Mossab Hassan Youssef silencing the UN and for the comic relief. Cause
00:39:43.320
I also, uh, like you got, I, I, uh, I, having a sense of humor is very important. And for me,
00:39:49.120
always a good measure of someone character to be able to have a sense of humor if they don't,
00:39:53.600
it's a bad sign. Um, so I try to have a sense of humor, especially where I am. Cause it's an
00:39:58.840
absurd place. It's Orwellian Kafkaesque. So you gotta have the fun too. So one of the fun things
00:40:04.500
is when you give a speech is the reaction shots. And when Mossab spoke, there were two individuals
00:40:08.960
right in front of him and you could see them. One guy here, one guy here.
00:40:10.980
I remember. And they're, they're doing this, they're freaking out and it helps make the video.
00:40:17.820
Mossab speech was amazing, but it helps make the video. Um, and, uh, why am I mentioning him? I
00:40:23.320
lost track. We were talking about, yeah, impact. So he spoke and, um, and it got like 10 million views
00:40:29.180
on various platforms and different languages. And I remember being at an event and a green
00:40:34.380
socialist green party, uh, politician in Geneva came up to me and he said, he said, I saw that
00:40:41.040
speech. I don't know if it was Mossab speech or my speech. So, you know, when, when it's, when it's
00:40:45.220
a hundred thousand people, it might be my friends from Hebrew school and their cousins. Um, when it
00:40:49.860
reaches a million, it's beyond, when it reaches 10 million, it's reaching a wider audience. Um, so
00:40:55.000
is it changing opinions? I don't know. Certainly I would say you asked about the UN in the room,
00:41:00.900
their hearts are made of stone. Many of them. Okay. They're sent by the Capitol. If you're the
00:41:06.080
French ambassador, you are sent by the Capitol. The instructions are coming from the Capitol.
00:41:10.200
Uh, so it's not like you're going to hear a speech and really change your mind. Um, of course the
00:41:16.080
ambassador, if he's, if he or she is a senior person, they're involved in the discussion on how
00:41:20.460
to vote, but it's rare to change their minds. And I'd say to be honest, uh, often we're looking at
00:41:25.980
wider public opinion and we're looking at folks who are, um, reasonable, uh, assume that they're
00:41:32.600
reasonable and, um, and they're not hostile to our position, uh, and are, have some openness
00:41:40.660
and, and can see Mossab Hassan Youssef, the son of Hamas, talk about what's really happening
00:41:45.540
in Gaza and elsewhere and say, Oh, you know what? Maybe he has a point.
00:41:48.520
Do you feel that the, it's strange to ask someone who, whose business it is to monitor
00:41:56.460
the UN shenanigans? Do you feel that it's outlived its purpose or notwithstanding the
00:42:04.380
fact that it is a deeply flawed, deeply diseased institution, there is no better model and we've
00:42:10.960
got to live with what we have. What, what's your general view on that?
00:42:13.640
Yeah, it's, it's the latter. It just, you know, the, the, the UN does many different things.
00:42:18.200
Some are technical, which no one would dispute its utility in Geneva. In particular, we have
00:42:23.880
the specialized agencies, the telecommunications union, which is regulating area codes, uh,
00:42:32.000
internet stuff, which of course problematic as China is trying to influence and something
00:42:35.460
like that. But, you know, we, we need some regulation of, of frequencies, whether it's
00:42:39.160
for the cell phones or different things. And then you have the world health problematic,
00:42:42.680
but you do need some world health body, ideally, um, intellectual property, world
00:42:48.020
trade, um, meteorological organization, all kinds of things. We need these things. The
00:42:53.620
world is a smaller and smaller place and, uh, we need to cooperate in various ways. So
00:42:58.540
you certainly need the UN on the technical administrative things. Um, the international
00:43:03.420
community wants them also for things like refugees. When there's a refugee situation in Sudan
00:43:08.700
or in Syria or Ukraine, they want an agency that will go there and help millions of people.
00:43:13.880
And, uh, and the U S and other wealthy democracies are willing to pay for an international agency.
00:43:19.480
So you're not going to, you could, you could eliminate the UN. It'll be created in some other
00:43:25.340
form. And of course, many of the pathologies that exist at the UN do manifest themselves in
00:43:30.760
other fora. We talk about hijacking these bodies to attack Israel. You know, it can be a meeting of
00:43:36.200
FIFA, the international football association, and they'll be trying to expel Israel. So could get
00:43:41.360
rid of FIFA. So I'm, I'm no defender of the UN and the last to be an apologist for the UN, but I
00:43:45.720
recognize that not every body, meaning human rights council doesn't have to be there or certain
00:43:51.840
things. It doesn't mean you have to attend every conference. Uh, you can walk out of the Durban
00:43:56.820
two conference. You can walk out of the ICC, but the United nations as a whole is not going anywhere.
00:44:01.600
At the end of the day, the question is, are our governments doing the right thing? And if they're
00:44:07.700
not, they need to be. And even if there's some other international body, the fact that Canada
00:44:13.160
didn't say a thing, uh, as we're speaking now, this Francesca Albanese, who is an open apologist
00:44:18.980
for terrorists, tells them you have the right to resist one of the most horrible, uh, officials to
00:44:24.480
have the name United nations and human rights. It's really obscene. Uh, the Canadian government
00:44:29.000
hasn't said a thing to oppose her reappointment. U S Congress spoke out, uh, the 42 French MPs spoke
00:44:37.140
out. We have the former deputy foreign minister of Italy and, and, um, Canada did criticize her,
00:44:44.060
uh, eventually this year, here and there, it was really the special envoy in antisemitism,
00:44:50.380
Deborah Lyons and the government a teeny bit, but they have not registered their opposition.
00:44:56.020
Australia hasn't registered their opposition. So that is a problem, uh, because of our governments
00:45:01.520
and, uh, sadly the UN is the place where a lot of bad decisions get aggregated and Israel is
00:45:08.180
typically the scapegoat, but others are as well. How do you explain? So we, we, we spoke about the
00:45:13.700
three sources, three general sources of Jew hatred, you know, Islamic stuff, academic left, and sort of
00:45:20.420
the far right. I'm going to add a fourth group. And I think you'll, you'll appreciate it in a second.
00:45:25.760
So I call those wood cricket Jews. Have you, have you heard my term wood cricket? Do you know what
00:45:29.880
that? No, I knew honey badgers. And, and luckily I had happened to see the video independent
00:45:34.260
of your term. I had seen one a month ago, so I know exactly what they are.
00:45:39.420
Pardon? You haven't heard wood cricket? No, no. Tell me. Okay. So, uh, the wood cricket, uh,
00:45:47.160
the explanation comes from the parasitic mind where I'm talking about how a wide range of animals,
00:45:54.080
including humans could be parasitized. Their brains could be parasitized and then they engage
00:45:59.500
in behaviors that are detrimental to them, but that are beneficial in the service of the, the,
00:46:05.680
the parasite. Now the wood cricket is a insect that abhors water. It wants nothing to do with water,
00:46:13.120
but when it is parasitized by a hair worm that ends up going to its brain, the hair worm needs the
00:46:19.220
wood cricket to jump into the water so that it could complete it, meaning the, the, the parasite,
00:46:24.260
it could complete its reproductive cycle. So once that wood cricket is regrettably parasitized,
00:46:29.580
it happily or, or hopelessly jumps and commits suicide in the service of the, uh, parasite. Now wood
00:46:37.820
cricket Jews would be Jews for Hamas, uh, queer, you know, queer Jews for Palestine. It's Anna Epstein,
00:46:47.920
Jewish Anna Epstein, uh, at Boston university, ripping down the posters of infants of babies that
00:46:56.000
have been kidnapped. Right. I am so empathetic. I'm so progressive. I'm so committed to my activism
00:47:02.340
that look how noble I am and virtuous and hence suicidally empathetic. Now, regrettably, now I think
00:47:10.400
this manifests itself across many groups, but there is something unique about ultra progressive,
00:47:17.500
ultra suicidally empathetic Jews that seem to support exactly the people that would be
00:47:24.340
decapitating them first. Have you experienced this in your career? And if so, what is your reaction
00:47:33.260
to such wood cricket Jews? Yeah, actually the first time I met one of those was at Concordia.
00:47:38.480
I remember she was sitting at a table, giving out some PLO propaganda and her name was something like
00:47:44.940
Alana. Um, and, and I remember I was in shock because I'd never met someone like that. And I was just
00:47:52.360
looking and she seemed like a very nice person. She was pretty. I was just, I couldn't understand
00:47:56.900
it. Um, and then of course in my work, cause I'm at the UN and dealing with these various issues. Uh,
00:48:03.580
of course I encountered them quite a bit. Um, the UN, you know, someone once asked me, and I hope I
00:48:10.240
don't go off on too much of the tangent, but someone asked me, I get the question from time to time.
00:48:14.180
Okay. There's UN watch, which fights against bigotry against Israel, bias against Israel.
00:48:19.100
Uh, does the Arab world or the Islamic world, do they have their own UN watch? I said,
00:48:23.560
no, they don't. They have the UN. And, and it sounds funny, but it's not a joke. When I walk
00:48:29.860
into the UN, I see 56 black Mercedes or BMW show up and each one, the ambassador of Pakistan gets out,
00:48:36.540
the ambassador of Iran and the ambassador of Libya and Egypt and one after the, after the other. And
00:48:41.460
they, they, they have this massive power to get any resolution they want, whether it's targeting
00:48:47.480
Israel, whether it's attacking the West from time to time, whether it's these various Islamophobia
00:48:53.520
resolutions, where you're not allowed to criticize Islam legislated in a UN resolution. And they have
00:49:00.180
the UN, any resolution they want, typically they can get. So, um, uh, how that connects to what we
00:49:10.100
were just talking about, I'm already forgetting, but, but, um, but, um, I was talking about the
00:49:17.180
wood cricket Jews. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm trying, I'm trying to remember the connection anyway, but
00:49:20.600
the, the, the, the point is that, that, uh, the, the point is again, it's the odd to me, the odd
00:49:26.960
mix that the UN attracts those from the Islamic countries who have their peculiar agenda, uh, which
00:49:36.220
is Islamist, anti-Israel and so forth. And these wood cricket Jews who are part of the radical left,
00:49:42.380
the Amnesty International, okay. Amnesty International and that whole, that whole ideology,
00:49:46.520
they're living in the UN. Okay. The folks who live in the UN who are built into the system,
00:49:52.140
all the UN rapporteurs are basically a part of Amnesty International and that whole movement.
00:49:57.200
They, um, they, the reports of the rapporteurs, they write them for them. They're sort of copy paste.
00:50:01.560
It's, it's a revolving door of the UN experts, the UN bureaucracy and the radical left. And these
00:50:07.920
wood cricket Jews are part of that. So I see them there. Um, and, uh, and yeah, so I, I see them all
00:50:14.940
the time and, um, Are they typically Israeli or they could be there once in a while? I, I, to be fair,
00:50:22.540
I don't see so many of them, but, but, you know, groups like Human Rights Watch, um, the, the Jews who had
00:50:29.780
some sense of pride and some moral compass and some, uh, uh, uh, common sense left Human Rights
00:50:35.900
Watch. So the founder of Human Rights Watch, Bob Bernstein left, uh, and he was fighting a wood
00:50:40.520
cricket Jew, Ken Roth, who for at least three decades ran Human Rights Watch, um, has a pathology
00:50:47.320
that, uh, in, in, in, in the words of, uh, from Seinfeld, speaking about George Costanza,
00:50:53.860
you would need, send you to Vienna and not, not 24 hours having one psychiatrist. You need a whole
00:51:00.420
team. You need a whole team, George, walking around you, looking at you and Vienna monitoring.
00:51:06.780
Ken Roth would be in that category. This is a guy who controlled a budget. They had more than $200
00:51:11.860
million in the bank, in the bank, more than $200 million. Ken Roth had given them, sorry,
00:51:17.360
George Soros had given them a $100 million gift over 10 years. So they're swimming in money. Um,
00:51:24.960
and every day, every single day, he, he asked himself, how can I turn the knife against Israel
00:51:32.260
and those who support it? And it's pathological. In the old days, you know, Twitter now you can have,
00:51:37.860
I think it's maybe 260 characters. I don't know what it is. You get about a paragraph now. Uh,
00:51:42.380
originally for the first five, 10 years, maybe more, you, you had a sentence in one sentence.
00:51:47.800
It was very hard. In one sentence, Ken Roth, if something happened, if an Israeli was attacked,
00:51:51.900
if there was a Hamas terrorist attack, killing a baby, he would say, if, if he would respond,
00:51:55.940
he would say, I condemned the attack comma, just like I condemned the war crime settlements that the
00:52:01.040
Israelis are doing in the place where it happened. So to, so to, you know, pretend to condemn the
00:52:06.120
attack where at the end, he's really sticking the knife at the Jews. You see the exact same thing,
00:52:10.820
which I have since satirized, where every single time there is some, uh, really bad action against
00:52:17.600
Jews, I always then retweet and say, this is why we must redouble our efforts to combat Islamophobia,
00:52:24.780
because that's exactly what you see by the Canadian government. They can never just say,
00:52:30.320
we condemn this reality about Jew hatred without lumping it to appear as though they are even handed
00:52:37.600
with Islamophobia. Those two have to always go together. Even if you just killed 50 Jews,
00:52:42.960
you have to combat Islamophobia. Uh, I want to ask you a couple of more things,
00:52:46.680
but I'm mindful. Are we still okay for a few more minutes? Um, yes, I think I have about 10 minutes
00:52:51.820
if needed. Okay, perfect. Uh, have you heard of my, uh, game, six degrees of Jew? Do you know this game?
00:52:58.800
I do not. I do not. So six degrees of Jew works as follows. I give you any calamity around the world
00:53:05.100
and you have up to six illusory causal steps to blame the Jews. So for example, if I say
00:53:12.040
an Amazonian frog just died in the Amazon, go. And so you have, you have up to, I mean, six steps you
00:53:19.800
could cover a lot, right? So now let me give you an example of this when it comes to immigration policy,
00:53:24.940
which is certainly something that would be discussed in a place like the United Nations.
00:53:29.460
So if I point to the names of the grooming raping gang that was just arrested in Huddersfield in
00:53:38.740
England, and let me just summarize their names for you. Muhammad, Ahmed, Muhammad, Ahmed, Ahmed,
00:53:44.440
Muhammad, Muhammad, Hussein, Muhammad, and all, all 20 names have that commonality. And then I put out
00:53:52.380
on social media as I have, you know, I don't have a big enough data analytic mind to identify what is
00:53:59.260
the commonality across those 20 guys. Could somebody help me out? I will receive not facetiously,
00:54:05.420
genuinely the response. Yeah. It's your people who are responsible. So then I, I know where they're
00:54:11.760
going with this. And then I say, well, how is that? And then the answer using six degree of Jews,
00:54:16.900
it's because it is the Jews that control the immigration policy of every possible country in
00:54:25.060
the West. So even when three Mohammeds rape your daughter, it's really Mordechai who's to blame.
00:54:31.940
Now, it, can we ever hope, I understand you're not a psychologist, but you truly are in the Orwellian,
00:54:37.720
Kafkaesque, dystopian world, as you so beautifully explained. Can we ever hope to get people to be
00:54:44.480
inoculated against six degrees of Jews? Or is this an eternal reality that Jews will forevermore have
00:54:51.860
to face? I don't know enough about psychology to comment on this. Obviously, antisemitism has been
00:54:59.380
around for thousands of years. It seems the oldest hatred. And why is it that when, when a mind
00:55:07.280
needs to flee from rationality, when things are so difficult, and it attracts itself to this age-old
00:55:17.000
conspiracy theory? Why is it? I don't know. I mean, I can, I understand its potency, meaning if you say
00:55:23.960
I'm going to blame everything on, on the Kurds, well, I, you know, how do you even get there? But obviously,
00:55:31.500
the Jews are kind of an eternal people, uh, the, the ancient peoples, the, the Greeks, the Babylonians,
00:55:37.180
um, uh, the, the ancient Persians, you know, many of them in their, in their ancient empires of what
00:55:45.720
they were, the Romans, they don't exist anymore, those, these empires, the Jews were not an empire,
00:55:50.380
but the, it's an ancient people that's still alive. And when sometimes people meet a Jew for the first
00:55:54.600
time, like, I know you from the Bible and you're alive. So obviously there is, there is some kind of
00:55:58.840
mystic, there's some mystic power in, in, in, in an ancient people that is, you know, one of the main
00:56:04.940
characters in the Bible, which is sacred to billions of people. So certainly it has the potency. If you're
00:56:10.480
going to come up with a conspiracy theory and you're going to make it about any number of peoples, it just
00:56:14.520
doesn't sound that interesting. Uh, but the Jews also being small people. So I, I don't know how we, how we
00:56:21.300
inoculate, uh, how we inoculate people in the end. Certainly it's, um, um, yeah, it's, it's, it's something
00:56:28.580
that's irrational. And so how do you fight something that's so irrational? Uh, I don't
00:56:32.400
know. I can offer one possibility and I don't know if, uh, if you can actually create that
00:56:37.440
mind vaccine and then I'll, I'll end, I'll just say this and then I'll end with one sort
00:56:41.060
of one additional broad question and then we'll wrap it up. So I argue that, so in psychology
00:56:46.860
you have what's called the self-serving bias, which is a type of attributing successes and
00:56:52.420
successes and failures in such a way that protects your ego. So for example, uh, if I did well on the
00:56:59.500
exam, it's because, well, I'm smart and I studied hard. If I did poorly on the exam, well, it's because
00:57:05.420
Professor Saad is an asshole Jew, right? He's unfair. And so most people, unfortunately, have that
00:57:11.940
ego defensive attributional style, which is attributing successes internally and attributing
00:57:16.420
failures externally. Now imagine if we can have an external culprit for all of our failures. Now,
00:57:24.480
why is it the Jews? Well, because the Jews, to use the terms of a fellow lawyer, Amy Chua, she calls
00:57:30.980
them market, uh, market dominant minorities, which is when you have a small group of people that are in
00:57:38.520
much larger ecosystems, but they always seem to be punching above their weight, at least in terms of
00:57:45.620
their numbers, right? Anywhere you go, Jews are somehow influential in nearly everything. Well, that
00:57:51.420
sucks if I'm not part of that group, right? And therefore it becomes incredibly easy since already
00:57:57.440
the architecture of my mind is structured to find external reasons for my failures. Well, now I've
00:58:04.420
got already May 1. Why did my wife cheat on me? Well, who peddles porn? It's the Jews. Why did I get
00:58:10.960
diabetes? Who controls the pharmaceutical industry and is probably holding out, giving us the cure for
00:58:16.420
diabetes? It's the Jews. So it becomes a quote, beautiful way to organize all of my failures. And
00:58:24.180
that reality has existed since time immemorial because the Jews have always been a market dominant
00:58:29.780
minority in most places. And they're always astoundingly successful. One can talk about why
00:58:35.680
Jews are so successful. So if I can get people to experience a greater sense of personal agency,
00:58:44.280
you know, some of my failures might actually be due to my wrongdoings. Maybe my entrepreneurial
00:58:50.360
company failed, not because the Jews did it, but maybe because I made wrong decisions. Is there,
00:58:57.200
well, first of all, what do you think of this explanation? And if so, can we inoculate people by
00:59:01.960
giving them a greater sense of personal responsibility for their existential failures?
00:59:07.640
Well, those are some interesting ideas that I'll have to give more thought to. My first reaction is,
00:59:17.100
I would think that there are a number of cases in history where the Jews were not allowed to
00:59:22.900
participate in the market. I'm thinking of, I don't know, 19th century Russian Empire, Poland. The Jews
00:59:28.020
were basically in the shtetls. They were not allowed into larger society. And the hate from their
00:59:32.760
neighbors, the Ukrainians, the Poles, the Russians was severe in the pogroms. And I don't think you had
00:59:39.040
that phenomenon at that time, at that place. So I don't know if that fits. Certainly, it may fit in other
00:59:44.500
things. I have the sense that it might even be, yeah, these things are very deep. You know, some of it
00:59:50.560
may be that, you know, the Jews brought the Bible and the Ten Commandments to the world,
00:59:55.760
and we resent a judge. And something, you know, Jordan Peterson talks about sometimes, you know,
01:00:01.440
there's a schadenfreude. When you read the newspaper and it says a priest did something
01:00:04.200
terrible or a rabbi did something terrible, there's some kind of a comfort because the judge,
01:00:09.340
who, as they say in Israel, hey, no, no, no. The one who's reprimanding you and admonishing you,
01:00:14.520
they did something bad. So suddenly, somehow you feel the judge has fallen. So the Jews,
01:00:21.160
in some sense, brought morality to the world. And if the Jews did something, are doing something
01:00:29.880
bad, that also has some psychological role. I think that that's one element to it. Obviously,
01:00:36.640
we know that the, in many places, antisemitism happens in religions that came from Judaism.
01:00:42.700
And so they have an antagonistic relationship to their parent religion. But of course, it's
01:00:48.160
other places as well. But certainly in the Christian, the Islamic world,
01:00:51.960
somehow seems more stronger than, say, in India or in China, where they don't have it as much,
01:00:58.680
Yeah, cool. Okay, last question. What are some projects that you're currently working on
01:01:04.180
that you would like to use this forum to promote? Take it away, Mr. Hillel.
01:01:10.580
Okay, I'll just share one report. You know, there's a UN agency that most of our governments is
01:01:14.740
funding called UNRWA. It's the UN agency for Palestinians. And Canada gives tens of millions
01:01:20.000
of dollars a year. Every Western country is funding it, except now the US is out. The Netherlands
01:01:25.200
is beginning to defund. Sweden announced that they're out. Otherwise, every single Western
01:01:29.420
country is giving tens of millions of dollars to UNRWA, supposedly to help the Palestinians.
01:01:34.460
Schools, medical facilities, who run the schools? We have a report coming out. It's 250 pages.
01:01:40.840
Screenshots, right? I got asked in the Dutch Parliament, do you share your material with
01:01:46.260
UNRWA beforehand? A radical left member of parliament was given a talking point. How come
01:01:51.420
you don't share? If you were in good faith, you would share with UNRWA? I said, why do you publish?
01:01:56.140
I'm not publishing. These are screenshots of UNRWA staff posting every day, I love Hitler,
01:02:02.180
Allahu Akbar, Hamas, pictures of themselves with Hamas leaders. So we have a 250-page report.
01:02:07.920
The head of the UNRWA teachers union in Lebanon, Fatih Sharif, outside of Tyre, Lebanon. He was
01:02:15.020
schoolteacher, head of a major school, head of the teachers union, was the head of Hamas in Lebanon.
01:02:20.780
I'll say that again. The head of the UN schools in Lebanon, UNRWA, the head of the teachers union,
01:02:26.860
2000 teachers, was the head of Hamas. When Israel brought justice to him in, I think it was late
01:02:31.220
September past. The day that he was killed, Hamas announced, you killed our leader. And suddenly
01:02:38.240
a video went out, eulogizing him of him with Ismail Haniyeh. And they hailed his jihadist
01:02:45.840
education. The head of the UNRWA teachers union, you and I are paying for it. If you're a Canadian,
01:02:50.880
Swiss, European, Brit, you're paying for it. If you're American, you paid for it up until last year,
01:02:55.740
you gave a lot of money. So, and Gaza, same thing, copy paste. The head of the staff union,
01:03:02.040
teacher, school principal, Suel al-Hindi, elected member of the Hamas Politburo. Half of them have
01:03:08.740
been eliminated. He's one of the ones that are still standing. He escaped. He's now in Turkey,
01:03:13.840
coordinating things with Hezbollah in Turkey. And the head of the entire staff union of UNRWA,
01:03:21.520
one of the elected leaders of the Hamas Politburo. 250 pages of how UNRWA knew these people were
01:03:27.340
hiding in plain sight, posting pictures every single day, hiding in plain sight, and we're
01:03:33.140
paying for it. So that's our upcoming report. Well, you make Montreal proud. I'm proud to call
01:03:39.080
you a fellow Montrealer. Keep up your good work. Continue being a honey badger. Stay safe.
01:03:44.680
A real pleasure talking to you. You could come back anytime you want. Thank you so much.