The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - October 18, 2023


On the Hamas-Israel War - the Piers Morgan vs Bassem Youssef Heated Exchange (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_604)


Episode Stats


Length

11 minutes

Words per minute

138.26605

Word count

1,556

Sentence count

113

Harmful content

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

8

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Piers Morgan and Bassem Youssef's exchange is a classic example of poisonous irony. It is impossible to have meaningful dialogue when someone is monopolistically spewing endless transparent jabs under the guise of sarcasm.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
00:00:00.300 Hi everybody, this is Gatsad, third clip of the day. I was just trying to exercise, watch a bit of TV, maybe do a bit of reading and chill out.
00:00:10.900 But you know how it is, you guys always pull me back in.
00:00:14.500 I was tagged on an exchange between Piers Morgan, I appeared on the show last week, and Bassem Youssef, who is an Egyptian TV host and supposed satirist.
00:00:32.100 And so I was very keen to watch this because I thought, okay, well let's see what the exchange is going to be.
00:00:37.580 I'll put the link to the exchange between the two of them, and you can go then, you know, listen to the words that I'm going to share now, which I just posted as a long Twitter thread.
00:00:51.640 And you can contrast what I said with the context of what Mr. Youssef was spouting on the show.
00:01:01.820 So let me just read it out, and then I can add some additional comments.
00:01:06.300 I just watched the exchange between Bassem Youssef and Piers Morgan.
00:01:12.020 First, I thought that Piers was incredibly gracious and generous in granting Mr. Youssef the opportunity to lecture for nearly 30 minutes.
00:01:19.160 By the way, every single affectation, gesticulation, rhetorical device that Bassem was using is like grade two stuff for me.
00:01:34.340 I come from that region.
00:01:36.680 I know satire.
00:01:38.700 So I follow everything that he's doing.
00:01:41.220 It's not nearly as impressive as you think that it is if you come from that region. 1.00
00:01:46.440 Second, as a satirist from the Middle East myself, I could have easily handled Bassem's passive-aggressive sarcasm.
00:01:53.200 His point about disproportionality is nonsensical in a myriad of ways.
00:01:58.200 I've already covered this in a recent sad truth clip on my show.
00:02:01.280 A lot of people are hailing Mr. Youssef for his brilliant sarcasm.
00:02:06.800 It was seething, albeit castrated passive-aggressiveness that has several names in Arabic.
00:02:13.760 Let me share a few of those.
00:02:15.820 لَأْمَنِي
00:02:16.620 وَأْحَنِي
00:02:18.740 نَسْنَسِي
00:02:20.380 If Mr. Youssef listens to this, he'll know exactly.
00:02:24.660 Those are the specific, exact words that capture what he was doing.
00:02:30.900 لَأْمَنِي
00:02:31.580 نَسْنَسِي
00:02:32.860 وَأْحَنِي
00:02:34.040 There are a few others I could include here.
00:02:36.720 It's a particular type of poisonous irony, seething sarcasm, manipulative ploys that, again, if you're well-versed in that language, it's nothing.
00:02:52.880 It is impossible to have a meaningful dialogue when someone is monopolistically spewing endless transparent jabs under the guise of sarcasm.
00:03:04.080 There was nothing, absolutely nothing, brilliant in the sarcasm that Mr. Youssef was using.
00:03:11.980 Most decent and moral people, including yours truly, abhor the harming of any civilian on any side of a conflict.
00:03:20.880 I wonder, though, if Mr. Youssef mourns the loss of all of the innocent people that have been killed by the noble people of perpetual peace.
00:03:28.220 Perhaps Mr. Youssef could let us know what happened to the Egyptian Jews, the Lebanese Jews, the Syrian Jews, the Libyan Jews, the Algerian Jews, the Yemeni Jews, and the Arabian Jews from the days of Muhammad, among other Mizrahi Jews.
00:03:43.940 Perhaps he could tell us about whether he'd rather live in a society organized along Western principles or those dictated by the noble faith.
00:03:52.500 There is enough tragedy to go around on all sides of this conflict.
00:03:56.260 The reason why I'm saying this is because if you listen to Mr. Youssef, I mean, it's just, you know, the Israelis are disproportionate, they're butchering all Palestinians, and the Palestinians are just, you know, they're mini Ripperton, the famous soul singers. 1.00
00:04:10.100 They just walk around with flowers and a reggaeton holding hands, and that's it.
00:04:15.940 There's no nuance, there's no ability to, there's no theory of mind of the other side, and so on.
00:04:22.360 So anyways, let's go on.
00:04:26.260 So as I said, there is enough tragedy to go around on all sides of this conflict, but this is a battle between two visions of how society should be organized.
00:04:34.600 Again, countless Palestinians have suffered as have countless Israelis.
00:04:39.480 This is not a contest of victimology poker.
00:04:42.500 But free thinkers of all faiths and no faith should rise above tribal allegiance.
00:04:50.720 I have more in common with the Imam of Peace, Imam Tawheidi, than I do with many Orthodox Jews because I share many values with the Imam.
00:04:58.980 When your calculus is restricted to, quote, my side is the perpetual victim, and the other side is the eternal Satan, quote, close quote, as Mr. Yusuf was doing with his very clever sarcasm, you can't get anywhere.
00:05:15.320 Both Israelis and Palestinians commit this cognitive and emotional bias. 1.00
00:05:19.900 Rise above this.
00:05:21.400 Do you want to spread values that are in line with individual dignity, freedom of conscience, freedom of speech, secularism, and enlightenment?
00:05:30.240 If yes, then choose your side carefully.
00:05:34.760 Best of luck to Mr. Yusuf with his poisonous sarcasm.
00:05:39.560 Kudos to peers for being classy.
00:05:41.760 This was a great opportunity, in my view, for Mr. Yusuf, who hails from the Middle East, to come on.
00:05:51.140 He's got a huge audience.
00:05:52.500 I went to check who he is and so on.
00:05:54.220 And, you know, he certainly seems to have a large following.
00:05:57.580 To come on, share a perspective.
00:06:00.720 Of course, you know, he's got family in Gaza, so I could understand how it could be painful for him.
00:06:05.380 See, look, I'm using theory of mind.
00:06:07.060 I could put myself in the shoe of the other, even though I have family in Israel.
00:06:12.100 I understand his pain.
00:06:13.920 I understand his plight.
00:06:15.780 I understand that the innocent person in Gaza, who's hearing the whistle signature of a bomb coming, is not deserving of that.
00:06:23.500 But that's what it takes.
00:06:25.020 It takes a universal moral compass that says, wait a minute.
00:06:28.660 Forget about this specific battle, as horrifying as it is.
00:06:34.100 What's the bigger issue here?
00:06:35.840 It's a civilizational issue.
00:06:38.440 It's a battle between different visions of how societies should be organized.
00:06:45.660 Do the Palestinians have the right vision? 1.00
00:06:48.820 If so, we should all be thinking about organizing our societies in the manner that they do.
00:06:55.360 If not, then we should be perhaps being a bit more careful in where we lay our support.
00:07:03.440 When you say something like, queers for Palestine, or as I did a clip recently, because I love that analogy, like saying chickens for KFC, you're not quite understanding the full picture.
00:07:21.680 Because if you are a so-called member of the queer community, then maybe it's probably not a good idea to place your support with a society that would probably not be very nice to you. 0.97
00:07:37.960 And typically, they like to use you as a participant in an experiment on gravity, where they look for a building and then see if gravity applies to you.
00:07:48.360 So, again, Mr. Yusuf, who I think might have a home in the United States, and I don't know if this is true or not, but I think he does maybe have a home in L.A.
00:08:01.240 If I'm misspeaking, then my apologies, has made a vote with his feet and saying, look, all other things equal, I prefer the values that are enshrined within the West, because I like liberty, I like freedom of conscience, I like freedom of speech.
00:08:21.140 Well, do all of the rulers of the Palestinian territories share in those values?
00:08:29.180 If yes, then we should all be signing up to support their cause.
00:08:34.580 If no, then supporting Israel is not just about supporting the Zionist, genocidal, apartheid state.
00:08:43.400 It's about supporting a democracy.
00:08:46.640 In Israel, Supreme Court judges are Arab Israelis.
00:08:54.620 Valedictorians in universities are Arab Israelis.
00:08:58.920 Physicians in the top hospitals and nurses are Arab physicians, many of them.
00:09:05.100 People in the military, including officers in the IDF, you know, the genocidal apartheid regime of Israel, they're Arab, Muslim.
00:09:16.640 Israelis, how many Arab countries have Jews who serve in their parliament, who are valedictorians in their universities, who are the top physicians in their hospitals, who can speak freely about issues without worrying about anything?
00:09:38.800 Oh, wait a minute, no, there are no Jews in any of those Arab lands.
00:09:43.020 We don't know what happened to them.
00:09:44.440 It's a mystery.
00:09:45.380 It's probably they disappeared because, you know, Zionist occupation. 0.79
00:09:50.880 So, again, one has to have a grand sense of what's at play here.
00:09:58.180 It's a battle between completely, radically visions of varied societies.
00:10:04.180 Most Palestinians are undoubtedly lovely people.
00:10:08.380 I know many of those Palestinians.
00:10:10.300 I'm friends with many of those Palestinians.
00:10:12.680 Many of those Palestinians are fans of mine.
00:10:16.060 So, I don't have to be lectured about the fact that there are good people and bad people on any side of the conflict.
00:10:23.820 Right? 1.00
00:10:24.200 They are asshole Jews. 1.00
00:10:26.040 They are lovely Jews. 1.00
00:10:27.340 They are nasty, brutal Palestinians. 1.00
00:10:29.900 They are lovely, kind, and hospitable Palestinians. 1.00
00:10:33.440 That's not the issue.
00:10:34.740 The issue is it's a fight for different visions of how they could be optimal flourishing for individuals.
00:10:45.820 Does Israel better capture that or do the Palestinian territories better capture that?
00:10:51.340 That's the side that I choose.
00:10:53.600 I don't choose to be on the side of Israel because, you know, I'm Jewish or because, you know, I have family there.
00:11:01.200 Of course, I care about the safety of my family.
00:11:04.240 But, again, I support all of the values of classical liberalism.
00:11:10.100 And that's not to be found in a territory ruled by Hamas.
00:11:14.340 Take care, everybody.