Dr. Gad Saad is a marketing professor at Concordia University and a Global Ambassador at Northwood University. He has also been a visiting professor at Cornell, Dartmouth, and the University of California, Irvine, and is now a global ambassador at the Azrieli Foundation. In this episode, Dr. Saad talks about his family's experience growing up Jewish in Lebanon and the challenges of being a member of a Jewish family in the context of the Lebanese civil war.
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00:00:52.660Today, my guest, and I'm so thrilled, is Dr. Gad Saad.
00:00:58.080He is a professor of marketing at Concordia University, but I believe you're on a pause for a little bit.
00:01:04.520He has also been a visiting professor at Cornell, Dartmouth, and the University of California, Irvine.
00:01:12.640And we're very pleased to announce that he is a visiting professor and global ambassador at Northwood University.
00:01:21.660And I also heard from a friend of mine, who is a huge, huge fan of yours, that we do have another thing in common, in that you love dogs and you don't like the Beatles.
00:01:49.080And, you know, I wanted to kick it off with talking a little bit about your experiences and your family's experiences as a Jew of Lebanese descent.
00:02:00.360Which I think, you know, given the current state of affairs right now, is really first and foremost, you know, with what's going on with Lebanon and so on.
00:02:14.020So if you can just share a bit about that with me.
00:02:18.300First, thank you so much for having me.
00:02:19.600Thank you for that lovely introduction.
00:02:22.620So we were part of, we meaning my immediate family, were part of the last remaining group of Jews in Lebanon.
00:02:33.180At one point, Lebanon had a, I mean, thriving community would be maybe stretching the term, but certainly there were quite a few Lebanese Jews in the many thousands that lived in Lebanon.
00:02:46.740But then as things became a bit more precarious in terms of being Jewish in Lebanon, you would see an exodus of Jews, including my extended family.
00:02:58.620So my grandparents left to Israel in 1970.
00:03:02.700Many of my aunts and uncles left well before the Civil War.
00:03:06.840But my immediate family had steadfastly refused to leave Lebanon because we were well entrenched in Lebanese society.
00:03:15.320And then unfortunately, in 1975, the Lebanese Civil War broke out, where it really became impossible to be Jewish in Lebanon.
00:03:25.480So we were there for the first year of the Civil War, and we were lucky to, you know, to be able to eventually flee Lebanon.
00:03:33.160And then we emigrated to Montreal, Canada.
00:03:36.560If you'd like, I can share with you some of the realities of growing up Jewish in Lebanon, even before the Lebanese Civil War, if that interests you.
00:04:17.960So that, you know, yes, we know that you're Jewish.
00:04:21.780We tolerate you until, of course, we don't.
00:04:25.220In which case, you better put on some really good running shoes and run real fast and hopefully outrun the ones who want to catch you.
00:04:32.320So it's not as though I lived free of Jew hatred in Lebanon.
00:04:38.140And I tell all this in the first chapter of The Parasitic Mind, which was my 2020 book, where I'm trying to talk about what happens to a society that is perfectly organized along identity politics lines.
00:04:53.260Because Lebanon is the perfect model of that, right?
00:04:56.200Who sits in parliament is dependent on what your religion is, whether you're going to be president or prime minister depends on your religion.
00:05:04.340Everything is viewed through the prism of your religious identity.
00:05:08.300So in that sense, it is the perfect example of identity politics.
00:05:11.880And so in 1970, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was the president of Egypt at the time, and highly appreciated and revered pan-Arabist, meaning that he was trying to unite all of the Arabs into one grand, you know, pan-Arabic movement.
00:05:34.160He passed away in 1970, and as so often happens in the Middle East, but now we see it on university campuses in the West, there are these really sort of violent, feverish protests where people will scream out all kinds of things.
00:05:51.360And one of the things I remember as a five-year-old boy, I hadn't yet turned six, as people were proceeding down our street lamenting the passing of Abdel Nasser, they were screaming, death to Jews, death to Jews.
00:06:05.540And as a five-year-old boy, I turned to my mother, I'm thinking, well, why are they screaming this?
00:06:11.140And she's saying, just put your head down, you know, shut up, be quiet.
00:06:14.480So that was my first exposure of what it was, you know, vivid exposure and episodic memory of what it is to be Jewish.
00:06:22.840If you fast forward, I'll tell two additional stories, and then we can drill down as much as you'd like.
00:06:28.660When I was about maybe nine or almost ten, so before the start of the Civil War, the teacher had asked us to stand up and, you know, say in a few sentences what we want to be when we grow up.
00:06:42.840So, you know, person gets up, I want to be a doctor, I want to be a fighter pilot, I want to be a soccer player.
00:06:49.300And one kid gets up and says, when I grow up, I want to be a Jew killer.
00:06:56.900Now, this kid knew that I was Jewish, I was his friend, we grew up together.
00:07:01.700And third story, my brother had been a Lebanese judo champion for several years in a row.
00:07:08.500And at one point, you know, in a culture of honor and shame, I guess it was perceived as shameful that a Jew was consistently winning in these combat sports, in this case, in judo.
00:07:21.880And so he was approached by some men who explained to him that it was time for him to, you know, retire, lest there might be an accident that happens to him.
00:07:29.620And that he ended up actually leaving Lebanon.
00:07:35.580To the Civil War, he moved to Paris, France, where he pursued his judo career there.
00:07:40.340Now, the irony to complete that story, in 1976, after we had immigrated to Canada, you might remember the Montreal Olympics happened in Montreal, Canada.
00:07:50.020Well, he ended up representing Lebanon in the Montreal Olympics.
00:07:55.760So the same guy who suffered from the terminal disease called being Jewish a few years earlier, and therefore had to flee Lebanon to pursue his judo career, we can overlook the fact that he was Jewish when it came to representing Lebanon and carrying the Lebanese flag.
00:08:13.760So that's what it means to be progressive and tolerant in the Paris of the Middle East.
00:08:56.800Because as you're saying it, I happen to know that you're only a year older than me.
00:09:01.200So I picture, like, like, I remember things that happened to me when I was 9, 10, and you carry that with you, you know, and just processing that is a lot.
00:09:16.680And when you said it was your friend, you know, that just struck me, it's like, it's like a, forgive me, and you can correct me, it's almost like a conditional friendship.
00:09:27.160That's that small T tolerance that you referred to, that your friend displayed.
00:10:32.920And that's why I think, you know, my, my personal story has resonated with so many people.
00:10:39.540The, the day that we left Lebanon, I call this the, the full circle of the star of David.
00:10:47.560Because it's, it's going to, it's going to start in Lebanon, but it's going to end about two weeks after October 7th.
00:10:54.480So in the day that we left Lebanon, as we literally were flying outside of Beirut, the, the pilot, the captain announced that we were now outside of the, of Lebanese airspace.
00:11:09.780At which point my mother took out a pendant, you know, star of David high thing.
00:11:17.160And it put it around my, my neck and said, now you can wear this, not hide your identity and be proud of who you are.
00:11:25.640But now let's fast forward to two weeks, roughly about two weeks after October 7th.
00:11:33.920And you can, you can probably go do a search.
00:11:39.140I don't, I don't delete any of my tweets.
00:11:40.800My wife and one of our children, my son had just, they had just returned.
00:11:50.080My wife had picked him up in the East end of Montreal, where he had just played a soccer match.
00:11:54.760And they were coming to pick me up at the local cafe where I was working on my laptop.
00:11:59.400And as I got into the car, my dad, my dad, my son said to me, daddy, if you were wearing a star of David, where I just played soccer, you'd be dead.
00:12:17.900And my mother says, you could now wear the star of David.
00:12:21.100In 2023, my son, who's almost the exact same age as I was when my mother put the star of David around my neck, tells me, in Montreal, Canada, you shouldn't wear the star of David.
00:12:38.440That doesn't bode too well for the future of Jews.
00:12:54.180Well, that's why I fight, by the way, because, you know, I thought that I had been, you know, you know, when, what is that sign in your mirror?
00:13:27.240I shouldn't call it a movie because for about 25 years after escaping Lebanon, I haven't had many of these nightmares recently.
00:13:35.280And actually, I talk about this in the parasitic mind.
00:13:37.840I would have a recurring nightmare very frequently where and it would take one of two forms.
00:13:44.960It's either the bad guys are coming to the house to take us away and my gun would jam or I run out of ammunition.
00:13:55.740And one day I was telling that story to the gentleman who who literally killed Osama bin Laden, Rob O'Neill, who had come on my show to chat.
00:14:07.420And he says, oh, this is actually a dream that we often have in the military.
00:14:35.540I mean, I don't have the luxury of having grown up in the West thinking that what we have in the West is the default society across the world.
00:14:45.660And that's why, by the way, as I often like to remind people, some of the staunchest defenders of the West are usually immigrants who have sampled from the buffet of societies outside the West.
00:14:59.480And so we're the ones who stand on top of the mountain and say, don't take your freedoms for granted because you don't want to see what's out there.
00:15:06.820And so exactly is why I can't keep quiet because I do have children.
00:15:11.080I might be able to outrun them, outrun the bad guys in terms of my life expectancy, but my children and their children won't.
00:15:22.340And I and I thank you for that, because you're right.
00:15:25.220You share a different perspective that actually it feels more realistic to me because those of us who did grow up in this bubble of Canada or this bubble of the US don't get it.
00:15:39.200And I think because of that, we tend to try and apply our our Canadian North American solutions to a land that thinks differently and and feels differently and intellectualizes differently.
00:15:56.420So it's almost like we try and put this this square peg into a round hole and we often need people who have lived it or whose families have lived it to say, this is not going to work.
00:16:10.160This is not how you resolve what you need to resolve if you can.
00:16:15.920And that actually leads me to because Lebanon, Lebanon in my house has always been a topic of conversation because my equal other, he was he's Israeli and he was a Galani soldier who fought in the first Lebanon war.
00:16:33.780So we do, it does tend to come up every now and then.
00:16:38.740And of course, now, even more so, because of the fact that while all eyes were on Gaza, I can only speak to my household, our eyes were on the north.
00:17:38.260Now, I don't think people realize that.
00:17:40.540And and so one of the reasons why there was greater tolerance.
00:17:45.840Now, this is, by the way, in no way meant to imply that the Christians don't have and certainly the Arab Christians don't have their own very nasty and virulent form of Jew hatred.
00:17:56.860But I think in their case, it's because they take on what's called the Dimmis.
00:18:01.820Dimmis are the religious minorities that are, quote, tolerated until they're not tolerated in Islamic life.
00:18:07.500And so one of the ways that I demonstrate, hey, guys, don't take me out and behead me is that I will show even greater hatred to the Jew than you do, because that shows that I'm really part of the community.
00:18:19.020So but that notwithstanding, Lebanon, to the extent that it was, quote, tolerant and progressive is precisely because it had been a at one point, it was a French protectorate and it was a Christian majority country.
00:18:34.860Now, it didn't take a thousand years for Lebanon to flip and become an Islamic majority country.
00:18:42.100It happened before my eyes in the way that you you watch paint dry.
00:18:50.120So so the bigger story in Lebanon, I think.
00:18:53.500I mean, yes, there are immediate things that we could talk about how Hezbollah has taken over Lebanon, blah, blah, blah.
00:18:59.660But the fact that, you know, Lebanon is a failed state for many reasons, one of which is because, as I said, the demographic realities, the corruption.
00:19:12.100And so on, it so it pains me because, you know, I'm I'm very Jewish in terms of my heritage, but I'm also Lebanese.
00:19:23.640So if you if you if people ask me, you know, oh, you know, you have a particular look to you.
00:19:46.980And so one of the biggest regrets I have in my life is that not only I've never been able to return to Lebanon for obvious reasons, but also that my children have never seen Lebanon.
00:19:57.720My children don't speak Arabic well, if at all.
00:20:01.760I mean, they understand a little bit here and there that pains me.
00:20:05.100Now, of course, I would also want them to learn Hebrew and visit Israel.
00:20:09.640But the tragedy for me of Lebanon is that there is no conceivable pathway that I can think of where within my lifetime, inshallah, may I live to be a thousand where, you know, I'll ever be able to go back to Lebanon and show them the beauty of the country.
00:20:28.580Right. For all of the ugliness, there are elements of Lebanese society that are astounding.
00:20:36.240The hospitality, the warmth, the joie de vivre.
00:23:17.300So there's this game that I've coined called six degrees of Jew.
00:23:22.480And so basically the game is, and I'm going to link it to Lebanon in a second.
00:23:26.200The game is basically, I propose any calamity to you, and then you've got up to six causal links to demonstrate why it's the fault of the Jew.
00:23:37.400Well, I mean, it sounds like I'm being humorous and facetious, but it's actually very powerful because, you know, Lebanon, again, for all of its, quote, progressive nature and tolerance, was very much a six degrees of Jew society, right?
00:24:16.920And they're the ones who are the famous physicians and scientists, and therefore they are, they are literally choking us by not releasing it.
00:24:28.460Now, by the way, it is so pervasive in the Middle East that even animal disasters are attributed to the diabolical Jews.
00:24:37.960So, for example, you might remember that many years ago in Sharm el-Sheikh, which is an area in the, on the Red Sea, a tourist area in Egypt, there were a couple of shark attacks.
00:25:22.660And so the reason why that society can never heal itself is because as long as your foundational definitional metric is the hatred of the Jew, that oil, I always joke that if you want to really get a green energy source, just try to harvest the Jew hatred in the Middle East because it is an infinitely renewable fuel source.
00:25:52.820Don't teach children straight out of the womb that the Jew is a diabolical creature.
00:25:59.180And then maybe Lebanon could have a prettier future.
00:26:03.100But do you find, though, that we are saying this Jew hatred in the Middle East, but it feels like it's been transported, like it's been packed up in luggage and brought to Europe and brought to Canada.
00:26:20.660And just, you know, it's, it's so, it feels so pervasive and has become like just this mindset that.
00:26:38.140So, look, one of the, one of the reasons for, I mean, you were kind enough to mention my new affiliation.
00:26:46.400One of the reasons why I felt very much compelled to take a leave of absence from Concordia and go to Northwood.
00:26:53.400I mean, Northwood, independently of the reality at Concordia, was a very exciting project that I wanted to be involved in.
00:26:59.280But it certainly made it easier for me to accept this wonderful opportunity, given the fact that I was very, very concerned about going back on campus at Concordia.
00:27:10.440Now, imagine if the average student who's Jewish, but who is completely anonymous, right?
00:27:16.900As he or she is walking on campus, people don't know who, that that person is Jewish, and they're feeling incredibly threatened.
00:27:27.380Well, I'm not anonymous, and I'm not unknown, you know, and so therefore, you know, but this is happening in the 21st century in Montreal, Canada, right?
00:27:38.960So that, you know, the proverbial, you know, canary in the coal mine story, boy, does it apply here.
00:27:46.440If a Jewish professor is feeling sufficiently threatened that he thinks it's a much more attractive proposition to be a visiting professor elsewhere, that's not a good thing.
00:28:01.820And to your point, demography is destiny.
00:28:06.500You said that the Jew hatred is coming in luggages.
00:28:09.340I mean, it literally is coming in luggages in the sense that if you import people in the hundreds of thousands, in some countries, in the millions, where they're hailing from societies where endemic Jew hatred is not some small but significant minority.
00:28:29.260So I'll give you an example, the Pew surveys, P-E-W, Pew surveys is a nonpartisan global survey that, you know, administers all sorts of surveys around the world.
00:28:42.440Several years ago, they had done a survey in Islamic countries of people's responses to Jews, you know, what are your views of Jews?
00:28:54.320Now, if I told you, Rivka, that 10% of the sampled people had abhorrent views of the Jews, that would be alarming.
00:29:03.660But if I tell you that the numbers are in the 95 to 99% of surveyed people, these are scientific surveys.
00:29:16.780So imagine that statement, I survey, by the way, and my homeland of Lebanon was included in that survey, and I think their number was 98% or 99, I can't remember.
00:29:27.940So if you have people who are stemming from societies where nearly to the last person surveyed, your attitude towards the Jew is a terrible one, and now you import such people into your country, do you need a fancy professor and evolutionary scientist to explain to you that you're likely to have an increase in Jew hatred in the whole society?
00:29:53.800What could be clearer? Gravity couldn't be as clear as that.
00:29:58.020But yet people shake their head and go, what explains this Jew hatred?
00:30:37.520Can you be so bereft of logic that has to recognize that not all immigrants are created equal?
00:30:44.700Yes, Elon Musk is an immigrant, but Elon Musk doesn't want to eradicate Jews.
00:30:50.000So these are kinds of the problems that we're facing in the West.
00:30:53.680And by the way, that's why I wrote The Parasitic Mind, because that's what happens when a brain is completely parasitized by ideological rapture.
00:31:01.480Yeah, and when I notice if people point out that logic or that truth, because you're right, it's not anecdotal.
00:31:35.300But yet we are sometimes, I'm trying to soften it because I can be harsh.
00:31:42.540We are sometimes a society that is so worried about being politically correct that we lose our sense of common sense.
00:31:55.760And I've even had that political correctness used to, used, I'm not going to, almost against me as a person of color, where I say, first of all, why are you being offended for me?
00:32:30.600Like, we said what we meant and we meant what we said.
00:32:33.520And I sometimes have a real hard time navigating this correctness when it's like part of not owning what is happening is part of the reason we are where we are.
00:32:48.840So, in the parasitic mind, what I demonstrated is what happens to our cognitive system, our thoughts, when it is parasitized by a whole bunch of bad ideas.
00:33:04.520My forthcoming book, which I'm currently feverishly working on, titled, tentatively titled, but I'm pretty sure that the title will stick.
00:33:15.400In a sense, it's part two of the parasitic mind.
00:33:21.020Because if the parasitic mind was what happens to your cognitive system when it is parasitized, suicidal empathy is what happens to your affective system, your emotional system when it is parasitized, right?
00:33:36.300So, the number one thing that you should optimize if you are suicidally empathetic is the currency of empathy, right?
00:33:44.920So, to say that Venezuelan illegal gang members should not be allowed to crash American borders, that is simply wrong.
00:33:56.380Because Venezuelans also deserve to live the American dream, right?
00:34:02.380To criticize tenets of Islam because they are profoundly incongruent with Western values is simply empathetically wrong and icky and gauche because you shouldn't be criticizing someone else's religion.
00:34:19.020No, I judge, right, because I have the capacity to discriminate between good ideas and bad ideas.
00:34:29.740In accepting the position at Northwood University, I had to go through a process to get a visa.
00:34:41.140I'm a well-known professor who defends American values.
00:34:45.920Yet, because I'm a law-abiding citizen, I had to take physically my doctoral diploma from Cornell University to the border in order to legally work in the United States.
00:35:02.800So, by which stretch of logic do I have to go through that process but 20 million illegal immigrants can come and crash the society and it would be wrong and racist of me to be concerned about that.
00:35:20.140So, the quicker that we can inoculate people's minds and the quicker we can inoculate their emotional system from succumbing to suicidal empathy, the quicker we can return to the beauty of our Western tradition.
00:37:04.560So, but, and I've only mentioned this a few times, but since you've given me the lead-in, I'll mention it here.
00:37:12.600When I was a doctoral student at Cornell, I became very good friends with the Chabad rabbi there, whom I actually recently met up again with his wife.
00:38:08.600And from 1994 to about, which is when I graduated, to about 2004, 2005, so about a 10, 11 year period, I put on Thelin every single day.
00:38:21.960So it's not as though I'm averse to engaging in religious, but frankly, and this may disappoint some of your audience, I do it for earthly reasons.
00:38:33.780In other words, we are part of a people that has a shared history.
00:38:41.100Now, yes, you can argue that that is rooted in a religious heritage, but I don't necessarily take seriously the fact that the Shabbat candles have to be lit at 721.
00:38:53.820But if I do it at 722, look out, I'm a bad person.
00:38:57.840So I practice those things as a reminder of my heritage, not necessarily because I'm wedded to every single element of the religious tenets.
00:39:08.620I don't know if that disappoints you as an answer, but it does.
00:39:38.880If people haven't read it, they need to get the parasitic mind.
00:39:42.960And you need to inundate Dr. Saad's Instagram with requests for suicidal empathy, ideally before, you know, the middle out of, let's say, let's give them till the middle of 2025.
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