The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad - November 08, 2024


Trump's Victory, Musk's Influence, and Growing Up Jewish in Lebanon (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_746)

Hosted by
Gad Saad
Mentioned
Elon Musk Donald Trump Gamal Abdel Nasser Suicidal Empathy Golda Meir Hamas Erin
The Will Cain Show - Discussing Reactions Post Trump's Victory (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_744) The Biggest Lesson I Learned from Escaping the Lebanese War (The Saad Truth with Dr. Saad_747)

Episode Stats


Length

6 minutes

Words per minute

184.96

Word count

1,291

Sentence count

79

Harmful content

Misogyny

1

sentences flagged

Toxicity

12

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Summary

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

Dr. Ghad Saad is a visiting professor and global ambassador at Northwood University, a famed author, and a former journalist. He has over a million followers on Twitter, and Elon Musk is one of his biggest fans. And it s not hard to see why. Dr. Saad calls out nonsense, and is warning that what he saw as a Jewish child in Lebanon is a lot closer to home than we might think.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.260 Dr. Ghad Saad is a big deal, to put it bluntly.
00:00:04.360 Over a million followers on Twitter, now X,
00:00:07.020 and Elon Musk is one of his biggest fans,
00:00:09.540 and it's not hard to see why.
00:00:11.760 He calls out nonsense and is warning that what he saw
00:00:14.640 as a Jewish child in Lebanon is a lot closer to our home
00:00:18.360 than we might think.
00:00:19.780 He's a visiting professor and global ambassador
00:00:22.060 at Northwood University, a famed author,
00:00:24.880 and I'm so pleased to say he joins me now.
00:00:27.160 Dr. Ghad, so good to see you.
00:00:28.760 Thank you so much for coming on, Erin.
00:00:30.900 Tell me a little bit about your childhood.
00:00:32.780 I'd imagine it would be a little bit tough being in that position.
00:00:36.480 Right.
00:00:37.120 Well, contrary to what people think,
00:00:39.720 Lebanon was not this utopia of progressive tolerance.
00:00:43.740 I mean, you're tolerated until you're not, right,
00:00:46.200 and then you better run real fast.
00:00:48.300 So I tell many stories of how difficult it was to be Jewish in Lebanon,
00:00:52.540 even before the Civil War in 1975.
00:00:54.520 So, for example, when I was five, the Egyptian president,
00:00:58.540 Gamal Abdel Nasser, had passed away,
00:01:00.460 and he was a revered guy in the Arab world.
00:01:03.040 Well, when he passed away, all the people would go on the streets,
00:01:06.040 and the first thing that they would sing or chant or shout was, 1.00
00:01:10.940 death to Jews, death to Jews. 1.00
00:01:12.540 So as a five-year-old boy, I was looking at my mother and saying, 1.00
00:01:15.480 why are they screaming death to Jews?
00:01:16.920 What do we have to do with this? 0.89
00:01:18.100 So that was one example.
00:01:19.140 I'll give you maybe one or two others.
00:01:22.140 When I was about eight or nine years old,
00:01:24.120 the teacher asked us to stand up and say what we were going to be
00:01:26.960 when we grow up, and I want to be a policeman,
00:01:29.400 I want to be a soccer player, I want to be a doctor.
00:01:31.760 And so one of my friends who knew that I was Jewish stood up and said, 0.96
00:01:34.620 when I grow up, I want to be a Jew killer to raucous laughter and applause. 1.00
00:01:39.920 And so this is the kind of life you lived in Lebanon as a Jewish boy. 0.90
00:01:43.760 So you're giving examples of what it was like for you in Lebanon as a Jew
00:01:49.520 from decades and decades ago, but so much of that mentality sounds very familiar.
00:01:55.540 In fact, it's starting to rear its ugly head now in 2024 and has been since October 7.
00:02:01.520 Indeed.
00:02:02.240 Look, if you allow millions of immigrants to come into host nations that are generous
00:02:09.480 by virtue of the fact that they're letting these people in,
00:02:11.740 and those people come from cultures where you have 95% to 99% of polled people
00:02:17.580 exhibiting endemic Jew hatred towards the Jews,
00:02:21.500 it doesn't take a fancy professor to tell you what's going to happen to Jew hatred
00:02:25.120 in the whole societies.
00:02:26.200 And so that's exactly what I had been warning about in Canada,
00:02:29.180 and that's exactly what we now see in every corner of every street.
00:02:32.920 What really frustrates me about the pro-Hamas, and they say pro-Palestinian,
00:02:37.480 they're not, they're pro-Hamas-types waving flags and cheering on terrorists,
00:02:41.960 is that they propose to be the humane ones.
00:02:45.160 So they'd say to someone like me who stands against terror alongside the only country
00:02:49.780 who's fighting it right now that I don't care about children in the Middle East, 0.99
00:02:53.500 which is utterly ridiculous.
00:02:55.200 The only reason I stand against terror is because I care desperately about all children 0.99
00:02:59.220 in the Middle East, and I want the people killing them, 1.00
00:03:01.260 the terrorists, to be eliminated. 0.99
00:03:03.980 It's a bit of false rhetoric, but it actually trampolines into my next book,
00:03:10.020 which is titled Suicidal Empathy, right?
00:03:12.460 So empathy is a wonderful and laudable virtue to possess,
00:03:16.540 as long as it is directed towards the right targets in right measure.
00:03:22.160 So it's not that empathy is bad no matter what,
00:03:24.440 but if I care more about Central American illegal migrants than I care about American vets
00:03:31.240 who've lost their limbs protecting the United States,
00:03:34.360 then I'm engaging in suicidal empathy.
00:03:36.460 So I think the example that you just discussed is exactly that.
00:03:40.280 Oh, that will absolutely be a bestseller, I've got no doubt at all.
00:03:44.440 It's a similar situation.
00:03:45.860 My dad was a politician here in Australia, a former major general,
00:03:49.060 and he was an architect of what they called Operation Sovereign Borders,
00:03:51.820 which essentially stopped people smugglers bringing people here illegally by boat,
00:03:56.400 and they were all drowning at sea.
00:03:57.600 And people said, that's so cruel.
00:03:59.560 Let everyone in.
00:04:00.480 That's so mean.
00:04:02.240 And it's like, no, we're actually saving people's lives.
00:04:05.280 We're stopping children drowning at sea.
00:04:07.580 I want to ask you about Donald Trump.
00:04:09.900 Now, you took 2X and you said that you might now have to hide under a desk in fear.
00:04:15.900 Explain that to me and tell me you don't appear to be under a desk right now,
00:04:20.000 so clearly you're feeling a little bit safer.
00:04:21.820 Well, I will.
00:04:24.880 Be patient.
00:04:26.180 That clip will show up at some point soon.
00:04:28.660 But no, I'm, of course, elated that he won to the dismay of nearly 100% of my academic colleagues,
00:04:37.560 all of whom are saying that women will now no longer have any access to health care,
00:04:42.860 trans people will be executed, Jews will be in internment camps. 0.97
00:04:47.420 It really is a level of orgiastic, unhinged irrationality that is an affront to human reason. 0.98
00:04:54.260 But here I stand and here I persist.
00:04:56.080 And the exact same people who are saying that he hates women and that women aren't safe
00:05:02.220 in America now are the ones who sided with Hamas after October 7, who denied the rape of Jewish
00:05:08.640 women, who marched in the streets, flying the flags of the terrorists who killed people,
00:05:14.260 innocent women, innocent children. 0.99
00:05:16.220 It is unbelievable.
00:05:17.820 Now, I mentioned Elon Musk at the start of our interview.
00:05:20.700 I'd love to get your thoughts on him.
00:05:21.920 I know he's a big fan of yours.
00:05:23.220 I'm assuming you are of him as well.
00:05:24.840 And what kind of role do you see him playing in a Trump administration?
00:05:28.860 Well, he's already done quite a bit.
00:05:30.740 I don't think that Donald Trump would have been elected were not for, number one, Elon Musk
00:05:35.780 buying Twitter, now called Edge, and then putting his influence into the final stretch.
00:05:44.300 But I think that it looks like if he does try to remove some of the excess fat that occurs
00:05:52.320 with any institution, and certainly the U.S. government, if he did only that, it would
00:05:57.260 be enough of a service.
00:05:58.400 So I think let's start with there and see where it goes.
00:06:01.240 Absolutely.
00:06:02.320 Now, just finally, peace in the Middle East.
00:06:04.700 You seem like a very sensible man.
00:06:06.680 In fact, I know you are.
00:06:07.860 Highly educated, reasonable, rational, things that are quite rare these days.
00:06:12.180 How do we achieve it?
00:06:13.280 We only achieve it when young kids straight out of the womb are not taught that anybody
00:06:21.700 who doesn't share their religion is to be eliminated or converted.
00:06:25.500 It has nothing to do with land.
00:06:26.980 It has nothing to do with any of the things that you hear about.
00:06:30.160 It's got nothing to do with colonialism and Zionism.
00:06:32.660 It has to do with endless orgiastic teaching of hatred of the other.
00:06:38.780 However, once that is removed, Golda Meir, who was a prime minister of Israel in the late
00:06:44.000 60s and up to the mid-70s, said that once the Palestinians love their children more than 0.79
00:06:50.500 they hate ours, we will have peace.
00:06:52.700 And that maxim still holds true today.
00:06:55.660 It really does.
00:06:56.660 Doctor, thank you so very much for speaking with me.