#373 — Anti-Zionism Is Antisemitism

Welcome to the Success Podcast, this is Sam Harris. Okay, well, I'm back in town after traveling for about 11 days in Europe. This is my first podcast after that disastrous presidential debate. This was actually a perfect example of the relevance of sub-stack for me.

Because I couldn't record a podcast, I was traveling. I was traveling the morning after the debate. But I could post a short piece of sub-stack, which I did. So there's just the cadence of doing it once a week podcast.

It allows for certain things to fall through the cracks, and my writing over a sub-stack will help fill the cracks. Anyway, if you want to read me over there, you can just search my name over a sub-stack and you'll find it. If you haven't read what I wrote last week, my main point was not merely that Biden should drop out of the race. He clearly should.

And those who have worked so diligently up until it's going to conceal his deficits should be ashamed of themselves. I don't know how they thought he was going to bluff his way through this. But more important, I think we have to acknowledge that we have paid a significant price for his deficits already. It's not just that he can't campaign effectively and offer any assurance that he's going to beat Trump in November.

And spare as a second Trump term, it's that he can't speak effectively about anything, certainly not extemporaneously. He's done no interviews with the New York Times or the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal. He hasn't done them for a reason, and the job of the President is not just to be cognitively intact, such that he can make decisions. But let's just grant that he may be intact enough to make all the decisions he needs to make.

One could be forgiven, of course, for feeling that they saw no evidence of that in last week's debate. But even granting that his cognition may be all there, the job of the President is also to communicate and persuade. And there has been so much he should have communicated about about the war in Ukraine, about the war in Gaza. He should have been able to push back against all of this insanity we have witnessed in response to America's engagement such as it is in both of those wars.

He has to make sense of these things in public. He has to make the case for why America needs to be engaged in the world. He needs to be able to do a two-hour interview or a two-hour press conference. He's 81 and is not up to the job.

There's a proper insanity surrounding the President now where people are just torching their reputations, coming forward and defending him. This includes President Obama, it includes Governor Newsom, but Jesus Christ, you cannot tell America they didn't see what they saw during that debate. He didn't just have a bad night, it's not at all analogous to Obama's bad debate against Romney. No one came away from the debate that Obama clearly lost, thinking Obama is unfit to be in the Oval Office because his faculty of speech and very likely cognition is so degraded.

That was not the lesson drawn there. It absolutely was last week about President Biden. The Democrats ignore that or obviously that at their peril, not just at their peril, but everyone's peril. Because if half of what Democrats believe about a second term is real, well then, what are they doing, rolling the dice with Biden at this point?

I think there's no way that man wins in November. So obviously Biden himself should decide to drop out, but short of that, there has to be a way to do this at the convention. Anyway, a lot of people talking about that, writing about that, let's just see what happens. Also sometime last week, there was a demonstration, effectively a pro-Hamas demonstration in front of a synagogue in Los Angeles that really was quite ugly.

You had people blocking Jewish access to a synagogue in the most Jewish neighborhood in Los Angeles. This is the point that no Pollock made over the free press. If you had a bunch of masked Christian Republicans gathered in front of a mosque in Los Angeles assaulting Muslims, what would the response have been? As he says, we would now be several days into a national news cycle about Islamophobia and injustice in America.

There would be joint LAPD FBI task forces kicking down doors and press conferences, vigils, presidential speeches, and multi-part investigative reports from numerous leading publications. I think that's extraordinarily likely to be true. As many pointed out, the essence of anti-Semitism are the double standards, one continually discovers here. It happens to the Jews and no one seems to care.

If it happened to the Muslims, if it happened to Black Americans, we'd never hear the end of it. It's the stuff that's been normalized around the Jews that seems to own cities. I was in New York, not that long ago. I had to walk down Fifth Avenue past the big synagogue there, I guess somewhere around 65th Street or so.

And noticed, not for the first time, but for the first time I noticed how normal it had seemed, that happened from the synagogue entrance, they're these giant blocks of stone. One is about the size of a washing machine. They look nicer, nice blocks of limestone or something, and certainly not an eyesore, but they're quite unusual. The sidewalk is ringed there with these giant blocks of stone.

Think about that for a moment. What are they doing there? You know what they're doing there. They're to prevent a car jumping the curb and mowing down people in front of the synagogue entrance.

People who could assume if they're gathered there in any number are Jewish. It's to prevent the murder of Jews in Manhattan. This is normal, but it's only normal for Jews. No one else has to do this in American society, which brings me to the topic of today's conversation.

Today, I'm speaking with McCall, Coppler Wunch, who is Israel's special envoy for combating antisemitism. And she's also a prominent speaker and author and researcher and independent policy and strategy advisor covering antisemitism and law and human rights and Zionism. She was once a member of Israel's Knesset, and she's a trustee of Rabbi Sax's Legacy Trust. Anyway, I recorded this conversation back in December about seven months ago, and didn't release it.

And really, that was just based on my own incompetence, really. What happened is, I recorded it, and then I kept hitting the topic of October 7th. I've recorded several solo podcasts, you might recall. I felt like I had spent so much time on October 7th that I was wearing out the interest of the audience, so that the weeks and months passed, I never felt like the right time to release it.

But I went back and listened to it, and it is still perfectly relevant. I don't think there's a sentence here that shows this age. I mean, we're still in this moment of moral confusion around October 7th. In any case, McCall is an extraordinarily clear speaker.

I mean, she speaks with an urgency and eloquence that you don't often hear on any topic. She's spectacular. And I discovered her in a YouTube clip back in November, where she was dressing down the UN, and just did that as effectively as I've ever seen anyone do anything like that. It's worth walking that performance in front of the UN, which, as we make clear in this podcast, is a hostile environment for Jews and certainly any representative of Israel.

In any case, before giving you the conversation with McCall, I wanted to explain the title of giving this podcast because it represents a change in my view of the situation post-October 7th. Before October 7th, I certainly would have said that anti-Zionism is quite distinct from anti-Semitism. At one point, I could have even claimed to have been an anti-Zionist of some sort, myself. After October 7th, I don't think there's any meaningful difference.

I mean, there's still a conceptual difference that we could semantically justify. Anyone who's arguing that Israel shouldn't be a Jewish state at this point is clearly betraying. If not an outright hatred of Jews, such moral confusion about what happened on October 7th and about the risks to Israel, not just to the nation state, but to the actual inhabitants, the existential risk to them posed by Hamas and Hezbollah and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Anyone who's arguing that Israel shouldn't exist as a Jewish state at this point is so out of touch with what has happened there, and with what millions upon millions of people who really do hate the Jews want to have happened there between that river and the sea.

So surrender any semantic distinction there, I think morally confused. It's not important to make the distinction. The thing to acknowledge is that all of these people who are calling into question the legitimacy of the state of Israel and the legitimacy of its fighting for its own survival against antagonists that really do mean to perpetrate a genocide there. These people are not engaging with the actual moral terrain.

And maybe as much as Holocaust deniers are not actually a party to the conversation about what happened in Europe in the 40s and about what many people think should happen at some point in the future. That's actually a good analogy. Is Holocaust denial synonymous with anti-Semitism? Well, technically, no, right?

I mean, one could find some anomalies in the historical record or take an interest in the possibility that such anomalies exist so as to call some part of that history into question and to not be motivated by an abiding hatred of Jews. But you think a lot of people are standing on that part of the Venn diagram? No, right? If you're in the Holocaust denial business, we know what you're up to.

And I think we're in the same spot post-October 7th with anti-Semitism. It seems to me that most people don't understand here the justification for the state of Israel, certainly post-October 7th, which was a direct echo of a multi-century history of pogroms and a direct echo of the Holocaust itself. I mean, this was not normal violence. And the Jews can be forgiven, frankly, for perceiving a threat that most other identifiable groups would never imagine feeling.

I mean, the Jews have on countless occasions discovered from one day to the next that their neighbors want to kill them. This is a part of the history of the Holocaust that most people don't understand. And most people, when you think about the Holocaust, you think, well, there was Auschwitz, right? There was the killing machine of the Third Reich, the mechanization of death perpetrated by Nazi Germany on the Jews of Europe.

Now, that's obviously a significant part of the story, but it's by no means the whole story. On some level, it's not the most disconcerting part of the story. I mean, there were about 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, about 3 million, I believe, within the concentration camp system, so about 3 million died outside of it. And this is through mass shootings and ghettos and forced labor and death marches and other means.

Obviously, a lot of this was the result of what the Nazis did, in particular, their mobile killing units, the onsets group, but they had an uncountable number of collaborators in all the countries they invaded. And in many cases, they didn't have to force anyone to round out their local populations of Jews for slaughter. They simply had to give them permission. And in countries like Lithuania and Latvia and Ukraine and Belarus and Poland and Romania and Croatia and even Greece, right?

They were just well-known atrocities committed by locals who weren't forced to do anything. They just realized that they could, and this is the history that is even more unnerving for Jews. These were neighbors suddenly turning on neighbors and torturing them and beating them to death or shooting them in dishes or helping the Nazis do that very directly. They were Jews who returned from concentration camps after they were liberated, only to be murdered by their neighbors.

There's a quote here that I found in Dan Stone's recent book, The Holocaust and Unfinished History. He introduces it with a following. Nazi Germany was certainly responsible for initiating the program to kill the European Jews and the killing occurred within this overall framework, but at the local level, the ways in which the killings often took place were quite different from the factory line extermination associated with the death camps, not least because many locals participated. And then he introduces a quote from another source.

Here's a quote. For the Jews living in these Eastern European villages, towns, and cities, who had co-existed with their Christian neighbors for centuries, the fact that their acquaintances, colleagues, classmates, and friends had turned against them, hunted them down, or delivered them to Nazi murderers, meant that they experienced the Holocaust not just as a murderous invasion by a foreign enemy, but also as a series of communal massacres in a once-familiar but now-leafily hostile environment. That really is different. The once-familiar but now-leafily hostile environment.

And it's the intimations of that, the fact that society can turn and become a leafily hostile environment for Jews, as for no other people on Earth. I mean, I guess it's possible it could happen for some other people, but who has it happened to for the last 2000 years? So the Jews can be forgiven for not having the patience to split hairs, but the motivations of people who are blocking synagogues in Los Angeles and beating people up who try to enter. Are these people really anti-Semitic, or are they just anti-Zionist?

Are these people who are holding Jews in Los Angeles responsible for policies of a foreign country, Israel? Is this anti-Semitism or is it just really passionate anti-Zionism? The stupidity on display by people who can't figure out the difference between what Hamas did on October 7th and what the IDF has done in fighting Hamas, which, again, is using its own population as human shields, which is still holding American hostages. Again, another thing that our president can't talk about.

And when McCall and I cover much of this terrain, we discuss the bias against Israel's UN, the nature of double standards, the president set by Israel in its conduct and war, the shape-shifting quality of anti-Semitism, anti-Zionism is a new strain of anti-Semitism, the Zionism is racism, resolution of the UN, the lie that Israel is in apartheid state, the notion that Israel is perpetrating an genocide against Palestinians, another lie, the Marxists oppress, oppressor and narrative that is confounding people, the false moral equivalence between the atrocities committed by Hamas and the deaths of non-combatants in Gaza, the failure of the social justice movement to respond appropriately after October 7th, what universities should have done in those early days, reclaiming the means of words, extremism of many types versus civilization, and other topics. Anyway, there's another PSA, so no paywall. And again, sorry for the lay on this podcast. I just dropped the ball.

I want to apologize to McCall for that. And thank her for her patience. And I bring you, McCall, Kotler, Wunch. I am here with McCall, Kotler, Wunch.

McCall, thanks for joining me. Thank you very much for having me on. I'm sure I sounded like the Asra Jew in the pronunciation of your name, but it's great to have you here. Like many people, I first became aware of you seeing your really brilliant and Syrian speech in front of the UN recently.

Once you get that speech, it's about a month ago. So that was, yeah, that was just about three weeks ago. And, well, you know, we saw one manifestation of what I was trying to say just in the complete silence regarding, obviously, the women so really great on 10-7, but that's just one manifestation of what that speech was about. Yeah, so we're going to talk about what happened on October 7th, or at least more about the aftermath, and what didn't happen in the aftermath.

But before we do it, just summarize your career up to this point. I think that you became Israel's special envoy for combating anti-Semitism, and how is it that such a role exists? I think that's kind of a rhetorical question, but how long has it existed, and just how is it that you come to occupy it? So Israel's special envoy for combating anti-Semitism actually joins the coalition, a special envoy from around the world, the United States included, Canada, European countries, European Parliament, South American countries, and really it is testament to a devastating reality in which we have seen a consistent rise in anti-Semitism in real spaces and virtual spaces on the streets, on campuses, and Israel's special envoy for combating anti-Semitism.

I'm actually the second person to hold this position appointed by the state of Israel, and in many ways, the way that I think of it is that not only my Israel's special envoy for combating anti-Semitism with regards to the state of Israel, but as Israel is the nation's state of the Jewish people, to which Jews, prototypical indigenous people, returned after thousands of years of identification. Well, I am in that sense the Jewish people's special envoy for combating anti-Semitism at a time where, if before 10-7, we knew there was this very, very troubling gradual increase in anti-Semitism manifested on multiple sort of spaces and places. 10-7 became an explosive manifestation of the anti-Semitism that we see, that we'll talk a little bit about, I hope, during the past, but I come to it from decades, really, of work in the several spaces that enabled this mutation of anti-Semitism that we saw on 10-7, whether it be the international law institutions and human rights that were co-opted and weaponized to enable this mutation of anti-Semitism of this particular strain, this virulent legal strain, and my sort of academic expertise and research with regards to university spaces, in which this particular anti-Semitism has been explosive, and finally has a legislator with regards to the social media platforms, and the way that all those spaces feed into each other, to have created this perfect storm, if you will, in a very, very negative way, is what guides me in my role as Israel's special envoy. And so did you mean that there are special envoy's for those other countries on the topic of anti-Semitism?

Absolutely, so the United States has never lived out, she's the United States special envoy for combating anti-Semitism, Canada has ever lions, the European Parliament, and the EU has had to re-enchant for her behind, there are many special envoy's. I was totally unaware of this year. I know Deborah's work, but I didn't know she was our special envoy. Well, one would hope there'd be no such need, but obviously the need is excruciating at the moment.

I want to talk about the history of anti-Semitism as you see and how this hatred has morphed over the centuries. But before we jump into the history, can you just tell me what is happening at the UN, because again, I discovered you in your speech there, where you were expressing it. I recommend everyone listen to this speech or watch it on YouTube. It's there in all its moral clarity.

I mean, it's amazing that effectiveness with which you were able to express moral outrage in that context, and the outrage is so appropriate given how the UN has behaved for really a long time. You can just tell me how the double standards applied to Israel have become enshrined there, and what explains it? I mean, it's functioning almost like an anti-Semitic organization at this point, and it's frankly pretty bizarre to see. So what's happening at the UN?

So here's a devastation of that, and I think that anti-Semitism is just perhaps the, as I referred to, and that's the bloody canary in the mine shaft, but here's the thing, that this infrastructure was created post-World War II to ensure that an international rules-based order regarded the way in which countries held each other to account, and were held to account, including by the way in situations of war. And the understanding that if that infrastructure that was created and mandated to hold, promote, and protect these foundational principles, that we fulfill the prospect of, or future-looking commitment of never again, right? Post Holocaust, understanding that not only 6 million Jews, but 6 million Jews were systematically murdered, what are burned because of this lethal hatred that enabled their dehumanization, their delegitimization, and the application of double standards to them as individuals or as communities in their various countries. That enabled the atrocities of the Holocaust, so the never again principle, which the majority of the countries that joined at the time, in understanding that we need to ensure that never again, and I say prospect of our future looking because we can't very well prevent the past, can we?

But what never again committed to do was to actually learn from the past from that dehumanization, the legitimization and double standards, the process that enabled, eventually, because it didn't happen overnight, the atrocities of the Holocaust, so that never again, and words like genocide and crimes against humanity, coined actually for the nuremberg trials because there were no words to describe the atrocities that were perpetrated by the Nazis and their helpers, that systematically burned and massacred and butchered Jews. Well, the understanding was at the time that never again was a shared prospect of commitment, and that it needed a set of rules, an international rules-based order, with the understanding that rules have to be applied equally and consistently to all the parties, member states of the UN, and be upheld in all the institutions that it would roll out, or create as mechanisms to hold, whether it be the Red Cross, whether it be the refugee entities that were created, and so on. And what has happened systematically in the UN, with a majority of countries that have no regard for that international rules-based order, in fact, do everything possible to violate that international rules-based order without accountability, enables, for example, on November 2nd for Iran, the Islamic regime of Iran, and differentiated with the people of Iran to be appointed to be the chair of the Human Rights Council's social forum. That's not a joke, right?

So when we understand... How is that... I mean, that is beyond a joke, and it's absolutely perverse, so it's like a Saturday Night Live sketch of dysfunction at the UN, how can anyone with a straight face put Iran on a human rights council? So you're 100% right, and that's why I choose to shine a light on that and not solely on the anti-Semitism piece, because I think that this is where we have to hold it to account all the governments, including those governments funding these institutions, funding the agencies of these institutions, whether it be, I mentioned the Red Cross, I've been mentioned Enra, a single refugee entity created for one group of refugees.

So there is one UN mechanism created for all refugees around the world, and it's a UNHCR created in order to ensure that refugees and their needs are taking care of for the first generation of refugees, and guess what? The UN created another additional entity, singularly or singling out one group of refugees, that is Palestinians who singularly get to hand it down a refugee status from generation to generation to generation, and we are now with the fifth generation of refugees, that is almost counterintuitive to the whole purpose of an entity created by the UN, funded by the international community. So here we are with countries that do replace their respects, excuse me, and uphold and promote and protect presumably the rules based order, except that they are funding entities, including those I mentioned within the UN, including the UN infrastructure, the points Iran, or the points trying out, or the points other countries, to ridiculous positions where an Orwellian inversion is too much even to imagine, right, in this moment in time, and we have to hold those countries to account. So the very countries that were entrusted to uphold, promote and protect that international rules based order and actually do respect it, but enable these entities that do not and systematically violate it, including the regards to anti-Semitism as a civil Israel, in the demonization, the deal of generalization, and the double standard of applied to Israel and we should know, Israel has a specific agenda item that comes up every time that the human rights council meets.

So all the countries in the entire world, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, you name them, China, the leaders in China, you name the countries with the flagrant human rights violations, all of them together have less human rights violations than one single country of Israel, according to the human rights council in the UN. Those are just, you know, there are so many examples, but those are just the most blatant ones that are really a call to action at this moment in time, and 10-7 ripping off so many masks ripped off that one as well. So as an organization, is it even redeemable at this point? I know it's the only thing we have, but it just seems like a moral farce and an increasingly dangerous one, that this is getting normalized, right, and I don't understand why, obviously, Israel has some important allies, and you think that the United States and the UK and other countries that are aligned here could make a difference.

What does it take to bring some moral sanity to that organization? Well, it's going to take exactly what you just said. It's going to take those countries, by the way, the overwhelming majority of the funding for UN comes from those countries. So the interesting thing is that those countries like funding, this Orwellian version, are actually enabling the perversion that we see, right, that enables and empowers genocidal terror organizations that are proxies of genocidal terror regimes and actually other authoritarian governments to sort of get free pass at the very place that was created to uphold, promote, and protect these foundational principles.

This is a moment of reckoning in that sense, and maybe the last sort of opportunity for those countries recognizing through the very, very clear inability to unequivocally condemn 10-7, and I want to be clear, anybody that cannot unequivocally condemn the atrocities of 10-7, the burning babies, the entire families, the raping of women so badly, their legs can't be straightened for burial, the abduction, the killing, the mutilation of thousands, actually in violation of a ceasefire, that on October 6th held a very fragile and pitiful mass of genocidal terror organization that took over the Gaza Strip, Israel has not been since 2005, that it holds Palestinians hostage as human shield, as sacrifices, whatever you want to call them, but has no regard for human life as a genocidal terror organization. Anybody that can't condemn that day and that magnitude of barbaric savage atrocities, unequivocally, is not upholding promoting or protecting the foundational principles of life and liberty that those institutions were created to ensure and secure. So it pretty much exposes whole-range organizations of mechanisms of the institution itself of the UN, if, for example, the UN women's groups resisted condemning and actually were silent, and we know that silence is complicity, until a couple of days ago when they issued some very lukewarm sort of statement in anticipation of the event that took place at the UN initiated by Israel yesterday, exposing the silence that actually empowers that genocidal terror, that uses rape, brutal rape, and sexual crimes that cannot even be imagined, but are not actually not too terrible to have, just too terrible to imagine that we're described in the state of the UN yesterday. So in anticipation of that, one of the women's groups issued sort of lukewarm statement 50 days after the atrocities were perpetrated, but you're 100% right in your question, and it'll be up to the countries, mostly as I said, that are funding this infrastructure to ensure that it upholds its original mission statement or collapses, because where we may be the legendary in the minejack, the minejack is collapsing all around us, and that is what I'm exposed very clearly from anybody's attention.

Well, again, I want to talk about some of the history here, but I think we should focus on the UN for a few more minutes here, because it's really hard for people who are not really seeped in the details here to understand how bizarre the status quo is here. Perhaps you can dissect one of these double standards for us, and just to see how deep it runs, because what many of us perceive, those who are paying attention, perceive Israel to be in a no-win situation, because they're clearly fighting a defensive war, and as you correctly pointed out, there was a ceasefire. Anyone calling for a ceasefire now should recognize there was a ceasefire on October 6, which was broken by Hamas, and it was broken away that, again, as you said, is so patently evil and so patently in violation of any same use of self-defense, even if you were to grant the claim that the Palestinians in Gaza are being occupied or imprisoned or consigned to some kind of apartheid state, and I would not grant those claims, but even if you were going to grant that, and imagine that Hamas, as their duly elected representatives, organized a properly conceived defensive act of war against Israel, so as to throw off those shackles. Well, just the moment you look at the details of what they did, as you said, I would only put linger on them because I've done that in previous podcasts, but consciously targeting for torture and rape and mutilation and destruction, non-combatants, children, and taking children hostage, killing their parents in front of them and taking them hostage.

The details are so obviously in violation of every norm of self-defense or just war, and they're completely un-analogous to collateral damage in time of war, where non-combatants get killed inadvertently, that you can't see which way is up here, morally, there's something quite wrong, but Israel has been held to a standard now in defending itself against this, where the scrutiny on its own collateral damage is of a sort that no other democracy in defending itself has ever seen. When the US is fighting Islamic State in Iraq and bombing Mosul, there's no such analogous scrutiny on the civilian death toll. Now, it was quick to admit that it is, of course, tragic that civilians die in any of these conflicts, and we would all hope that Israel would be holding itself to the highest possible standard of waging its round war in Gaza, in Gaza, so it's a protect civilian life, but they're fighting an enemy that is consciously using human shields and trying to leverage collateral damage in a propaganda victory with the rest of the world, and that propaganda victory is only possible given this complete inversion of moral sense that we're describing at the UN and obviously it's not just at the UN and elsewhere, and we'll discuss that. But perhaps you can just unpick this particular double standard, the scrutiny applied to Israel when it wages a defensive war in the aftermath of thousands of rockets and medieval-level barbarism in its own territory against civilians.

What is happening with the UN and how is that this double standard of scrutiny justified? What is not being done to Syria or to Saudi Arabia or to Russia that is being done to Israel in its context? Right, so that double standard and then it will drill down on other things that have happened to the UN, but that double standard is actually one of the most critical pieces to understand. Look, double standards are the selective application of any principle undermines the entire infrastructure.

Always, when people say me and I lawyer, I don't understand that, I say, if you're three years old and I say to you, we're going to play a game and you're going to play according to the rules, but I'm not. That three world will say me, I'm not playing. I'm not playing. That is the problem with double standards and not to concern us all.

So the consistent application of double standards are the selective application of standards to one single member state in family of nations. That happens to be the proverbial two organizations, the Jewish nation state, that is Israel. That is a problem not just for that member state. It is a problem for the infrastructure created that has to hold, promote and protect those foundational principles we spoke about, including, there is a body of laws called the Laws of War, including the Laws of War.

Now, everything you've just mentioned, including over 11,500 rockets that have been launched at Israelis, including this morning, I received pictures from my husband, I didn't know, stairway in his office building, 11,500 rockets launched in Israelis, imagine this in New York City, in Washington, in Berlin, in Toronto, 11,500 rockets. Every time, there are red alert, sirens blaring, sending you into safe rooms, since and on, ten, seven. Each one of those rockets targeting Israeli civilians from populated areas in Gaza. What I just said in international law language of the Laws of War is a double war crime, targeting civilians from densely populated areas in dangerous civilians, a double war crime.

Not one of that 11,500 double war crimes, not one, has been condemned by the institutions mandated to hold, promote and protect, double standard. When you look at what you described as those barbaric atrocities, they are so far beyond the pale of anything that the Laws of War clearly stipulate, as absolutely ever, ever being justified. And nonetheless, what we have is a response that, you know, the Nazis at least hid what they did during the Holocaust. They hid what they did because they had an understanding that morality would judge them, and one day would judge them looking back.

On ten, seven, the three thousand-plus barbaric savages that infiltrated Israel under the first barrage of rockets that we experienced at 6.30 a.m. And what was the Sabbath and holiday that celebrates our, you know, Bible, our book that has kept us together as a people for thousands of years, that day violated by rockets, what happened on that day was live streamed. It was filmed on boopros. It was with pride that many of them called parents to say that they murdered ten Jews.

That is something that we have to look at very clearly and understand, that when they did that, when they did not even hide, they knew that they would be receiving support, including right here on University campuses. That would actually echo the Hamas charter that like mankind calls the murder of Jews and the annihilation of Israel from the river to the sea. That's called to annihilate the state of Israel. If you look at map of the state of Israel, that is not two-state solution, and anybody who cares about Palestinian well-being, that's just hatred of Jews and the complete unacceptance of Israel's existence in any borders, double-standard.

If we don't call out those double-standards, including the implementation of the international military law, and by the way, you know, Israel not only holds itself up to a very, very high level of ethics in fighting wars generally because those are our principles, but you should know, and all of our listeners should know, that international action is created by precedent. What has happened in this fighting, and you know, as opposed to the United States that had to fight millions, you know, threats by millions of genocidal terrorists around how many ISIS fighters and so on, but had to fight them a long way from home. Israel is fighting this war inside and just on its borders. The precedent that Israel has created in its war on genocidal terrorists is now going to be a very high standard for all democracies that want to uphold those laws of war.

The understanding that Israel has created humanitarian quarters, that it has actually announced before any attack where it was going to announce, and asked the civilians in those areas to evacuate, and that it is Hamas that has prevented their evacuation in many cases, or that his intercepted humanitarian aid that Israel has enabled to flow through, or that has stopped civilians from actually moving from areas of Gaza where Israel had to fight Hamas terrorists, because they use them as human shields, building their infrastructures under mosques, schools, and hospitals precisely for that reason. The understanding that the world has enabled, a colleague of false moral equivalence between that genocidal terrorization and democratic state defending itself from it, that's going to be a problem for all these democratic countries that have enabled that, because in any ways it's a double standard that undermines the entire infrastructure. There is tragic loss of life. There is tragic loss of life, but just like after 9-11, the only entity that has to be held to account for the tragic loss of life, both what he perpetrated on 10-7 and in the aftermath of 10-7 in the Palestinian loss of life, is Hamas, a genocidal terror organization.

And if we are not morally clear on that, what those double standards actually do is empower terror and the regime supporting these proxies of terror, and even name some of them, including Iran, with the Iranian return to Iranian regime. All that does is empower those regimes, and that is a problem for all democracies, and for all of us who cherish life and liberty. And, you know, the thing about the Syrian regime is that they have this funny tendency to actually say what they mean and mean what they say. From an E just days before 10-7, the Supreme Leader of Iran tweeted precisely what it was that we saw happen on 10-7, only that he instead of using the word Jew or Israel, exchanges it with Zionist or Zionist cancer in this case, that would be destroyed by Palestinians.

Now, I'd say the conflation of Palestinians with Hamas undermined the Palestinian cause, and we should be very clear on that. If the Palestinian cause is represented by the genocidal acts perpetrated on 10-7, then we have to call that out and say there should be a Palestinian leadership. Sadly, there hasn't been one that's available enough that unequivocally condemns and says that was not in my name. I truly long for a two-state solution and for peace and coexistence recognizing Israel's right to exist alongside whatever will be this long, you know, long-term resolution of the conflict.

But it can't be that we expect that resolution of some kind with an entity like Hamas that perpetrated the atrocities of 10-7, and that is a problem with double standards. Again, if we do not have an equal and consistent application of any principle, it undermines it completely, and it no longer exists for any situation, any context. So double standards and any context actually undermines the principle in every context, and that's what has happened. But I want to talk about the sentiment among Palestinians at the moment, but let's get there through a brief tour of the history of anti-Semitism.

This goes way back, at least to Christian theology nearly 2,000 years ago, and then it changed, to my knowledge, it changed somewhere around the 19th century, and it became an explicitly racialized notion. I think the actual term anti-Semitic first appears in the 1850s, and then we have things like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and America. We had Henry Ford, we obviously have the Nazis, and now we have this great reservoir of Muslim anti-Semitism, which has been influenced by some theology, but also by many of those modern trends. How do you think about the history here, and how can we understand the durability and shapeshifting character of this hatred?

So, the oldest hatred in the world as Jew hatred has been called by many, including the late Professor Robert Richard, the oldest hatred in the world has actually survived by mutating. So anti-Semitism or Jew hatred never died, it just mutated, and it mutated according to the guiding social construct of the time, and you mentioned some of them, right? Religion, science, and I would say in our day, in this conversation about the UN and about international law and human rights in general, the secular religion of our time is human rights, right? If you latch onto the guiding social construct of the time, then what happens to that guiding social construct, of course, is that it has been co-opted and weaponized for something very lethal, right?

In that sense, the mutation of anti-Semitism is the strain that we see right now, the 10-7 made very clear, and I think we should put it on the table as we talk about it. 10-7 exposed the modern, mutated, mainstream strain of an ever-mutating virus, and that is what anti-Semitism is, it mutates over time, and that's how it survives. And that strain, anti-Zionism, or the negation of Israel's very right to exist, intersects at all of those places that you mentioned, doesn't matter what side of the extreme of the spectrum that comes from, what we call extreme right, what we call extreme left, what we call extreme, Islamist ideology, the negation of Israel's very right to exist in any border is shared by all of those extremities. And so the mutation of anti-Semitism to this form, to this strain that we have to identify, and it's important to say that the international Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism actually is the single definition of the benchmark definition, including utilized by the coalition of special envoys, that I mentioned I'm a member of before, the benchmark definition that enables to identify this strain.

You know, in a post-COVID world, we all understand the way that virus is mutate, and we understand that if we inoculate our societies, our communities, our families, against just one strain of a virus, we are actually not immune to the other strains when it does mutate. And the importance of understanding anti-Semitism in this way, and the old strains never die, they still exist, just like with COVID. There are old strains and new strains, but we have to inoculate our societies, our spaces, our communities, our countries, against this new strain that is the strain of anti-Zionism, exposed very clearly, not just in the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on 10-7, and in the gravity and the barbaric savage nature of them, but in the responses to what happened on 10-7 around the world, including in democratic countries, but denied within hours, that justified within days, that supported the continuous support and that attacked Jews in the week of those atrocities. That makes very clear that anti-Zionism, or the negation of Israel's very right to exist, is the modern, mutated, mainstream strain of anti-Semitism that we have to be able to identify and combat.

Again, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition is the single definition that was created in order exactly to be able to be able to identify and combat this strain, we'll talk about it a little bit more. The importance of understanding that at this moment, the history of anti-Semitism, or Jew-hatred, as it was called before it became anti-Semitism, as you said, the understanding that it began not today, and that there is a long process of demonization, of theologization, and the double standards that were in a traditional form of Jew-hatred. An individual Jew was born from an equal place in society, in the modern strain of anti-Semitism or Jew-hatred, it's the proverbial Jew among the nations, that is the state of Israel, to which Jews and indigenous people returned after thousands of years of ex-opprecation 75 years ago. If we demon ideal legitimize the Bible standards to that Jew among the nations, then we enable the very same process of that mutation of anti-Semitism.

If we drill down a little bit further, you know, we spoke about the UN, the UN Zionism is racism resolution in 1975, passed in 1975, and I will argue, after a series of conventional wars failed to destroy the state of Israel, from that moment of return of that indigenous people in 1948. So immediately after the partition plan was rejected by the Arabs then living in what was then the Virgin Anti-Palestine, the Jews accepting it, immediately the next day actually a war of independence broke out, as we know, but a series of conventional wars failed to destroy that Jewish nation state, to which, you know, in many ways we would be remiss if we didn't understand that return, to Zion enables the understanding that the unconventional war, the War for Public Opinion, was waged in 1975, in that Zionism is racism resolution, recognize that conventional warfare was not going to obliterate the state of Israel, annihilate it, the unconventional war for public opinion, and actually, ironically or not, then Soviet Union propaganda, Zionism is racism, 1975 is alive and well on 2023 university campuses in the name of Progress. So ironically or not, that is a critical understanding of how we got to where we got to, and I would say the next time. So that has been traced to Soviet propaganda, that initiative?

Well, we know that it was, again, actually the Zionism is racism resolution, including the UN, and actually utilized in the Soviet Union at the time in order to be able to sever the connection and any religious connection, obviously, and the then Soviet Union was not an option, right? So we understand that identity was something that was going to have to be, I'd say, not mainstream, that's the wrong word, there was sort of a leveling of the playing field, right? We were all just going to be the same comrades in the Soviet Union, and identity or particular identity was not going to work if the idea of communism was going to work. And therefore, Zionism is racism was a vehicle not only to sever the identity of Jews then living in the former Soviet Union, but in the understanding of how it was that Israel should be regarded by the former Soviet Union at the time, and it's an alliance with the then Arab countries of the Arab League.

Zionism is racism that took hold on university campuses, as I said, in the name of progress in the last decades, is based on that same understanding. And we would be remiss if we didn't mention in that context, you know, I'm not saying that all Jews self-defined as Zionists are Jews, not at all. Zionist is integral to the identity of the majority of Jews, who for thousands of years, I insist on reminding us that we're indigeneity, belonging to an indigenous, a prototypical indigenous people. That's the same language Hebrew and the same book, the Bible, the same land Israel, and practice the same rituals and customs for thousands of years.

That's why prototypical indigenous, that's what indigeneity means. The understanding that for thousands of years that people and Jews are a people, 15 million of us, not a very big one, actually longed and prayed and yearned to return to Zion. Zionism is not a political statement, it's integral to the identity of the majority of Jews that longed and yearned and prayed to return to Zion, if anything. Zionism is more than 140 year old, a national progressive, national liberation movement based in that identity of a Jewish people that enabled the return of indigenous people to ancestral homeland, a national liberation that succeeded, and taking that as the moment of reckoning.

That Zionism's racism passed in the UN became mainstream on university campus in 2023, and the name of progress is something that I believe that we will have to contend with, including on university campuses and spaces as we speak, in sort of identifying and combating the anti-Semitism that's become mainstream on those campuses. The next step that I wanted to mention, sort of in the evolution of this mainstream anti-Semitism that we're seeing today is actually the apartheid lie you mentioned it before. Look in 2001, there was a urban conference against racism, no surprised urban South Africa, and that conference against racism turned into an anti-Semitic hate fest. It was at that conference that it became clear, all of the human rights advocates of the time, that it was actually our skill, our commitment, our belief that we could ensure that never again principle.

That was co-opted in weaponized, i.e. human rights for the demonization and the delegitization and the application of double standards to the state of Israel. After that, conference against racism, which turned into an anti-Semitic hate fest in urban South Africa, what we saw is Israel apartheid weeks across North America in nearly every campus. Israel apartheid weeks, no question asked.

Now, some of us are old enough to remember apartheid, and Israel has its share of troubles, but Israel is not an apartheid state. And apartheid was one of the cruelest eras to live under, and attributing falsely the lie of apartheid to the state of Israel does two things. It minimizes the suffering of those that lived under the apartheid regime, and in any ways it disenables to identify the challenges which Israel like every other democratic country has. And should address, that's not to say that Israel is perfect, that is to say that Israel is not an apartheid state, and that misappropriating a historical concept like apartheid, and placing it or forcing it onto an irrelevant set of facts is actually a double undermining, not only of what was that apartheid described singularly, but disenabling to address the challenges that are in the false application to the set of facts that it's applied to.

What is the status of Arabs who are Israeli citizens? Oh, so we're clear. So we're clear. So we're clear.

So 20% of Israelis, and by the way, 20% of Israelis, some of them butchered, including Muslims, including bad women, including support workers that came to treat the Nova festival participants, this peace festival. The understanding that Israel's 20% is represented in every walk of life, in Israel, in Supreme Court, in hospitals, in the army, in every walk of life, in everyday things like shopping, that 20% is represented, which is why I say the apartheid lie is such a vicious lie. And such a crime against those that lived under apartheid, because of 20% of Israel's minorities, Muslims, Christians, Jews, Bedouin are fully integrated into everyday life in Israel. To be seen in university campuses on the beach and everywhere you go, then that means that what you've actually done is completely erase them or strip them of agency.

Now, where there are issues is where Israel has tried over and over again to come to some sort of resolution with Palestinians. And here we go back to the challenge in coming to resolution that somebody who denies your very right to exist. That is a whole other story, right? What's known as Judeans and Marya, the West Bank, whatever it is that people use.

Gaza, including Israel having disengaged from Gaza in 2005, post also, of course, exactly in order to be able to create final status borders, so that these allegations can't be in any way, true, in any way, a part of the story of Israel, because Israel does not want to be in Gaza, but can not stick over the Gaza Strip in 2007, and through Fatah members off roofs, and has been actually in control of Gaza, Israel has not been in Gaza since 2007. Most people do not know that, and there are, of course, other areas in which, if Israel is to be able to come to some sort of final agreement with Palestinians that do want to continue living side by side, that has been tried over and over again by Israel, and each and every time, just like the 1947 Partition Plan was rejected by Palestinian leadership. That's an important piece of understanding, but there is nothing between that and between what apartheid was, that can describe what Israel's reality is, including, as I said, not only on on 10-7, but since 10-7, and as I said, Israel's hospitals are filled with not only patience, but doctors and nurses of every religion and every faith, Muslims and Christians and Jews, and Bedouin and Druze, and that is actually part of the misunderstood part of the story that you only see and experience in Israel. And finally, I want to give a moment to the most Orwellian inversion of them all, and that is, of course, the attribution of the perpetuating and perpetrating, excuse me, a Holocaust by Israel in Gaza, or a genocide.

I said before, I mean, the words genocide and crimes against humanity, by the way, happened on 10-7, were war crimes and crimes against humanity and the making of a genocide so dubbed by international law experts, where Orwellian inversion of accusing Israel of precisely by experience not only in the Holocaust, but on 10-7, accusing it of perpetrating a Holocaust or a genocide in Gaza is absolutely the most Orwellian inversion of them all. And, you know, the 3,000-plus Hamas terrorists and their helpers that came in infiltrated Israel on that day in 10-7, the atrocities that they perpetrated intended to elicit the memory of the Holocaust, the burning of babies and families, so that they could only be identified weeks, weeks after they were murdered. It took weeks to identify the remains of Lillian Silver. You know, sometimes when you think of numbers, it's too hard to even imagine, right, 1,200 individuals.

When you think of individuals like Lillian Silver, a 72-year-old Canadian Israeli that could only be identified by her remains or remain of her, weeks after 10-7, a peace activist by the way that lived in one of the villages that were basically burnt and pillaged and in those barbaric ways, that understanding that it meant to elicit the memory of the Holocaust and actually create this multi-generational trauma that we haven't even begun to process if you ask me, and, you know, very few people know that some of the survivors, and that's what they refer to them as, that Nova Peace Festival that I referred to earlier, and I don't want to name names, obviously, but at least 19 of them are in psychiatric wards. The understanding of what was witnessed on that day, and since that day, by those that bore witness, whether on that day or since that day, identifying bodies, identifying remains, grappling with what was that the human mind can't even imagine, but happened. That understanding makes the Orwellian inversion and webinization of the Holocaust and the allegations of Israel perpetuating the genocide only more grotesque. There can be no worse accusation against any country, and so look what we have.

If Zionism is racism and Israel's apartheid state that perpetrates a Holocaust or an genocide, then there is no defense, including in, for example, diversity, equity, and inclusion principles in workplace or in university settings, for racists. There is no defense for an apartheid state. There is nothing left to do with it but to dismantle it. There is never legitimacy to perpetrating a Holocaust and a genocide.

And so through that systematic, co-opting organization of these terms, of real-world events that occurred, and their application in Orwellian way, on Jews, on Israel, in a way that 10-7 exposed very clearly that now accuses Jews around the world of them. In Canada, in France, in the United States of America, what we have is the making of the newly mutated strain of anti-Semitism. In basic, I'd say, clear view for anybody that is paying attention. Anybody that is paying attention cannot look away from this moment in time that demands that we utilize the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition created in the aftermath of that 2001 driven against racism, understanding that the mutation of anti-Semitism weaponized and co-opted international law and human rights.

That includes the demonization, the demonization, and the double standards against the state of Israel, just replacing the traditional anti-Semitism that did that very thing against the individual Jew. First of all, that was a brilliant dissection of some profound misunderstandings. So much of this is a matter of consciously misusing terminology and then spreading those lies in half-truths to a wider audience that then unconsciously misuses these concepts. And you just ran through many of them, things like apartheid and genocide and Holocaust.

And we might also add the concept of colonialism, as you were saying earlier, that Jews are not colonialists or interlopers in the land of Israel. But they've been indigenous people all the time, and certainly longer than anyone has thought in terms of their being a Palestinian population. Not to say that their ancestors don't reach back into that area as well. Just to say that the fact that I insist that I'm a member of indigenous people doesn't preclude other indigenous peoples as we know from other spaces and regions in the world.

The only thing is that I expect the mutual recognition of my indigeneity and my right to exist as who I am, just as I afford that recognition to whoever else claims that indigene. And I think that that principle is a foundational principle by the international law and I think of human relations. That's a proxy. I expect the very same recognition that I afford.

And that is a critical piece of it. So you've alluded to this definition of asceticism that you think is worth knowing. What is the definition? First of all, I recommend that everybody just look up the international Holocaust member's line definition, the iRites, by one page definition.

And the importance of that definition is not just to read what's in the neat little box of what antisemitism typically is, which I would say encapsulate what we think of as traditional antisemitism. But actually to read the examples that are listed by the iRites, because the examples enable us to identify what we've talked about about the strains of antisemitism, right? The understanding that our virus, you know, we had a micron, we had COVID-19, we had all kinds of strains of a virus, and we needed to name each of them. Or I'll give an example, not from a virus.

We understand what a table is, but a table can come in all kinds of shapes and sizes and heights. So the fact that we understand what a table is, when antisemitism is very, very sort of high level, is not sufficient when we understand that we're going to have to understand the various strains or forms in which antisemitism presents. And 10-7 made clear why it is critical to identify this strain, so that if we're just busy with the traditional strain that single-doubt individual Jew, or that deny the Holocaust, those are very important strains of antisemitism that we have to identify and combat. But they are not sufficient.

If we are not going to commit to identify and combat this strain that made itself very evident, as I said, not only the atrocities of 10-7, but in the responses to the atrocities of 10-7 across the world and campuses on social media, then we're not actually committed to identifying and combating antisemitism, because if you allow this current strain of a virus to run rampant, again, as we know, it will infect our entire society. The fact that we've annihilated against the or identified, the older strains is not going to be able to protect us from this one. And this one is festering. It is not just percolating below the surface anymore when we have a George Washington University days after 10-7, essentially Hamas charter projected on the library.

That says from the river to the sea, calls when I like to stay this role. If you look at the map, that's the entire thing, and glory to our martyrs, then we have a problem right here in identifying and combating antisemitism. If we allow on social media spaces, I refer to it before, Zionist, the codes Jew, to, although they're protected characteristics on social media platforms, if we allow Zionist to be used coding Jew, then we're allowing that same antisemitism to run rampant, and actually infect an entire generation that consumes all of their information on social media platforms. And this is important and the reason that I keep sort of referencing 10-7 as a reminder to 9-11.

It's also about traditional media and not just social media. Imagine if 11 days after 9-11, the New York Times would have posted on its front page, evidence or data given to it by al-Qaeda. That's actually what happened, 11 days after 10-7. And if you can deny, justify, support, and attack Jews in the wake of 10-7, why not 9-11?

That's actually what happened, with a TikTok letter from Bin Laden to America, where millions actually not only were exposed to this letter to America, but gave us a sense of the understanding that said, well, if you can deny, justify, support, and attack Jews in the wake of 10-7, why not do the same with regard to 9-11? Bin Laden was right. That is a problem for the United States of America. So, whereas I think in many ways we understood the imperative to combat antisemitism or identifying combat antisemitism as a Jewish issue, it is not a Jewish issue.

Antisemitism is, in many ways, predictive of what it is that gnaws weigh at the foundations of democracies, including right here in the United States. If we're not paying attention to what it is that's happening, an antisemitism is showing the path to where we have to go in order to protect the foundations of democracies. And I don't mean by censoring or shutting down, I mean by identifying and combating antisemitism as a part of what allows extremism to actually identify the strengths of democracies and use them as weaknesses. That's what terror does.

We value life. They glorify death. But because we value life, the Hamas not only did what it did to extinguish life on 10-7, it abducted 240 hostages. It holds its own people as hostage because we value life so if it hides under hospitals and schools and mosques, it knows that Israel will be debilitated in many ways to fight in the way that it must fight in order to secure and protect its citizens.

I think this is a much bigger story. I really think that whereas Israel is fighting for its life and we're an existential moment at 75 years young and a real existential moment, not only for Israel as a Jewish nation-state but for Jews around the world that are being attacked for what happened on 10-7. But whereas Israel is on the front lines and let it be clear, it's not just the army of the entire Israeli society that is deployed. There is a war.

I said just today, rockets continue flying overhead and red alert, sirens continue blaring and there is a war that is ongoing right now in Israel. But I would say that the war is raging. I'm going to say something that may sound a little difficult to understand when we're sitting here and there's no sirens blaring outside. It's a war that is raging right here too.

That unconventional war for public opinion is raging in the streets of the United States and Canada in all democracies. And that's not just a war on the state of Israel. It's a war in our shared humanity. It's a war on civilization as we know it.

I said before, you know, authoritarian regimes, they have a funny way of saying what they mean and meaning what they say. We just follow what command he intends to do. It's actually to build a caliphate on the rubble of our civilization. Whereas Israel is the small-level United States of the big devil and so on and it's not just Iran, obviously.

We have an intersection of very, very bad forces that are bound together by the commitment to undermine democracy as we know it and as we cherish it. So again, I think that this is a moment of reckoning in all of the spaces that we've mentioned, international institutions, the university spaces, traditional media, social media. But it's a moment of reckoning for ourselves as people who cherish those foundational principles of life and of liberty to understand that this war that's raging in Israel affects us. And there are many people who are boots on the ground right here in this war, if we cherish life and liberty.

And those boots on the ground, you have to be just as willing as the boots on the ground in Israel to what I call devastatingly after burying more of my friends' kids and more of my kids' friends because I'm at that age. I have to be my own children in the army right now. And we haven't even begun to process. But when you are fighting a war, you have to be willing to lose friends, literally and figuratively.

That means on university campuses, that means in all of our spaces and workplaces ensuring that we understand that, first of all, DEI principles have to be applied equally and consistently assuming that we are supporting DEI principles' existence. And they do exist in all of our workplaces and universities. If they leave out or exclude the Jews slash Zionist, last supporter of Israel, that undermines the entire infrastructure, that brings me to the beginning of the conversation. And even bigger than that, it's a moment of reckoning to that entire analysis.

And I'll say like a Marxist analysis that divides the world into a press and oppressor. And to colonize and colonize, we have to be asking ourselves, is that true? Is the whole world divided into a press and oppressor now? I'll say something about that.

The Jews don't fit, right? I said, we're indigenous people returned to an ancestral homeland out of our institution. I'm not an oppressor. I didn't come from Europe and stop sending you back there.

That's not my story. But this is a much bigger moment of reckoning for democracies. And the DEI infrastructure is sort of the rivet of it. Are we satisfied with this division of the world and it's a Marxist division of the world that's speaking back to Soviet propaganda into oppressed and oppressor?

What does that do to our democratic societies? Is that where democratic societies actually were intended to do? Is that sort of the American dream that enabled refugees, including European survivors of the Holocaust, to arrive here and build a new life? Is this really a country that is an oppressor?

Do we accept that? That doesn't mean there aren't problems like I said before. It just means that applying social constructs that are irrelevant to the setbacks to which we are looking disenables the ability to actually ensure equality of opportunities and equality and diversity that enables all of us to thrive and so on. I think that, you know, in many ways there were many good intentions that led us to this place and time.

But it is a moment of reckoning that we have to look at the results of those intentions because intentions have led to this place where the division of the world into this polarized reality in a social media reality that anyway polarizes the way that we see the world. And consuming information is really destructive for the foundations of all democracies. Again, not just Israel and not just of Jews living in the various societies and democracies in which they are now under attack. Well, it is a very complex picture.

There are two points on the landscape that I think are worth flagging. One is this wider tragedy of good intentions, where you have people who are not all sociopaths, these are college kids that are idealistic and wanting to do good in the world. And they've been fed a set of concepts that have been, I'm convinced in many cases, consciously distorted so as to mislead them. But when they're out there chanting from the river to the sea, I would say that most of those kids at Cornell and Harvard and Stanford don't imagine that they're advocating a genocide of Jews.

Or they do and think that Jews aren't human and deserve to be. Well, yeah, I want to differentiate those two groups of people. So the people who know what these words mean and know that they're misusing them and know how cynical and even evil this is. They say like a professor who's exhilarated on 10-7.

Yeah, right. So the people who know the details of what happened on 10-7. And they're not even saying there's a kind of gray area here. They're people who understand the details of what happened on 10-7, but they don't understand how that kind of killing of civilians is radically different from the killing that happens when you bomb.

The headquarters of Hamas that they have conveniently located underneath the hospital. It's like a philosophy seminar to figure out how it is different when you drop a bomb, even though you've been telling people to leave a building for a week. And you drop a bomb and there's still people in that building and they die and they're innocent on combatants and how they've been in many cases obliged to stay there by the terrorist organization that's running their society. How that is different than going into people's houses at dawn and tying them up and torturing them and burning them alive.

How are those two things that are there? Body count. Just keeping track of the number of dead does not give you any understanding of the minds that produced those calamities. And just a feedback on the double standard conversation we had before.

The understanding that ISIS had to be not just destroyed, but destroyed over however long it took. Even if there were tragic civilians, like the tragically civilians killed, or the Nazis, the war against the Nazis, absolutely. I'm sure had casualties of civilian nature as well, but we could not afford a humanity to not fight them to the end. We could not afford not to win the war against the Nazis because that would be the end of millions of more of innocent lives.

That's a very complex sort of understanding, except that it isn't. Except that it isn't. We're very clear on why the Nazis are maybe some people aren't, but we're very clear on why the Nazis had to be destroyed in World War II. I think that what you're touching on is actually a part of this unconventional war of public opinion that enables the false moral equivalence, right?

The false moral equivalence between the democratic country that not only can, but must defend its civilians. And in this case, a genocidal terrorization by one proxy of a genocidal murderous regime alongside any other countries. You know, you know, if we reference the past, I can use Nazis, but there are regimes currently that are, in that sense, the false moral equivalence, they are empowered by it. Because if everything we love the playing field, then we say, okay, then it's fair game and everybody's equal.

Except that there are things that are out of bounds. Not all things are created equal. There is the imperative need to differentiate between good and bad. And I think that that's part of the conversation that we need to be having.

And just to go back to the university piece, you know, I think this is a real moment of reckoning for university spaces. First, because if you kind of quickly condemn what happened on 10-7, there's something seriously wrong. And if you have professors who are exhilarated about what happened on 10-7, or students that support what happened on 10-7, and that threaten fellow students to commit the atrocities that were perpetrated on 10-7, whether it is we will rape you or we will burn you, then there's something seriously wrong with the university setting and obviously the society in which that happens. But there's another piece, and sort of the pseudo-academic can't help but talk about this.

In fact, when I meet university presidents or chancellors, this is usually the most important piece of the conversation that I have with them. The moment of reckoning for universities in terms of their mission. What is the role of the university? And as far as I knew, it was the pursuit of, we can't say this word anymore, it means another whole conversation with the pursuit of truth, so let's just say it opposed to the very least, it's the pursuit of knowledge.

Well, if universities have become spaces in which instead of teaching people how to think, we are teaching people what to think, meaning, you know, either they or their friends are being brainwashed, that is a real problem for mandated institutions to teach people how to think, to critically think, to pursue knowledge. That's a problem for humanity, it's not just a problem for each and every individual university. And so the university presidents have come to this moment of reckoning at this time, and many of them wish to go away and understand, because when you come in for a three or four year term, the last thing you want to do is have to cope with what has been happening, festering, percolating, for decades, including, we should say, foreign funding. That is coming to the university of transparency, but from cutters from other places, and you wonder, how has that impacted not just free speech, but academic freedom.

What is it that has happened in university spaces? And I think that, you know, 10-7 is a moment of reckoning, as I said, for many of the spaces, or many of the mass that have been uncovered, universities are critical on, and I go back to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism. You know, there is an infrastructure that protects all students, and all of those students get to self-define as what they are and who they are. That should include Zionists who self-define as Zionists, whether they're Jews or not Jews, and for that protection to be afforded to them equally and consistently, like it is, the safety and security of all students is insured by universities who have to be able to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition.

Again, to identify this strain that threatens their safety and security now on campus, as opposed to everybody else who, you know, is insured safety and security. So, just to be clear, this strain you're referring to is one that has cynically leveraged the rubric of social justice. It's almost like an export of American civil rights history, where it's very very much modeled on the African-American experience, and the current variant, which is to view white people and white adjacent people as being oppressors, and all people of color as being oppressed, you know, whether indirectly or cynically, and in that context, and certainly when you're on the left side of the political spectrum in America, Jews are viewed as, essentially, extra white, right? And they're viewed on the far right, they're viewed as not white, right?

So they're getting it from both sides, but on the left. So, anti-Semitism always is for what we are and what we aren't. So, that's the strain you're talking about. It's kind of a social justice, quasi-Marxist, DEI-leverage, animus against Israel and Zionism.

Exactly. It's why I call anti-Semitism. Anti-Semitism is anti-Semitism. I'm not saying that anti-Zainism, you know, in many ways are anti-Zainismites.

We're not anti-Zainismites, right? They just hate Jews, and believe that they all die, right? They don't care about Israel. You know, that's making a traditional anti-Semitism with just anti-Zainism.

But this new strain, the anti-Zainism strain, like if you look at the intersecting circles in Venn diagram, is the majority of the current mutated, you know, campus kind of anti-Semitism that we are witnessing. And you're right, it has intersected with all those, I see it tragically, actually, because I think, you know, in many ways it undermines those other social justice movements in that it has been co-opted and weaponized for this. And, you know, just because you said, you know, that, you know, sort of elicited the social justice piece, you know, when Israel began exposing in a very devastating decision what it was that happened on 10-7, and you have to know that it is ruling. There's not a family, not a home, not a neighborhood that is not impacted by the atrocities or by their aftermath.

So, you know, the soldiers that were then, you know, sort of called up, including our own best friend son who was killed three hours after the 10-7 attack. When Israel began divulging the atrocities, and of course, the denial that came immediately thereafter is heartbreaking, because what Israel did was actually what I call, and for many of, maybe, you know, an older generation listening to us. It was an Emmett Till moment, where Emmett Till's mother decides that she is leaving the casket open for everybody to see what was that happened, when Emmett Till was beaten to death, as grotesque as he looked. And the grotesque nature of the 10-7 attack in Israel's decision was a painful decision, much like Mrs.

Till made a very painful decision to leave that casket open. It has a lot of implications for our, say, for our own mental health to look into that casket, to open it up to the world in that way. But the decision to open up the casket or to leave it open is not just Israel's. The decision to look into what Israel has exposed in leaving the casket open is going to have to be civilization's decision, right?

All of those social justice movements that we just moment mention. If they choose to look away or to look and not believe or to look and remain silent at which is what we saw, the UN, women's groups and so on, or the children's groups and so on, or the children's groups and so on, children's day. Also, no mention of anything that happened, including the drugging of children and the burning of children, even not just burned alive on that day, but children captivity that were burned a marker so that they wouldn't run away with an exhaustive of a motorcycle. When you think of that casket being open, but civilization choosing to look away, then I think that that's the moment of reckoning for what you call the social justice movement and principles that have been appropriate and weaponized in the enablement of this mutation of antisemitism or in its current strain of anti-Zionism.

Yeah, well, I guess at this point, I want to ask you what we should do. Specifically with respect to two venues here. So we've spoken about college campuses. What should colleges have done?

And what should they do now? What should donors to colleges, or as well donors to colleges do? And what should we do about social media? What should those running these platforms do?

What should governments do? What should governments do? What should users ask to be done? How do you view the role of social media here is just overwhelmingly important.

It seems to be the thing that is kind of a hallucination machine that is distorting everything. But just finish your remarks on the college problem because this was shocking to so many of us to see some of the most privileged and sensibly best educated people in our society lining up to support a effectively supporting terrorist organization that had just committed atrocities of the sort you didn't think you were going to see any kind of century. And the mismatch between their moral pretensions and what in fact they're supporting couldn't be more glaring. I mean literally you have blue-haired people whose whole lives are organized around trans rights or gay rights or women's rights supporting an organization.

And even I think we have to admit a wider community among the Palestinians that would hurt them from rooftops if only they could be given the chance. I should say the footnote to what I just said. I just think there's obviously not all Palestinians are fans of Hamas. But I think we would be lying to ourselves to think that none are right.

And there were those during mobs spitting on hostages and worse. And those are not all members of Hamas one must imagine. So there is this larger problem of a kind of a take the narrow case and elimination of anti-Semitism among Palestinians and among Muslims generally. There's a sympathy for the whole jihadist project which is the underlying moral horror and political horror that is bigger than anti-Semitism.

And it is the very thing that is putting so much of the Muslim world in collision with open societies everywhere. And that is a larger problem which I focus on. But what would you have university presidents do or have done on October 8th and 9th and 10th when they saw their student body erupt in some cases well-intentioned, but in many cases not, you know, grotesqueories of moral confusion. So actually the first thing that some universities did very successfully is so simple that I can't believe I have to say it.

But it's the unequivocal condemnation of the atrocities we saw in 10-7. That's it. Right? The understanding that if you call out Hamas a genocidal to organization, then its starters committed to the annihilation of state of Israel and the murder of Jews and actually showed us what they mean by that in Hamas charter.

Show the entire world. And it would have actually in many ways I think that kind of leadership moral clarity and courage that I would hope for. I think it would have actually headed off a lot of the counter demonstrations that we saw hours and days after when there was lack of moral clarity and courage. All they talk in the university campus is the few that issued a clear unequivocal condemnation that said, because we support, because we support humanity and peace, we have to unequivocally condemn what it was that we witnessed as world atrocities, the likes of which the Jewish people have not experienced since the Holocaust happened on 10-7.

Which universities were actually good here? There were a couple of universities that was a statement issued. I believe university in Brandeis led a couple of university presidents that joined. I mean, it's devastating to me that you don't have to mention it, right?

Because all it is, is an immediate unquivocal condemnation of the atrocities we saw on 10-7. Immediate. And that headed off a lot of the responses that were enabled by these sort of either silence, right? So if universities issued statements in the past about what happened in Ukraine or what happens anywhere else in the world and failed to do so on this day that the world hasn't experienced something so great on, then they sent a message.

The first thing would have been just to issue a clear unquivocal condemnation that should not be difficult when we saw the magnitude of these barbaric atrocities. That's the first. Second, and this is sort of not in a reactive whack-a-mole where we're going to do about this demonstration or that demonstration because from the river to the sea, we have to react to, as we said, is called to annihilation. It's called to genocide, actually.

Especially when it's coupled with glory to our martyrs who perpetrated these atrocities on 10-7. And that is something universities want to address. But in a pro-active kind of way, and I mentioned it so many times, but I have to mention it again, it's actually to adopt and implement the international health government's alliance definition the result of a 15-year democratic process that's been adopted by more than 40 countries, more than 1,000 entities. It's not enough to just adopt it as to be implemented.

But this is not something that we have to sort of reflect on and worry about. It is a working definition. It's not even legally binding. It's a working definition that in educational spaces, where more than in educational space do you want to say, this is how you're going to know to identify by the way this is true in social media platforms.

It was my engagement when I was a legislator precisely for this reason, with social media platforms, to adopt and implement IRRA algorithmically, because how are you going to know that you're engaged in Holocaust denial when you don't even know what the Holocaust was? And how are you going to know that you're engaged in this strain of anti-Semitism that denies Israel's very right to exist from the river to the sea glory to our martyrs if you don't have a definition? It's not because I'm a lawyer. It's just because it ought to be able to identify and combat anything you first need to define it comprehensively, all versions of it.

So, university spaces and beyond workplaces. Social media platforms have a definition that enables them to not only adopt it, but implement it to identify anti-Semitism, and then make the decision, what we do in an educational institution, or by the way, what we do as a social media space. I don't want social media spaces censoring or removing. I actually want them to refer out to the IRRA, to the international Holocaust remember the lines that says, when you're engaged on Holocaust porn on TikTok, there is such a thing, point of view videos.

It says, did you know that you're now engaged in what is a violation of the agro-working definition of anti-Semitism in Holocaust denial? And did you know what the Holocaust was? Because most of the people on that platform have no idea. Neither what the Holocaust denial is nor what the Holocaust was.

So, in that sense, there is a key moment to utilize to adopt and implement this resource that was created precisely for this moment in time and hasn't been done vigorously enough. And finally, I'll say, in a very clear way, the reclaiming of principles and of words to what they actually mean. I mentioned word indigenous. We mentioned Holocaust.

We mentioned apartheid. We mentioned racism. We mentioned Zionism, right? Positively and negatively.

What is Zionism? It's integral to the identity of majority of Jews. It's how when the majority of Jews are self-defined, it's integral to the identity meaning, I can't just shed that Zionist pound of flesh to be a good Jew. That means maybe there are Jews that can, but I can't.

And I deserve the very same equal understanding as all other self-defined identities. So that would be the third piece. And that is to reclaim what words, the concepts, what historical facts have been appropriated, weaponized, distorted. And actually in that way, not only to reclaim them, but enable what I would call reclaiming intersectionality.

You know, 10-7 enables a very important moment, I think. And it is to transcend real and perceive differences of politics, of religion, of denomination, of geography, that we're holding on to for dear life. And to understand that what 10-7 did is draw a line in quicksand, and we have to identify it. Between extremism, and it doesn't matter what the extremism comes from right, left, center, Islam, extremism, and civilization as we happen to like it.

The understanding that there are more of us that actually happen to appreciate our civilization, that cannot imagine ripping down a poster of a ten-month-old baby being held hostage because what we see is a ten-month-old baby. But there are individuals that are tearing that poster down because that baby has been demonized and delegitimized and applied up standards to anti-Semitism. And there are people in the streets saying to them, what are you doing? What do you think you're doing?

And it doesn't matter if they're Jewish, or if they've gone to university, or if they're, you know, I don't know what they are. If they're just walking by and if they're strangers, and saying, why are you ripping down a poster of a ten-month-old baby that is being held hostage by a ten-month-old organization? I think that this is an aha moment that actually requires that we transcend real and perceive differences and reach across them to make clear that we are intent on protecting civilization as we know it and as we happen to like it. From this extremism that is either percolating below the surface or already festering and infecting our societies, and the 10-7 did that too.

So in whatever space, whether it's the university campus, the social media space, or workplaces, or high schools, or community centers, in whatever space, I think the 10-7 leads us with a great deal of work, but that there are tools and resources that we should be using. And I've named some of them, but I think that this is a critical moment for us to realize that we're buying this together as a civilization, certainly in democracies that cherish life and liberty, is far greater than what sets us apart. And that means that what we're battling together is extremism. It's not, you know, the real or perceived differences of yesterday, like Jew and non-Jew right and left.

It's not that. It's extremism that's threatening foundations and democracies in 10-7 and responses to it made it abundantly clear. Thank you for your moral and conceptual clarity and for all of your work in this area. I look forward to a time when you'll be on a job, but I think that's not coming soon, so please take care of yourself and keep going because you're really our necessary voice at this moment.

Thank you. I appreciate it. I look forward to a continue conversation as I think that really was most important. Is that when you get successful to broad publics that recognize the responsibility of our claims, and that never again is right now.