Bad Hasbara - The World's Most Moral Podcast - Bad Hasbara 93: Schmuck and Jive, with Hadar Cohen

Episode Date: March 20, 2025

Matt and Daniel are joined by spiritual educator, mystic, artist and girlfriend of the pod Hadar Cohen to ask when Israel stopped thinking of itself as a colonial project, who gets to be indigenous, and to hear out the fresh ideas of a bright, young Democrat: one Charles Ellis “Stickball” Schumer.COME TO COBBS COMEDY CLUB TO SEE MATT LIEB AND FRANCESCA FIORENTINI. BUY TICKETS HERE: https://www.livenation.com/event/G5vYZb0MwzkkR/francesca-fiorentini-and-matt-liebPlease donate to Middle East Children's Alliance at mecaforpeace.orgFind Hadar online at hadarcohen.me or malchut.oneSubscribe to the Patreon https://www.patreon.com/badhasbaraSubscribe/listen to Bad Hasbara wherever you get  your podcasts.Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/5RDvo87OzNLA78UH82MI55Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/bad-hasbara-the-worlds-most-moral-podcast/id1721813926Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/bad-hasbara/donationsPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

Hello Hot bitch We invented the terrieria tomato And ways USG drives and The Iron Joe Israeli salad oozy stents and javas orange crows Micro chips is us iPhone cameras us

Taco salads us Pto-Bamos us Olive Garden us White foster us Sabrah Hamas As far as us Hello and welcome to Bad Hasbara, the world's most moral podcast. Hey, how did it feel there, doing it the other way around there, Matt?

It's nice, man. It's nice to kind of just have some space to just chill, you know? Yeah, just chill and join the... I'm like, I'm just waiting for my cue. I'm waiting for my cue. You got to say the thing, and then I say the thing. Yeah, well, you hit your mark beautifully. I'm Daniel Matte, your world's most moral co-host.

And I'm Matt Lee, the world's most other most moral co-host. A little joke. A little joke. And then sometimes you do a little joke. A little jokey, jokey. A little joke in there, a little thing. Is that your placeholder joke? Yeah, I hadn't thought of a little joke.

But next time, I will. You got the format down. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I get it. Yeah. Well, so welcome, everybody. this is another episode of the World's Most Moral podcast. As you can see, our guest is already on screen because she's in the building, in the room.

Back by popular, if not demand, then anticipation. We have spiritual educator, activist, artist, scholar, mystic. And my best friend. Roommate. Girlfriend of the pod. A dark going in the house. Hi, everyone. Good to be here. I always love. Hi, Matt. I'm glad to, I'm glad you're back on the pod. You know, we've, we've missed you. I haven't seen you since the Christmas special. That's true. I hope you're doing okay since then. Yeah, no. I mean, you know, thank God I avoided that alternate reality in which I got divorced and started a muckbang podcast. That seemed like a fate worse than death. So to be honest, I did want to listen to that. podcast yeah a lot of people were excited by that that that other reality you know a lot of people

got got into that show yeah no it was the uh the it was the graphic that uh adam made shout out to producer adam levin uh i'm supposed to say that because that i mean listen i say we just uh we you know we free wheel it we're free balling but yeah it was the the he made such a good intro graphic for Matt's muckbang that people were like, I think I'd watch the show. Just Matt eating food talking about his ex-wife. We had like six people withdraw their Patreon subscriptions and say, I can't afford Badd's Bar anymore. I got to save it up for Matt's muckbang.

Yeah, man. Yeah, so we had you on the Christmas special, the holiday special. And before that would have been, what, last May, us in studio with Matt in L.A. Look at that. That's right. like when he used to live there yeah that's crazy first of all the reason why i'm having uh daniel take over the hosting duties is because uh i was in sacramento as i had been telling you guys for the last month or and a half or so uh for the sacramento punchline show that i did and my

wife and i francesca we drove up we did the show we came back it was an amazing show shout out to the people the bad as bar fans who came out uh that was really amazing one of the bad has bar fans came and gave me these stickers and i shit you not these are it's hello kitty as hamas it's hamas kitty i got a goddamn hamas kitty i i i i'm not sure if it's picking up on the camera but it's the most adorable thing i'm not going to condemn yeah exactly Like, how can you condemn this? You can't condemn this. This is an adorable little chitty

just trying to get freedom for everybody. And it's got a AK. Anyways, shout out to whoever. I think it's a patron of ours made these Hello Kitty Hamas stickers. And I'm going to be putting them everywhere in my house. You guys get some nice gifts. You have loyal fans.

We do. We do. I snagged us a new. fan yesterday. We were out for breakfast. Oh, you kidnapped one. I snagged us a new fan. They're in my closet. Yeah. Yeah. She's got a headphones on. No, we were out for breakfast in Manhattan with some out-of-town friends of mine. And we went to a cafe that, or a restaurant that should remain nameless. But the, the rumor is that they're, we had gathered that their ownership was Israeli. But we didn't know what their politics were sure um but we agreed to go and um i love the discussion that

that has to happen i know i're just like what do we do we got to find out the politics you got to find out the politics of our cafe owners anyway uh she overheard uh the four of us discussing various things including i meant me mentioning the podcast and she stops and she says sorry to interrupt but I heard you mentioned a podcast. And, you know, it's incredible how often this happens where people... Yeah, I've been there a few times. They get excited about the notion of a podcast they haven't heard of. Well, it's also really interesting because these moments I feel like, Daniel's like, oh, shit, are they going to reprimand me?

Are they going to spew some propaganda? Or are they going to be on my team? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. The only time I ever... me describing what the podcast was ever got me into any kind of awkward situation was actually in like a spiritual context that was like at a retreat and that's where the person objected. But this woman, wait, wait, wait, I want to know why you got in trouble because of the retreat.

Well, this was a Jewish person who I think doesn't like to think about politics and probably likes to think of herself as progressive. But did she, was she the one who asked what podcasts you have? She was asking me what I did in life. Well, that's, then she's running the risk. Sometimes you ask someone, what do you do for a living? And they're just like, oh, I do the thing that probably gives you the most stress. I'm sorry.

You know, I am a domestic spokesperson for people you. They pull out their, um, Hello Kitty Hamas sticker. That's all you need to know. Exactly. It's like I print Hello Kitty Hamas stickers and I'm not ashamed. And it's right there on my lunchbox. Yeah, everybody's got to earn a living in this country. Exactly.

Anyway, so the server asked about it and I described it and the word Hasbara didn't turn her off and ended up being very excited about what the podcast was about and said, I totally agree with you. And I was able to slide into any idea what the owners believe and anyway, it doesn't matter. You're like, I'm here just for Intel And to get one more podcast listener I want to know what my Shukha money is really going to That's true, that's true And what kind of, and can I trust this Shakshuka? Is it cultural appropriation Shukkah?

That's right. Yeah, is it real Shukkah? Is it real Shukkah? Anyway, Shachshuka was actually started by Tunisian Jews, which is an interesting. Oh, what a relief. Okay, so we can eat Shakshuka without feeling like Colin. You know what else was started by Jews?

Not Tunisian ones, but Portuguese and Spanish ones. What? Fish and fucking chips. Did you know that, man? Fish and chips is, oh, man. Fish and chips is Jewish. These are, so are we doing a fish and chips us, but we're actually, it is us? It really is us, yeah.

Well, that's crazy. You said that to me when we were in London. I didn't believe you. I actually found that out from a Palestinian friend who I met for the first time. So she wanted to have me over for lunch and she made me fish and chips. And then she was like, I want to honor your Jewish roots. And I was like, what? And then she told me the whole story.

That'd be really funny. That was just a long way of doing a joke about like British Jewish colonizers in early Zionism. Just like, I'm going to honor your Jewish roots and give you the most British food of all time. I boiled you a chicken and we're going to eat bread pie. On placemats with the Balfour Declaration printed on it. Yeah, exactly. I just want to honor. your Jewish traditions

of eating very soft foods anyway I hope that nameless server at that nameless restaurant is listening to I hope they're listening and I hope they're enjoying the anti-British bias also patreon.com slash bad as barra please join

our Patreon and don't forget if you missed me in Sacramento I'm going to be in San Francisco at Cobbs May 7th. So get your tickets. That's going to be a really fun show. If you are in the Bay Area or anywhere near there,

go to Cobbs Comedy Club May 7th. Are you going to drive up for that one too? I think we're flying for that. I think we're going to stay for a little longer and this time we're bringing the baby. Nice. So we instead, we left the baby with my mother-in-law and a babysitter.

And so that's why we did a 24-hour trip. You needed someone to supervise your mom? brother-in-law? Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, she's 80. So she's there for like, you know, to be a set of eyes, but not really a set of like limbs. She's mostly sits there and she judges. She's the baby cam. Yeah, she's like a human baby cam. And, you know, so if the baby starts heading towards an outlet with a fork, she'll just be like, babysitter. Can you stop this from happening? And do you have to pay a babysitter extra for the, the extra? labor of babysitting while a mother-in-law while a grandmother is watching.

Can you look after a really little, little person and a really old person? At the same time. And the really old person is going to have opinions about how you look after the little one. Yeah, yeah. And you're going to have to make sure they both get a good nap because otherwise they get real cranky. They are very similar. Daniel, do you want to read today's sponsor? Oh, I'd love to.

So we mentioned our Patreon, but your first priority in terms of sponsorship and subscription should be today's sponsor or sponsor or the cause we're supporting with today's episode. That's right, yeah. Brought to you by Middle East Children's Alliance. Middle East Children's Alliance has a team of staff, volunteers, and partner organizations who responded to the urgent needs of children and families under attack in Gaza. And of course, that description is newly... refreshed with last nights.

We're recording this on Tuesday, the 18th, and overnight, as we'll discuss, Israel resumed their mass bombing campaign. So Middle East Children's Alliance is currently providing food and hygiene kits, hot meals, safe and clean drinking water, and psychological support. And the link to donate and support there is Mecca for Peace. That's M-E-C-A-4-F-R-P-E-E-A-C-E-E-E-E-E. dot org beautiful that was great

i really like this you you have such a more like your voice is like honey like hearing you speak it just makes me it makes you want to donate even more okay as long as it makes you want to donate and yeah yeah yeah extract you from donating no it does not it does not um so let's get into

uh before you know we do anything else a two-person, what's the spin? So you guys both, I mean, I guess it'll be Daniels, what's the spin. But for the first time ever, I think we have someone next to Daniel who can look at the records and judge whether or not it was worth it. Well, we may have had that before with when Yaha was in my apartment and when no one was that. Do you have any records or music that's spinning in your mind or your life right now that seems

really relevant? I know I didn't prep you for this, so this is totally... Just any music I'm listening to? Any music you're listening to, yeah. Wow, well, the music I'm listening to is usually what you're listening to because you dominate the music space in our home. That sounds like Daniel. I offered to put Beyonce up on the wall.

That's true. And you declined. Wow, I don't know. I'm blinking. Well, your friend, Russia is... Yeah, Russia and Ahas is... is opening for our friend ML tonight here in Brooklyn. I've already featured ML's music on the show. But Rasha Nahas is a Palestinian from 48, yeah?

Yeah, from Haifa, Berlin, New York now. Yeah, as an amazing artist, highly recommend checking her out. So she's the spin. Okay. And as for me, spinning, we lost Roy Ayers recently, who is the great soul jazz vibrofoam player who has been sampled by many. So I got a couple of his albums here.

He did, everybody loves the sunshine. Oh, Brooklyn Baby and just really good vibes kind of guy. Vibes, so to speak. Right, literal vibes. Literal vibes. He played the vibes and he had good vibes. And then also we just had the Jewish holiday of Purim And this album by Theodore Bichel, sorry, sings Jewish folk songs, has the song

Homantashen on it, where he sings about a stuffed pastry. And with Hadar's leadership, I made my first homantashion this past weekend. We made some pretty great homintashen. Some of them were a little messy looking, the ones I made. Yeah, tough to get the dough to the right thickness and. Yeah. But we did prune, we did poppy, we did apricot. we did cherry and pomegranate raspberry pomegranate raspberry and damn which was very unorthodox but

that's amazing unorthodox i mean reconstructionist reconstructionist exactly wow jewish it was a jewish renewal that was beautiful yeah all right so that is the spin and we are here with our guest uh hadar cohen and i guess we should just hop into it you know before the you know we've started taping, we were talking about what content we were going to do. And then during that conversation, it turned out that Israel was back at it again. They started bombing Gaza once again, which is, it's always weird when that's news or like when that, you know, is like breaking. Israel is bombing Gaza because it seems like what they had been doing, uh, like throughout this entire ceasefire. It's, it seemed like they hadn't actually stopped, but this time it was like they

were talking about, as someone put it, it was, it's basically the difference between dozens of Palestinians killed per day and hundreds and we're back. We're back to hundreds. We're back to, you know, just endless images. It's the kind of day where it's extremely difficult to sit down and craft like a funny podcast. Yeah. Yeah. Like, like big, big sigh. Yeah, especially since we were like, you know, yeah, we were in the middle of, uh, what kind of content we had gathered. And then, and then you just start seeing the images again. You start seeing, you know, the, um, the images that we have been seeing for the last 16, 17 months now. It's like groundhog day. It's like it never, it, it never, it, it, it, it,

never fucking stops. And then, you know, they just tell us, oh, well, this time it's the ceasefire is off. It's crazy to me how the baseline is like dozens of Palestinians killed, you know, daily. And then that's not a breaking of the ceasefire. Well, it's just part of Israel's attack on Gaza is an attack on Palestinian as a people and not just on Hamas. And I think the media really distorts, you know, know, the Israel Hamas war, Israel Hamas war, and it's just so clear that the purpose from the Israeli government perspective is complete annihilation. So even when there's like a temporary

ceasefire, it is still the goal and the purpose. Yeah. And not the kind of annihilation where it's like we're going to wipe out a third of them today, a third of them tomorrow, and a third of them on Thursday. But annihilation of the will to live, annihilation of the conditions, required for life so if there's still Palestinians alive in Gaza what are they going to have to live for what are they going to you know and how are they going to be able to subsist so there's the there's the there's the there's the all at once massacres then there's the slow drip of starvation which we saw over the past couple of weeks they've been actually preparing for this resumption yeah of of the massacres by you know they were careful to shut down the electricity

and the supplies two weeks ago so that by the time they started this, you know, hospitals would already be, I heard one medic say, you know, we've run out of ketamine, we run out of all analgesics, all anesthetics, it's all part of that master plan. And, and you see the like, the, you know, ever, I don't know, the ever building consent manufacturing machine at work in the West where you're just, you're just, you know, Like, you know, it's a constant beat of like, here's another reason why at any point we should probably end the ceasefire. You know, here's another reason why, oh, these people need to die, whether it's the Beavis family, you know, the body's returning, the wrong body being returned, the way in which, you know, hostages are being returned. If they're being returned, you know, skinny, then this is the Holocaust.

If they're being returned healthy, it's because they're, you know, they're putting a gun to their head and making them work out. If they're being returned and, you know, talking about their experience or speaking out against the government, their Hamas. It was like, it was just a constant building and you're just like, you know this is leading to a breakdown. Yeah. of the ceasefire um and you know you you're own you're like helpless to to stop it because you you just uh you see too many people biting when they're told like hey you know uh here's another reason you should fear hamas fear um fear Palestinian people fear any kind of Palestinian Palestinian and Palestinian liberation and they're just like they've just bought into the

has bars so they're just primed and ready for this to happen again yeah well i was also going to say that i think there's something about manipulation of attention too you know because there are certain times that israel can just do whatever it wants and there isn't world attention and then when there is world attention israel has to kind of say like okay well what do we do how do we divert that attention and i kind of feel like the ceasefire part of it was like okay how do we get people to stop looking at us You know, how do we get all this attention to kind of wear off and die off? And, you know, I think that's been going on for, you know, over a decade since Israel started bombarding Gaza since 2014. And, you know, it was like all these massive attacks.

And then there would be like a bit of quiet to just kind of get the world attention to look away for a bit. Yeah. Yeah. To move on and go on to another news coverage and then, you know, be able to have more. Yeah, to be able to continue their company. Yeah, like more room to maneuver in darkness. Yeah. Less people looking over their shoulder.

And yeah, and they haven't, you know, pre-seasfire, post-October 7, they hadn't been able to have any of that space. And even during the ceasefire, they didn't have much of that space. But, you know, it was kind of a similar thing where we're going to let Trump take office. We're going to give him this ceasefire win. You know, we're going to play along with this idea of like, you know, hostage exchange, diplomatic, you know, exchange. And then at some point, you know, we're going to pull the rug out from under the whole thing

and start it up again. And they chose a very interesting point. I don't know if you guys read the Times of Israel, But Netanyahu's testimony in graft trials canceled for the day amid shock Gaza offensive. Oh, shucks. Oh, I'm sorry, guys, I was, I totally, listen, Judge. I absolutely was going to come in. I was, like, ready for it.

I had, like, all, like, why I'm innocent of doing any kind of, like, corruption or graft. But then I was like, oh, shit, we got to start doing war again. So how about let's let's push this another. let's say a thousand years, you know, until we have a nice thousand year Reich and then we can talk about this. I put my homework in a stick of dynamite and stuck it up the dog's ass and blew up the dog. Yeah. Wolf the family. All right. So we're going to read Israel's official pretext for this. Yeah. This is the official Israel X account. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and Defense Minister Israel Katz.

Is there any other country where the name of the country is a first name? Yeah, I feel like... Agriculture Minister Sweden, Yorkstead. Exactly. Canada Putin, the minister of eating weird foods is here. I don't know if Putin's weird. You know, it seems weird to me. Why do you guys eat it?

Mayor... Yeah. Anyway, so they instructed the IDF last night to act with force against the Hamas terrorist organization in the Gaza Strip. The decision was made in light of accumulating circumstances. This is a nice lint ball of excuses. Yeah. This paragraph here. There's no one reason.

It's just like things started building up. You know what I mean? Why did we do it? Why does anyone do anything? Yeah. It's a combination of things. Cause is hard to escrow. We wouldn't want to be reductive.

Yeah, exactly. Listen, there's many straws that broke the camels back, you know? And we tried the pile enough so that it would be a legitimate use of force. Because Hamas hides inside camels. They hide inside the camels. We have to break the back of every camel. That's right. In fact, all mammals.

We have to kill all the camels. And that's why we have to. to turn off the water supply because then you can, you know, those humps get too big. You can hide all sorts of weapons in the camel. Well, exactly. And then we can safely use the straws without, uh, that's right.

The decision was made and I, it's so hard for me to read this with any kind of jovial podcast or host cadence because it's just so fucking grim. Yes. The decision was made in light of accumulating circumstances. Primarily the lack of any movement in negotiations for the release

of our hostages due to, to Hamas's rejectionist stance. There's one accumulating circumstance that's a lie. And a warning of the possibility of an attack by terrorist organizations in Gaza against our soldiers and communities for the purpose of killing and kidnapping. Funny that they put the soldiers first. Yeah. Yeah.

And this is a warning. This is a bullshit false flag like intelligence report that they try to. about a few days ago being like, we think they might be planning something against our soldiers and communities. Yeah. Well, it's also just the way that soldiers and civilians are just not regarded as separate beings in the state of Israel. And it's, you know, I always have this question of like, well, why aren't Palestinians

allow to have their own army? Like, if it's truly a war, if you're really saying it's a war, then each party has a right to a military. And it's just clearly, it's like the soldiers. are not seen as ones who are as part of a, like, militaristic war. They're seen as just like, oh, these are our civilians, these are good people. These are, you can't harm them. Yeah.

And I think the crazy thing is, is that there's a lot of projection there, too, in terms of, like, the way that Israel paints all of Palestinian society, they go, like, they're all Hamas. You know, they're all, all, there's not one uninvolved person is something that they say all the time. And, you know, they don't even, like you say, have an official army. They don't have a state army. They're not a state. Whereas in Israel, they do have an army and you are forced to, you are conscripted. It is every citizen serves. So you can more likely say there is no uninvolved Israeli than you can say about the Palestinians. It's a crazy amount. of projection. Well, it also goes with that line of, oh, they teach their children to hate.

They teach them violence. And it's like, Israeli society militarizes teens. Like, it gives 16-year-olds guns and teaches them how to shoot and, like, trains them. Yeah. And the military since such a young age, you know, like, yeah, like, Perim is such an interesting holiday there because so many people as kids like as five year old seven year olds like dress up as soldiers and how is that not a culture of hate yeah yeah how is that not a militaristic culture where you're taught i mean if you're not taught to hate you're taught how to you know to shoot and you're taught how you're taught how to use weapons against someone who you know you are probably taught to hate i would say I mean, you grew up there.

Do you have any particular memories of that indoctrination? And when you sort of first remember it and when you first realized it was a kind of grooming into something that you didn't want to be a part of? Yeah, definitely. I mean, I have childhood memories are always so interesting because you're just like, what was true? What was my memory? What was this?

But I definitely remember as a 10-year-old girl having this reckoning or questioning or questioning with myself of being taught that, you know, and it's never like Palestinians or Arabs. It's always like they, like the ambiguous they, you know. But this, this thing that they hate us. They hate us because we're Jewish. Like I remember that being really, really strongly taught. And I remember as a young child being like, but why would they hate me because I'm Jewish? Like I wanted to know why. And I was very scared because, you know, they teach it in a very scary way. They show you all the Holocaust videos and then you're like scared. Yeah. That's an interesting thing too. The constant like, you know, oh, well, they teach their children to hate. And it's like,

are you sure you're not just teaching your children that they are hated? Yeah. That's a really good line. I know. That line just came to me and now I'm like, fuck, dude. Yeah. Sometimes I say smart shit. We really are reversing roles today. Yeah. I said the smart thing. Hell yeah. You're emotionally damaged, Jewishly. Go ahead, I'm sorry. Yeah. No, yeah, that's a really good line.

And I think that, yeah, I mean, that was later on as I became an adult, something that I unpacked, especially because of what you just named, is then I realized that so much of my emotional experience was like being hated, but where was that coming from? Yeah. Yeah, but I do remember, you know, especially as a little girl because I grew up in Jerusalem and, you know, Jerusalem is an interesting place to grow up in within the state of Israel because in some ways it's like the most visibly apartheid city because it's literally east and west. But on the other hand, it's like you actually see Palestinians more than you would in a place like Tel Aviv. And you actually see them not just as like Palestinian 48ers, but like Palestinians who. are um yeah under apartheid you know right not yeah not full citizens yeah yeah um yeah so anyways i remember just having like small interactions on streets with palestinians where so much of this propaganda started unfolding for me where i was like this can't be the full story like they just

can't and i think this is why like sometimes i try to read Israeli news or like like Zionist media and really trying to understand, like, what are these people actually thinking, you know, because even now, when it's like Israel's beginning, it's reenacting, you know, its whole bombardment campaign in Gaza. It's like the hostages are the ones. It's like, oh, it's because we need the hostages or the negotiation for the hostages didn't fully go through. But it's like, that just doesn't make sense, you know. And I'm sure you guys talked about this already like a million times but it's like if you're actually trying to get the hostage back why would you bombard god like it just makes no sense right yeah yeah yeah of course and and the

way that certain people actually like try for it to make sense you know it's like really and and then it just ends up becoming um so illogical what these arguments are based on right they just don't hold through that the second you have any bit of questioning you You know, it all just has to collapse. And I think that's part of why, you know, in Zionist Jewish communities, like you're not allowed to question at all. Because if you've been questioned a little bit, like, it will just completely fall apart. Yeah.

Which, you know, like, yeah, I can go on and on. But questioning is in some ways such the base of Jewish practice and Jewish tradition. So it's like so strange to be like, they hate you because you're Jewish, but don't do this thing that your tradition is teaching you to do, which is to question. Right. Don't question that. You have to, there's, yeah, there's just so many things that you are taught not to question. New halakhic interpretation just dropped. You're allowed to have bacon every now and then, depending on your intention, but you should never even, even click play on the Bad Hezbarra podcast. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Don't even look that way. Yes. We're,

you know, we're kind of re-assessing our stance on shellfish. Yeah, they got to make some concessions, right? Because questioning Zionism is just too tempting at this point. It's just too, it's too readily available now. So, yeah, they got to, they got to do some, some, some, some, some, some Talmudic carbon offsets and, yeah, and let people, you know, okay, your, scallops. if your father is Jewish and your mother isn't as long as you sign this I support Israel letter then we can throw out the whole matrilineal thing you could turn off the stove yourself

you could turn off one stove per Shabbat but that's it if the ceiling fan is on fine Just go ahead. So many Jewish thinkers have spoken about this, but the way that I'm really interested in this notion of heresy because, you know, there's a really profound tradition of like who counts as a heretic. And throughout Jewish history, there's been so many people

who were heretics that then got integrated into the tradition. But heresy really had to do with denying God's existence or like the oneness of God or things like breaking Shabbat, you know, or going against kind of these laws that were rooted in God. And nowadays, Jewish community is so fascinating where it's like, you don't have to believe in God,

you don't have to keep these traditions, you don't have to do anything, but don't question Israel because then you're going to be a heretic and then you're going to be excommunicated or then you're going to be a capo or whatever the hell words they use. And yeah, I think there's something there of how God has been really replaced by the state.

Which is a case of blasphemy being elevated above heresy because the state of Israel and Zionism as an idol is just pure blasphemy, you know. And we're engaging in blasphemy right now, you know, like in that kind of discord. Yeah. Wow. That's that is a way I haven't like examined it before. It's very interesting. So continue on with what was, what this, you know, Israel's. resumption of bombing um it looks like all of the uh you know the same hasbarus that we've

been keeping up with all had their own uh opinions about this yeah can i just ask like do you guys get bored of just the same hasbar i mean i know this is the whole purpose of the podcast but i'm like it just really comes down to like the same points over and over again oh i mean seldom do i find myself getting bored but when i get bored i get really bored yeah i don't mean with the podcast I just talking about the same point. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Oh, 100%. I mean, I will get bored with the Hezbara itself, not the Hezbarist.

I love the Hezbarists. They're like my little ducklings that I just want to like, you know, put, I want to take them all and just swim around with them and just pick their brain. What are you thinking, little guy? Whatever they're thinking, I'm like, well, that's insane. That's insane. How cute. You have a little vet.

on them make sure they're warm um but the the talking points yeah i mean i've been bored with them for like a decade which is why i started this podcast because i was like stop saying the same lies it just update your lies which is why i get really excited when you know i see a new talking point uh when i when there's when i see um a new way of explaining israel that's that's that's that's when I get, you know, the blood flowing in me. It's like, oh, yeah, tell me, tell me a new thing that you wrote as to why exactly this is okay to do. So I love, a few years have been a bumper crop for those. Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, liberal Zionists are plenty, baby. Yeah, absolutely. Um, so we don't, we, we haven't

collected, I mean, I haven't seen a whole lot of coverage of what happened last night because it's so fresh. And by the time, this podcast comes out, I'm sure there'll be, a raft of content to react to. There were a whole bunch of headlines that were like, Israel, Hamas, war resumes. The exact thing you just highlighted Hadar, you know, the framing of it.

Or Israel renews bombing of campaign in targeted attacks on Hamas, this and that, you know, while all of the footage were getting sent and all of the testimony from medical workers is that it's like, actually, the numbers from what I saw, I think it was like 440,

Palestinians killed overnight, 170 of them were children. Is it 440, you said? Is that what it's been updated to? That was the latest number I saw. It might be slightly off on that, but that was the ballpark. Mostly women and children, right? So capital job targeting Hamas, whatever that means. Which is so ridiculous because it's like, that's almost like a third of people who were

killed on October 7th. And, yeah, I think it's so horrendous. You just see, like, the blatant dehumanization of Palestinians that their lives just don't matter as much to the media and to, you know, everything keeps going back to October 7th and October 7th and October 7th. And since October 7th, there's been many October 7th for Palestinians, and that's just not registering.

Yeah, I mean, hundreds of October 7th. Yeah. If not, yeah, I mean, it's, it's crazy. It's crazy. And how do you, how do you, how do you, how do you find anything to make fun of? Well, a few of our, a few of our ducklings have quacked a little bit here. Yeah. So, uh, on the, uh, on the militant side, we got Eve Bolo.

Fartlow back, baby. Who she just says, I mean, the minute the news drops that they're bombing again, she tweets, Let's win this shit, Israeli flag. Yeah. To which our favorite liberal Zionist Shail Bidefrey said, What unit are you in? Good, good line. It is a good line.

It is a good line. It was immediate where I was just like, you guys are both in Santa Monica. What are we doing? Why don't you guys meet for a smoothie and hash this out? How about you guys have this argument in person? You know, you guys, you clearly both share some, you know, politics but not all of it

not all of it that's the thing about Shail is like he's funny in that like you feel like if you could just talk to him you could convince him that like he's wrong like to like leave the liberal Zionism behind but

but then it always that it feels like he proves to be an optical illusion yes it is anyway we have a tweet from him yes expressing he does express sincere

consternation and being appalled by what Israel quote unquote is becoming and that's what I want to ask Hedar about here. He says it's surreal reading the news about Israel now this is from yesterday morning so before the news of the resumed bombing but he could tell that it was ramping up to that. Yes. Surreal reading the news about Israel now

it's firing the head of its internal security security service for investigating treason, planning ethnic cleansing, planning, breaking a ceasefire, starving civilians, neutering the judiciary, all just today. What is this country? I don't recognize it. Now, I don't think he's saying he doesn't recognize the state of Israel. I wish he was saying that. I no longer recognize. I am now calling it the Zionist entity, aka Pissrael. I do not recognize. I am a Pisraeli citizen. I have an Israeli, I have an Israeli citizenship. I renounce my Pissraeli citizenship. I am burning my is not really passport. Yeah. Um, no, he's saying I don't recognize it. Like, what is this? I need. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I don't, uh, sometimes I slip into

Hebrew with her. Yeah. Um, not bad, right? So I don't recognize. So, I don't recognize. So, let me ask you, Hadar, having grown up there, do you recognize the country you're seeing? Is this such a departure from the Israel of the past? In what ways is it? In what ways is it not? Yeah, that's a good question. Thank you. Yeah.

I don't often hear that. That's true. Yeah, I mean, on the one hand, it's like hard to say that it hasn't gone worse because it clearly has. I mean, you know, when I was born, they didn't have the apartheid wall. Like, I don't know. There's, there has been an increasing, um, fascism, you could say, um, increasing cruelty and brutality, increasing segregation, increasing torture. Like, I, I think there is an increase in the violence. And a decrease in any semblance of opposition to it, yeah? Yeah, I think that, you know, a lot of anti-Zinous Israelis who were doing a lot of action, especially in the 80s and 90s, left in the like 2000s, basically.

Yeah. And I think that also is part of what led to Israel becoming more and more right wing is that a lot of the anti-Zinous Israelis were just like, we just need to leave at this point. Yeah. But, yeah, I mean, I very much also connect to Hannah Arendt's point where she said, you know, that the beginning of how the state were created was fascist and the only resulting if there wasn't going to be an intervention in that was a full-blown totalitarian regime. And she said that in like the 40s, you know. And yeah, I think that like that. We should have her on the podcast. Yeah, you should.

I'd be sick. Hannah Arendt, come on Bad Hasbara. Yeah, go on Bad Hasbara. You're a coward. You can start doing podcast with, like, energies of people. Oh, shit. We need to get mediums on to, like, channel Albert Einstein. Yeah.

Yeah. Ask Einstein just like, hey, can you expand more on that letter where you're just like, hey, nice country you got there, but no thank you. Thanks, but no thanks on the presidency. Judah Magnus, would you still call yourself a cultural Zionist or is that problematic? Yeah. Hey, I would love to just go back in time and talk to Gershwin and be like, this sucks, right? Like, look at this whole thing.

Because I just want, I just want, you know, Gershwin died in like 38, but I feel like I do this thing where I'm like, Gershwin would be like my homie and we'd be like anti-Zionist Jews together. George Gershwin or Ira Gershwin? George Gershwin. I don't know what Ira thinks. He's a, you know, I was great. He's the words guy. yeah he's the words guy i'm sure ira's great but you know i'm a more of a george george head i didn't know you were into george gershwin oh my god dude i love george i've even seen shitty biopics about

george gershwin wow i'll have to feature him on the spin sometime adam had an underrated or under commented on kairon there that i really liked can we cold harbor jabotinsky in here oh yeah i still i've not seen the second to last episode so nobody tell me anything about We have a lot of opinions about this season, don't we? Yeah, we're going to do a little on YouTube. Yeah, we're thinking we might do a reaction, you know, an analysis video once the season's all over. Okay. Well, you wait till the season's over because I want to watch it.

And I want to watch your reaction. Okay, you fed it, Muppet. Okay. All right. But yeah, just to go back to a rent, like, I mean, and I think so many of the 20th century Jewish thinkers and philosophers like Walter Benjamin, like, we're actually thinking so thoughtfully about, you know, quote-unquote, the Jewish question or what do we do with, what is Jewishness in this world?

Right. Yeah. Yeah. So I think that it's kind of inevitable that the creation of the state of Israel, you know, literally was built on ethnic cleansing and dispossession. And I think its seeds have been revealed to be a full-on totalitarian regime. But I also think that there's something. interesting that has shifted quite a bit that I think early kind of Zionist thinkers

were just very explicit that this is a colonial project this is what we're doing and nowadays you have a lot of like denial no we are the peace ones we just want peace but they don't want peace with us yeah or or were the indigenous ones or were the indigenous ones yeah like early Zionist colonizers very much knew they didn't really belong you know they They were like, we need to eradicate Arabness and create a new European. Right. Cosmopolitan city here, you know? Like Tel Aviv was shaped after European cities.

So it was very much a project of like, we need to eradicate the barbaric Middle East to create this new civilization. Like, that was very, very clear. And I think nowadays it's like, no, we're just returning to the biblical. I mean, and now we're getting into like when religious Zionism really started. kind of becoming more prominent because in the early days zionism was very secular um but yeah i think nowadays you'll rarely see zionist being like yeah this is a colonial project and this is you know no why we're doing it they're like we're not doing it yeah we're the natives um but we're still going to do it with you know so it's a bit i think there's a that is it's a rewriting of yeah it's a

rewriting of history obviously it's like you know revisionism um but it's also you know um i look at it as like half of the revisionism or whatever percentage of it is is for um the purposes of hesbara right of the doing public relations trying to you know change the narrative to make it softer for the liberal mindset but i also think it exists um to uh colonize the minds of people, you know, in Israel and, and a lot of Israelis where they, you know, I think they're not, they don't think it's a lie that they are indigenous, you know, a Ukrainian Jew moving to Israel. I don't think he is saying to himself, oh, well, I'm going to say this lie of, I am indigenous. I think he actually does believe, you know, that being connected to a piece

of land 3,000 years ago gives him the right to to displace people. And I think even if you proved to him that he was not connected to that land 3,000 years ago, he'd still think he has a right to it. Yes. Because he's been given something called Jewishness. It's a pass. It's a card

at this point. Right. It's just an identity. It's a badge that gets you in and exempts you from certain, it gives you certain rights and privileges and it exempts you from certain responsibilities like being a part of the rest of the human race. Yeah, I think this is where it becomes really interesting for me because if you study Jewish tradition and Jewish texts,

you know, there's always these questions of like, what are the boundaries of Jewishness and Jewish community? And it was always very clear that it's centered around God. You know, like if you're as a Jewish person and don't believe in God, you're not part of the Jewish community. Like that was the litmus. Okay, I'll see you guys later. Yeah, but times have changed.

Matt and I both log off and just like, God just runs the podcast from now. All right. Now this has become a spiritual now. Good has Goda. Yeah. But part of why Zionism succeeded and getting so many Jews to become Zionists is because so many Jews had a void inside of not knowing what Jewishness was or what it was about.

And all of a sudden, Zionism is like giving like a very clear answer. Oh, here is who your ancestors are. Look at biblical Judaism. Now let's become. you know, these people who belong to this land. Like, it was a very, very clean answer for people who had very complex trauma. Still have that trauma, you know. And I think that's part of why you see so much of, like, the psyche of Israeli society,

but not just Israeli society, of Zionist Jews all over the world, where it's like complex trauma that is so, so, so deep. And then this overlay of like almost like this simple, but this is just who I am. this is where I belong or why would you know why would you tell me that I'm not indigenous to this because that whole narrative is really sitting to cover up all of these complex traumas really and are we just to head off at the past some possible objections or at least to deal with them in good faith are we by talking about complex trauma are we thus excusing the behavior or saying that it's you know understandable or whatever but to speak about the trauma underneath let's say

genocidal behavior are you are you whitewashing it yeah i mean to me it's not just about yeah i mean if you're a war criminal and you're um engaged in the military right now then of course there's no excuse for that um but i think like looking at it historically and looking at it in terms of like well because this is a fascinating question for me that of like being a jewish person who is committed to Jewish tradition and Jewish spirituality, where when I look into that tradition, I find so much richness, there's so much depth and so much material to actually resist and question Zionism in its current state, and to just find that there's so much mass ignorance, I would say, that Jewish people all over hold about Zionism and Jewish

tradition at the same time. I think I'm just explaining that part for me, which was part of my education was to see like, okay, Israeli society, even though it's saying that it's Jewish, and this is a Jewish country, and this is a Jewish regime, actually knows so little about Jewish tradition and is engaging so little with this. There's such a flattening of Jewishness and. Yeah. Yeah. So there's a kind of spiritual trauma. On top of all the historical trauma is there's a god-shaped hole you're pointing to a god-shaped void that a nationalist project would come into fill and having grown up in zionist summer camp i can say that on the emotional level zionism does try to provide some of the ecstasy and communion a hundred

and meaning and glory and history and lineage like all the things that a true religious or spiritual practice would do yes you know they even give you things to meditate on like meditate on like, I don't know, the unbroken historical line of Jews suffering up to this point in our eventual triumph in the promised land of Israel and they give you a vicarious connection to those religiously devoted ancestors. I actually truly think that that is why the, we are indigenous argument, work so well with a lot of these, like, you know, secular Zionists is because it's not just the like, well, you know, according to like, you know, liberal, the way it is to be a liberal is like, you know, you, if you are

indigenous, we're supposed to love, you know, any indigenous person. Then you can say land back. Then you can do all the, all of the fucking, you know, bullshit that liberals do when it comes to venerating indigenous and indigenity without actually ever meaning it. But, but, I also think that there is a weird spiritual thing, too, where you can go, like, you don't need God, land is God, just like, you know, for an indigenous person, you know, the land is all that matters. It's just, you know, just being there. You, that's what you hear a lot of people when they, you know, go to Israel, or just being

here, you know, this being on the soil. It doesn't matter what you do when you get here. No, yeah. Doesn't matter how you treat the land. You're just here. Exactly. you're like, man, this is a beautiful. This is just like there's, there's God in this land.

I feel like planting a bunch of trees that'll easily burn down, you know. I feel like uprooting the trees that have been here for friends, just improving on it because God loves being improved upon, you know, God loves when you improve them. Oh, God loves a good blueprint for an upgrade. Yeah, God is the first to say that, you know, it's about progress, not perfection. But I just want to, you know, I want to play this one thing I saw recently before we take a quick commercial break. This is a First Nations for Israel video that I saw.

Oh, boy. So it is, it is, I, you know, it's like a drum circle. We are North American indigenous, and we stand. With Israel. We bless you to Israel. So that is something I saw on Instagram. You see it says, hashtag stop anti-Semitism, First Nations, Stand with Israel, and the Indigenous people of Judea. Hashtag Jewish Lives Matter and Israel, hi.

What does that say? I support my Jewish neighbors. Yeah, to me, I looked at this and I was just like, this is, uh, I mean, this is, who is this for? Like, it's, we, we need to get some Native Americans doing some Native drumming in order to co-sign this idea that that's us, that this is us. And I think there's a spiritual, there's a thing where, you know, especially white Americans, we look at like the American Indian, the, you know, the Native American is, you know,

we kind of fetishize it in this way. And I think for a lot of white Jewish, Americans, given the opportunity to make, you know, Aliyah and turn their land into their God, I think they, they'll do it. And it's not to say that they worship the land in the same way you would, you know, but like, it's just kind of like this, this fills that spiritual whole, this land. That video, I mean, I don't want to cast this person. I don't know who those people are. It's a little suspect to me that they're like, we are North American indigenous. have you ever have you ever met a group of true indigenous north americans who didn't actually

tell you which nation they're from exactly what nation they're from yes so maybe they were able to cobble together like one person from this nation and you know whatever but look it's not my place to judge but we know that throughout the history of relations so-called relations between first nations and second third fourth and all the other nations on this concept there's been a lot of appropriation, a lot of co-opting. Yeah. And native people have had to, in order to survive, put on a performance of one kind or another to assuage the prejudices and fears and fetishes, really, of white people.

And this, to me, just reads like a group of intrepid, indigenous people got together, be like, you know, we could probably turn a buck like playing bar mitzvahs. Yeah. And I like, if we like drape ourselves in the Israeli flag and, you know, to which I say, you know, can't knock the hustle. I don't know who's paying them. I don't know. Or maybe they're just, maybe they're just true, you know, it takes all kinds. Maybe they're just, died in the wool Zionists.

Yes. We will have to do a full episode, I think, on the pro-Israel indigenous peoples of America, Hasbaris out there because there are a few. Yeah, maybe we can get Dallas Goldtooth to come on. talk about that. That would be great. I bet Dallas would actually. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Do you know Dallas personally? No, Francesca does. Okay, and I've met him. I was at a conference with him years ago, so. Yeah, yeah, Francesca's homies with him, like, from the, you know, in the old days, like war in Iraq days. And so, yeah, that would be, that would be great.

Dallas, if you're listening, you're on notice. Yes. We won't you. It is a very interesting, you know, like angle for a Hasbarist. I'm a Native American. and I approve of the indigenous people of Judea, especially, yeah, go ahead. Well, one thing just I wanted to say about that, as, you know, we were talking about Zionism and its beginning roots of political ideology. Like, it is deeply rooted in not just dehumanization of Arabs as people, which is, you know, of course, Palestinians, but not just Palestinians. It's also in some ways of the people of the region.

Which includes your family. Yeah, yes. Right, which is, yeah, but also like the deep hatred of them, right? Because when early Zionists were like, this is a colonial project, we need to eradicate not just the people of this land, but the culture of this land, the tongue of this land, the memories, like all of it, so that it can't be recreated, you know? And then nowadays, you see this like, oh, we actually are indigenous or we actually are native. right like that is also rooted in such a deep hatred because you could imagine someone saying like well i'm native to this place but also this place as being a center of history for thousands and thousands of years is also native to so many other beings and so many other groups but it's like

we are the sole native people um i think that's when it's also just stops making sense because it's like you know i come from a family who's been in jerusalem for 10 generations like of course I believe, and I know that Jewish people belong, not just to Jerusalem, but to Iraq and Egypt and Tunisia and all of these places. But we're not the sole people who belong to that. Like, you know, these are diverse cities with deep historical layers and multireligious traditions. So, yeah, and I think I see this all the time as just like the way that like the deep hatred

and the I'm native to this land are. are so connected. And that's, and that's the way, and what you're also pointing to is the way that hatred and jealousy are connected. You covet. Yeah. You hate that which you covet. You desire that which you, you end up fearing that which you desire because it's,

you know, it's, maybe we could take a look at the Flake Blatens tweet quickly before we break because it's just so on point with us. He's trying to do some psychological analysis here of Palestinians, but he ends up completely this is one of the most crystalline expressions of projection I've ever seen this is Flake Blayton or I can't say his name right

I'm Flake Flake no it's Blake Blake Flaten Blake Flaten terrible name I thought you were doing a nickname Flake Blaten Well I kind of am He's a Blayton Flake I'm so used to calling him that

that my mouth won't fix it to say his real name He says I will die on the hill that the accusation of Israel committing genocide is entirely predicated on the Palestinians being jealous that the Jews were actually genocided and Westerners finding great joy in assuaging their guilty conscience

from letting said genocide happen. Where do we even start with that one? I don't even know. This is, to me, there's nothing like more amazing than this and it's like absolute like pea brain childishness where you have to be, You have to be so West L.A. I'm sorry, this feels like to me, like I know this kid.

You know, it's... How did your great-grandparents die? Will mine die in gas chambers? Yeah, yeah, exactly. Are you jealous? Oh, you're just jealous that you don't have the tragic backstory that I've been exploiting for my own gain. Like, you wish you were as sad as me.

like this is the most privileged fucking tweet i have ever seen in my life like you you have to you truly have to have the brain of a child uh it like uh not just any child like a child of privilege where all you can be like i i this is all stems back from them really really just venerating their own victimhood and you're like that's all you do that's all you do that's your entire identity like especially someone like like blake flayton like this guy this is this is all he does is is uh use victimhood uh as a cudgel against others like that's this is the entire like in the caddiest way and then the part about and then the part about uh assuaging the west's guilt dude that's the only reason you get to get away with this yeah yeah yeah

You've been exploiting the Western guilt. And that's the other, like, the whole tweet is just a big read of himself in the mirror that he doesn't know exists. Yes, 100%. It is, and it is just so amazing because you know he thought he was cooking. Yeah. Like, you know when he wrote this. And I love how it starts with the most, like, like, the most defiant way of phrasing.

I will die on the hill, to which I tweeted, well, I hope that that hill gets to claim its quarry without too much delay, you know. That hill is num-g-g-g-g-g-m-g-m-g-g-h. I love it. I don't like to wish swift death upon anyone, but when someone phrases it that way, yes. I'm like, may you, may that hill and you

consummate your, exactly. Yes. Your destined relationship in the near future. We will place a memorial, a little memorial pit on that hill, just a tiny. Well, he's kind of like,

admitting in that tweet that you know the whole kind of victim mentality and victim narrative is predicated on being an aggressor like the reason why you want to assert victimhood so much is so that you can be an aggressor without you know accountability yes yes and it's like it's like fucking this is like watching like the room it's like Tommy Wizzo level like I can see your mind maybe that's what happens when you when you stuff down stuff far enough yes it pops out on the other side of the planet yeah like you actually say something completely insightful except the pronouns are reversed the you as me and the me is you yeah exactly it's like dude it's it's it's a whole new level of consciousness where you do nothing but attack yourself and you're just

walking around just going like man i've got so many hot insights about others it is so wild too because he's just like he's talking about like this uh you know Palestinians being jealous of victimhood you know uh the west assuaging their guilt through like supporting Palestinians as if this is like a policy in the West it is you know that this is all projection he starts it off with I will die you already victimizing yourself you've begun this tweet about how everyone is playing victim with a fucking I know I'm going to get killed

for this opinion but I will die on this hill and then they will build a village and call it Mount Flakebaden Mount Flakton Mount Blakton Yeah The thing I just don't understand

is when people like that are actually convinced that the West supports Palestinians I'm like where do you get your information from From fucking it's people who their entire like, you know, their entire I guess communication with the outside world is through like social

media and because social media is, you know, the only media that they're consuming they are actually seeing pro-Palestine stances. And so... But even social media, like, sometimes when I just, I mean, it's silencing so many Palestinian creators and so many people talking about Palestine and sometimes I just...

Right, there's a mutant. But there's a mute button for that, and he's used it many times. Yeah. To the point where his feed is not showing him anything that would threaten his view. You know, but I think he is seeing it, though. I mean, I think, well, I think all these people, it's the same reason like we see them. It's like we are, you know, the algorithm is feeding us the slop that we are clicking on, right? So all of these has bars are seeing the, you know, the anti.

I had one in my DMs this morning that I ended. up blocking. She's been harassing, not harassing, but, you know, pestering me for, I don't know, since this all started, you have a few of these people who just love to pop off in every comment thread. And this morning, finally, I just had enough. She was like, I've seen these, these, first of all, you didn't post any Biba's pictures. Why are you posting these infants now? And, oh, these infants died three months ago, you know, I've seen these pictures before, which even if that's true, what, you need fresh baby meat

in order to feel compassion? But second of all, like, the absolute monstrousness of it, I was just like, fuck off psycho and I... Sometimes you... You said fuck off cycle? I actually did say, what did you say, you psycho?

That's what I typed. Yeah, yeah. And then I said to myself, fuck this. And I... Yeah, it is more healthy to do that than it is to do what I think I do, which is follow them. and then turn on notifications for whenever they tweet.

And then look up their addresses and sit in a darkened car in the middle of the night, just watching for signs of life inside the house. Yes, exactly. Wait till cover of night. And then when they finally wake up in the morning and grab their newspaper, I run up to them and I say, hey, I disagree. And then I run away. I will say I've had a few people also reach out to me with like stupid comments like that.

and not all of them, but every once in a while I engage. And sometimes it works. Sometimes they're like, can you send me more information for me to learn? It has been known to happen. And I had more energy for that in the first few months. Yeah,

you were doing that like every day. That's kind of what I got known for. Yeah, the first few months, it was, that was exactly what we were all trying to do. I think that's how we became friends is we were like people who were just trying to talk to people, you know,

who both, you know, disagreed and and trying to talk sense into people fast forward to now and if we could if if us then could see us now oh yeah they'd be like well we failed well we didn't convince anyone and started a podcast we're not going to fail at one thing we're not going to fail at is doing right by our advertisers our sponsors the people who make this show possible possible it's not really these people don't actually make the show possible we still don't actually have shit to sell you We still don't actually have ads.

What we have is a programmatic Google-made advertisement that pops up whether we like it or not. That we hope is appropriate for your region and general demographic. We hope so. And, you know, for every ad you listen to, we get maybe about three cents. So please listen to these ads. But stick around. We'll be right back. And we're back.

Welcome back to Bad Hasbar, the World's Most Moral Podcast. Daniel Matte here along with Most Moral co-host and founder, Matt Lieb. What's up? Our special guest today, Hadar Cohen in the house. What up, Adar? Thanks for having me. So we have a little segment we want to do on a very special guy. The Master of the Senate himself.

Yeah. Senate master, the roast master general of Senate, it is Chuck Schumer, apparently was very recently interviewed by the New York Times. Well, he has a new book out about anti-Semitism in America. He does not. Does he really? Oh, he does. That was one of the reasons they interviewed him, yeah. Oh, wow. This is, okay, this is great. I did not know that. Yeah, and earlier in the interview, I don't think we have this excerpted, but he just talks about this. need for this book right now why he had to write it why he had to be the next bestselling industry like books on anti-semitism so yeah the book is called anti-semitism in america a warning

all right finally i've been waiting and it's warned about this anti-semitism what do you mean i haven't heard you guys talk about that for a fucking a year and a half that's wild to hate us why oh it's because they're jealous the Holocaust? I knew it. I didn't, like every other Jewish child in North America have my mother's, have the obstetrician, obstetrician

whispering into my to my mom's pregnant belly. You're coming into a very dangerous world. That was this, you know, you're supposed to play like music for fetuses. Yeah, my OBGYN suggested that I put headphones around my wife's

pregnant belly. and then just kind of play, you know, the fucking sermons of the guy who said this. You're emotionally damaged, you know. Just, you know, just a constant loop of everyone's going to, everyone's going to hate you. They're all going to laugh at you, Carrie, you know, over and over again. So, yeah, he's got a new book out, a very urgent book. And in the first, so there's a big New York Times profile on him. Yeah, yeah.

And the New York Times, when you load the interview, it plays this very striking video on a loop of him, where he's taking off his glasses. Oh, Schumer getting serious. Oh, I have a video of that. We have that video right here. Here it is. He's slowly taking his glasses off with his fucking bird-like features. And like crushing them in his hands. Yeah.

No more seeing for me. I don't see nothing. Taking off the glasses is always funny because it's like, I understand why you do it. I do it. And it's because I'm like, you know, sometimes I look hot without my glasses on. Let's both do it at the same time, Matt. All right. Let's do it.

One, two, three. Oh, my question. Now I have some words. I'm going to tell you about why they hate us. That video is like James Egan's like shady account, like the Lumen account. There are no Jews in Lumen. Yeah. But if there were, that would.

How do you know? We haven't seen any. They're also fucking Nordic. Well, I guess we have Milchick. Oh, yeah. I mean, listen, you don't know who could be a Jew. I think it's very possible that, you know, Ira is a Jew. I've seen John Titoro play Jews before.

Ira, Irv. Irv. No, I don't mean employees. I mean in the executive. Oh, I don't. I see, I see, that's true. South Milchig and Seth Flesiich. Milchick and Flesiak.

That's true. Yeah, very good. Anyway, Ben Stiller is at the helm of that show. He's unfortunately kind of a soft sail. Well, listen, I've already severance to myself. I've severed that part of my brain that knows anything about the soft Zionism and I've decided I don't care because I like to show. How about that?

Enimat is a blissfully ignorant fan. That's right. Same here. All right. So he, in the first question of the interview talks about. about why this book, why right now, which we can quickly take a look at. Whoa, that's really small.

Let me see if I can get a little closer to the screen. Oh, yeah. You write that you rarely faced anti-Semitism when you were growing up in Brooklyn. What was the moment that you felt things changed in this country that made you want to write the book now? So you want to do the impersonation?

I could do it. Here we go. So I was born in 1950. So I was born in 1950, And for the first 50 years, it was sort of what you might call a golden age for Jewish people, not only in America, but forever, because we had never seen so much acceptance. I experienced a little anti-Semitism. I'm abyssal.

It's funny that the golden age for Jewish people ended five years after the worst genocide in our and possibly human history or one of them, you know, like. You know, it's just listen. Of course, it was a golden age in comparison. But, you know, I think, I also think that, you know, he's not wrong in terms of, like, the, you know, the feeling that he had. He's correct. Is correct. Even though, like, if you were to ask him or ask anyone pre-October 7th about this, they would say, like, oh, yeah, no.

And, you know, the 50s was not a great time, you know, for Jews in America. There were still a lot of, you know, laws on the books. There was like, there was quotas at colleges. There was, what do you call it? You know, there was certain jobs that Jews couldn't have, white shoe law firms that wouldn't have Jews. There was, I mean, shit, the fucking entire, you know, borsh belt, you know, the comedy scene in the cat skills,

the camps were born out of like, well, you know, if they won't have us at their fucking country clubs, we'll build our own. Right. So this is the 1950s. The Jewish Chitlin Circuit. Yeah, the Jewish Chitland Circuit. Exactly.

So, you know, it's like, you know, we talk about the 1950s now, and we go like, it was a golden age for Jews. And it's amazing because you can only say that if you're preparing to be like, but now is the dark ages. And also drives me crazy because here I am growing up in the 1980s, which really was, you know, by that point. Yes. Jews were doing just fine.

Yes. You know, with the 67 war victory in America coming fully on side with Israel and, you know, all the Hollywood propaganda. I mean, Jews were fully assimilated into, I mean, they're sure there's always been distrust of minorities and all that. There's always been xenophobia in America society, but in terms of mainstream acceptance, yeah, he's right. But this is when I was growing up being told it's not safe for you here. You need a plan B. exists for that, you know? Yeah.

So if that wasn't true then, then why should I believe you now? Right. It's insane. Yeah, that's exactly what I'm saying. There was a moment, for instance, when I was eight years old and we were driving home from my grandmother's house and somebody rolled down the window and said to my nice, decent father, you expletive Jew, but it didn't happen very much. It began, first of all, okay, I want to know more so what the situation was, unless, like,

This is someone who's saying, you know, they just yelled at you, you fucking Jew while they were driving down the street. They knew each other. That's all I'm saying. I'm saying there was a business deal gone wrong. You're saying there's a, you're saying there's a moral difference between just a random, you fucking Jew, and hey, you just ran over my cat, you fucking Jew? No, no. I'm saying more like, it's a Jew on Jew crime. It's two Jews yelling at each other about who's a Jew.

I had a cab driver called me, you know, basically said the same thing to me, and he was also Jewish, and it was because I wanted to pay with a credit card. Hey, never try to Jew a Jew. Yeah, exactly. He was like, a credit card is a promissory note. It is not real money. And he said, it's fucking Jewish bullshit. I was like, holy fuck. And he's like, you know, it's okay.

I can say that. I'm also Jewish. He was like, oh, okay. Wow. Yeah. Anyways. This happened in L.A.? Yeah, this happened in L.A., yeah.

But, you know, this is, listen, hey, that is an anti-Semitic experience he had you. Yeah, are you okay, Matt? Well, you know, I'm still, like, suffering some trauma from, and I'm thinking of making Ali-a. Do you need a Band-Aid? Do you need a hug? Do you need an ethno state? I need a whole ethno state, please.

Can I just have a one? Because I don't feel good. I feel bad. And I'm still suffering from the trauma of that cab driver. Okay, but if anyone comes and tries to take it back from you, just remember, they're just jealous. They're just jealous because you wish you were yelled that Jewish bullshit by a cab driver. You just wish, you haven't experienced what I've experienced. Okay.

And I've written, and what I've written is a book. Okay. But it didn't happen very much. It began changing the beginning of the 21st century. And what I've written in this book is when things get a little rough, that's when anti-Semitism bubbles up. Connor Cruz O'Brien said, quote, anti-Semitism is a light sleeper. So in 2001 for the first time after 9-11,

we saw these conspiracy theories. Oh, the Jews did it. All the Jews evacuated the building, et cetera. It wasn't good, but it didn't lead to a huge spread of anti-Semitism. 2008 got a little worse because of the financial crisis and the, quote, international conspiracy. There were all kinds of theories, George Soros. But it was October 7th that changed it all.

All of a sudden, anti-Semitism explodes in a way we've never seen an overt anti-Semitism. Jewish bakeries being called Zionist bakeries and rocks thrown through their windows. People who wore yarmacas or Jewish stars being screamed that, billified, even punched. And it shocked us for the first time Jews, I know, started saying, oh, God, maybe it could happen here. No one thought it would happen here, but for the first time, the thought maybe it could happen here. I wonder who encouraged that kind of thinking along. Yeah. Yeah.

It is, it's like one of those things where I, look, I'm not going to, I'm not going to give Chuck Schumer any, um, credit. Like I,

I do not believe, uh, he is as dumb as he's pretending to be. Yeah. In no way do I believe that he is sitting there going like, what happened October 7th? All of a sudden it's, It's okay for people to be anti-Semitic.

And it's just like, you know exactly what you're doing here. You know exactly why is the time, you know, why this is the perfect time. I just needed to write this book now. And you're going to sit there and pretend like this entire bubbling up of anti-Semitism since October 7th is from people's just latent fucking enjoyment. of terrorism and Hamas and not acknowledge that Israel is like we represent all Jewish people

we are the Jewish state Jews are a monolith and we're going to kill some babies baby Let's put some videos out Up until that point in his argument Sorry for interrupting you Matt As long as I don't interrupt Hidar I'm happy

Oh you were so I pre-interrupted you Why don't you go ahead here You were riled up Well I was just going to say like up Up until that point in his argument He's not saying anything earth-shaking When times get tough, that's when anti-Semitism gets stirred up. That's true.

That's always been true because Jews historically are an easy scapegoat. Yes, 100%. Being insider outsiders. And that's true for a lot of groups. When times get tough, stochastic, sectarian, you know, when times get tough, it's hard to be an al-Oite in Syria right now. Right, yeah. I mean, you talk about, you know, fucking, you know, in United States. States when times get tough and the economy gets bad and jobs are going down people going after

immigrants like crazy that's like we got to you know close these borders because they're taking our job there are when times get tough fascism uh tends to uh have a much more receptive audience and bigotry has a much more receptive audience because it is easier to blame people exactly and reinforce your own fucking worldview than it is to challenge yourself on fucking of the system that you currently live in. So the financial crisis, societal unrest, you could even talk about the Trump movement and the coddling of neo-Nazis and all that stuff. Fine.

But October 7th, that's when everything changed, he says. Yes. He's actually right. Yeah. That's when, that's what changed was a massive portion of the American population became aware suddenly, not because of October 7th, but because of Israel's genocidal response to it, that we are bankrolling a crazy lunatic state that says it's doing this in the name of Jews.

Yes. And that was, that is what changed. And a lot of people stood up and said, I oppose this. And the vast majority of them opposed it on grounds having nothing to do with the Jewishness of the state. Right. But rather the. Just on a moral, a completely moral level.

Right. They criticized it and rejected it on the, grounds that they would uh reject anything from any other country that's exactly right what were you going to say well it's just it's always so wild to me in these discourses how Palestinians are just completely missing as just people who are also part of um this reality and you know I'm sure you talked already about the ADL and just how psycho they are but it's like so many of their speeches we're like yeah we have to stand up against anti-Semitism it's not political, you just have to be willing to end Jew hatred.

Yeah, David Schwimmer said that a few weeks ago, and it was very, it had a big influence on that, and then David Schwabler said. Yeah. Yeah, we love that. From friends. Oh, yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's heartbreaking. Sorry for your loss.

No, but just like the way that it's like, oh, this is not political, this is just about Jew hatred, as if, like, Palestinians are not out here also experiencing so much destruction and violence that are not also, you know, in the American diaspora. also experiencing and extreme silencing and repression and physical violence and physical violence and the way that it's just like oh it's not political just it so it's like but what are you actually telling people to do you're telling people to completely ignore right Palestinians cry for justice like yes i mean i mean this is this is my main thing with the um centering of anti-semitism not just in our like political discourse but like in our fucking you know in Washington in our

in the seat of power and and the same thing with like you know in the media or anywhere the centering of it exists for one purpose only whether or not people know it you know it's like you you are being taught especially you know these you know Jews who who are American Jews who are online absorbing this shit. You're being taught over and over. Anti-Semitism is not just bad, but it is the worst form of racism. It is the racism to end all racism. And this very reasonable thing, which is like, don't let people be racist against Jews,

which is not a wrong position, is used in order to make it so that you cannot have a critique of Israel that isn't, heavily redacted based on the you know like the trying to get the words exactly right so you can criticize Israel in a way that doesn't make people go is this about Jews well it also yeah goes further where it's just like do you actually want Jews to be safe in this world right which if you say yes to that question yes you know then you have to also in some ways um divest from the Israeli propaganda machine because it is literally fed on Jews not being safe. And I think that's always the question that come back to with these discourse on anti-Semitism is that do you actually want to envision a world of Jewish belonging and a world of Jewish safety? Or is this just like a way

you know, that's just veiled support for Israel? Right. Instead, what they end up doing is they present the proximate cause of so much resentment of Jews, Israel, as the solution to resentment of Jews. I'm not saying it's right that people take their opposition to Israel and export that onto the entire population of Jews in the world, but it's also more understandable than not given it, like you said, the way Israel, or the way you said, Matt, the claims our peoplehood and does everything in our name and all the symbology and all that. Anyway, so just the idea that Schumer thought that this book needed to be written right now, especially coming out of four years of the administration that he more than carried water for and their

wholesale enthusiastic hypocritical support for and funding of the genocide in gaza is it's truly disgusting it is it is and also his recent capitulation to trump on the the budget uh being passed through the Senate. Which prompted him to postpone or cancel his tour, right? He was going to go on tour around the country, maybe with the book. That is a much pushback. Yeah, no. And now he's getting, you know, an incredible amount of pushback over this. That's so funny. I see, I completely missed a part where he wrote a book on anti-Semitism. Yeah. And so that is fucking great. And throughout the interview, through the sections that we're not going to look at, and we probably won't have time to even look at the stuff I cut out, but, or all of it.

But, you know, he's talking about how optimistic he is about the Democratic brand and how, you know, I don't think it's true that we're a losing team. And, and, and, I think we've, I feel very good. This guy's going to get primaried in 2028. But anyway, this podcast is not about domestic politics so much. After a whole bunch of that, some like tough questions that are uncomfortable for him about, like, the state of the Democrats and their low approval ratings right now, the interviewer says, I want to come back to your book, and he says, that's good.

He's really relieved. Thank God. Thank God. Oh, thank God. Oh, thank God. I can talk about that. Jews in America have always been closely allied with the Democratic Party, but Trump in this past election clearly saw an opening to win some of them over. And it does seem as if the events of the past year and a half have shifted things for American Jews.

Do you think the political landscape has changed in any lasting way? No, there are different polling numbers. Most of them show a very high percentage of Jews voted Democratic. Some of the more vocal people are on the right, and the Republican Party has made an attempt to make Israel and even anti-Semitism a political issue, which is horrible for Israel. I told that to Netanyahu, actually years ago,

not to make it a political issue, but he did. What? What does that mean that anti-Semitism is not a political issue? And what does it mean that Israel or the Republicans or the Democratic or the Democrats have ever not made it a political issue? It being, I believe, a political issue as in calling one party anti-Semitic and one party of the party for the Jews

and one party of the party against the Jews. He means a partisan issue. When he talks politics, all he means is Republicans versus Democrats. Yeah, but there's also, like I feel in that discourse of anti-Semitism, this assumption that anti-Semitism is not like a learned thing. thing, just like every form of racism that's part of social conditioning, that with justice work, with education, with resistance work, all of that you can transform. It's like, no,

anti-Semitism is like ingrained in certain humans. And it's like an evil that will never go away. And it's just kind of inherent. And I think back to that chat GPT response thing that I know you looked on with Lara, but one of them, it said that there's like a fantasy of persecution. And I've just been thinking about that since I saw that written because it really feels like there's a really deep psychology fantasy of like we are the persecuted ones and this evil thing. Like we don't actually want to transform and heal anti-Semitism and make Jewish people safe in this world.

We actually want to continue being persecuted and then using that persecution as, you know, this creation of an ethno state and genocidal. see one way or the other. I mean, it's people using it as currency. Even as we fund, like, it's, it's immutable, it's not political, it's just a, it's a law of nature, it's just like an, it's on the periodic table. Right.

You know, it just exists as an element in this cosmos, right? A periodic table of elements. Right. And it cannot be eliminated. And so give us your money so we can fund think tanks and ADLs and orgs and whatever to say that we are eradicating it. Yeah. When he says it's not political, he's basically, it's almost like he's saying, you know,

look, water is a human right, health care is a human right. These things should not be political. The right to feel terrified of anti-Semitism everywhere is a human right. This is not a Republican or a Democratic issue. This is a natural law. Yeah. And what you're saying is directly connected, how there's actually no red line for Israel. Right.

It's kind of like a bottomless hole where it's like there's no amount of funding that's sufficient. There's no amount of genocide that's enough. Like, there's actually something in it that it's, it just keeps going and going and going. And I mean, Norman Finkelstein and others have pointed out, go ahead, drink at home if you're playing the drinking game. Whenever Daniel mentions Norman Finkelstein, take a shot. I walked in on him yesterday watching Norman Finkelstein. I was like, damn, your other lover. Yeah, I turned it off like it was porn. Oh, no, Sorry, that was a gang bang. That question has two elements, number one.

What are you doing, honey? Oh, God. What was I going to say? Oh, yeah. Every time Israel needs to prime, basically, manufacture, consent, or demand for another round of atrocities, every time there's a new Israeli horror to explain away to Le Hasbir away, right? It always coincides with some new book called the new anti-Semitism. Yes, yes.

And that was there in the 60s, in the 70s, in the 80s, the 90s, all the way up until now. And Chuck Schumer is just the latest buckster to cash in on this. Not that anti-Semitism isn't real. You know, you have a friend, Ben Lorber, who's put out a book, you know, from a safety through solidarity, where we're trying to take a serious look at the reality of. anti-Semitic sentiment in the world and how pro-justice people should approach it without sacrificing our awareness of Zionist crimes. And part of the point of that book is that you can't actually have this conversation about anti-Semitism without talking about Israel or Palestine.

Yeah, because Israel is the risk factor. There's no way to talk about anti-Semitism in our modern age without also confronting the injustices of Palestinians. Like, it's just completely connected. So to try to have this apolitical conversation about anti-Semitism, it just feels like nonsense. Yeah. Yeah.

Well, I think Schumer is trying to sell that nonsense in this book. Yeah, clearly. Because he goes on to discuss his view of this. You know, obviously with the situation in Israel, there's some people who failed the Democrats weren't strong enough, but Biden was. he stuck by Israel very strongly and most everyone recognizes that.

Yeah, including many people who stayed home or turned out to vote for the other guy. Yeah, and fucking moron. The interview says, and it cost him. And he responds, it costs him a little. I'm not sure how much, but okay. I think that basically the rank and file Jewish person who is not that political or no more than anyone else

is fundamentally a Democrat and will stay that way. Yeah, that's not who, you have to be thinking about if you actually want to win elections. This is a crazy fucking thing about this entire, like, um, this, this discourse, like this entire framing of it is that like the way they look at this, um, they go like, oh, you know, um, there's people, uh, who think that Democrats weren't strong enough supporters of Israel. Um, I'm like, there, of, Those people who actually were like, oh, the problem is that Democrats aren't supportive enough of Israel, there's 30, it's like there's a factor by a factor of 30.

There's people who are like, what is with this fucking, you know, what seemingly endless war slash genocide happening in Palestine? not like the idea that you're more concerned with the uh people who thought Biden wasn't strong enough on Israel is fucking insane and this is this this is the losing side that we're supposed to believe is going to learn its lessons and come back around in four years yes and and like you know and then you look at like the the polling of the actual like Jewish vote and it still went you know heavily in favor of Democrats as it as it always does it is just a you know a consistent voting base for the Democratic Party um and it's like you you can't like look at that and still have

this conversation be about how Israel cost Biden because he was too anti-Israel it's like no it's the clearly not the case yeah anyways it's like how many people how many people fucking saw this quagmire ahead of time who were like scummy who are like, oh, this isn't going to be good. And they didn't say it's not going to be good because, oh, the Democratic Party is going to get all anti-Semitic. They're like, no, it's because Biden's going to do everything that Israel says. And the base of the Democratic Party is, you know, not people who are like, yeah, do war.

You know, it's small L liberal. Yeah, small L liberals, exactly. And they're not going to look at this with any good feelings. It's crazy. It's just fucking crazy. Yeah, it takes such force of will to not see. that and not acknowledge that and to keep insisting on this uh this line um someone says there is this big debate as sorry the uh the interviewer says there is this big debate about where the there is this

big debate about where the line is between anti-semitism and legitimate criticism of israel's government where is that line for you i don't know that line is somewhere in them in the two thousand miles between those two things i mean yeah um what does he say it here says i've criticized the israeli government and i I've criticized Netanyahu, as you know. Criticism of Israel. They always start with that. I've already been critical.

Yeah, yeah. I've been critical. You know, I haven't done anything. I haven't used the fact that I am a person who has power in Washington to do anything. But I've been like, hey, not cool, guys. Criticism of Israel and how it conducted the war is not anti-Semitic. How it conducted the war. That's always the question.

Not whether the quote-unquote war was a war, not whether the quote-unquote war was justified to begin with. Yes, exactly. Not whether the conditions that led to the inciting incident that sparked it were legal or illegal, not certainly whether this country that I'm a, you know, the leader of the opposition for. Yeah, right, right. Is directly responsible for those conditions.

No, yeah. It is just like, you know, did they use too many bullets in that one raid or is like 2,000 pound bomb versus 1,500 pound bomb? but it begins to shade over and it shades over in a bunch of different ways. When you use the word Zionist for Jew, you Zionist pig, you mean you Jewish pig. Yes. When you use the word Zionist for Jew, you mean Jew when you say Zionist. That's tautologically true.

Yes, exactly. But no one uses the word Zionist for Jew or virtually no one uses the word Zionist. They mean, like, this is what these people can't understand. Yeah. Is it possible to use the word Zionist for Zionist? Yeah, yeah, right, right. Exactly. That's the thing.

They are so convinced of, you know, the idea that Zionist is, is a dog whistle for just any Jew, that they refuse to learn what Zionism is or what it means or does it have any other uses as a word other than to be a dog whistle. And is anyone besides the people who proudly claim it allowed to use the word? Right. Exactly. Like Zionist is the only word in the English language as far as I can tell according to these people. That is only you, I mean, I guess there are certain reclaimed slurs against certain minority groups, but that's not what we're talking about. Zionist is a proud, self-coined ideology that people, okay, fine, you say you're a Zionist cool. Can I talk about you as a Zionist? No, you mean Jew. Yeah, right. I'm sorry about that. Just, what if that is what

Zionism was, though? What if it was a slur, like way back in the day? And then they're like, you know, we're going to reclaim this word. You know, that's like what Herzl said. And it became, you know, a reclaimed version. You don't know, man. That's possible. Shit. That's woke as fuck. That is woke as fuck. Yeah, but even for the people who do sometimes use Zionist for Jew, It's like they're talking about the Jewish people in Palestine and what they're doing to Palestinians. It's not like their inherent Jewishness. That's like the issue. It's like the power that the state has over inflicting Palestinian life with so much violence.

That's the issue. And yeah, that just refusal to kind of see that. I feel really comes back to what we were talking about, how it's like anti-Semitism is an evil that will never. be gone, you know, it's, they hate you because you're Jewish, not because what Jewishness has become or what Jewishness is being used for, you know, it's. Palestinians, colloquially, refer to Israeli Jews as Yehud, right? Yehud, yeah. But that's, what's that?

I just said right in there, but, but that's just because it's the Yihudish state. It is more syllables. Like, you know, the Jews, themselves are Jews like they're they're not hiding their Jewishness they're using their Jewishness to assert their I'm going insane trying to no right the notion that it's an anti-Semitic slur even Palestinians who say Yehoud for Israelis it's like a lot of them have memories or education about when Jews were actually part of the region and not you know part of a settler colonial state and I

think that yeah like that memory is very alive especially in the older generation of Palestinians. And I get messages like that all the time. It's like, oh, my Palestinian grandfather talked about his Jewish best friend, you know, and all of that. And, yeah, the way that, I mean, I can go on and on it about this. Yeah. But just the way that, like, Arab Jewish existence has just, it is also necessarily part of that erasure, which if I can just go on a little rant here, it's part of my frustration.

Hold on. Just let me crack a LaCroix, right? Okay. Everyone listen. Oh, yeah. Okay. No, but just, you know, there's a lot of kind of racial justice initiatives within the Jewish community to both be allies and racial justice movements more broadly, but also within Jewish communities to think about Jews of color and all of that. And I've witnessed that it's so difficult for them to talk about Arab Jews as a racial issue because part of what that means is that you also have to look at Palestinians as a racial issue. And Arab world is a race.

And there's such a deep resistance to doing that because then you have to actually see Zionism for what it is. So it's easier to just erase Arab Jews. And then somehow say this is a project of Jewish belonging where all Jews are welcome, you know? Like I always find it so much cognitive dissonance in some of these like Hasbara accounts that are like, we love Jews, everyone, the way they are. and then you just like slightly go against what they imagine and it's like oh you are the enemy of the Jews you're you know and it's just like wow that was like a really big transition yeah quick turnaround yeah there's a really instant pivot on the loving of the Jews thing yeah it is um you know uh it is just watching all of this like discourse about anti-semitism and the dog whistles of what Zionist means all I can all I can do is just like watch and go like hey I'm glad that I'm I'm glad there's one place this podcast where we can actually differentiate Zionism as something other than a slur that these guys are purporting it to be

other than a dog whistle but an actual ideology and identity that people... And material system of power. And material system of power, political power, and historical... Military power, yeah. And historical... Thing with consequences in the real world that everyone is entitled to spout off about

and that no one should be cross-examined to see if that's coming from a place of disliking Jews. Yeah, and, you know, just finally, if someone calls you a Zionist pig I hey they could be doing it because they are anti-Semitic but also

I will check your tweets and I will see if you are in fact a Zionist and if so you might be a Zionist pig in which case you have some apologizing to do to pigs yes yes exactly Were you going to say one last thing? Because I think we're about to wrap. Oh, I was just going to say about the conversation about anti-Semitism.

I think a lot of the frustration and anger that I feel about it is the audacity to have a conversation about anti-Semitism and not Orientalism. And especially when you actually study systemic injustices and racial patterns, there's so much interconnection between anti-Semitism and Islamophobia. Oh, yeah. I mean, yeah. So just also to, and that goes into a deep colonial history of separating out Jews from Muslims and that's right, pitting them against each other. But yeah, it's just always so enraging for me how conversation about anti-Semitism is really like so often dismissing Islamophobia and Orientalism. 100%. Yeah. And it does it, I think, for a very specific purpose. And I think at this

point it's like you people aren't fooled too much anymore into you know as to what the reason is and it's we are trying to center the conversation around this idea of a of a dangerous you know type of bigotry uh so that we can try to lessen the impact of the conversation around the bigotry that is currently killing hundreds of children today in Palestine. Anyway, the Schumer interview goes on at length. We don't have any time to keep going. But he talks about how, you know, look, if Mahmoud Khalil committed any crimes, he should be deported.

If he didn't, he shouldn't. I don't know enough. You know, I don't know. I'm scared. Yeah. So if you want to be enraged, bored, irritated further, if you haven't gotten your fill of the Schum, go ahead and steal the article somehow. steal the article from the New York crimes exactly uh and that is our episode

hold on it's my role if we're reversing rolls oh yeah yeah can you yeah i'll yeah i'll do it yeah so you do the ending hell yeah yeah yeah yeah you get to do that and you get to get to yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah you're ready yeah yeah yeah you say anyways i think that's a podcast i think that's an episode what do you guys think yeah that's an episode seems like an episode hadar cohen thank you so much for joining us on the bad as barra podcast do you have anything to plug anything you want to tell the folks where can people find you um you can find me my instagram is hadar cohen 32 my website is hadar cohen dot m e the other 31 hadar coens not even worth a follow yeah exactly um now 32 is my birthday march second um happy late birthday

it's a little awkward because i forgot about her birthday this year i have to remember be reminded live on a podcast. Oh boy. He's a better boyfriend than that. There are still balloons in the bedroom. Yeah, I guess I will plug in if you want to join a multi-faith scripture class. There's a weekly Hebrew Bible class that I teach every Thursday. You guys threw in some Quran last week, too. We did a Torah Quran class, which was really beautiful.

Yeah, and I really believe that scripture is meant to be learned in a multi-religious community. So you can access it. at malchut.1. Mind if I spell that? Yeah, I know you were going to do that. My pet peeve is that she's like, at mahout, malchut.1, I'm like, most people don't know. All Americans like, malch-o-m-ch-U-T-O-N-E. Hell, yeah.

Thank you. Thank you so much for having me. Of course. We'll put the link in the description. Daniel, you toss to me. I'm about to toss. You catch, all right? Okay, okay.

Anyway, shout out to producer Adam Levin on the ones and twos. Thank you for listening, patreon.com slash badhasbara, badhasbara at gmail.com. And until next time, from the river to the sea. I wouldn't take the Schumer book, not even for free. We're done. Yeah, that was all Adam. Jumping Jacks was us. Push-ups was us.

Godma-Ga-U us. All karate us. Taking Molly us. Michael Jackson us. Keyboards, us, Jarja Binks not us, Andor was us, Keith Ledger Joker us, endless bread success, Happy Meals was us, McDonald's was us, being happy us, Bequem yoga us, eating food, us, breathing air, us, drinking water us, we invented all that shit. Thank you.