Making Sense with Sam Harris - #373 — Anti-Zionism Is Antisemitism

Episode Date: July 2, 2024

Sam Harris speaks with Michal Cotler-Wunsh about the global rise of antisemitism. They discuss the bias against Israel at the United Nations, the nature of double standards, the precedent set by Israel in its conduct in the war in Gaza, the shapeshifting quality of antisemitism, anti-Zionism as the newest strain of Jew hatred, the “Zionism is racism” resolution at the U.N., the lie that Israel is an apartheid state, the notion that Israel is perpetrating a “genocide” against the Palestinians, the Marxist oppressed-oppressor narrative, the false moral equivalence between the atrocities committed by Hamas and the deaths of noncombatants in Gaza, the failure of the social justice movement to respond appropriately to events in Israel, what universities should have done after October 7th, reclaiming the meanings of words, extremism vs civilization, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Welcome to the Making Sense Podcast. This is Sam Harris. Okay, well, I am back in town after traveling for about 11 days in Europe. This is my first podcast after that disastrous presidential debate. This was actually a perfect example of the relevance of Substack for me, because I couldn't record a podcast. I was traveling. I was actually on an airplane the morning after the debate, but I could post a short piece to Substack, which I did. So just the cadence of doing a once-a-week podcast allows for certain things to fall through the cracks, and my writing over at

Substack will help fill those cracks. Anyway, if you want to read me over there, you can just search my name over at Substack, and you will find it. If you haven't read what I wrote last week, my main point was not merely that Biden should drop out of the race. He clearly should. And those who have worked so diligently up until this point to conceal his deficits should be ashamed of themselves. I don't know how they thought he was going to bluff his way through this. But more important, I think we have to acknowledge that we have paid a significant price for his deficits already. It's not just that he can't campaign effectively and offer any assurance that he's going to beat Trump in November and spare us a second Trump term. It's that he can't speak effectively about anything, certainly not

extemporaneously. He's done no interviews with the New York Times or the Washington Post or the Wall Street Journal, and he hasn't done them for a reason. And the job of the president is not just to be cognitively intact such that you can make decisions, right? I mean, let's just grant that he may be intact enough to make all the decisions he needs to make. One could be forgiven, of course, for feeling that they saw no evidence of that in last week's debate, but even granting that his cognition may be all there. The job of the president is also to communicate and persuade, right? And there has been so much he should have communicated about, about the war in Ukraine, about the war in Gaza.

He should have been able to push back against all of this insanity we have witnessed in response to America's engagement, such as it is in both of those wars. He has to make sense of these things in public. He has to make the case for why America needs to be engaged in the world. He needs to be able to do a two-hour interview or a two-hour press conference. He's 81 and is not up to the job. There's a proper insanity surrounding the president now where people are just torching their reputations coming forward and defending him. This includes President Obama.

It includes Governor Newsom. Jesus Christ, you cannot tell America they didn't see what they saw during that debate, right? He didn't just have a bad night. It's not at all analogous to Obama's bad debate against Romney. No one came away from the debate that Obama clearly lost thinking Obama is unfit to be in the Oval Office because his faculty of speech and very likely cognition is so degraded. Right. That was not the lesson drawn there. It absolutely was last week about President Biden. The Democrats ignore that or obfuscate that at their peril, not just at their peril, at everyone's peril.

obfuscate that at their peril, not just at their peril, at everyone's peril. Because if half of what Democrats believe about a second Trump term is real, well then, what are they doing rolling the dice with Biden at this point? I think there is no way that man wins in November. So, obviously, Biden himself should decide to drop out. But short of that, there has to be a way to do this at the convention. Anyway, lots of people are talking about that, writing about that. Let's just see what happens. Also sometime last week, there was a demonstration, effectively a pro-Hamas demonstration in front of a synagogue in Los Angeles that really was quite ugly. You had people blocking Jewish access to a synagogue in the most Jewish neighborhood in Los Angeles. This is a point that Noah Pollack made over at

the Free Press. If you had a bunch of masked Christian Republicans gathered in front of a mosque in Los Angeles assaulting Muslims, what would the response have been? As he says, we would now be several days into a national news cycle about Islamophobia and injustice in America. There would be joint LAPD-FBI task forces kicking down doors and press conferences, vigils, presidential speeches, and multi-part investigative reports from numerous leading publications. I think that's extraordinarily likely to be true, right? And as many pointed out, the essence of anti-Semitism are the double standards one continually discovers here, right? It happens to the Jews and no one seems to care. If it happened to the Muslims, if it happened to black

Americans, we'd never hear the end of it. It's the stuff that has been normalized around the Jews that seems so insidious. I was in New York not that long ago. I happened to walk down Fifth Avenue past the big synagogue there. I guess it's somewhere around 65th Street or so, and noticed, not for the first time, but for the first time I noticed how normal it had seemed, that out in front of the synagogue entrance, there are these giant blocks of stone. Each one is about the size of a, I don't know, a washing machine. They look nice. They're nice blocks of limestone or something, and they're certainly not an eyesore, but they're quite unusual. You know, the sidewalk is ringed there with these giant blocks of stone. Well,

think about that for a moment. What are they doing there? You know what they're doing there. They're to prevent a car jumping the curb and mowing down people in front of the synagogue entrance, right? People who you could assume, if they're gathered there in any number, who you could assume, if they're gathered there in any number, are Jewish, right? It's to prevent the murder of Jews in Manhattan. This is normal, but it's only normal for Jews, right? No one else has to do this in American society. Which brings me to the topic of today's conversation. Today, I'm speaking with Mikal Kotler-Wunsch, who is Israel's special envoy for combating anti-Semitism, and she's also a prominent speaker and author and researcher and independent policy and strategy advisor covering anti-Semitism and law and human rights and

Zionism. She was once a member of Israel's Knesset, and she's a trustee of Rabbi Sachs' legacy trust. Anyway, I recorded this conversation back in December, about seven months ago, and didn't release it. And really, that was just based on my own incompetence, really. I mean, what happened is I recorded it, and then I kept hitting the topic of October 7th. I've recorded several solo podcasts, you might recall. I felt like I had spent so much time on October 7th that I was wearing out the interest of the audience. So the weeks and months passed, and it never felt like the right time to release it. But I went back and listened to it, and it is still perfectly relevant. I don't think there's

a sentence in here that shows its age, right? I mean, we're still in this moment of moral confusion around October 7th. And in any case, Michal is an extraordinarily clear speaker. I mean, she speaks with an urgency and eloquence that you don't often hear on really any topic. She's spectacular. And I discovered her in a YouTube clip back in, I guess it was probably November, where she was dressing down the UN and just did that as effectively as I've ever seen anyone do anything like that. It's worth watching that performance in front of the UN, which, as we make clear in this podcast, is a hostile environment for Jews and certainly any representative of Israel. In any case, before giving you the conversation with Mikal, I wanted to explain the title I've given this podcast,

because this represents a change in my view of the situation post-October 7th. Before October 7th, I certainly would have said that anti-Zionism is quite distinct from anti-Semitism. And at one point, I could have even claimed to have been an anti-Zionist of some sort myself. After October 7th, I don't think there's any meaningful difference. I mean, there's still a conceptual difference that we could semantically justify. But anyone who's arguing that Israel shouldn't be a Jewish state at this point is clearly betraying, if not an outright hatred of Jews, such moral confusion about what happened on October 7th and about the risks to Israel, not just to the nation-state, but to the actual inhabitants, the existential risk to them, posed by Hamas and Hezbollah and the Islamic Republic of Iran. Anyone who is arguing that

Israel shouldn't exist as a Jewish state at this point is so out of touch with what has happened there and with what millions upon millions of people who really do hate the Jews want to have happen there between that river and the sea. So as to render any semantic distinction there, I think morally confused. It's not important to make the distinction. The thing to acknowledge is that all of these people who are calling into question the legitimacy of the state of Israel and the legitimacy of its fighting for its own survival against antagonists that really do mean to perpetrate a genocide there, these people are not engaging with the actual moral terrain. I mean, every bit as much as Holocaust deniers are not actually

a party to the conversation about what happened in Europe in the 40s and about what many people think should happen at some point in the future. That's actually a good analogy. Is Holocaust denial synonymous with anti-Semitism? Well, technically, no, right? I mean, one could find some anomalies in the historical record or take an interest in the possibility that such anomalies exist so as to call some part of that history into question and to not be motivated by an abiding hatred of Jews. But you think a lot of people are standing on that part of the Venn diagram? No, right? If you're in the Holocaust denial business, we know what you're up to. And I think we're in the same spot post-October 7th with anti-Zionism. And it seems to me that the thing

that most people don't understand here, the justification for the state of Israel, certainly post-October 7th, which was a direct echo of a multi-century history of pogroms and a direct echo of the Holocaust itself. I mean, this was not normal violence. And the Jews can be forgiven, frankly, for perceiving a threat that most other identifiable groups could never imagine feeling. I mean, the Jews have on countless occasions discovered from one day to the next that their neighbors want to kill them. This is the part of the history of the Holocaust that most people don't understand. I mean, most people, when you think about the Holocaust, you think, well, there was Auschwitz, right? There was the killing machine of the Third Reich, the mechanization of

death perpetrated by Nazi Germany on the Jews of Europe. Now, that's obviously a significant part of the story, but it's by no means the whole story. And on some level, it's not the most disconcerting part of the story. I mean, there were about 6 million Jews killed in the Holocaust, about 3 million, I believe, within the concentration camp system. So about 3 million died outside of it. And this is through mass shootings and ghettos and forced labor and death marches and other means. Obviously, a lot of this was the result of what the Nazis did, in particular, their mobile killing units, the Einsatzgruppen. But they had an uncountable number of collaborators in all the countries they invaded, right? And in many cases, they didn't have to force anyone to round up their

local populations of Jews for slaughter, right? They simply had to give them permission. And in countries like Lithuania and Latvia and Ukraine and Belarus and Poland and Romania and Croatia and even Greece, right, there were just well-known atrocities committed by locals who weren't forced to do anything, right? They just realized that they could. And this is the history that is even more unnerving for Jews. These were neighbors suddenly turning on neighbors and torturing them and beating them to death or shooting them in ditches or helping the Nazis do that very directly. They were Jews who returned from concentration camps after they were liberated, only to be murdered by their neighbors. There's a quote here that I found in Dan Stone's recent book, The Holocaust and Unfinished History.

He introduces it with the following, Nazi Germany was certainly responsible for initiating the program to kill the European Jews, and the killings occurred within this overall framework. But at the local level, the ways in which the killings often took place were quite different from the factory line extermination associated with the death camps, not least because many locals participated. And then he introduces a quote from another source. Here's that quote. For the Jews living in these Eastern European villages, towns, and cities, who had coexisted

with their Christian neighbors for centuries, the fact that their acquaintances, colleagues, classmates, and friends had turned against them, hunted them down, or delivered them to the Nazi murderers meant that they experienced the Holocaust not just as a murderous invasion by a foreign enemy, but also as a series of communal massacres in a once familiar but now lethally hostile environment. I mean, that really is different. The once familiar but now lethally hostile environment. And it's the intimations of that, right, the fact that society can turn and become a lethally hostile environment for Jews, a lethally hostile environment for Jews, right, as for no other people on earth. I mean, I guess it's possible it could happen for some other people, but who has it happened to for the last 2,000 years, right? So the Jews can be forgiven for not having the patience to split hairs about

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

bias against Israel at the UN, the nature of double standards, the precedence set by Israel and its conduct in the war, the shape-shifting quality of anti-Semitism. Anti-Zionism is the new strain of anti-Semitism. The Zionism is racism, resolution at the UN, the lie that Israel is an apartheid state, the notion that Israel is perpetrating a genocide against the Palestinians, another lie, the Marxist oppressed oppressor narrative that is confounding people, the false moral equivalence between the atrocities committed by Hamas and the deaths of non-combatants in Gaza, the failure of the social justice movement to respond appropriately after October 7th, what universities should have done in those early days,

reclaiming the meanings of words, extremism of many types versus civilization, and other topics. Anyway, this is another PSA, so no paywall. And again, sorry for the delay on this podcast. I just dropped the ball. I want to apologize to Mikal for that and thank her for her patience. And now I bring you Mikal Kotler-Wunsch.

I am here with Mikal Kotler-Wunsch. Mikal, thanks for joining me. Thank you very much for having me on. I am sure I sounded like a diaspora Jew in the pronunciation of your name, but it's great to have you here. Like many people, I first became aware of you seeing your really brilliant and searing speech in front of the UN recently. When did you give that speech? Is that about a month ago? So that was, yeah, that was just about three weeks ago. And well, you know, we saw one manifestation of what I was trying to say just in the complete silence regarding, obviously,

the women so brutally raped on 10-7. But that's, as I said, just one manifestation of what that speech was about. raped on 10-7. But that's, as I said, just one manifestation of what that speech was about. Yeah. So obviously, we're going to talk about what happened on October 7th, or at least more about the aftermath and what did and didn't happen in the aftermath. But before we do, just summarize your career up to this point. I mean, how is it that you became Israel's special envoy for combating anti-Semitism? And how is it that such a role exists? I mean, I think that's kind of a rhetorical question, but for how long has it existed? And just how is it that you come to occupy it? So Israel's special envoy for combating anti-Semitism actually joins a coalition of

special envoys from around the world, the United States included, Canada, European countries, the European Parliament, South American countries. And really, it is testament to a devastating reality in which we have seen a consistent rise in antisemitism in real spaces and virtual spaces, on the streets, on campuses. in real spaces and virtual spaces, on the streets, on campuses. And Israel's special envoy for combating anti-Semitism, I'm actually the second person to hold this position appointed by the state of Israel. And in many ways, the way that I think of it is that not only am I Israel's special envoy for combating anti-Semitism with regards to the state of Israel, but as Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people, with regards to the state of Israel, but as Israel is the nation state of the Jewish people, to which Jews, prototypical indigenous people, returned after thousands of years of exile and

persecution, well, I am in that sense the Jewish people's special envoy for combating antisemitism at a time where if before 10-7 we knew there was this very, very troubling gradual increase in antisemitism that manifested on multiple sort of spaces and places. 10-7 became an explosive manifestation of the antisemitism that we see, that we'll talk a little bit about, I hope, during this podcast. But I come to it from decades, really, of work in the several spaces that enabled this mutation of antisemitism that we saw on 10-7, whether it be the international law institutions and human rights that were co-opted and weaponized to enable this mutation of antisemitism, of this particular strain,

this virulent, lethal strain, and my sort of academic expertise and research with regards to university spaces in which this particular anti-Semitism has been explosive. And finally, as a legislator, with regards to the social media platforms and the way that all of those spaces feed into each other to have created this perfect storm, if you will, in a very, very negative way, is what guides me in my role as Israel's special envoy. in a very, very negative way is what guides me in my role as Israel's special envoy. And so did you mean that there are special envoys for those other countries on the topic of anti-Semitism? Absolutely. So the United States has Deborah Lipstadt. She's the United States special envoy for combating anti-Semitism. Canada has Deborah Lyons. The European Parliament

and the EU has Katarina von Schnerbein. There are many special envoys. Interesting. I was totally unaware of this. I know of Deborah's work, but I didn't know she was our special envoy. Well, one would hope there'd be no such need, but obviously the need is excruciating at the moment. Well, I want to talk about the history of anti-Semitism as you see it and how this hatred has morphed over the centuries. But before we jump into the history, can you just tell me what is happening at the UN? Because, again, I discovered you in your speech there where you were expressing it. And I recommend that everyone listen to the speech or watch it on YouTube.

It is there in all its moral clarity. It's amazing the effectiveness with which you were able to express moral outrage in that context. how the UN has behaved for really a long time. I mean, can you just tell me how the double standards applied to Israel have become enshrined there and what explains it? I mean, it's functioning almost like an anti-Semitic organization at this point, and it's frankly pretty bizarre to see. So what's happening at the UN? So here's the devastation of it. And I think that anti-Semitism is just perhaps the, as I referred to in that speech, the bloody canary in the mine shaft. But here's the thing, that this infrastructure was created post-World War II to ensure that an international rules-based order guided the way in which countries held each other to account

and were held to account, including, by the way, in situations of war. And the understanding that if that infrastructure that was created, mandated to uphold, promote, and protect these foundational principles in order that we fulfill the prospect of or future-looking commitment of never again, right? Post-Holocaust, understanding that not only six million Jews, but six million Jews were systematically murdered, butchered, burned, because of this lethal hatred that enabled their dehumanization, their delegitimization, and the application of double standards to them as individuals or as communities in their various countries. That enabled the atrocities of the Holocaust. So the never again principle, which the majority of the countries that joined at the time in understanding that we need to

ensure that never again, and I say prospective or future-looking because we can't very well prevent the past, can we? But what never again committed to do was to actually learn from the past, from that demonization, delegitimization, and double standards, the process that enabled eventually, because it didn't happen overnight, the atrocities of the Holocaust, so that never again. And words like genocide and crimes against humanity coined, actually, for the Nuremberg trials because there were no words to describe the atrocities that were perpetrated by the Nazis and their helpers that systematically burned and massacred and butchered Jews,

well, the understanding was at the time that never again was a shared prospective commitment and that it needed a set of rules, the international rules-based order, with the understanding that rules have to be applied equally and consistently to all the parties, member states of the UN, and be upheld in all of the institutions that it would roll out or create as mechanisms to uphold, whether it be the Red Cross, whether it be the refugee entities that were created, and so on. And what has happened

systematically in the UN with a majority of countries that have no regard for that international rules-based order, in fact, do everything possible to violate that international rules-based order without accountability, enables, for example, on November 2nd for Iran, or rather the Islamic regime of Iran and differentiated with the people of Iran, to be appointed to be the chair of the Human Rights Council's social forum. That's not a joke, right? So when we understand- Let me just stop you right there. How is that? I mean, it's beyond a joke. I mean, it's absolutely perverse. So it's like a Saturday Night Live sketch of dysfunction at the UN. How can anyone with a straight face put Iran on a human rights council?

So you're 100% right. And that's why, you know, I choose to shine a light on that and not solely on the antisemitism piece, because I think that this is where we have to hold to account all of the governments, including those governments funding these institutions, funding the agencies of these institutions, whether it be, I mentioned the Red Cross, I'm going to mention UNRWA, a single refugee entity created for one group of refugees. So there is one UN mechanism created for all refugees around the world. And it's the UNHCR created in order to ensure that refugees and their needs are taken care of for the first generation of refugees. And guess what? The UN created another additional entity singularly or singling out one group of refugees, that is Palestinians, who singularly get to hand down refugee status from generation to generation to generation. And we are now at the fifth generation of refugees. That is almost counterintuitive to the whole purpose of an entity created by the UN, funded by the international community. So here we are with

countries that do replace, respect, excuse me, and uphold and promote and protect presumably the rules-based order, except that they are funding entities, including those that I mentioned within the UN and including the UN infrastructure that appoints Iran or that appoints China or that appoints other countries to ridiculous positions where an Orwellian inversion is too much even to imagine, right, in this moment in time. And we have to hold those countries to account. So the very countries that were entrusted to uphold, promote, and protect that international rules-based order, and actually do respect it, but enable these entities that do not, and that systematically violate it, including with regards to anti-Semitism and specifically Israel,

in the demonization, the delegitimization, and the double standards applied to Israel. And we should know, Israel has a specific agenda item that comes up every time that the Human Rights Council meets. So all of the countries in the entire world, Iran, Cuba, Venezuela, you name them, China, the Uyghurs in China, you name the countries with flagrant human rights violations, all of them together have less human rights violations than one single country, the state of Israel, according to the Human Rights Council in the UN. Those are just, you know, there are so many examples, but those are just the most blatant ones that are really a call to action at this moment in time. And 10-7, ripping off so many masks, ripped off that one as

well. So as an organization, is it even redeemable at this point? I mean, I know it's the only thing we have, but it just, it seems like a moral farce and an increasingly dangerous one that this is getting normalized, right? And I don't understand why. Obviously, Israel has some important allies, and you'd think that the United States and the UK and other countries that are aligned here could make a difference. I mean, what is it going to take to bring some moral sanity to that organization? Well, it's going to take exactly what you just said. It's going to take those countries. By the way, the overwhelming majority of the funding for the UN comes from those countries. So the interesting thing is that those countries, by the way, the overwhelming majority of the funding for the UN comes from those countries. So the interesting thing is that those countries, by funding this Orwellian

inversion, are actually enabling the perversion that we see, right? That enables and empowers genocidal terror organizations that are proxies of genocidal terror regimes and actually other authoritarian governments to sort of get a free pass at the very place that was created to uphold, promote, and protect these foundational principles. This is a moment of reckoning in that sense, and maybe the last sort of opportunity for those countries recognizing through the very, very clear inability to unequivocally condemn 10-7. And I want to be clear, anybody that cannot unequivocally condemn the atrocities of 10-7, the burning of babies, of entire families,

the raping of women so badly their legs can't be straightened for burial, the abduction, the killing, the mutilation of thousands, actually in violation of a ceasefire that on October 6th held a very fragile one between Hamas, a genocidal terror organization that took over the Gaza Strip, where Israel has not been since 2005, that holds Palestinians hostage as human shields, as sacrifices,

whatever you want to call them, but has no regard for human life as a genocidal terror organization. call them, but has no regard for human life as a genocidal terror organization. Anybody that can't condemn that day and that magnitude of barbaric, savage atrocities unequivocally is not upholding, promoting, or protecting the foundational principles of life and of liberty that those institutions were created to ensure and to secure. So it pretty much exposes a whole range of organizations, of mechanisms, of the institution itself, of the UN. If, for example, the UN women's groups resisted condemning and actually were silent, and we know that silence is complicity, until a couple of days ago when they issued some very lukewarm sort of statement in anticipation of the event of an event that took place at the U.N. initiated by Israel yesterday, exposing the silence that actually empowers that genocidal terror that used rape, brutal rape and sexual crimes that cannot even be imagined but are not actually not too terrible to have happened, just too terrible to imagine, that were described in this day that was held at the UN yesterday. So in anticipation of that, one of the women's groups issued some sort of a lukewarm statement

50 days after the atrocities were perpetrated. But you're 100% right in your question. And it'll be up to the countries, mostly, as I said, that are funding this infrastructure to ensure that it upholds its original mission statement or collapses. Because where we may be the bloody canary in the mineshaft, the mineshaft is collapsing all around us. And that is what 10-7 exposed very clearly for anybody paying attention. Well, again, I want to talk about some of the history here, but I think we should focus on the UN for a few more minutes here, because it's really hard for people who are not really steeped in the details here to understand how bizarre the status quo is here. So perhaps you can dissect one of these double standards

for us, and let's just see how deep it runs. Because what many of us perceive, those of us who are paying attention, perceive Israel to be perpetually in a no-win situation. Because they're clearly fighting a defensive war. I mean, as you correctly pointed out, there was a ceasefire. Anyone calling for a ceasefire now should recognize there was a ceasefire on October 6th, which was broken by Hamas. And it was broken in a way that, again, as you said, is so patently evil and so patently in violation of any sane use of self-defense. Even if you were going to grant the claim that the Palestinians in Gaza are being occupied or imprisoned or consigned to some kind of apartheid state, and I would not grant those claims, but even if you were going to grant that and imagine that Hamas, as their duly elected representatives, organized a properly conceived defensive act of war against Israel so as to throw off those shackles.

you said, and we don't need to linger on them because I've done that in previous podcasts, but consciously targeting for torture and rape and mutilation and destruction non-combatants, children, and taking children hostage, right? Killing their parents in front of them and taking them hostage. The details are so obviously in violation of every norm of self-defense or just war, and they're completely unanalogous to collateral damage in time of war where noncombatants get killed inadvertently, that it's just, if you can't see which way is up here morally, there's something quite wrong. So Israel is being held to a standard now in defending itself against this, where the scrutiny on its own collateral damage is of a sort that no other democracy defending itself has ever seen. So when the US is fighting the Islamic State in Iraq and bombing Mosul, There's no such analogous scrutiny on the civilian death toll.

Now, we should be quick to admit that it is, of course, tragic that civilians die in any of these conflicts. And we would all hope that Israel would be holding itself to the highest possible standard of waging its ground war in Gaza so as to protect civilian life. But they're fighting an enemy that is consciously using human shields and trying to leverage collateral damage in a propaganda victory with the rest of the world. And that propaganda victory is only possible given this complete inversion of moral sense that we're describing at the UN. And obviously, it's not just at the UN, it's elsewhere, and we'll discuss that. But perhaps you can just unpick this particular

double standard, the scrutiny applied to Israel when it wages a defensive war in the aftermath of thousands of rockets and medieval-level barbarism in its own territory against its civilians. What is happening at the UN and how is that this double standard of scrutiny justified? What is not being done to Syria or to Saudi Arabia or to Russia that is being done to Israel in this context? So that double standard, and I think we'll drill down on some other things that have happened at the UN, but that double standard is actually one of the most critical pieces to understand. Look, double standards or the selective application of

any principle undermines the entire infrastructure. Always. When people say to me, I'm not a lawyer, I don't understand that. I say, look, if you're three years old and I say to you, we're going to play a game and you're going to play according to the rules, but I'm not. That three-year-old will say to me, I'm not playing. I'm not playing. That is the problem with double standards and that should concern us all. So the consistent application of double standards or the selective application of standards to one single member state in the family of nations that happens to be the proverbial Jew among the nations, the Jewish nation state that is Israel, that is a problem not just for that member state. It is a problem for the infrastructure created that has to uphold, promote, and protect those

foundational principles we spoke about, including there is a body of laws called the laws of war, including the laws of war. Now, everything you've just mentioned, including over 11,500 rockets that have been launched at Israelis, including this morning, I received pictures from my husband hiding in a stairway in his office building, my husband, hiding in a stairway in his office building. 11,500 rockets launched at Israelis. Imagine this in, you know, New York City, in Washington, in Berlin, in Toronto. 11,500 rockets every time there are red alert sirens blaring, sending you into safe rooms since and on 10-7. Each one of those rockets targeting Israeli civilians from populated areas in Gaza, what I just said in international law language or the laws of war is a double war crime because you are targeting civilians from densely populated areas, endangering civilians, a double war crime. Not one of that 11,500 double war crimes, not one has been condemned by the institutions

mandated to uphold, promote, and protect. Double standard. When you look at what you described as those barbaric atrocities, they are so far beyond the pale of anything that the laws of war clearly stipulate as absolutely ever, ever being justified. And nonetheless, what we have is a response that, you know, the Nazis at least hid what they did during the Holocaust. They hid what they did because they had an understanding that morality would judge them and one day would judge them looking back. You know, on 10-7, the 3,000 plus barbaric savages that infiltrated Israel under the first barrage of rockets that we experienced at 630 a.m. on what was the Sabbath and a holiday that celebrates our, you know, Bible, our book that has kept us together as a people for thousands of years, that day violated

by rockets, what happened on that day was live streamed. It was filmed on GoPros. It was with pride that many of them called parents to say that they murdered 10 Jews. That is something that we have to look at very clearly and understand that when they did that, when they did not even hide, they knew that they would be receiving support, including right here on university campuses. Carter, that like Mein Kampf, calls for the murder of Jews and the annihilation of Israel from the river to the sea. That's a call to annihilate the state of Israel. If you look at a map of the state of Israel, that is not two-state solution. And anybody who cares about Palestinian well-being, that's just hatred of Jews and the complete unacceptance of Israel's existence in any borders. Double standard. If we don't call out those double standards, including in the implementation of international humanitarian law, and by the way, you know, Israel not only holds itself up to a very, very high level of ethics in fighting wars

generally, because those are our principles, but you should know, and all of our listeners should know, that international law actually is created by precedent. What has happened in this this fighting and, you know, as opposed to the United States that had to fight millions or, you know, threats by millions of genocidal terrorists or I don't know how many of ISIS fighters and so on, but had to fight them a long way from home. them a long way from home. Israel is fighting this war inside and just on the cusp, just on its borders. The precedent that Israel has created in its war on genocidal terrorists is now going to be a very high standard for all democracies that want to uphold those laws of war. The understanding that Israel has created humanitarian corridors, that it has actually announced before any attack where it was going to announce and asked the civilians in those areas to evacuate, and that it is Hamas that has prevented their evacuation in many cases, or that has intercepted the humanitarian aid that Israel has enabled to flow through or that has stopped civilians

from actually moving from areas of Gaza where Israel had to fight Hamas terrorists because they use them as human shields, building their infrastructures under mosques, schools and hospitals precisely for that reason. The understanding that the world has enabled, I'll call it a false moral equivalence between that genocidal terror organization and a democratic state defending itself from it, that's going to be a problem for all these democratic countries that have enabled that, because in many ways, it's the double standard that undermines the entire infrastructure. There is tragic loss of life. There is tragic loss of life. But just like after 9-11, the only entity

that has to be held to account for the tragic loss of life, both what it perpetrated on 10-7 and in the aftermath of 10-7, in the Palestinian loss of life, is Hamas, a genocidal terror organization. And if we are not morally clear on that, what those double standards actually do is empower terror and the regimes supporting these proxies of terror. And we've named some of them, including Iran, with the Iranian, current Iranian regime. All that does is empower those regimes. And that is a problem for all democracies and for all of us who cherish life and liberty. And, you know, the all democracies and for all of us who cherish life and liberty. And, you know, the thing with authoritarian regimes is they have this funny

tendency to actually say what they mean and mean what they say. Khamenei, just days before 10-7, the supreme leader of Iran, tweeted precisely what it was that we saw happen on 10-7, only that he, instead of using the word Jew or or Israel exchanges it with Zionist or Zionist cancer in this case that would be destroyed by Palestinians. Now I'd say the conflation of Palestinians with Hamas undermines the Palestinian cause and we should be very clear on that. If the Palestinian cause is represented by the genocidal acts perpetrated on 10-7, then we have to call that out and say there should be a Palestinian leadership, sadly there hasn't been one that's vocal enough, that unequivocally condemns and says, that was not in my name. state solution and for peace and coexistence, recognizing Israel's right to exist alongside whatever will be this long-term resolution of the conflict. But it can't be that we expect that resolution of some kind with an entity like Hamas that perpetrated the atrocities of 10-7.

And that is the problem with double standards. Again, if we do not have an equal and consistent application of any principle, it undermines it completely, and it no longer exists for any situation, any context. So double standards in any context actually undermines the principle in every context, and that's what has happened. Well, I want to talk about the sentiment among Palestinians at the moment, but let's get there through a brief tour of the history of antisemitism. This goes way back, at least to Christian theology nearly 2,000 years ago, and then it changed. To my knowledge, it changed somewhere around the 19th century, and it became an explicitly racialized notion. I think the actual term anti-Semitic first appears in the 1850s.

And then we have things like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion. And in America, we had Henry Ford. We obviously have the Nazis. and now we have this great reservoir of Muslim anti-Semitism, which has been influenced by its own theology, but also by many of those modern trends. How do you think about the history here, and how can we understand the durability and shape-shifting character of this hatred? So the oldest hatred in the world, as Jew hatred has been called by many, including the late Professor Robert Westrich, the oldest hatred in the world has actually survived by mutating. So anti-Semitism or Jew hatred never died, it just mutated. And it mutated

according to the guiding social construct of the time. And you mentioned some of them, right? Religion, science. And I would say in our day, and this connects to our conversation about the UN and about international law and human rights in general, the secular religion of our times, human rights, right? If you latch on to the guiding social construct of the time, then what happens to that guiding social construct, of course, is that it has been co-opted and weaponized for something very lethal, right? In that sense, the mutation of antisemitism, the strain that we see right now, the 10-7 made very clear, and I think we should

put it on the sort of table as we talk about it. 10-7 exposed the modern mutated mainstream strain of an ever mutating virus. And that is what anti-Semitism is. It mutates over time and that's how it survives. And that strain, anti-Zionism or the negation of Israel's very right to exist, intersects at all of those places that you mentioned. Doesn't matter what side of the extreme of the spectrums it comes from, what we call extreme right, what we call extreme left, what we call extreme Islamist ideology. The negation of Israel's very right to exist in any border is shared by all of those extremities. And so the mutation of anti- antisemitism to this form, to this strain that we have to identify, and it's important to say that the International Holocaust

Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism actually is the single definition and the benchmark definition, including utilized by the Coalition of Special Envoys that I mentioned I'm a member of before, the benchmark definition that enables to identify this strain. You know, in a post-COVID world, we all understand the way that viruses mutate. And we understand that if we inoculate our societies or our communities or our families against just one strain of a virus, we are actually not immune to the other strains when it does mutate. And the importance of understanding antis-Semitism in this way, and the old strains never died, they still exist, just like with COVID. There are old

strains and new strains, but we have to inoculate our societies, our spaces, our communities, our countries against this new strain, that is the strain of anti-Zionism, exposed very clearly, not just in the atrocities perpetrated by Hamas on 10-7 and in the gravity and the barbaric, savage nature of them, but in the responses to what happened on 10-7 around the world, including in democratic countries, that denied within hours, that justified within days, that supported, that continue to support, and that attack Jews in the wake of those atrocities. That makes very clear that anti-Zionism, or the negation of Israel's very right to exist, is the modern, mutated, mainstream strain of anti-Semitism that we have to be able to identify and combat. And again, the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition is the single definition that was created in order exactly to be able to identify and combat this strain. We'll talk about it a little bit more. The importance of understanding that at this moment, the history

of anti-Semitism or Jew hatred, as it was called before it became anti-Semitism, as you said, the understanding that it began not today and that there is a long process of demonization, of delegitimization, and the double standards that were in a traditional form of Jew hatred. An individual Jew was barred from an equal place in society. In the modern strain of anti-Semitism or Jew hatred, it's the proverbial Jew among the nations, that is the state of Israel, to which Jews, an indigenous people, returned after thousands of years of exile and persecution 75 years ago. If we demonize, delegitimize, and apply double standards to that Jew among the nations, then we enable the very same process of that mutation of anti-Semitism. And if we drill down a little bit further, you know, we spoke about the UN. The UN Zionism is Racism Resolution in 1975, passed in 1975,

and I will argue, after a series of conventional wars, failed to destroy the state of Israel from that moment of return of that indigenous people in 1948. So immediately after the partition plan was rejected by the Arabs then living in what was then British Mandate Palestine, the Jews accepting it. Immediately the next day, actually, the War of Independence broke out, as we know. But a series of conventional wars failed to destroy that Jewish nation state, to which, you know, in many ways we would be remiss if we didn't understand that return to Zion enables the understanding that the unconventional war, the war for public opinion, was waged in 1975 in that Zionism is racism resolution. Recognize that conventional warfare was not going to obliterate

the state of Israel, annihilate it. The unconventional war for public opinion, and actually, ironically or not, then Soviet Union propaganda, Zionism is racism, 1975, is alive and well on 2023 university campuses in the name of progress. So ironically or not, that is a critical understanding of how we got to where we got to. And I would say the next- So just to linger on that point, so that has been traced to Soviet propaganda, that initiative? Well, we know that it was Soviet propaganda, actually. Zionism is racism resolution, including in the UN, and actually utilized in the Soviet Union at the time in order to be able to sever the connection and any religious connection, obviously, in the then Soviet Union was not an option, right? So we understand that identity was something that

was going to have to be, I'd say, not mainstream, that's the wrong word. There was sort of a leveling of the playing field, right? We were all just going to be the same comrades in the Soviet Union. And identity or particular identity was not going to work if the idea of communism was going to work. And therefore, Zionism as racism was a vehicle not only to sever the identity of Jews then living in the former Soviet Union, but in the understanding of how it was that Israel should be regarded by the former Soviet Union at the time, and it's in its alliance with the then Arab countries or the Arab League. Zionism as racism that took hold on university campuses, as I said, in the name of progress in the last, you know, decades,

is based on that same understanding. And we would be remiss if we didn't mention in that context, you know, I'm not saying that all Jews self-define as Zionist or that all Zionists are Jews, not at all. Zionist is integral to the identity of the majority of Jews who for thousands of years, and I insist on reminding us that word indigeneity, belonging to an indigenous, a prototypical indigenous people that speak the same language, Hebrew, and read the same book, the Bible, and traverse the same land, Israel, and practice the same rituals and customs for thousands of years. That's why prototypical indigenous, that's what indigeneity means.

The understanding that for thousands of years, that people, and Jews are a people, 15 million of us, not a very big one, actually longed and prayed and yearned to return to Zion. integral to the identity of the majority of Jews that longed and yearned and prayed to return to Zion. If anything, Zionism is more than 140-year-old national, progressive national liberation movement based in that identity of a Jewish people that enabled the return of an indigenous people to ancestral homeland, national liberation that succeeded. And taking that as the moment of reckoning that Zionism is racism passed in the UN became mainstream on university campus in 2023 in the name of progress is something that I believe that we will have to contend with, including on university campuses and spaces as we speak in sort of identifying and combating the anti-Semitism that's become mainstream on those campuses. The next step that I wanted to mention sort of in the evolution of into an anti-Semitic hate fest. It was at that conference that it became clear to all of the human rights advocates of the time that it was actually our skill, our commitment, our belief that we could ensure that never again principle that was co-opted and weaponized, i.e. human rights, for the demonization and the delegitimization and the application of

double standards to the state of Israel. After that conference against racism, which turned into an anti-Semitic hate fest in Durban, South Africa, what we saw is Israel apartheid weeks across North America in nearly every campus. Israel apartheid weeks, no questions asked. Now, some of us are old enough to remember apartheid, and Israel has its share of troubles, but Israel is not an apartheid state. And apartheid was one of the cruelest eras to live under. And attributing falsely the lie of apartheid to the state of Israel does two things. It minimizes the suffering of those that lived under the apartheid regime. And in many ways, it disenables to identify the challenges which Israel, like every other democratic country, has and should address.

That's not to say that Israel is perfect. That is to say that Israel is not an apartheid state and that misappropriating a historical concept like apartheid and placing it or forcing it onto an irrelevant set of facts is actually a double undermining, not only of what it was that apartheid described singularly, but disenabling to address the challenges that are in the false application to the set of facts that it's applied to. And next- Just to close the loop on that, Michal, what is the status of Arabs who are Israeli citizens within Israel? including support workers that came to treat the Nova Festival participants, this peace festival, the understanding that Israel's 20% is represented in every walk of life in Israel, in the Supreme Court, in hospitals, in the army, in every walk of life, in everyday things like

shopping, that 20% is represented, which is why I say the apartheid lie is such a vicious lie and such, I'd say, almost a crime against those that lived under apartheid. are fully integrated into everyday life in Israel, to be seen in university campuses and on the beach and everywhere you go, then that means that what you've actually done is completely erase them or strip them of agency. Now, where there are issues is where Israel has tried over and over again to come to some sort of resolution with Palestinians. And here we go back to the challenge in coming to resolution with somebody who denies your very right to exist. That is a whole other story, right? What's known as Judea and Samaria, the West Bank, whatever it is that people use. Gaza, including Israel having disengaged from Gaza in 2005, post-Oslo Accords, exactly in order to be able to create final status borders so that these allegations can't be in any way true, in any way a part of the story

of Israel, because Israel does not want to be in Gaza. But Hamas took over the Gaza Strip in 2007 and threw Fatah members off roofs and has been actually in control of Gaza. Israel has not been in Gaza since 2007. Most people do not know that. And there are, of course, other areas in which if Israel is to be able to come to some sort of final agreement with the Palestinians that do want to continue living side by side. That has been tried over and over again by Israel. And each and every time, just like the 1947 partition plan was rejected, was rejected by Palestinian leadership. That's an important piece of understanding. But there is nothing between that and between what apartheid was that can describe what Israel's reality is, including,

as I said, not only on 10-7, but since 10-7. And as I said, Israel's hospitals are filled with not only patients, but doctors and nurses of every religion and every faith, Muslims and Christians and Jews and Bedouin and Druze. And that is actually part of the misunderstood part of the story that you only see when you experience in Israel. And finally, I want to give a moment to the most Orwellian inversion of them all. And that is, of course, the attribution of the perpetuating, excuse me, a Holocaust by Israel in Gaza or a genocide. I said before, I mean, the words genocide and crimes against humanity, by the way, what happened on 10-7 were war crimes and crimes against humanity and the makings of a genocide so dubbed by international law experts.

And the Orwellian inversion of accusing Israel of precisely what it experienced not only in the Holocaust, but on 10-7, accusing it of perpetrating a Holocaust or a genocide in Gaza is absolutely the most Orwellian inversion of them all. And you know, the 3,000 plus Hamas terrorists and their helpers that came in, infiltrated Israel on that day in 10-7, the atrocities that they perpetrated intended to elicit the memory of the Holocaust, the burning of babies and families so that they could only be identified weeks, weeks after they were murdered. It took weeks to identify the remains of Lillian Silver. You know, sometimes when we think of numbers, it's too hard to even imagine, right? 1,200 individuals. Too hard to even imagine, right? 1,200 individuals. When we think of individuals like Lillian Silver, a 72-year-old Canadian-Israeli that could only be identified by her remains, what remained of her, weeks after 10-7, a peace activist, by the way, that lived in one of the villages that were basically burnt and pillaged in those barbaric ways, that understanding that it meant to elicit the memory of the Holocaust and actually create this what they refer to them as, of that day or since that day, identifying bodies,

identifying remains, grappling with what it was that the human mind can't even imagine, but happened, that understanding makes the Orwellian inversion and weaponization of the Holocaust and the allegations of Israel perpetrating a genocide only more grotesque. There can be no worse accusation against any country. And so look what we have. If Zionism is racism and Israel is an apartheid state that perpetrates a Holocaust or a genocide, then there is no defense, including in, for example, diversity, equity, and inclusion principles in workplace or in university settings for racists. There is no defense for an apartheid state. There is nothing left to do with it but to dismantle it. There is never legitimacy to perpetrating a Holocaust and a genocide. And so

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

double standards against the state of Israel, just replacing the traditional antisemitism that did that very thing against the individual Jew. the traditional anti-Semitism that did that very thing against the individual Jew. First of all, that was a brilliant dissection of some profound misunderstandings. So much of this is a matter of consciously misusing terminology and then spreading those lies and half-truths to a wider audience that then unconsciously misuses these concepts. And you just ran through many of them, things like apartheid and genocide and Holocaust. And we might also add the concept of colonialism. As you've, or it pains to make clear earlier, the Jews are not colonialists or interlopers in the land of Israel, but they've been indigenous people all this time and certainly longer than anyone has thought in terms of there being a Palestinian population.

Not to say that their ancestors don't reach back into that area as well. to that area as well. But just to say about that, you know, the fact that I insist that I'm a member of an indigenous people, it doesn't preclude other indigenous peoples, as we know from other spaces and regions in the world. The only thing is that I expect the mutual recognition of my indigeneity and my right to exist as who I am, just as I afford that recognition to whoever else, you know, claims that indigeneity. And I think that that principle, it's a foundational principle, by the way, of international law, and I think of human relations, reciprocity, right? I expect the very same recognition that I afford. And that is a critical piece of it. Yeah. So you've alluded to this definition of anti-Semitism that you think is

worth knowing. What is the definition? So first of all, I recommend that everybody just look up the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition, the IRA. It's about a one-page definition. And the importance of that definition is not just to read what's in the neat little box of what anti-Semitism typically is, which I would say encapsulate what we think of as traditional anti-Semitism, but actually to read the examples that are listed by the IRA. Because the examples enable us to identify what we've talked about, about the strains of antisemitism, right? The understanding that a virus, you know, we had Omicron, we had

COVID-19, we had all kinds of strains of a virus, and we needed to name each of them. Or I'll give an example not from a virus. We understand what a table is, but a table can come in all kinds of shapes and sizes and heights. So the fact that we understand what a table is, what antisemitism is, very, very sort of high level, is not sufficient when we understand that we're going to have to understand the various strains or forms in which that antisemitism presents. And 10.7 made clear why it is critical to identify this strain, so that if we're just busy with sort of the traditional strain that singled out the individual Jew or that denied the Holocaust, those are very important strains of antisemitism that we have to identify and combat. But they are not sufficient. If we are not going to commit to identify and

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

the map, that's the entire thing and glory to our martyrs, then we have a problem right here in identifying and combating anti-Semitism. If we allow on social media spaces, I referred to it before, Zionist that codes Jew to, although there are protected characteristics on social media platforms, if we allow Zionist to be used coding Jew, then we're allowing that same anti-Semitism to run rampant and actually infect an entire generation that consumes all of their information on social media platforms. And ironically, you know, and this is important and the reason that I keep sort of referencing 10-7 as a reminder to 9-11, It's also about traditional media and not just social media. Imagine if 11 days after 9-11, the New York Times would have posted on its front page evidence or data given

to it by Al-Qaeda. That's actually what happened 11 days after 10-7. And if you can deny, justify, And if you can deny, justify, support, and attack Jews in the wake of 10-7, why not 9-11? That's actually what happened with a TikTok letter from bin Laden to America, where millions actually not only were exposed to this letter to America, but gave us a sense of the understanding that said, well, if you can deny, justify, support, and attack Jews in the wake of 10-7, why not do the same with regards to 9-11? Bin Laden was right. That is a problem for the United States of America. So whereas I think in many ways we understood the imperative to combat anti-Semitism or to identify and combat antisemitism as a Jewish issue, it is not a Jewish issue. Antisemitism is in many ways predictive of what it is that gnaws away at the foundations of democracies, including right here in the United States. If we're not paying attention to what it is that's happening and antisemitism is showing the path to where we have to go in order to protect the foundations of democracies.

And I don't mean by censoring or shutting down. I mean by identifying and combating anti-Semitism as a part of what allows extremism to actually identify the strengths of democracies and use them as weaknesses, right? That's what terror does. We value life. They glorify death. But because we value life, the Hamas not only did what it did to extinguish life on 10-7, it abducted 240 hostages. It holds its own people as hostage because we value life. So if it hides under hospitals and schools and mosques, it knows that Israel will be debilitated in many ways to fight in the way that it must fight in for its life and we're at an existential moment at 75 years young, at a real existential moment, not only for Israel as a Jewish nation state, but for Jews around the world that are being attacked for what happened on 10-7. But whereas Israel is on the front lines, and let it be clear, it's not just the army, it's the entire Israeli society that is deployed. There is a war. I said just today, rockets continue flying overhead and red alert sirens continue blaring. And there is a war that is ongoing right now in Israel. But I would say that the war is raging. And I'm going to say something that, you know, may sound a little,

you know, difficult to understand when we're sitting here and there's no sirens blaring outside. It's a war that is raging right here too. That unconventional war for public opinion is raging in the streets of the United States and Canada and all democracies. And that's not just a war on the state of Israel. It's a war on our shared humanity. It's a war on civilization as we know it. I said before, you know, authoritarian regimes, they have a funny way of saying what they mean and meaning what they say. If you just follow what Khamenei intends to do, it's actually to build a caliphate on the rubble of our civilization. Whereas Israel is the small devil, the United States is the big devil, and so on and so on. And it's not just Iran, obviously. We have an intersection of very,

very bad forces that are bound together by the commitment to undermine democracy as we know it and as we cherish it. So again, I think that this is a moment of reckoning in all of the spaces that we've mentioned, the international institutions, the university spaces, traditional media, social media. But it's a moment of reckoning for ourselves as people who cherish those foundational principles of life and of liberty to understand that this war that's raging in Israel, it affects us. And there are many people who are boots on the ground right here in this war if we cherish life and liberty. And those boots on the ground, they have to be just as willing as the boots on the ground in Israel to what I call devastatingly after burying more of my friend's kids and more of my kid's friends because I'm at that age.

I have three of my own children in the army right now and that we haven't even begun to process. But when you are fighting a war, you have to be willing to lose friends, literally and figuratively. That means on university campuses, that means in all of our spaces and workplaces, ensuring that we understand that, first of all, DEI principles have to be applied equally and consistently, assuming that we are supporting DEI principles' existence. And they do exist in all of our workplaces and universities, if they leave out or exclude the Jew slash Zionist slash supporter of Israel, that undermines the entire infrastructure. That brings me to the beginning of the conversation. And even bigger than that, it's a moment of

reckoning to that entire analysis, and I'll say like a Marxist analysis, that divides the world into oppressed and oppressor, into colonized and colonizer. We have to be asking ourselves, is that true? Is the whole world divided into oppressed and oppressor? Now, I'll say something about that. The Jews don't fit, right? I said we're an indigenous people returned to an ancestral homeland after millennia of exile persecution. I'm not an oppressor. I didn't come from Europe and stop sending me back there. That's not my story. But this is a much bigger moment of reckoning for democracies. And the DEI infrastructure is sort of a derivative of it. Are we satisfied with this division of the world? And it's a Marxist division of the world, speaking back to Soviet propaganda,

into oppressed and oppressor. What does that do to our democratic societies? Is that what our democratic societies actually were intended to do? Is that sort of the American dream that enabled refugees, including European survivors of the Holocaust, to arrive here and build a new life? Is this really a country that is an oppressor? Do we accept that? That doesn't mean there aren't problems, like I said before. It just means that applying social constructs that are irrelevant to the set of facts to which we are looking dis-enables the ability to actually ensure equality of opportunities and equality and diversity that enables all of us to thrive

and so on. I think that, you know, in many ways, there were many good intentions that led us to this place in time. But it is a moment of reckoning that we have to look at the results of those intentions because intentions have led to this place where the division of the world into this polarized reality in a social media reality that anyway polarizes the way that we see the world and consume information is really destructive for the foundations of all democracies. Again, not just of Israel and not just of Jews living in the various societies and countries and democracies in which they are now under attack. Well, it is a very complex picture. There are two pieces or two points on the landscape that I think are worth flagging. One is this wider tragedy of good intentions where you have people who I think are, you know, they're not all sociopaths, right? These are, you know, college kids that are idealistic and wanting to do good in the world. And they have been fed a

set of concepts that have been, I'm convinced in many cases, consciously distorted so as to mislead them. But they, you know, when they're out there, you know, chanting from the river to the sea, I would say that, you know, most of those kids at Cornell and Harvard and Stanford don't imagine that they're advocating a genocide of Jews. Or they do and think that Jews aren't human and deserve to be. Well, so I want to differentiate those two groups of people. So they're the people who know what these words mean and know that they're misusing them and know how cynical and even evil this is in the end. Right, we'll say like a professor who's exhilarated on 10-7. Yeah, right. So there are people who know the details of what happened on 10-7.

And I would even say there's kind of a gray area here where there are people who understand the details of what happened on 10-7, gray area here where there are people who understand the details of what happened on 10-7, but they don't understand how that kind of killing of civilians is radically different from the killing that happens when you bomb the headquarters of Hamas that they have conveniently located underneath a hospital, right? So they, they need to sit in a philosophy seminar to figure out how it is different when you drop a bomb, even though you've been telling people to leave a building for a week, and you drop a bomb, and there are still people in that building, and they die, and they're innocent noncombatants, and how they've been, you know, in many cases, obliged to stay there by the terrorist organization that is running their society, how that is different than going into people's houses at dawn and tying them up and

torturing them and burning them alive, right? How are those two things different? Body count, just keeping track of the number of dead does not give you any understanding of the mines that produced those calamities, right? Right. And just to piggyback on the double standards conversation we had before, the understanding that ISIS had to be not just destroyed, but destroyed over however long it took, even if there were tragic civilians, tragically civilians killed, or that the Nazis, the war against the Nazis, absolutely, I'm sure had casualties of civilian nature as well. But we could not afford as humanity to not fight them to the end. We could not afford not to win the war

against the Nazis because that would have been the end of millions of more of, you know, innocent lives. That's a very complex sort of, you know, sort of understanding, except that it isn't, right? Except when it isn't. We're very clear on why the Nazis, or maybe some people aren't, but we're very clear on why the Nazis had to be destroyed in World War II. And I think that what you're touching upon is actually a part of this unconventional war for public opinion that enables the false moral equivalence, right? The false moral equivalence between a democratic country that not only can but must defend its civilians, and in this case, a genocidal terror organization, but one proxy of a genocidal murderous regime alongside many other countries. If we reference

the past, I can use Nazis, but there are regimes currently that are, in that sense, the false moral equivalence. They are empowered by it because if everything, if we level the playing field, then we say, okay, then it's fair game and everybody is equal, except that there are things that are out of bounds. Not all things are created equal. There is the imperative need to differentiate between good and bad. And I think that that's part of the conversation that we need to be having. And just to go back to the university piece, you know, I think this is a real moment of reckoning for university spaces. First, because if you can't unequivocally condemn what happened on 10-7, there's something seriously wrong. And if you have professors who are exhilarated by what happened on 10-7,

or students that support what happened on 10-7, and that threaten fellow students to commit the atrocities that were perpetrated on 10-7, whether it is we will rape you or we will burn you, then there's something seriously wrong with the university setting and obviously with society in which that happens. But there is another piece, and sort of the pseudo-academic in me can't help but talk about this. In fact, when I meet university presidents or chancellors, this is usually the most important piece of the conversation that I have with them. And that is the moment of reckoning for universities in terms of their mission. What is the role of university? And as far as I knew, it was the pursuit of, we can't say this word anymore. I mean, it's another whole conversation. It was

the pursuit of truths. But let's just say in a post-truth era, at the very least, it's the pursuit of knowledge. Well, if universities have become spaces in which instead of teaching people how to think, we are teaching people what to think, meaning, you know, either they or their friends are being brainwashed, that is a real problem for mandated institutions to teach people how to think, to critically think, to pursue knowledge. That's a problem for humanity. It's not just a problem for each and every individual university. understand, actually, because when you come in for a three or four year term, the last thing you want to do is have to cope with what has been happening, festering, percolating for decades, including, we should say, foreign funding that has come into the university without transparency, whether from Qatar or from other places. And you wonder, how has that impacted not just free speech, but academic freedom? What is it that has happened in university spaces? And I think that, you know, 10-7 is a moment of reckoning, as I said, for many of the spaces or many of the masks that have been uncovered, universities a critical one.

And I go back to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of anti-Semitism. You know, there is an infrastructure that protects all students, and all of those students get to self-define as what they are and who they are. That should include Zionists who self-define as Zionists, whether they're Jews or not Jews. And for that protection to be afforded to them equally and consistently like it is, the safety and security of all students is ensured by all universities. You have to be able to use the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition, again, to identify this strain that threatens their safety and security now on campus, as opposed to everybody else who is ensured safety and security. Just to be clear, Mikhail, that this strain you're referring to is one that has cynically leveraged the rubric of social justice. white people and white adjacent people as being oppressors and all people of color as being oppressed, whether directly or systemically. And in that context, I mean, certainly when you're

on the left side of the political spectrum in America, Jews are viewed as essentially extra white, right? I mean, on the far right, they're viewed as not white, right? So they're getting it from both sides, but on the left... That's what anti-Semitism always is, for what we are and what we aren't. So that's the strain you're talking about, kind of a social justice, quasi-Marxist, DEI-leveraged. And anti-Zionism is anti-Semitism. I'm not saying that anti-Zionism, you know, in many ways there are anti-Semites who are not anti-Zionists, right? They just hate Jews and believe that they should all die, right? They don't care about Israel. You know, that's maybe the traditional anti-Semitism was just not anti-Zionism strain, like if you look at the intersecting circles in a Venn diagram, is the majority of the current mutated, you know, campus kind of anti-Semitism that we are witnessing. And you're right, it has intersected with all of those. I say it tragically, actually, because I think, you know, in many ways it undermines those other social justice movements in that it has been co-opted and weaponized for this. movements in that it has been co-opted and weaponized for this. And, you know, just because you said, you know, that, you know, sort of elicited the social justice piece, you know, when Israel began exposing in a very devastating decision what it was that happened on 10-7, and you have to know that it is grueling. There is not a family, not a home, not a neighborhood that is not impacted by the atrocities or by their aftermath.

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

nature of the 10-7 attack and Israel's decision, and it was a painful decision, much like Mrs. Till made a very painful decision to leave that casket open. It has a lot of implications for our, I'll say, for her own mental health to look into that casket, to open it up to the world in that way. But the decision to open up the casket or to leave it open is not just Israel's. The decision to look into what Israel has exposed in leaving the casket open is going to have to be civilization's decision, right? All of those social justice movements that we just mentioned, if they choose to look away or to look and not believe or to look and

remain silent, which is what we saw at the UN women's groups and so on, or the children's groups, it was International Children's Day. Also, no mention of anything that happened, including the drugging of children and the burning of children, even not just burnt alive on that day, but children kept in captivity that were burnt a marker so that they wouldn't run away with an exhaust of a motorcycle, right? When you think of that casket being open, but civilization choosing to look away, then I think that that's the moment of reckoning for what you call the social justice movement and principles that have been appropriated and weaponized in the enablement

of this mutation of anti-Semitism or in its current strain of anti-Zionism. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I guess at this point, I want to ask you what we should do, specifically with respect to two venues here. You've spoken about college campuses. What should colleges have done, and what should they do now? What should donors to colleges or erstwhile donors to colleges do? And what should we do about social media? What should those running these platforms do, and what should we as users, what should governments do, and what should we as users, what should governments do and what should we as users ask to be done? How do you view, I mean, I think the role of social media here is just overwhelmingly important.

It's just, it seems to be the thing that is kind of a hallucination machine that is distorting everything. But just finish your remarks on the college problem, because obviously this was shocking to so many of us to see some of the most privileged and ostensibly best educated people in our society lining up to effectively support a terrorist organization that had just committed atrocities of a sort you didn't think you were going to see any time this century. And the mismatch between their moral pretensions and what, in fact, they're supporting couldn't be more glaring. I mean, literally, you have blue-haired people whose whole lives are organized around trans rights or gay rights or women's rights, supporting an organization, rights or gay rights or women's rights, supporting an organization, and even, I think we have to admit, a wider community among the Palestinians that would hurl them from rooftops if only they could be given the chance. And I should just say as a kind of a footnote to what I just said is

that I just think there's obviously not all Palestinians are fans of Hamas, but I think we would be lying to ourselves to think that none are, right? And there were those jeering mobs, you know, spitting on host case, an eliminationist anti-Semitism among Palestinians and among Muslims generally. political horror that is bigger than anti-Semitism, and it is the very thing that is putting so much of the Muslim world in collision with open societies everywhere. And that is, you know, that's a larger problem, which obviously I focused on. But what would you have university presidents do or have done on October 8th and 9th and 10th when they saw their student body erupt in some cases well-intentioned, but in many cases not, you know, grotesqueries of moral confusion. So actually, the first thing that some universities did very successfully is so simple that I can't believe I have to say it, but it's the unequivocal condemnation of the atrocities we saw in 10-7.

That's it. That's it, right? The understanding that if you call out Hamas, a genocidal terror organization that in its charter is committed to the annihilation of the state of Israel and the murder of Jews, and actually showed us what they mean by that

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

Which universities were actually good here? There were a couple of universities. There was a statement issued, I believe, Yeshiva University in Brandeis led a couple of university presidents that joined. I mean, it's devastating to me that I even have to mention it, right? Because all it is, is an immediate, unequivocal condemnation of the atrocities we saw on 10-7. Immediate. And that headed off a lot of the responses that were enabled by these sort of either silence, right? statements in the past about what happened in Ukraine or what happens anywhere else in the world and failed to do so on this day that the world hasn't experienced something so grave on, then they sent a message. The first thing would have been just to issue a clear, unequivocal condemnation that should not be difficult when we saw the magnitude of these barbaric atrocities. That's the first. The second,

and this is sort of not in a reactive whack-a-mole, what are we going to do about this demonstration or that demonstration? Because from the river to the sea, we have to react to, as we said, is a call to annihilation, is a call to genocide, actually, especially when it's coupled with glory to our martyrs who perpetrated these atrocities on 10-7. And that is something that universities are going to have to address. But in a proactive kind of way, and I mentioned it so many times, but I have to mention it again, it's actually to adopt and implement the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition, the result of a 15-year democratic process that's been adopted by more than 40

countries, more than a thousand entities. It's not enough to just adopt it, obviously it has to be implemented. But this is not something that we have to sort of reflect on and worry about. It is a working definition. It's not even legally binding. It's a working definition that in educational spaces, where more than in an educational space do you want to say, this is how you're going to know to identify and combat? By the way, this is true on social media platforms. It was my engagement when I was a legislator precisely for this reason with social media platforms to adopt and implement IRA algorithmically, because how are you going to know that you were engaged in Holocaust denial when you don't even know what the Holocaust was? And how are you going to know that you're engaged in this

strain of anti-Semitism that denies Israel's very right to exist from the river to the sea, glory to our martyrs, if you don't have a definition? It's not because I'm a lawyer. It's just because in order to be able to identify and combat anything, you first need to define it comprehensively, all versions of it. So university spaces and beyond, workplaces, social media platforms have a definition that enables them media spaces censoring or removing. I actually want them to refer out to the IRA, to the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, that says when you're engaged on Holocaust porn on TikTok, there is such a thing, point of view videos. It says, did you know that you are now engaged in what is a violation of the IRA working definition of anti-Semitism in Holocaust denial? And did you

know what the Holocaust was? Because most of the people on that platform have no idea neither what Holocaust denial is nor what the Holocaust was. So in that sense, there is a key moment to utilize, to adopt, and to implement this resource that was created precisely for this moment in time and hasn't been done rigorously enough. And finally, I'll say in a very clear way, the reclaiming of principles and of words to what they actually mean. I mentioned the word indigenous. We mentioned the Holocaust. We mentioned apartheid. We mentioned racism. We mentioned Zionism, right? Positively and negatively. What is Zionism? It's integral to the identity of the majority of Jews. It's how the majority of Jews self-define. It is integral to the identity, meaning I can't just shed that

Zionist pound of flesh to be a good Jew. That means maybe there are Jews that can, but I can't. And I deserve the very same equal understanding as all other self-defining identities. So that would be the third piece, and that is to reclaim what words, what concepts, what historical facts that have been appropriated, weaponized, distorted, and actually in that way, not only to reclaim them, but enable what I would call reclaiming intersectionality. not only to reclaim them, but enable what I would call reclaiming intersectionality. You know, 10-7 enables a very important moment, I think, and it is to transcend real and perceived differences of politics, of religion, of denomination, of geography that we're holding onto for dear life. And to understand that what 10-7 did is draw a line in the quicksand. We have

to identify it between extremism, and it doesn't matter where the extremism comes from, right, left, center, Islam, extremism, and civilization as we happen to like it. The understanding that there are more of us that actually happen to appreciate our civilization, that cannot imagine ripping down a poster of a 10-month-old baby being held hostage because what we see is a 10-month-old baby. But there are individuals that are tearing that poster down because that baby has been demonized and delegitimized and applied double standards to anti-Semitism. And there are people in the streets saying to them, what are you doing? What do you think you're doing? And it doesn't matter if they're Jewish or if they've gone to university or if they're, you know, I don't know what they are. If they're

just walking by and if they're strangers and saying, why are you ripping down a poster of a 10-month-old baby that is being held hostage by a genocidal terror organization. I think that this is an aha moment that actually requires that we transcend real and perceived differences and reach across them to make clear that we are intent on protecting civilization as we know it and as we happen to like it from this extremism that is either percolating just below the surface or already festering and infecting our societies. And the 10-7 did that too. So in whatever space, whether it's the university campus or the social media space or workplaces or high schools or community centers, in whatever space, I think that 10-7 leaves us with a great deal of work, but that there are tools and resources that we should be

using. And I've named some of them, but I think that this is a critical moment for us to realize that what binds us together as civilizations, certainly in democracies that cherish life and liberty, is far greater than what sets us apart. And that means that what we're battling together is extremism. It's not, you know, the real or perceived And that means that what we're battling together is extremism. It's not, you know, the real or perceived differences of yesterday, Jew and non-Jew, right and left. It's not that. It's extremism that's threatening the foundations of democracies and 10-7 and the responses to it made it abundantly clear. Well, Mikhail, thank you for your moral and conceptual clarity and for all of your work in this area. I look forward to a time when you'll be out of a job, but somehow I think that's not

coming soon. So please take care of yourself and keep going because you really are a necessary voice at this moment. Thank you. I appreciate it. And I look forward to a continued conversation as I think that really what's most important is that we make this accessible to broad publics that recognize the responsibility of our times and that never again is right now. you