Scott Horton Show - Just the Interviews - 12/14/23 Sheldon Richman on the Long History of Jewish Anti-Zionism

Episode Date: December 19, 2023

Sheldon Richman joins the show to debunk the ridiculous conflation of anti-zionism with anti-semitism. He and Scott review the long history of Jewish opposition to the Zionist project. That leads them to today’s fights over free speech in relation to the war in Gaza. Discussed on the show: Coming to Palestine by Sheldon Richman “The Role of Zionism in the Holocaust” (True Torah Jews) “Israel Says Gaza Onslaught Will Continue ‘With or Without’ World Support” (Antiwar.com) “Ahad Ha’Am’s Prophetic Warning about Political Zionism” (Libertarian Institute) Sheldon Richman is the executive editor of the Libertarian Institute and the author of Coming to Palestine and America’s Counter-Revolution: The Constitution Revisited. Follow him on Twitter @SheldonRichman. This episode of the Scott Horton Show is sponsored by: Moon Does Artisan Coffee; Roberts and Robers Brokerage Incorporated; Tom Woods’ Liberty Classroom; Libertas Bella; ExpandDesigns.com/Scott. Get Scott’s interviews before anyone else! Subscribe to the Substack. Shop Libertarian Institute merch or donate to the show through Patreon, PayPal or Bitcoin: 1DZBZNJrxUhQhEzgDh7k8JXHXRjY Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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and the brand new, enough already. Time to end the war on terrorism. And I've recorded more than 5,500 interviews since 2003. Almost all on foreign policy and all available for you at Scott Horton.4. You can sign up the podcast feed there, and the full interview archive is also available at YouTube.com slash Scott Horton's show. All right, you guys, on the line for the first time, and way too long is the Institute's executive editor and co-founder Sheldon Richmond.

Welcome back to the show. Sheldon, how are you? Thanks. I'm under the circumstances doing all right, Scott. Well, good. Happy to talk to you again. And listen, folks, if you're not too familiar, Sheldon is the author of The Great Libertarian Primer, what social animals owed to each other, and probably more importantly for our discussion today. Coming to Palestine, a collection of his essays that we published at the Institute last year or the year before that or something, which is just fantastic and is a great, again, introduction to the subject of Israel Palestine from a libertarian perspective. Really good stuff.

So anyways, I want to talk with you, of course, about some of the things that you've been writing lately and some of the things we've been talking about amongst ourselves here. and I guess particularly the fraught issue of anti-Zionism and anti-Semitism and who's allowed to think or say what and in what circumstances in the United States of America here and you know as someone who for some ungodly unfortunate set of reasons I can't possibly begin to articulate lives on Twitter all day long I constantly here. What you're really saying is you're an anti-Semite,

you hate Jews, you want Jews killed, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's never a quote of anything I said, although sometimes there are quotation marks around things I never said, but you know what, I don't know. Obviously, a lot of it is just you know, has Barabots and trolls

and whatever, but then again, that kind of PR does work on people who then internalize it and repeat it and really do believe that if you're against the Jewish state of Israel doing anything, then it's because you hate Jews and want to see them all killed. And I was wondering what you thought about all of that, Sheldon. Well, there's so many things to say about that. That's really, it's a cliche, I know, to say.

It's hard to know where to start, but it's certainly true. I think it's interesting that we can begin by quoting a Democrat in the House of Representatives, who's not someone I'd ever quote on anything. Gerald Nadler. When the House, was it last week, was considering a resolution that, among other things, equated anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism. Gerald Nadler, who's a senior Democrat and Jewish and represents part of New York or Brooklyn, stood up to say, I can't, I can't vote for this because too many of my Orthodox Jewish constituents are anti-Zionists, and they're certainly not anti-Semites. Now, Nadler, by the way, didn't vote against the reason I don't know. He voted only present. He didn't vote against, but he didn't vote for it either. But that's the answer.

I mean, that begins to hint at the answer. There have been, you know, Jewish anti-Zionism is old as Zionism. There's a good way to sum it up. moment there was a Zionist, Herzl or whoever you want to attribute it to, certainly the moment there was a Jewish anti-Zionist. By the way, there were Christianist Zionists even before Herzl in the middle of the 19th century. They didn't call themselves Zionists, but they thought some of them, anti-Semites, some of them just evangelicals, thought, we got to get all the Jews to Palestine or else the end of days will never come. But so talk about Jewish Zionism now, which begins in the 1890s, let's say. The moment Hertzel

started talking about this and writing about this, and then he wrote a pamphlet in the late 1890s. There were Jews, Jewish Europeans, people around him in Eastern Europe, further Eastern, he was in Vienna, further east than he was, were objecting to this, saying this is counterfeit Judaism. Judaism is not a nation. It's not a one people. It's not political movement. And it will change the religion to turn it into something. That is that, and that longs for a state, you know, an actual physical country somewhere. Herzl was willing to entertain other locations, although he got quickly talked out of that. He was willing to have it in Argentina, Uganda, oh, a few other places, someplace off of Africa.

What was it, Madagascar, I think? Yeah. And but other said, no, it's got to be, it's got to be in Palestine. It's got to be Palestine because of our biblical roots there. But the point is there were Jewish anti-Zionists from the moment there were Jewish Zionists. I mean, almost simultaneously because you had the Orthodox who said, you know, Herzl's not the Messiah. We can't go back until the Messiah, you know, God tells us this time to go back. They thought their view, it's not factual, but their biblical view was we were expelled because there was God's

will because we were sinful. So now we have to wait until God through the Messiah tells us to come back. But there are also the reform who were further east, further west, like in Germany and America, who said, that's 2,000 years ago. This is a new world now. And we're not looking to restore reformers saying we're not looking to restore a nation in Palestine under the sons of Aaron, who are the priests, the high priests. This is a new world now. And they saw a Judaism as eventually a totally universal religion for all of mankind. And they thought this was a backslide. To go back to the biblical days where there were isolated tribes in Palestine was completely out of sync with what should be going on. They saw themselves more in the tradition of

the prophets. So for today to say that if you're anti-Zionist, you're anti-Semite, is to be ignorant of history, and chances are they're not ignorant. They're just lying. They want you not to know that. So people don't know that. Well, but Sheldon, wouldn't they say probably that, yeah, yeah, yeah, but that was all before the Second World War. And after the Second World War, it was agreed that anybody who cares about Jews support Zionism, period. Well, you know, there's a lot of historical work about what Zionist groups were doing during World War II and right afterwards. And it seems pretty clear from a lot of different sources that the Zionist organizations and individuals like Ben-Gurian and others were much more interested in a state in Palestine than in saving Jews.

I don't want to push that too hard. I don't have a lot of individual knowledge about that, but it's been written about for years. In fact, in the 80s, there was a commission set up in the United States, not a government commission, that was chaired by Arthur Goldberg, former Supreme court justice and also a cabinet member under Johnson. He was also, he was Johnson's UN ambassador during the 67 war. And he chaired this, and a draft of their initial report was leaked to the New York Times, which pointed out that the American Zionist organizations were not, were against any plan that would have saved Jews in place to places of the brought Jewish refugees in Europe to anywhere else but Palestine. They are only interested in Palestine. And if they weren't going to

Palestine, then we were against the plan. And the when the when I was leaked to the New York Times, it caused such a fuss that they just the the the committee disbanded and there was never a final report issue. And there's been lots of work on this. It's pretty disgraceful what the Zionist organizations would do. For them to invoke now the Holocaust is really a joke. Norman Ficklestein's been very good on this. For them to exploit the Holocaust, you know, to the benefit of Israel is really a very cruel, sad, no, I hate to even call it a joke. It's not a joke. Yeah. It's a terrible thing to be done. You know, Biden said the other day that if it wasn't for Israel, no Jewish person in the world would be safe.

That's a heck of a thing for the President of the United States to say. Yeah, it's completely terrible. America wouldn't be safe for Jews. If there were no Israel, never were in Israel, no Israel now, that's absurd. It's ridiculous. What the hell is he talking about? Well, I'm not sure the exact statistics, Sheldon, but I saw on Twitter, someone said, you know, the biggest population of Jews in the world is in the United States of America. this guy is the leader of the national government

that's sworn to protect the rights of everyone or at least the states are and he's sworn to implement the law under the U.S. Constitution. We all know the thing. But anyway, he's allegedly the head of our security force in this country and he's going, hey, look, I'm not promising that I can protect you.

You might all have to flee. What? What is he saying? That's the craziest thing in the world. Imagine saying that about any other population. in the country. And here he's saying it about Jewish people? This is the weirdest thing. Although it's just, you know, who knows what Biden's going to ramble at any given

time? That's an old cliche from a long time ago that counts as knowledge for a schmuck like him, you know? By the way, wait a minute, let me hold that thought one second, Sheldon, because I want to go back to that previous subject real quick. Because I had sent you this thing

that I had found at some questionable type site, and I had always wondered whether it was true. But then I went and found at the Torah Jews website. And this is the, again, I believe Hasidic, but certainly Orthodox, right? Hasidic is a subset of Orthodox, but right? So anyway, these are the anti-Zionists, but very religious Jews. Let me just say that, so I don't miscategorize anyone. They're religious Jews and they're anti-Zionists. And they had, and you know the names of all these guys. So let me just set you up here. But they had these articles by these rabbis who were making the accusations, like you were talking about

there. Like, why wouldn't FDR let the Jewish refugees into the country? And it was one, because the anti-Semites were against it and the Democratic Party in the South and that kind of thing. But it was two, because the Zionist Jews were against it and lobbied him to prevent Jewish immigration even, you know, like right in the run-up to the war, right, at the Evian Conference and all of these things. So this is just, and can you talk about who these guys are? Because these are not like some fringe characters. These are extremely important Jewish leaders from the 20th century that we're talking about here, right? I've read over the years that Rabbi Stephen Wise, who was the leading Jewish Zionists in the United States, opposed those kinds of programs to get them anywhere.

And you could see the point. And also, they were afraid that fundraising to save, to get refugees to America, Canada, or South Africa or South America or someplace else or England would run it, would conflict with the Zionist fundraising. Stephen Wise was against that. Tony Greenstein, I think he might have died now. I'm not sure if he's still alive. I apologize. He's got a book called,

oh, Zionism and the Nazis or something like that. They were against the Evian. You know, Evian was convened in France with a bunch of countries to see what they could do about taking refugees. Now, not a lot. That was opposed. That conference was opposed. I understand it by Wise and other big name Zionists. It didn't really go anywhere. The Dominican Republic apparently was willing to take 100,000 European Jews, and they were lobbied against. You can see the logic, right, of the lobbyists, of the Zionist lobbyists saying, wait a second, if there are other places to go, that's going to put Zionism on the back burner. That's going to going to make it seem not very urgent. And maybe people will forget about it if Jews can get out, get out to other places.

You know, at first, the Nazis are trying to get rid of the Jews, not to kill them. But Eichmann's help is, you know, getting some of them out. They're leaving the country. And it doesn't mean that they foresaw the Holocaust, right, but it was part of the consequence of their policy. Well, this was before the, you know, the final solution was. formulated. Right. And, you know, look, a totalitarian government, even when it's under like someone like, like Hitler, is not like superbly organized from day one, right? They don't

have a total plan of everything. They're still like feeling around what to do. And, and Eichmann, this is in, this is in Hannah Aaron's book on Eichmann. He was assigned to read Herschel's the Jewish state, the famous thing that kicked everything off, the pamphlet, the little book by Eichmann, by Herzl, and he went to Jerusalem. The idea was, too, how do we get the Jews out? And here's something else that doesn't go to the benefit of Herschel and his people. And this was true for decades, before the Nazis even came along. They would, in order to win support among European non-Jews for the Zionist movement, they would say, look, we agree with the anti-Semites. We don't belong here.

We are permanently foreigners, aliens, strangers, so help us get to our country. That, you know, I think that was really bad. I'm not saying there wouldn't have been Nazis if they didn't say stuff like that. I can't know that. But it didn't help to have the Zionist reinforcing the stupid anti-Semite, you know, view that the Jews were strangers and had to be strangers. There was no way to avoid this. They were going to always be, you know, interested in money.

He was feeding all the stereotypes of the anti-Semites. How could that be good? Yeah. And by the way, when I interjected there, I wasn't able to finish my statement before he kept going. So I might have made it sound like the refusal to allow the Jews in the country was what caused the Holocaust. But I just meant what caused those Jews to get caught up in it when they could have been safe here. It was all I was trying to say there. And it's just

It's unconscionable And again, they didn't know what was going to happen But still, they knew that something bad was going to happen They knew that they were You know, refusing these people Entry and knowing that they were turning them back To the tender mercies of the German Nazis And the Third Reich under Adolf Hitler

Who had anti-Semitism as a policy from day one You know This is pretty cynical, bad stuff And by the way, It's just what a shame that these guys pick right now to redo their website. So true Torah Jews now forwards to TorahJews.org, and it doesn't work anymore. And now they don't have the article anymore. But anyone can just go to, it's actually easy enough to find if you just go to the way back machine

and put in true Torahjews.org slash Lieberman, just like it's always spelled. And you'll see. It's called the role of Zionism in the hall. Holocaust. It's by Rabbi Godalaya Lieberman from Australia. And on YouTube, if you look to see some of the stuff up there by Yaakov Shapiro, who's a rabbi, and he's an Orthodox rabbi. He's not in the Turakarta, but he's a ultra-Orthodox. He, and he's extremely articulate and culturally. relevant. He has plenty of modern cultural references. He's not what you think of as the old

orthodox, which doesn't believe in studying the outside world and stuff like that. He's very worldly. But he has the view. He's got a book also called The Empty Wagon from, as he calls it, he calls it from identity crisis to identity theft. And he accuses Zionism of basically hijacking Judaism and that it's not Judaism and all the reasons why not. And I know reform today, Alan Brownfeld and others, the American Council for Judaism, who say that those guys back then were real profits, because what matters today, this is changing now, but what has mattered for a very long time now, is that what makes you a person a good Jew is to be loyal to Israel. That's like the main thing. You can be an atheist. You can eat pork, you know, three

days, for your three days meals, you know, three days, three times a day. And, and cheeseburgers all the time. But if you love Israel, and if Israel's essentially your second country, then you're a good Jew. And they warned about this. It used to be, they would say, you know, I'm not, I'm not religious, I'm an atheist. And out of respect for believing Jews, I don't call myself Jewish because I don't, I'm an atheist. I think that would be disrespectful to the religion for me to use the name, but while I don't believe in any of the essentials. But what used to be central to Judaism was obeying God's commandments and, you know, obeying the Torah, which was his, mostly his word, the law. But today, that's all been displaced, as the reform

warned about, and as the Orthodox warned of them. Today, what matters is Israel's idolatry, and that's often what they say. It's a form of idolatry. They've put, they've put a nation, a nation state in where God used to be, according to both the reform and the Orthodox. And it seems to me they're right. Now, that doesn't tell you what to do today, what it would be done today, because there's a lot of genies out of the bottle that we can't just put back in now. The violence and blood feuds and stuff, and I don't have a, I don't have any advice to give. I mean, I don't know what people should do now. The Palestinians have had a terrible time for many years, and the Israelis are afraid.

The Jewish Israelis are afraid that they're all, you know, when I'm living safely in the United States, luckily. So I'm reluctant to give anybody advice from where I said. Hey, guys, I've had a lot of great webmasters over the years, but the team at Expanddesigns.com have by far been the most competent and reliable. Harley Abbott and his team have made great sites for the show and the Institute, and they keep them running well, suggesting and making improvements all along. Make a deal with Expanddesigns.com for your new business or news site. They will take care of you.

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Support the show and support your brain at Moondoseartisan coffee.com. Just click the link in the best. the right margin at scott horton dot org well you know here in the united states now there's such a propaganda campaign about well it's just a obvious siop bait and switch distraction tactic don't look at the war look at the people protesting against the war here and the tone police are on defcon one alert status for anyone who uses the j word in the wrong context or you know students flying Palestinian flags and you know even with all of the the protest chance I mean this whole thing it's amazing that anyone is allowed to get away with this even the Israel lobby at all to say when somebody says this what they really mean is that and that's what we're against is the that even though we're lying and we just made that up and this is the dumbest damn thing anybody ever heard of if anyone ever says Palestinians deserve to be free Well, what they're really saying is secret code words for kill every Jew in the world and throw them in the ocean and then they actually get to implement policies based on that absolute absurdity in broad daylight in front of everyone.

And I guess what happened though, Sheldon, and I don't watch TV, man, so I'm really out of the loop on a lot of this stuff. But what happened was these idiot university deans went up there. and when asked about this, instead of saying, look, man, nobody was saying genocide. They were protesting against a genocide, or at least this massive ethnic cleansing campaign that's going on in Gaza right now, and none of them were chanting about harming Jews. They were saying, stop the harm that the Israeli government is inflicting on the Palestinians, and that's why I'm not giving in to the fake premise of your stupid question. Instead, these are these complete, ridiculous, mediocre, liberal academics.

So when asked, well, geez, is it against the rules to demand genocide of Jews on your campus? They went, uh-huh. And I refuse to say yes, even though, of course, it's against the rules to incite violence like that and always was anyway and whatever. And so they just made total jackasses out of the whole argument, and they helped the overall Israel lobby. to change the subject from little kids being buried alive right now and their lives torn to shreds by American bombs dropped by Israeli forces to when college kids said something that I interpret as a secret code word, code whistle, dog whistle for hurting me when, and they did it.

In fact, we're even talking about it right now instead of the war. So, but go ahead. What is really going on with all this crap? Yeah. Yeah, I agree with what you just said. They had the three presidents of three Ivy League universities. They had Harvard. They had MIT and they had Penn. All women, by the way, one of them, a black woman. I thought that was interesting. Three presidents of three elite Ivy League schools. And then they were grilled. I mean, I don't, I agree with you. I watch on YouTube side. I only saw one kind of segment, a couple different lengths of it, but it was this representative, Elise Stefanik, who was also apparently trafficked in the Great Replacement Theory. So it's kind of odd that she'd be taking this side

when she seems to be buying this trope from the crazy right that Jews are trying to bring in immigrants to order to water down the mongrelize the white race. Now she's on this side. So, and I don't want to defend, you know, these three women, I'm sure I don't agree with on anything, anything else. But the very nature of the question was designed to put them in a position where what is happening would happen.

I think that was probably Stefanik's own objective. She asked them, is calling for genocide, And she asked it two different ways. Does it constitute harassment? And number two, does it violate, you know, your school's code of conduct? And, you know, these three presidents, first of all, as one of the president said, I think from Penn said, I have, no one's calling for genocide. But so she says, the Stefanik then says, he's representative, Stefanik says, well, wait a second, what about saying from the river to the sea or calling for intifada? So you're right. You've already identified this, Scott. She's assuming that those phrases mean in the mind of the person using the phrases, genocide. Now, it's funny, they don't apply that to Lakud, right? The Lakud platform, at least past platforms, have called for Jewish sovereignty from the river to the sea.

They're currently. Yeah, they've never changed that. Does that mean the genocide of all Palestinian people? Why not? If that's the method, then I can say that they're for genocide. They've endorsed genocide. And they seem to be the ones implementing it, so you've got an actual argument there. You know, who else says that? Gideon Levy says it, who's a Jewish columnist for Raharitz.

He doesn't mean any kind of genocide when he says freedom from the river to the sea. So, and the same with Intifada. Intifada, that word, we have come to know that word because it's an Arabic word for uprising. It was used against occupation

in the West Bank. Some Some of the people, especially in the second Intifada, aimed at innocent people, at civilians. I mean, if you were a bomb a civilian bus or a cafe, that's horrible. But initially it starts off as going after, you know, kids like throwing stones at soldiers. I mean, hardly like existential threat or anything like that. It was an uprising against an attempted uprising, at least against an occupation. So if you use that as a phrase, you know, Stephanic is yanking out of context to say that means genocide. No one was using that term to mean genocide.

You can condemn Hamas. You can condemn its horrible charter, which it's, you know, never formally taken back, even though in later years it said, okay, we'll take a separate state on the 67 borders. But it was very grudging. They said, not that we're going to recognize Israel. and, you know, in their initial charter, they called for death of Jews. But the thing is, if you treat people, here's what I like to say. Hardliners on one side encourage the hardliners on the other side. That always happens in any dispute, not just the Palestinian-Israeli dispute.

They're almost tacit allies. It's as if they get together in a room saying, look, you take the hardest line possible, and then we can take the hardest line possible in response to you. and then you can take any response to us and so on. You know, it's, I think that's a very old story. I'm not saying they sit in a room, but it's as if, it's as if they do that. The other thing is if you treat people like animals, and as my son reminded me, we treat animals better than this,

but just go with the cliche here, some people are going to act like animals. So what Hamas did, and I know they're still counting, the people are still counting the casualties, I don't want to get into that, but certainly Hamas did horrible things, on the 7th of October. But as we all know, history did not begin on the 7th of October.

Now, I told this to someone who I've known literally all my life, who told me that makes me an apology for terrorism. The fact that I say history didn't begin on the 7th makes me an apology for terrorism. I don't know what to say in response to that. The funny thing is that's a double standard because if I were to say, Israel, you know, I think history began on October 8th. What would an pro-Israeli person say to me?

No, it didn't. Well, why can't we say that about what Palestinians do, even if they're terrible things that they've done to be condemned? We can still say, as the UN Secretary General said, and I don't agree with him on much, but I agree to them with them this. It didn't happen in a vacuum. That wasn't to forgive what happened, because initially he said there's no justification for the civilian deaths and kidnapping on the seventh by Hamas.

But it didn't happen in a vacuum. Both those statements can be true. There are some people committed to the view that those two statements can't be true. And if you say the second one, you are effectively wiping out the first one. And I disagree with that. But like I said, I've been called by a loved one, an apology for terrorism for saying. yeah well i mean the fact that matter is just because you are shelton freaking richmond and you are special and know so much and care so much about this doesn't mean that regular people are

you know run-of-the-mill um you know less interested folk know enough to be in a real argument with you about it like that's all they're going to have is a cliche about well if you're not on this side then you're on the other side because isn't that how it always works and you can't really blame somebody for that if they're just a normal you know what I mean? Like if this person is some kind of

Democrat then by all means fight them but you know I think what we need and I was hearing an interview with the head of fire which is a very good organization right the foundation for individual rights and expression yeah which has consistently stood for free speech

on campuses and beyond that's why The E is now for expression, not in education. Right. And that goes for sticking up for right-wing kids that are being oppressed and silenced and also sticking up for left-wing kids being oppressed and signs, too. That same organization is good on both and has been consistent. And what Greg Lugianoff, who's the head of it, the fire said, is if the key to respecting free speech on campuses, and I know this now gets away from the actual conflict, we're now

back talking about this, but seems. like a distraction, talking about free speech on campuses, is at least have the ability to put yourself in the other person's position. And I don't think the defenders of Israel, you know, just the knee-jerk defenders, ever do that. You know, look, I was brought up with a standard American conservative Jewish education about Israel. I went to Hebrew school, and that was little more than inculcating a love of Israel. I think an Israeli flag was in the classroom along with the American flag. There wasn't any other nation's flag there, just Israel and the United States. So I at some point decided to take another look at it. A lot of people never do that.

And I'm not giving myself some great credit here, something that is perfectly within the capabilities of everybody. But you need to try to put yourself in the other person's position. Now, I do this regarding the Zionists. I totally understand that if you're Jewish and living in Europe, especially toward the east. But, you know, everything's great in the West. But Europe was very lumpy, even in the 19th century and earlier. Some places were very bad. Some places were not as bad. Some places were good for a while. I mean, it's a very granular thing. You can't just say, oh, it's only any Semitic as if it's a, you know, like a bowl of gruel in front of you that's just a single consistency and single quality. It differs from place to

place. But there's obviously issues. We're talking about before the Nazis, so we don't have the Nazis to point to. Terrible things, the pogroms in the late 19th century and Ukraine and, you know, things part of the Russian Empire and Poland. There's a problem because you might want to say, you know, we need to do something. This is terrible. Is it going to change or not? So Zionism to give, you know, the best of the people, the benefit of the doubt, was an attempt in an answer, okay, we need to do something. So I think we can put ourselves in that position and say, yeah, what would you do? What would you think? It was a horrible situation. I don't know what the answer, if I lived back then, I don't know what the answer, what I would

have said, what I thought was the right answer. You know, it's easy to say, well, come to the United States today. But of course, in 1924, Calvin Coolidge signed an immigration restriction Act, which really cut back and created very low quotas on immigration from not on Eastern Europe, but also Southern Europe. So it was aimed also at Italians and Greeks. It wasn't just anti-Jewish, but one of the effects was to really have very low quotas on Eastern Europeans. And those were the quotas that Roosevelt appealed to in the 30s when he said, we got quotas. What can I do about it?

We got quotas. Then I turned that ship away and all that stuff to St. Louis. So I think it's very important if we care about speech. We can be civil by at least, you know, at a quiet moment, put yourself in the other person's, you know, shoes, and at least try to see it as he sees it. It doesn't mean then surrender your view and take that view up, but at least think about it that way.

And I think people need to do that. I thought that hearing in Congress was totally ridiculous. I mean, look, you need to give a nuanced answer when the questions about speech because we have a First Amendment. And just saying something is not regarded as even, you know, in the Supreme Court 1969 Brandeburg case, that was a KKK leader who advocated violence against politicians if they continue to, you know, downgraded. the white race in that guy's view. The Supreme Court said that doesn't constitute incitement, so it's a protected speech. So even if we're only going to rely on Supreme Court jurisprudence,

it's not enough to say, even if you said, put out a pamphlet saying, I think all the Jews should be killed, and no one has done that. And it would be horrible, of course. But it doesn't mean you should go to prison for that. Now, if you're pointing at someone and then say to a mob, let's go kill that guy,

for whatever reason, whatever, he's a member of some group you don't like. Yeah, that's, you know, that sounds actionable. It's not their speech. Well, I'm not on a university campus, Sheldon, I'm pretty sure if you just put out flyers saying Jews should be killed, you get kicked out of school for that. But again, that's not an issue here. And I don't know what the rules are on the different campuses. And I don't know, but nobody did anything like that here is such a red herring.

That's right. That's right. the biggest thing seems to be from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free. And you can disagree with that. You can think, well, that's not how it would come out. The Palestinians would kill the Jewish Israelis. You may predict that and say, that can't be the solution. Okay, argue that point. But it's not a call for genocide to say there ought to be one free.

They say democratic. You and I are not crazy about democracy because we're for individual rights. but one free Democratic country where every adult can vote in that region from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. And there are plenty of Jewish people that take that position. So it can't be a call for genocide. And that's what the Farnik tried to claim. And she should have been laughed. She should be a laughing stock, but she's not.

Well, what about the turn of the right into? ridiculous, quivering little genderless snowflakes at the mention of Israel. All of the free speech, not all, many of the free speech crusaders of the past, you know, PC times here with all the woke stuff. Now couldn't be more woke. Yeah, you're right. It's the mirror image of the, you know, those presidents, those university presidents. Because in the university presidents and others, many others like them, other college administrators,

we've seen this time after time, just like you're talking about, when it comes to speeches on, you know, regarding racism, affirmative action, yeah, the gender nonsense. They're against free speech when the people they would like, the woke side gets their feelings hurt, therefore they can claim they're endangered. And this other side, now that you're talking about the so-called right, which is kind of an empty word, but let's call for the sake of a conversation, the right is against free speech when anti-woke people, the anti-woke side in their eyes doesn't like the speech and gets their feelings hurt and then claims they're endangered. It's just the mirror image. So both sides are hypocrites, but it's the, you know, they're the reverse. in their hypocrisy. So there are very few people that are being completely consistent about this.

And that's a shame because you feel kind of lonely if you really try to be nuanced and consistent. You find yourself, you know, there aren't many taking that position. Most people have, you know, they know what their tribe is. They put on the right t-shirt.

They put on the right ball cap and they know they have the talking points and that's all they need now. What's my team doing? Okay. And now I know what to do and then the other side does the same. thing it's just it's you know it's not as horrible as what's going on in the in the in the in

in Palestine and Israel so I'll give it that but it's pretty it's pretty horrible because look at the rancor I mean there's people screaming at each other it's just it's very depressing that's not the way you get a prosperous society yeah and look as far as all the woke stuff goes as despicable as all kind of censorship and intimidation of people from being able to just say what they want is. This is all on behalf of a foreign nation in the middle of a massive war crime, ethnic cleansing campaign. They slaughtered at an extremely conservative estimate at this point would be 15,000 civilians

plus maybe a few thousand Hamas fighters, but no leaders over two months here. And that's the context of what's really happening. The numbers are growing to, like unbelievable proportions. I think we're nearing 20,000. But now you're supposed to have to sacrifice your freedom of speech as an American citizen so that agents of a foreign power can have their public relations dominance over our country so that we can continue to be forced by our government to pay for this. And of course, not just in dollars, but in the, you know, unavoidable. terrorist blowback that

we're absolutely certain to suffer from this. Well, in the words of Biden, until the White House walked it back, Israel's involved in indiscriminate bombing of Gaza. Biden said that yesterday. Yeah. And in the same statement, he said,

and we're still sending them bombs, and we're protecting them. We're helping them protect themselves. What? You just said they're indiscriminately bombing people. How is that protecting themselves? You also condemn the people who said it's like W. Bush, right? You're supposed to just say, yeah, but the guy's an idiot. Nothing he says makes sense. So you're not supposed to try to make sense out of it. But I think you should try to make sense out of it and notice how it does not make sense. And these two positions are extremely incongruent. What the hell? And there you contribute it to age. I'm not sure that's the reason. But how do you do? You can't do that with Blinken. Blinken talks out of both sides of his mouth. Israel has to be more careful about civilians. But. You know, does that show up in any other way?

No, he's totally with Netanyahu. So you're right. It's just a joke. The funny thing is they may think they're trying to please everybody for political reasons, but they're not pleasing anybody. I can't believe they're pleasing any side. So even by political calculation, I don't see how that's supposed to work. But that's a secondary question who cares about, you know, American politics.

What's happening is terrible over there. Yeah. All the devastation, the hospital's being destroyed. You know, it's heartbreaking. And I try not to think about it. I know you guys have to do it. You keep up with the numbers and you talk to, you know, the fellow over at annawar.com every few days to talk about the latest numbers. I can't focus on that.

It's just too depressing. I can't do anything about it. The numbers are growing. It's going to be 20,000 soon and 10,000 kids that's heading that direction. It's not anywhere near over. They told them to go south, and then they bomb in the south. What are you supposed to do? So it's just completely heartbreaking.

And, you know, one state, two states, I can't see the Israelis going for either one of those. Red state, blue state. Sounds like a doctor suit. Listen, man, that's as good a place to end it as any. with this just total dejected frustration I feel it too man the headline I'm reading right now as you say that

the picture story on anti-war dot com today is this massive explosion or two at the time maybe here surely dozens of people being killed at once or more and it says Israel says Gaza onslaught will continue quote with or without world support so now that's not really true the president of the United States could pick up the phone

in this war right now but he's the only one who could probably other than the prime minister over there and he's not calling that shot so here we are i'm going to say well to bring this back to the very beginning i'll be real quick my article tomorrow on uh libertarian institute dot com is a is an excerpt from the 1958 uh journal article which has a lot of quotations from Ahad Ha'am, whose name was Asher Ginsburg. He was a contemporary of Hurtzels. He was a what they call a cultural Zionist. He was not for a state.

He was for a cultural revival and, you know, maybe some presence in Palestine. But he, right from the start, condemned the political Zionist's treatment of the Arabs in Palestine. So look at that article tomorrow. You'll find lots of quotations from this guy. Ahat Ha'aham. that was his pen name. Asher Ginsburg was his real name, about how badly the Zionists were treating and talking about the Palestinians. He was using the word Arabs in Palestine. So this is not a new thing, Jewish criticism. This goes back, as I said, to the very beginning.

And there you'll see. You'll see it in that article. Thank you, guys. That's the great Sheldon Richmond. The book is coming to Palestine and check out his great article every Friday. The goal is, freedom at libertarian institute.org. Thanks, sir. Thank you. The Scott Horton show, Anti-War Radio, can be heard on KPFK, 90.7 FM in L.A. APSRadio.com, anti-war.com, scothorton.org, and Libertarian Institute.org.