The Comedy Cellar: Live from the Table - Is Anti Zionism Anti Semitism? with Adam Louis-Klein

Episode Date: December 19, 2025

Noam Dworman, Dan Naturman and Periel Aschenbrand are joined by Adam Louis-Klein. Louis-Klein is a PhD candidate in anthropology at McGill University and has a BA in philosophy from Yale. He is a journalist for The Free Press and writes on Jewish peoplehood, antisemitism, and anti-Zionism.

This is live from the table. Come on, Dan. Boy, the way Glenn Miller play. I'm not doing that. Songs that made the hit parade. That's very good, though. Keep going. Come on, Dan.

All right. I don't do it as good as you do, so there's no point. Go ahead. This is the, sorry. This is live from the table, the official podcast of the world-famous comedy seller, available wherever you get your podcast. This is Dan Natterman here with Noam Dorman. Who does a very good Edith Bunker impression? Who knew?

Apparently, I never did it before. And we got Periel Ashen brand with us, and we have Adam Lewis Klein, writer, anthropologist, musician. So is known, by the way. Currently completing a Ph.D. in anthropology at McGill University. That's the Harvard of Canada. I guess it's also the Yale and the Columbia and it covers a wide range. You don't have to do that, honestly. Okay. But it's a good school.

It's pretty good. I mean, there's a lot of, you know, insane anti-Zionism there at this point. Well, we'll talk about that because Adam Lewis. Down boy, down boy. Because Adam Lewis Klein, his main focus is Jewish peoplehood, sovereignty, and contemporary forms of anti-Jewish hate. So we are continuing our obsession. Obsession, yes, that's the right word.

Stephen, my mic is a little bit lower to me than the others. You know, are there? Oh, thank you very much. I started a fun topic again. Adam. Adam Lewis Klein, ALK, to his fans. All right.

So, yeah, so Periel, before we begin, Perryl feels it's very important that we talk about Rob Reiner. So what would you like to say? And maybe you want to talk about how much Trump's horrible, uh, truth, social.

It was just, it's not a tweet. It's a, it's a truth. It's a truth. I don't know what, but it just seems like an astonishingly poor decision. You know,

It's funny because everything astounds Periel, right? It doesn't astound me at all. I'm not that surprise. I just think it's garbage. Okay, I'll just say very quickly about it. First of all, anybody in my age, of course, all in the family was like the defining... Me too.

You keep telling me that I was too... I'm telling you, though, like I grew up on that show. Okay, but I watched it from in 1971 when it was like a juggernaut. It changed everything. It was all in the family games. I mean, no one had ever seen anything like this before. And, of course, the humor holds up, but you can't really make those jokes anymore.

And Meathead, you know who Meathead was? Of course. Rob Reiner. You're such a pain in my ass. You know, we didn't even realize at the time that he was Carl Reiner's son and all that. And he was a very good representative of kind of the Vietnam generation at that time, you know. So this was – and then he went on to make spinal tap in Harry Smith's – and misery and few good men.

What else did he do? He do splash? Was that him? No, I don't think so. Well, he had quite a body of work. But yeah, so he was a first-rate director. So I'll tell you what this brings to mind to me is that because, you know, I had a very larger-than-life father.

And, of course, Norman Pothoris just died. he was the editor of commentary magazine, John But Horace's father. We had John on the show one time, and I had asked him about this. His Norman Podhorst just died last night. Oh, I didn't know that. About what it's like to have a larger-than-life father. And this is a heavy burden sometimes for somebody, like a Nepo baby, as they like to call it now. So, and then this tragedy that Rob Reiner, who seemed to flourish in the shadow of his father

and maybe even maybe perhaps outdo him in some ways, although Carl Reiner is an icon. Then he was murdered by his own son. Now, you never know why somebody turns out badly, why somebody turns to drugs, although drug addicts, it's not like murdering your parents is a typical thing of being a drug addict, right? Also, it seems he's been sober for quite some time

from what I read. So, although it's really, not fair to say the mind the mind wanders to the dynamic of the the father and the son and so um this is all just the it's like the most tragic thing you can imagine is being murdered by your son right you just can't even imagine it so it so when trump so when trump made this you know snarky wise-ass kind of tongue-in-cheek almost remark about Rob Reiner dying, it wasn't just that he made this kind of remark

about somebody who died. Let's say he died of old age, which would have been already, it's just not nice to talk about somebody freshly has died. But the fact that he, that he, Trump seemed oblivious to the, to the poignancy

of being murdered by his son is what really disturbed me about it. And then I just say one other thing I tweeted it didn't get much traction that, I said, well, there seems to be an invisible but very significant tripwire between making fun of Paul Pelosi in his almost 90s of being hit over the head with a hammer and having this skull bashed in, which Trump did, and nobody really seemed to pause for it and then making fun of Rob Reiner. You know, to me, like making fun of Paul Pelosi, who was an old man bashed with a hammer, was not that much different, right? So that's how I feel about all that. Then we have to get on.

Go ahead. You want to say, No, I just wanted to say also that I think it's just the worst thing in the world as a parent, that, you know, you spend all of your life and heart and soul that you pour into a child and that, like, that's what happened. Well, it's a mind field. Parenthood's a minefield. And, of course, with a boy, the downside risk is all the greater.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, one expects maybe to get murdered by their wife. Well, that. every single day well I don't think it's that unusual not that it's not that it's not that unusual but it's not

unprecedented well okay but I think it's pretty fucking unusual like a movie gladiator but it's not or the Menendez brothers well yeah that that would be probably the most famous also it doesn't help that they were Jewish let's be honest not doing this any no that's fine because it's not part of anything that's not part of the Jewish stereotype

it's okay like if it's a Jew if a Jew is like you know a mobster. That doesn't embarrass me because it's when a Jew steals money in the stock market then I get embarrassed. Fair enough. Okay. Anyway, that's, I think, a good lead in to our guest, Adam Lewis Klein, who discusses

all things Jewish and recently wrote a wonderful piece for the free press about anti-Zionism, which is, I assume, why you've invited him to the show. Yeah, you've been coming up on my radar a lot lately, and I have a bunch of questions I want to ask you about, but before we get into that, what's like top on your mind right now as the number one issue that burning issue in your mind

about this entire world of Israel and Candice Owens and Tucker and, you know, Australia and all this stuff? Is there a unifying idea to it all? What's really burning in your brain? Yeah, basically, so we've entered the anti-Zionist age. Anti-Zionists or anti-Semitic? Anti-Zionist. We're in the anti-Symanist. We're in the anti-Zionist age. There was a time when people lived in the anti-Semitic age. What's the difference?

So the difference is that anti-Zionism is essentially an entire ideological complex that makes Israel the center of everything that is evil in the world, according to the values of today. What are the great moral values of today that everyone basically acknowledges everyone, right? Colonialism, racism, and genocide. After World War II, after the Holocaust, after civil rights, rights movement, apartheid, decolonization, in Africa, in Asia. Everyone accepts these moral values.

Now go and tell someone, there's a country on this earth that is fundamentally founded in settler colonialism, it's inherently racist, it's inherently genocidal. So many people are immediately going to be like, oh yeah, that country must be evil. Like, I'm just angry you telling me about this country, right? I actually didn't know anything about it, but you've told me it's founded by these white European settlers who required the dispossession and genocide of an indigenous non-white people, that sounds like an awful country. And I'm not anti-Semitic, right? I don't have anything against Jews, right? I have something against white European colonialism.

So let me pause there. So do you actually acknowledge that they might not be anti-Semitic? So they're not classically anti-Semitic. They're definitely not anti-Semitic in the same way that someone like Wilhelm Mar was anti-Semitic. I don't know who that is. So he was a guy... The guy they invented the word anti-Semitism. Yeah, he was a German guy in 1879. Exactly.

He came up with the term anti-Semitism. He said, you know, we're actually done with hating Jews for their religion because they reject Christ, because the Talmud is a really weird book full of all of these stupid rules. We actually are more advanced. We're more scientific. We're more progressive.

The reason we hate Jews is because they are basically this foreign race that's fundamental. different from Germans, right? They are Semites, right? And we are Aryans. And they have a negative influence on our society. And this is science, right? So anyone who's into science, who believe science is respectable, should accept this. And how does that bear on this? So he invented anti-Semitism because he said it was different from religious anti-Judaism. When anti-Zionism came around, and we really started seeing it in the West after 1967, after the Six-Day War, and Israel defeated the Arab League, these Arab armies

converged on Israel. They wanted to conquer and colonize Israel, really. Israel won, and there was a mass propaganda campaign from the Soviet Union, which basically blasted all of this Soviet anti-Zionist stuff about... I was just because, you know, I hear my listener sometimes I'm here. You say

the Arab, it's really not, doesn't matter, but just to clarify it, you say the Arab countries wanted to defeat and colonize Israel, which you know, is a very tendentious way to put it, right? They just wanted to drive Israel, the Jews, out of Israel, but it had been Arab in their minds. Like, they weren't whatever.

I mean, so they claim... It's kind of a religious... Well, they claimed ownership of it. I mean, you know, starting with Muhammad in the 7th century, the Arabs radically expanded out throughout the entire world almost, conquered a ton of stuff, and after they conquered it, they enshrined it in Islamic law.

And they said, this is Dar al-Islam, meaning this is basically... I don't mean to side charge. I mean, they would say, We want the status quo ante. We're already living there. We're not colonizing. But go ahead, go ahead.

Continue from that point on. Yeah, I mean, they colonized it in the past, and they did have a strong presence of people who'd lived there for a long time. They had people who immigrated there as well. So the Soviets basically started blasting this stuff, but they were saying Zionism is racism. Zionism is fascism.

Zionism is Nazism is Nazism. And then there were sort of leftist students and groups in the West who were connected to the Soviet Union, who started repeating this. And this was kind of the first time Jews in the West were hearing this. We're hearing this weird new ideology. These people are obsessed with Israel.

They really hate Israel. They think Israel's the embodiment of everything they don't like in their ideology. It's colonialism, racism, and genocide, right? But these people are convinced they're not anti-Semitic. And in some ways, they aren't in the classical sense. They're not really Nazis. They're not necessarily a right wing. Many of them are on the left.

And so Jews had to ask themselves, you know, what is this? and they kind of struggled at first. Jews have struggled to name and understand this phenomenon because the memory of the Holocaust of anti-Semitism is so paradigmatic for many Jews, for Jewish identity and Jewish experience, and it's been hard to grapple with this new phenomenon. Well, the way to test for whether it's anti-Semitic,

it's just a thought experiment, would be, would these people who spent so much attention to anti-colonialism if the people in Israel were not Jewish, if it were Italians who returned to their, you know, historic homelanding, all the same thing except there wasn't Jews, would these same people who were so offended by colonialism see it in the same way as a colonialist country, and would they be just as motivated and animated by this story to oppose it?

Yeah, I mean, probably not. I mean, like we were just saying... Probably not. Probably not. You think being Jewish is... Yeah. It fuels it. So it's evolved out of earlier forms of Jew hatred. And it is Jew hatred in that sense.

But is it anti-Semitism in the classical sense? Is it anti-Semitism in the colloquial sense where we say like, anti-Semitism is where you hate all Jews, right? Because you hate Jews because they're Jews for no other reason. And if you hate Jews because they're Jews, you hate all Jews. Well, you have this problem that there are these anti-Zionist Jews. Some of the biggest, you know, most prominent voices that you had Omar Bartow on here, He's an Israeli and the Holocaust scholar, and he's coming on.

We don't use his name anymore, but go ahead. That's a good call. He's dead to us. Yeah, yeah. May Hashem erase his name. May his memory be a blessing. Go ahead. So he comes on and he gives incredible, like, authority, right, to the genocide libel.

He's going on the New York Times. And he has very bad arguments. You know, I listen to you, and he was like, you know, I got to get out of here. He got destroyed, in my opinion. And he, with the only podcast he didn't retweet. Is he anti-Zionist in general, Omer Bartab, or is just... No. So he's actually a really interesting case because he really resisted this whole trend of anti-Zionist

genocide studies for a very long time. So in 2010, he had a debate with probably one of the most vicious anti-Zionist genocide scholars called Martin Shaw. I mean, he basically, Martin Shaw spends his time basically just kind of harassing Jews under the guise of scholarship. I mean, he's been out there on X recently after the Bondi Beach massacre saying, somehow it's Israel's fault and somehow Jews are so-called weaponizing this. So he had a debate with Martin Shaw in 2010 and he was actually pushing back against what the anti-Zionist genocide scholarship

was doing at the time. He was saying, you know, it's a little bit ridiculous to compare the ethnic cleansing, which did happen, depending on how you define that term, in the War of Independence in 1948, of Palestinians, to the Holocaust because that was basically what Zionist genocide studies was trying to do at the time. They were trying to relativize the Holocaust, right, and say, you know, we shouldn't give so much attention to the Holocaust. There are all these genocides and stuff. And this is actually kind of a plot of Jews to center themselves and make themselves kind of privileged. So we always need to talk about the Holocaust. You know, there's actually these other genocides. But of course, there's a second step.

You know, the first, as you say, the Holocaust isn't that important. The second is you go, oh, well, Israel is like the real perpetrator. So Martin Shaw was already basically trying to construct Israel as sort of inherently genocidal since October 7th. And Omer Bartov was... But since 2010, even. Sorry, since 1948, I actually meant to say, but yeah. But Omer Bartov was pushing back against that. He's like, that's ridiculous.

You know, the Arab armies converged on Israel at that time, and we shouldn't think that, basically. But he really shifted after October 7th. And this is peer pressure, right? This is, I believe, what goes on. There's so much prestige to be gained from being... an anti-Zionist Jew and Israeli, no less even more, right? You could, yeah, yeah, exactly.

I don't want to get totally sidetracked, but I mean, I know this issue bothers you probably as much as it bothers me. Now, when this genocide issue first came up on the radar, I lost a good friend over this because he's an important journalist, and I was like, you need to write something about this genocide charge. He's prominent as we're just bubbling up, and he says, oh, it's not really going to to catch on. I said, oh, no, it's going to catch on. I said, and I kept saying, it's fine if you believe it. It's Jewish. I said, but if you don't believe it, you know, write something

about it. And he let slip to me, I'm not going to upset my readers. And then he, and I really never, although I'd like to fix the friendship, I hate losing friends, and I almost never do. I never, I never forgave him for that. I couldn't, it bothered me so deeply that it kept coming up and coming up and finally I I think I became intolerable to him because I just kept pushing him on it. But sure enough it did overtake us

and these two scholars Omar Bartov and what's the other guy's name? He was on Yesra Klein's show. There's Philip Sands. Philip Sands a little

bit more moderate and a little bit more bleak. Well, I was thinking of Shlomo Sands. There's another guy. Shlomo San is a different kind of token anti-Zionist. Hold on, hold on. There's no relation between. Not that I'm aware.

Okay, go on. Sorry, go on. They both found themselves having to answer the $64,000 question, one to me and one to Ezra Klein, which was, okay. But in other, you know, Hamas has hostages and is, you know, refusing to surrender. and Israel says, you know, if Hamas will just release the hostages and relinquish power, that will be the end of everything.

And no other genocide, which is supposed to be an intention to destroy a people. Well, if your intention to destroy a people, then your demands about hostages and who's in power are irrelevant. And no other victim of genocide has ever had that option. So what do you say to people who say, well, it's not genocide. All Hamas has to do is release the hostages. and both of them resorted to, well, we can't deal in that hypothetical. We don't know whether Israel would really,

Israel might very well continue killing the Palestinians, even if the hostages are released. And this so fucking sickened me because they can't believe that themselves. That was when I had to say, no, no, no, whatever you are, you're no longer a scholar because you know in your heart, that's just not true. You cannot imagine that if Hamas said, here's the white flag, and here are your hostages, is we'll say, we don't care about that.

Let them rip. Yeah, I mean, so you're arguing with people who don't actually believe that their claims are falsifiable. So they don't actually believe there's any counter evidence, right? So like I was saying, someone like Martin Shaw, they've constructed a theory where Israel's inherently genocidal since 1948. So the existence of Israel is just a protracted genocide against Palestinians. So it doesn't matter what Israel does.

It doesn't matter counterfactuals. So Francesca Albanese, who is this UN special rapporteur for the occupied... She's kind of attractive, I have to say. Oh, God. I'm sorry. In a certain evil way. So is G.D. Hadid or Bella Hadid, whichever one is the... Yeah, so, I mean, she calls it humanitarian camouflage.

So that's how she bases her theory of genocide. Yeah, but it sounds worse without the accent. You know, it's charming. Go ahead, go ahead. Enough of that. So whenever Israel does anything that's not genocidal, it's humanitarian camouflage for genocide. It's just outrageous.

Like, it really is. Can I ask a question? He wasn't finished with his point. Okay, go ahead. I'm sorry. Go ahead. I mean, I was basically finished on the floor to you. Go ahead, go ahead.

How does everybody get around acknowledging all of the Jews in Israel that were expelled from Iran, Iraq, Yemen, Morocco. How is it this white colonialized country when factually, I don't know what, would it 50% of the country is comprised of Middle Eastern Arab Jews that were expelled from their countries? And nobody seems to even have to acknowledge that fact. Yeah, I mean, it's completely erased.

from the narrative. And if someone is going to acknowledge it, they will just say, oh, you know, they were kicked out because of Zionism, because of Israel. And that's kind of the anti-Zionist rhetorical strategy always. When something bad happens to Jews, it's just because of Israel and Zionism, even if they reject it, right? So someone could say, in response to Bondi Beach massacre, right, like, I don't approve of that. That was anti-Semitic, right? But the reason it happened was because people were upset about Israel's genocide and took out their anger on innocent Jews. So I don't condone it. It's anti-Semitic, but I'm finding a way to constantly blame Israel. But that explanation does have merit. Were it not for the war in Gaza,

Bondi Beach likely not would have happened. Right, but that also assumes that the libeles about Israel are true. It assumes that Israel is doing a genocide. It assumes that Israel is a white colonial state. Right? So that's why anti-Zionism is really based on liables. Well, actually, oh, so let's, I have actually that video. Can you play the one that says, um, uh, Morgan made Jews unsafe? I'll, I'll, I'll play this few and then you can, okay, so, okay, here we are. So, so this is, uh, this just have, you saw this, right already? Uh, Adam, you saw this clip already? This is, appears Morgan asking a, uh, an offensive question about it. Go ahead, go ahead. The but is an important but, which is that,

many people feel that by killing over 70,000 people, including over 20,000 children reportedly, by blowing to pieces 75, 80% of Gaza itself, by waging a three-month blockade of much of the food and aid and so on in the early part of this year. But through these actions, many people feel that the lives of Jews around the world

have been made less safe by the actions of the Israeli government. So before I let you go, I simply wonder, if you, as a government, have considered that potential of the actions you've been taking. Okay, you can stop it there. So what do you think about that? What's your reaction? Have this the first time you saw that clip? The first time I saw it, but I saw people talking about it.

I mean, Piers Morgan since October 7 does nothing except really spread anti-Zionist libels and has people on a show who scream anti-Zionist libels at Jews. I mean, he goes 70,000, 50,000. people. He's not even distinguishing between civilians and combatants. He's looking at the destructive effects of a war, and we all know that a war is destructive. He's not doing any kind of moral analysis of who's responsible, of what are the military tactics involved, right? And we don't even have to say that everything Israel did was right. I mean, it's irrelevant, right? That's kind of what a libel is. It's malicious, right? He's spreading these defamatory claims about Israel, and that is

what harms Jews and Israelis. I might not agree with you on this, but I'm going to give you another pass at it because I want you to think about it, not in terms of who he is, because I know that it's difficult. And also not in terms of the fact that I think we all read through the way he asked the question

that he believes that he's kind of blaming Israel for this. But the question itself, I mean, this was something that we spoke about to Brett Stevens on like October. 11th or 12th, which was that Israel was going to take very strong action. The whole world was going to see it, and this was going to rain down upon the Jews. And I remember saying, I think it was surprised. It was like, listen, you know, it's so worrisome to me what the consequences are going to be. I said it's a war on, it's going to be a war on the Jewish people,

I said, that if Israel decided not to do anything, I wouldn't question it, meaning like, in my mind, this really was something to consider in the balance. And I believe, I don't find the question to be offensive. So what is the, maybe you do find the question to be offensive. I have an answer that I think I would have given, but what do you think the right answer is? As Dan said, it was hard to imagine that these people wouldn't have been shot. and has been anti-Semitic incidents all over the world,

if not for the war. So what's the answer? I mean, let me put it this way. What Pierce Morgan just did there involves an extreme hypocrisy that he hasn't noticed. So when he says, this is so bad, there are innocent civilians that are dying in Gaza.

What is wrong with innocent civilians dying in Gaza, right? In their language, it's a form of collective punishment. There are people who are innocent. They're people who were not involved in Hamas's attack. Hamas did that attack, and these people are suffering. And he is pretending to be outraged about that. Well, that's actually the same logic he just engaged in. So Israel did something that he claims is wrong,

and his analysis is probably not even correct. And then he says that there are people who did not do what Israel is doing, who are suffering. And he rejects our argument that the reason the innocent civilians are dying is because of Hamas' attack and that Israel had to respond, at least in some way. He rejects that argument?

No, I don't think he does. I don't think he rejects that Israel had to respond. I think he takes more middle ground or somewhat distant from that, which is that Israel had to respond, but this is excessive. I think that's true to what his fears Morgan's position is. I'm not defending it.

They were starting with this bullshit before Israel launched one rocket in the guy's eyes. So if you were the Israeli government spokesman, what would you answer to that question? Well, I think that the first answer that Adam gave is actually really accurate. Like, I think that's actually a really fair and balanced assessment of what Morgan just did. The way that he asked the question presupposed all of these things that on its face were not genuine, not true, and really leading. Dan, you have an answer to the question? I would say that is Israel making Jews unsafe?

Maybe, but that's the fault of anti-Zionists. That's the fault of, you know, the culpability is not on Israel. It's on the people that are performing these atrocities. Yeah, I mean, I tweeted what my answer would have been, but I'm close. I said my answer would be, yes, it might be. Well, I think Morgan asked us, did you consider this? I think that's how he asked the question. I said, yes, we considered it.

But leaving Hamas, Hezbollah, and Iran in power to declare victory, having realized how close they were to total victory and incentivized to do it again at first opportunity was not only not an option for us, but would have been far more, but would have been far more dangerous for the Jewish people all over the world. That's what I say, yeah, who are we kidding here? Of course, we understood that this might make things hot for Jews around the world, but the alternative of leaving these people in power to declare victory. And because, I don't know if it's clear from what I just said,

they were very close to winning. Like if Iran had released their rockets or even invaded, who knows, and Hezbollah had released their rockets. At the same time, Hamas was making their... invasion of Israel, who knows where that would have ended? And they all realize that now. They all realized, holy shit, we were very close here. We just didn't realize it at the time.

Israel cannot leave them standing to reconstitute and try to do this again, even if it means some crazy anti-Semite is going to pop off and shoot some Jews. That's the answer. But let's just go back to the basics, right? I mean, there's a global anti-Zionist war against the Jewish people, and that war is happening in Israel, in the attacks on Gaza, on the Gaza envelope, and in Bondi Beach. And that's a much more simple way to put it. And the Jewish people in Israel decided to defend against those attacks, whether rightly

or wrongly, in which way or whatever. But that's the basic context. The basic context is a global anti-Zionist war against Israel and the Jewish people everywhere. And that's what's happening. I just wish we would stop saying, how dare you? Like, he asked a question. It's, it's, maybe, maybe it's offensive. Maybe it's not how dare you.

It's just like, be honest. And like, it's a bullshit. The way that he's framing the question is bullshit. Like it, and I just want to say one more thing that I've said on this show many times before, which is that there are so many governments around the world that are doing such terrific things. I mean, start with Syria, Russia, China. No other groups of people are targeted for the actions of their government the way that Jews are all over the world. So if that's not anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism being the same exact thing, then I don't know what is.

Yeah, no, yes, I agree with you. So, um, wow, well, I agree with you. So, where are we going to go from here. Let's play another video that's in the news now. Get your response to. Play Tucker Aline with guitar. I can't speak for... My...

You know, before you play it, I don't quite know how to put it, but I just, I'm just very worried that we are just not approaching this problem that we have in the right way. I will say that, yes, where when we were younger, not that long ago, all the action was in two-state

solution world. And then somehow after October 7th, it reset to 1948. And this was kind of jarring as if people are reconsidering whether Israel has to, has a right, can continue to exist, although there is no mechanism in international law for, you know, rescinding a country. The country exists, just like there's no mechanism for rescinding America, although America's founding is quite similar to the founding that they imagine is the founding of Israel, you know, 100 years later or, you know, 80 years later, what do you, I'm sorry, 70, how many years, 77 years later, something like that, what are you going to do about it? And this, it's also, Oslo, I think, supersedes all this because the Palestinian people themselves have recognized Israel's right to exist.

So this anti-Zionist movement is going beyond even the legal framework that those very people have agreed to, right? so that to me is a very strong argument and say well yeah you think Zionism shouldn't exist well that ship has sailed like you can be anti-Israel you can think Israel should withdraw from the occupied territories but there is no legal framework for this so this is just you know it's moot you think Israel shouldn't exist I think America shouldn't exist now what are you going to do about that but actually the UN has considered this the Palestinians themselves have sat down and negotiated this. And the only issue in play here is where the border is going to be drawn when there is a two-state solution. There is nothing else to talk about. I think that's,

that answer is more powerful than trying to point out to somebody that they're anti-Semitic in some way. I just... Oh, I'm not trying to say that Pierce Morgan is anti-Semitic. No, I think he's an anti-Zionist. I think that's also bad. Right, but I opinion, so you're an anti-Zionist. Like, how do you, in other words, I would say, somebody says they're anti-Zionists, okay, well, are you anti-Israel or anti-Zionists? And what's the difference? And, you know, they don't really know, like, you'd see them like, ah, because they're not even expecting that question. But they're not the same thing. Anti-Israel would mean, I oppose Israel's policies. I think Israel should withdraw from the West Bank. I think Israel should, you know, whatever it is that they

don't like that Israel does. Anti-Zionism would seem to mean I think somebody ought to tear up Israel and it should revert to what? I mean, it's such a fuzzy thought. He would claim that he supports the existence of Israel, but I would still call him an anti-Zionist, because I think anti-Zionism is not even really a policy position. It's just this sort of behavioral logic of participating in this kind of hate mob that we've seen since October 7th where you're constantly circulating these libeles about Israel.

The foundational ones are the colonizer apartheid genocide livals, but they also have these kind of live libeles. So since October 7th, we've seen what they called a live-streamed genocide was actually a kind of live-streamed disinformation spectacle, where they sort of go from one libel to the next

that was coming out of Gaza, that was coming from Hamas Associated journalists. Israel just bombed an ambulance. Israel bombed this hospital. There are mass graves in Gaza, and they would just move from one to the next. So Israel's starving children, 14,000 babies are going to die. And you see this on Twitter, especially. They're a kind of synchronized mob, like almost like a herd or a flock of birds, like one flies, and then they all kind of fly together. So they'll circulate an image. Here's Ben Gavir saying this inflammatory thing, and they all kind of flock around it, and they

obsess over it. But Israel has some responsibility for allowing Ben-Gabir to be speaking, to be, you know, throwing gasoline to the world. Yes, of course. I mean, they're not helpful, but let's recalibrate the way we look at this, right? Like, if we were looking at this in terms of like black people, right, if there was a mass movement that was spreading libeles about black people, that was obsessing over videos of black criminality, or that was trying to find a black person, saying something really violent and then obsessing over it and getting outraged about it. Everyone would actually recognize that as racist. And no one would say, well, you know, maybe black people should stop being criminals.

Or maybe there shouldn't be so many black people who say violent things. Everyone would recognize the dynamic of that as racist. Everyone would recognize the gaze, the objectifying obsessive component of that as racist. And that is really what we've seen. So I do think we should view anti-Zionism as racism. I don't think it needs to be tethered to classical anti-Semitism because it's very easy for someone like Pierce Morgan to say he's not anti-Semitic and he's not against all Jews

and look, some Jews are against Israel. The problem is that I will play this video. I don't know what the fraction would be, but if you were to figure out the percentage of words in response to anti-Zionism that were devoted to trying to characterize it as opposed to devoted to trying to show why it doesn't hold up logically and legally and morally.

I think it's like 80% characterization, which has never moved the needle, not one millimeter for the people who have these beliefs. It needs to be demonstrated to them. And I think it's human on our part because we are so offended by it. And somehow it's hard to even imagine that they are, you know, 0.1% as informed on this stuff as we are. So we can't even comprehend how they could say such things. But actually, and I've had friends like this when you actually question them about what they know and don't know about this conflict,

they know either nothing or they have perfect you know 180 perfect incorrect information like they literally what they think they know is exactly the opposite of the truth so then you just characterize them and then they just dig in so why are they so confident about why do they have such conviction

with these positions when I agree with you most of them know nothing I actually I'm sort of leading to that but I want to let's play Tucker Carlson I want to get Adam's response to this, because this will get you going. Go ahead. Should I start? Can't speak for any GCC government.

I am an American. And so I will explain what I believe is the American perspective, which is we align with countries that share our values, but mostly we align with countries that have some strategic benefit to us. And this is a resource dense part of the world. Energy is essential for civilization. And the country that we're most closely allied with has no resources.

It is 9 million people. It is a completely insignificant country in the Levant. I'm speaking of Israel. It is an insignificant country from an American point of view. The only reason Israel is significant is because we provide a security guarantee. We have to defend Israel because I'm not sure why. We have no moral obligation to defend Israel whatsoever.

Israel whatsoever. And there's no American interest inherent in Israel. So the holy sites, which are great, and I think the world should be allowed access to them, to the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, to the Church of the Nativity, until Alaksa Mosque, and to the wall. But as a nation, as a secular nation, there is no overridingly value strategic interest in Israel for the United States. What are we getting out of this? That's good. So, like, this is very upsetting to hear, right?

But what I haven't seen is why is there not an article like in, or one of these symposiums in commentary magazine or somewhere else or, you know, or free press, explaining, no, this is why Israel is strategically and technologically and more like, like, we need to counter this point of view because what he's saying. is not facially out of order, right? Yeah, I mean, I think that's a good point. I haven't seen a lot of writing that actually just makes the case of, you know, why the U.S. should support Israel. But for me, of course, that has nothing to do with what he's saying, right?

We know that he's jumped on the bandwagon of the anti-Zionist hate movement since October 7th. We know he says things that like, oh, those homoceters in Jerusalem killed Jesus, right? So we know he's just using these anti-Jewish tropes, and now what they're doing is they're framing it as if it's a kind of policy disagreement,

right? It's very interesting. They've actually taken this whole rhetorical permission structure from the left. I just saw J.D. Vance on Twitter the other day say, oh, well, I think there's a difference between criticism of Israel and anti-Semitism. And it was kind of hilarious to hear him repeat that trope, right? Because it's something you hear all the time. As someone who comes from, you know, the belly of the beast of left academia, of so-called woke critical theory, you know, that's what I hear every single day, right? Oh, you're calling us anti-Semitic and that's just like you're weaponizing that as like an evil Zionist. I mean, it's amazing to hear that the right wing has taken that on. So anti-Zionism is just migrating into the right and they're framing

it as a policy disagreement. But it's not actually clear, you know, what he means by this. You know, why is it since October 7th, now he's reconsidering Israeli policy? Well, and of course, the whole exchange is built on, I'm not an expert on this, so correct me if I'm wrong. It seems to be built on a straw man because as far as I'm aware, we have a very good alliance with Qatar. I think we have some kind of military base. I don't believe that Qataris are pressuring us to not be allied with Israel. and he's presenting it as if we are forced

with some kind of a choice here and I mean they gave Trump that plane right like what is the like what is the issue that he's even trying to grapple with here in terms of Qatar

do we have a problem being friends what about the Saudis we also have a good relationship with them yeah we have a good relationship with all those emirous and by the way and the trend is that they are all making or looking or you know

trying to make peace with Israel, as everybody knows, October 7th was Hamas' way of trying to derail what seemed to be the imminent alliance between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Now, you know, there's so many answers that could be given to Sir Carlson. I don't want to sidetrack this conversation with that. But I just feel like our smart, sophisticated Jews ought to be focusing on that. These arguments should not be hard to make. And also zooming out, this has bothered me for a long time, they should also be making arguments because it seems to get lost in the mix here,

that, and this goes back even to Daryl Cooper and this idea that, you know, we didn't have to fight the Nazis in World War II. Do these people really imagine that we don't care about whether freedom is trending up or trending down on planet Earth? Do they really not understand that if they had their way, we'd have a Nazi planet with maybe one, if you take their dumb theory, one lone outpost of England and then America?

Have they considered that, you know, all right, we got through nuclear proliferation and biological proliferation. But what about now AI? We're all so fucking scared of AI, right? The entire world thinks AI might be the end of us. No, no, let the not, thank God the Nazis aren't around so we could have a Nazi AI and maybe be great if there's an Islamic fundamentalist AI, right?

Where do they think this is going if we do not want to push back against these trends in the world? And this is not what, this is without regard to Israel. This is also including for me in Dubai and, I mean, any, to Taiwan, any place on planet earth where people are yearning to be tolerant and free and and consequentially if they have their way will not be a threat to the future of our civilization and our planet this is in America's interest and that's without getting to the fact all the technology that comes from Israel which would be I mean you can like that movie it's a wonderful life oh yeah Tucker let's

reimagine the world without Israel having been protected all these years of the Arabs are just rolled over with Israel. How many all inventions and technologies and medical tests and anti-ballistic technologies? I mean, literally, you don't think Israel has been valuable to the world or to us because the Qataris, what? Because they have

oil coming out of the ground? I have an idea. Why don't we just take their fucking oil? I mean, I think Tucker Carlson's completely lost the plot, obviously. So, I mean, he supported the Iraq war, the Iraq war. He's entitled to change his mind. Well, he's entitled to changes mind, but what I see in it is basically that he has a kind of guilt complex. It's actually

very similar to the left. So the left, they basically say that Israel is the embodiment of Western colonialism, right? Israel is committing a genocide of indigenous peoples, just like these white North American states. So there are a lot of white people in the anti-Zionist movement who have a lot of white guilt, and they can sort of displace their white guilt onto Israel. Now, he's kind of the mirror inversion of this. He has a kind of American guilt that he expresses often about

the Iraq war, that the Iraq war was a failure, that it was a kind of humiliation for America. So he's really into these conspiracy theories by like that book, the Israel lobby, where they basically tried to claim that there was a kind

of Jewish or Jewish-Israeli conspiracy with APAC, etc., to force the U.S. to go into Iraq and that the U.S. wouldn't have gone into Iraq if the Israel so-called Israel lobby, which doesn't actually exist, because there's a lot of, there's so many Jewish organizations, like an alphabetical soup, honestly, and they aren't coordinated at all. I wish we were more of a conspiracy. Actually, I think we should create a conspiracy against

anti-Zionism and unify against anti-Zionism, but unfortunately we don't have that. If it doesn't exist, who am I writing checks to? I'm going to call the cops. No, it does exist, right? It exists. I mean, the lobbies exist for every issue under the sun. Well, I mean, there's APEC, which is a real lobby. It's a mid-level lobby.

And APEC doesn't give that much money to government officials, which is what seems to be gets people all worked up. But they do spend a lot of money on issue advocacy, I believe. But it's America, like, you know. But how come you don't think that exposing these people for being, bad faith actors or for having like some kind

of like sinister because we're not exposing them to be bad faith actors because there's a drought of actual focused argumentation that that doesn't that's not full of jargon

and words like heuristic and you know all these academic academic words which go over everybody's heads and and they like just like between the eyes explained to every day people who are mostly decent, why this is wrong? Like, you know, I've been saying this for years

already. Like, we just spend so much time clutching our pearls and wanting to shame. It's not like a strategy. It's a natural reaction. Like, like I said, our reactions, how dare you? Do you hear what you're saying? No, come on, Tucker. Yes, absolutely. You're absolutely right. We should be doing things in America's interests. Here is why it's in America's interest. A, B, C, D, E, F. Now, what do you say about that? What am I missing here? and why and okay let's imagine we did get rid of Israel A, B, C, D, EF would change And how would our relationship with guitar be even any different

Would we have more oil? Like what exactly are you getting at? And then people who are smart will say, Hmm, I wonder what's going on with him, you know? And they say, you know what? I don't think you like the Jews because that proves him to you. Okay, play Jimmy Dorr. This is going to, now, you're a little,

I know he's been going on for a while already, a little tired, this is going to wake you up. Go ahead. This one's really going to excite you. Go ahead. So there was a... Oh, let me stop there. Now, this is close to home because Jimmy Dore did an event at the Village Underground,

and Kurt Messker, who is like his sidekick, yeah, is a friend of ours. And I have to say, I mean, he's been a friend of mine. I like him very much. I didn't... I just saw this and I was astonished. My Kirk, my Kurt, but this is really... This is after the Bondi Beach killing. This is just, go ahead, go ahead, Stephen.

So there was a false flag attack in Australia, and we're pretty sure it was engineered by the Mossad. Oh, my. And the funny thing about this attack in Australia, so they say there was some Muslims who attacked Jewish people on a beach at the first day of Hanukkah. Is that what it is? And they're having a celebration,

and they just started showing. shooting them, right? So has all the hallmarks of a false flag. By the way, it's, it's like a block away from a police department, yet it took 20 minutes for the police to respond. Jimmy, Australia gave up all their guns after the first mass shooting that had. That's right. They gave up all the guns. So how did so Muslim sneak guns in? Right. And if a Muslim wanted to go to shoot Jewish people, why would they go to Australia to do it? Why wouldn't they go to Israel to do it? I thought they'd go to the sound of the guns. Remember, they go to the sound of the guns. Here's the weird thing. Candice Owens, did you know this, Kurt?

Candice Owen says, she tweeted this out. She says, they have been signaling that a 9-11-style attack is coming the second week of December. Save this tweet. It will age well. That was November 27th of this year. She said that. The second week, oh, well, lo and behold, here we are. Okay, stop it there.

All right. So, and as we all know, Jimmy Dorr is in with Tucker Carlson, is in with Candice Owens, who now has inroads, and Joe Rogan, and has inroads now with even with Megan Kelly. And they're all, we've spoken about this week after week, they're all that shit crazy, right? And nothing is, nothing is over the line anymore. And it also includes chem trails and demon attacks and, and all sorts of COVID nonsense. I was thinking, we've gotten to the point where there's nothing, once you're into outer space demons and chemtrails and demon attacks and all this stuff, is there anything at this point which you could imagine

which would be over the line? Didn't go to the moon. We're at a point now where in a big influential part of the right, you could make up anything. little green men, and no one will say, what the hell are you talking about? Like, yeah, that's an interesting point of view. Am I overselling it? Yeah, I mean, of course, we're seeing basically the reaction to years of wokeism and policing speech, and now... Believing a little green man is a reaction to wokeism?

So, I mean, what we're seeing now is a kind of cult of infantile transgression. And so people like Pierce Morgan, who will have, you know, blatant, sort of anti-semites on his show to make a point, basically. Just to say, you know, I'll have anyone on the show, I'll have complete lunatics, and no one's going to police our speech. And so we have this sort of playing the algorithm by performing mental illness almost.

You know, you're just complete lunatics on Pierce Morgan. And then people like Nick Fuentes, really, are basically the same thing, right? It's a kind of infantile transgression. He actually makes fun of them for the crazy things they say. He says, you know, like the Holocaust is sacred, right? It's like some you can't talk about. You can't say anything at it, and that's why I'm going to say it.

So it's all about this kind of transgressive moment that I get to break this taboo. And of course, anti-Semitism is no longer a taboo, right? And that's why we're seeing this kind of explosion. Well, I mean, is nobody going to say anything about that insane drawing with, like, the giant Holocaust yellow star on Theodore Herzl. Like, this is like straight out of like a fucking Nazi handbook. And this guy is just, like, sitting there, like, spewing this shit. Like, it's just unfathomable.

And, of course, it's the Zionist, right? So it's framed around. So it's anti-Zionism that's becoming the larger frame in which they're making these attacks. And this whole false flag thing, I think you mentioned those Shlomo Sands, actually. Well, there's this other guy called Avi Schleim, who's also kind of a token anti-Zionist, Israeli. And he's famous. I think he's a British historian, right? He's British, isn't he?

I think he's Israeli as well, maybe. He's Iraqi ancestry. Exactly. And his big thing is that he says that the bombings of synagogues in Iraq around 1950, were a false flag. Were false flag operations. And actually, the ethnic cleansing, the expulsion of Jews from the Middle East, which was actually a result of anti-Zionism, were actually operations by the Mossad or Zionists

to get people to move to Israel. I think he says that one bombing. Benny Morris, you can Google it, he totally tore Shlaim apart on his scholarship. Yeah, I mean, it's pretty ridiculous. But that's not going to stop people from listening to Schley and that already... I mean, there's two, it may be, like, you say it's pretty ridiculous. It might very well be ridiculous. Benny Morris, you know, now that he's looked into it and he says it's not true,

I'm more comfortable saying it's ridiculous. Our country, America has had, has flirted with false false. flags and wasn't this Spanish American more Mexican America what what they've been false flags Gulf of Tonkin is maybe false flag I don't know like false flags are something that nations

considered and you know I'm just always careful not say oh no Israel would never that a country or a people faced with extermination would never consider false flag in an

exigent circumstance if you're facing another war of annihilation in 1948 and you need bodies is it impossible to me to think something to say well what can we do to speed this up? Like it's all possible stuff but it's

important to get it right it's also important to note that these are not weaknesses and foibles of the Jewish people we are people like every other people and we may have

done certain things wrong. We have done some very things wrong. We may have done things that you think are wrong. We might as well justify. We need to get out out of that whole discourse, right? One that presumes that anti-Zionism is a critique. And that one needs to answer it as a, you know, yeah, I did some stuff wrong, but I'm not that bad. Right. You know, that's a kind, it's almost a kind of abusive dynamic, actually. I mean, what's funny about it is like, these same people would never think of dread like if germany did something in the news tomorrow that we really didn't agree with these and i said yeah the fucking holocausts and this and the camps people look at me like a crazy you're bringing up the holocaust because of a german policy in 2025 they would regard that

as unhinged you follow me right but somehow if you're upset with something israel's doing like you can bring up a fall an alleged false flag from the 40s like what does this have to do with anything No other argument would allow for this kind of thing. So what I'm coming to here, and then I'm before, are you free for, are you short on time? No, you're coming to. No, I'm sorry, I have really two things. But one thing is, is free speech. And my dear friend and kind of an intellectual hero, Michael Moynihan, I don't know if you know who he is,

he had on David Irving's, the Holocaust and our grandson on his show a couple days ago. I recommend it. And in that conversation, he talked about how, and I agree with them, there was controversy about whether to publish one of Irving's books, and the publisher pulled out at the end, and he and Hitchens, Christopher Hitchens at the time, thought this was crazy, or was wrong, everything should be published and then debated. And there's this whole kind of free speech absolutism that people of my generation believed in, which we still believe in.

We don't want censorship, right? But what all this stuff brings me to is that we really do need to recognize that although we did have free speech in the past, the kind of private censorship and gatekeeping that we resent today, this is nothing compared to what we had in the 70s, 80s, and 90s. In the 70s, 80s, you just had no access to getting your word out to a billion people from your living room. It had to go through certain sober individuals in charge of the TV networks, in charge of the newspapers, in charge of the magazines. So although you might have felt like, like you had totally free speech.

The fact is, if you were Nick Fuentes in 1985, what are you going to do? Advertise a newsletter in the classified section of some, of some, you know, newspaper and hope to get 30 people to send you $10. It's like there was no way for Nick Fuentes to get his word out. And now we're seeing what really unfettered free speech looks like. And, you know, we, the market. marketplace of ideas, it's another marketplace.

We believe in markets, but markets can work very, very slowly. Like evolution, like any problem that you have as a human now, if you give evolution a couple million years to solve it, evolution will take care of it. Evolution probably get rid of cancer eventually, right? But it takes a long, long time. The marketplace may eventually process all this horrible information and come out decisively with a decision on it that we all accept. But it can be many, many years of horrible things happening before that happens.

Yeah, I mean, I think anti-Jewish hate is the perfect grift, right? And it's perfect for the algorithms on social media. because what it allows people to do is it allows this kind of mob mentality where people are ganging up on this minority. Can I add one more thing to it? And what we're seeing here also, you know, there's many, many cognitive biases that we have.

One of them is called, I think, is the illusory truth effect or something like that where it's just true that if you hear something bad over and over and over and over, you begin to believe it even if you have no reason to think it's true and then there's a framing effect and if you hear those things 50 times

and you know they're not true you are still primed and ready to believe something else despite your better judgment because you've just gotten so used to it so what we're seeing is this unfettered free speech and these algorithms they are playing on our psychological weaknesses

such that it's like how are we going to stem this tide of anti-Semitism now that it's caught on with wildfire like wildfire and there are no gatekeepers anymore and the human mind especially of kids who are not averse to it they are going to begin to believe it So what I'm getting to, I know I'm being long-winded, is that we need to really start having countermeasures, not censorship countermeasures,

but in terms of how to teach children, how to interpret the news, how to interpret statistics, how to alert them to the biases. We have to gird ourselves and equip ourselves some way to not this blind notion that, well, we believe in the marketplace of ideas and sunlight is the best disinfecting. It'll all work out. It's not all going to work out if we don't activate ourselves to intelligent ways of dealing

with a brand new universe where Periel can tweet something out and some great intellectual could tweet something out, and my kid who... And you're saying Perryel's not a great intellectual. Yes, exactly what I was saying. And my kid reads it on TikTok or see that and they have no way of knowing one is more reliable than the other. It scares the shit out of me.

So, you know, not... Well, first I want to say that I don't think evolution will ever take care of cancer. I think that's built into the soup into the sauce. Would you like to also say that you think that Perryel is a great intellectual? I think Perryel is a great intellectual. Thank you, Dan. But what to what extent is, you know, if you ask Americans at

random, certainly a lot of people agree with Nick Fuentes and agree with Jimmy Dorr, but how much has it really penetrated into the American psyche, these kinds of anti-Zionism, for example? I mean, judging from X, judging from Twitter, there's really quite a lot of anti-Zionism, and it's been stunning to see how quickly people learned the anti-Zionist script since October 7th, because all of this anti-Zionism was basically formulated in the universities. So you have that Islamist Nazi lineage. You have the Soviet anti-Zionist propaganda I was talking about, which was more like far-left Marxists.

It wasn't mainstream in Western academia until like the 2000s. But then they started basically consolidating it, a small, basically cabal. I mean, this is the real conspiracy. There was a small cabal of academics who started creating this settler colonial theory. And all this academic jargon like you're talking about, somehow, you know, hundreds of thousands of people, millions of people, were able to learn overnight what it means to be a settler colonial state based on replacing an indigenous population.

Hundreds of thousands of people overnight were able to understand that a Jewish state is inherently oppressive. As an ethno state is a term that gets thrown around. And by the way, it's a term that I don't think was ever used. It comes from white nationalism. They coined the term ethno state. It's the best I've been able to tell. Yeah, and I mean, it's actually kind of a version of David Duke's great replacement theory.

So it's kind of funny, actually, because Patrick Wolfe, who created settler colonial theory, he's kind of like the most prestigious theorist within academia, right? You mentioned settler colonialism, like, you're in. And then David Duke is like the least prestigious person, you know, the most... Dr. Duke. Yeah, someone you don't want to be associated with, and their theories are actually the same. And, of course, if you read the Hamas Charter, it is an ethno-state charter. If you read the Israeli Declaration of Independence, it's like the American Declaration of Independence.

I mean, it's a total inversion. You, I'm sorry. Are you in your piece in the free press talked about indigenity? And I, if I could just ask, that seems to be a term that's thrown around that no one knows what it means. Indigenous doesn't, what exactly is it to be an indigenous people? I mean, there's two kinds of means. You know, first of all, even the American Indians came from Asia. So is it the first humans to inhabit an area?

would be the indigenous people? Yeah, I mean, there's two kinds of meanings that really get thrown around. I mean, the one is the associative meaning where there's just already peoples that were used to calling indigenous, like Native Americans. And they tend to be...

Yeah, and Australian aboriginals, and they tend to be groups that were basically conquered or oppressed by European colonialism. So then it becomes this, a certain kind of victim identity with certain associations. But then there's also kind of a concept

of an indigenity that has to do more with belonging to a land. But it's not just about origin. It's really that your culture, your whole kind of ethno-religious identity is built around that land. And in that sense, Jews are clearly indigenous to Israel because our story, our culture,

are holidays that are based around seasons in the land of Israel, right? Like Pesach, Sukkot, and Chavuot, for example, are actually timed with the agricultural cycles of Israel. Would you say the Palestinians, indigenous as well? Or you would not qualify them that way. So Palestinians have been framed as indigenous on the basis of this kind of victim identity notion that they're victims of European colonialism and Jews have been called European colonists. That's really the only basis

upon which Palestinians are claimed to be indigenous. Like from a kind of cultural sense, Palestinians aren't really indigenous to that land. They themselves understand themselves to be Arabs to basically descend from certain Arab tribes that migrated out of the Arabian Peninsula with Muhammad's conquest. Although some number of them were just converted to Islam and Arabized and had been there not since forever, but for a long time. Yeah, it's perfectly possible that some of them have genetics from earlier sort of Canaanite peoples or maybe even Jews that stayed in the land after the Roman conquests and were Arabis.

or converted to Islam over time. But if someone's making that argument, even if they're trying to do that with academic authority, that's really not what anyone means by indigenous. Actually, it's not a genetic concept. People have been very critical of trying to reduce indigenity to a blood quantum notion. It's actually a cultural concept.

But it's also a very dangerous line of inquiry because, let's say Jews are not indigenous. Let's just say, okay, let's make a... list of all the other people who are not indigenous or the lands are living. Are the Australians indigenous? Are the New Zealanders indigenous? There's all questions. Are the Canadians or the white? I mean, I don't even know who's indigenous and who's not. The world is not going to reset to a different time. I mean, I don't think we should just say, you know, indigenous people are good and colonizers are evil, right? Because that's already the discourse right now. It's

that colonizers are evil. And there have been genocides of indigenous people, but there have also been tons of genocides of groups that are coded as colonizers. Actually, people don't even realize the Holocaust was framed as a kind of anti-colonial genocide, that the Nazis thought Jews were invasive colonists, that they were kind of like a central Asian hordes. That's the language the Nazis used, that they were kind of the Mongols sort of coming in and invading, and the Tutsis were killed, you know, under the same assumption. Let me add to people, you know, who we think about it.

Okay, like, we don't like, or no, I shouldn't even say that. Many of us resent people who arrive here illegally. You know, they're not indigenous to America. They're not, they have no legal right to America. They are invading America, no differently, actually, than Jews went to Palestine under the Ottomans. But they're, so then they have kids. they have grandkids and their grandkids are born in America, you know, 30 years, 40 years after

or however many years, 40 years after their illegal entry. And we're horrified at the notion that, you know, right wingers want to take these people who were born here and throw them out of the country. Like, you know, at some point, okay, but that, and, and what you get where I'm going, Like, whatever you think about indigeneity, everybody in Israel is generations past this. And normally you don't, not only do you not allow yourself to go along these lines, you're normally offended by this kind of analysis. You're normally offended by the idea of holding an innocent person who's been there

for generations responsible because you don't like the way their grandparents came in 1920 or something like that, great-grandparents. So, and as I said before, and I mean it, I think that these UN resolutions and the Oslo agreements in the law, what is it, Dan, when everything that came before the contract, the merger doctrine, you know, when you sign an agreement in the law, everything else that went before is considered done and superseded by the meeting of the minds represented in the new agreement. that's been negotiated. And unless I don't understand what was negotiated, this is all done with, with the permission of the Palestinians. They might say that they weren't properly represented.

You know, the average... Well, then let them say that. In other words, at least force the argument upon them. Say, what are you talking about this? You signed an agreement. You sat down. You're a leader and you said, yes, we're going to try to negotiate two states here.

think the Israelis have acted back, at least let them make the arguments, and then, you know, we'll make the counter arguments if we have good ones. But this notion that, well, you could just, you can just ignore all this and reset the clock back to 1948. And all the UN resolutions and the partition and Oslo, this is beside the point. This doesn't hold up. This is not the way the world works. I mean, I think the xenophobic element is really interesting. Yeah, this whole kind of settler colonial theory is basically just kind of anti-immigrant kind of ideology. But then it's sort of inverted. It's like we have these white people or Western anti-Zionists who are saying, you know, I'm going to ally with these colonized Arabs. And on that basis, they're actually just

taking on the kind of chauvinistic xenophobia of the Arabs of the time, who when the Jews were immigrating into mandatory Palestine, were coming up with these notions that the Jews are invading and colonizing and trying to replace us in the same way that Nick Fuentes says that non-white people are invading and trying to replace white people in the U.S. All right. Last thing before you go, because I wanted to do a courtesy to a guest that was on the show, Matthew Cockrell, History Speaks. You know who he is?

Oh, yeah, I do. He loves me on Twitter. Oh, yeah, he loves you. Can you bring up Klein History Speaks? So you add a tweet. Maybe if you can read, I'll let you read it. I'll let you read it in your own voice if you want to read it. can you zoom in on it

Steve? Oh yeah yeah yeah so this was my this was my tweet to kind of it's like an audio book go ahead it's sort of my recommendations post Bondi yeah so we need to stop calling everything a blood libel and start naming the specific libels of the anti-Zionist age the colonizer

apartheid and genocide libles it's not enough to say it's anti-Semitic we must demand that institutions formally repudiate the genocide libel and recognize that it is driving real world violence they must condemn anti-Zionist ideology, fully and unequivocally, not just claim that it can become anti-Semitism. We must stop referring to anti-Zionist mobs and protests as pro-Palestinian or free Palestine.

Jewish organizations should launch a full-scale campaign against anti-Zionism now. All right. Now, Stephen, bring up Klein. History speaks, responds. So Matthew responded, this is all a lie. The killers, part of an ISIS cell, were not motivated by the anti-Zionist academic ideology you talk about slash mischaracterized. They were motivated by a heterodox extremist sect of Sunni Islam that wants to kill various religious minorities, not just Jews, but also the Yazidis, Christians, Shiites, etc. They even want to kill Hamas, whom they deem apostates.

They are not driven by anti-Zionism. Now, I wrote to Matthew, and I say, well, actually, I'm going to have Adam on the show. do you want me to read anything? So he wrote me an email as well. I should have sent it to you before the show. Forgive me. So he gave me a chance to think about.

He says, Hainah, I'm responding to the fact that the killers were ISIS guys and motivated by ISIS ideology, according to the Australian authorities. It might seem strange to you that I'm arguing that an ISIS motivation is not only distinct from,

but incompatible with the Palestinian nationalism. But if one reads more about ISIS, one would find quickly that they consider all nationalisms, Palestinian or otherwise, to be expressions of K-U-F-R, I don't know how to pray, K-U-F-R, quote, disbelief. And he has a quote, see a link here, see ISIS rejection of the nation state, nation-state. To quote from ISIS's propaganda magazine, Dabik, quote,

we do not perform jihad here for an illusory border drawn up by Sykes and Pico. Rather, our jihad is loftier and more superior. They also consider all Palestinian political parties and national leaders to be apostates to Islam, and therefore advocated for their execution. They do not spare Hamas from their ire, having called for attacks on them on the grounds that they are supposedly fake Muslims. It is also wrong to associate this attack

with the Palestinian movement because basically nobody in that movement supports ISIS. Supporters of Israel have correctly pointed out that a lot of Palestinians and now a lot of people in a Palestinian solidarity movement support groups like the P.I.J. and Hamas. This is something I have spoken out about and against with my modest platform.

Yet support for ISIS is happily only a radical fringe movement. So what do you want to say? Does he have a point on any of this? No, he's extremely confused. So basically there are a number of Islamist groups. So Islamism, basically, all Islamism is against the nation state. It ultimately wants to achieve a caliphate. Some want to do that by peaceful means.

Basically, they will immigrate into Western democracies, build a majority, and eventually vote in Sharia law. and then there are many jihadist groups who want to achieve this through violent means. So Hamas is also an Islamist group. They only support Palestinian nationalism as a means to ultimately get to a global caliphate because they believe that destroying Israel is a theological imperative for their Islamism. Now, groups like ISIS that call everyone else fake Muslims and apostates, that's an extremely common dynamic within jihadist ideology and Islamic extremism generally.

You have new splinter groups that constantly emerge and say, you know, we are, we have the true way, we are the true Muslims, we are the most extreme and the most rigid in our application of Sharia law, and everyone else is fake. Now, all of these Islamic groups actually do share anti-Zionist ideology. Of course, they don't have the exact Western academic anti-Zionism that I often critique, but I often draw attention to that there are really three regional variants. So there's Middle Eastern anti-Zionism, which is closely articulated with Islamic ideology with Islamic anti-Jewish traditions in the Quran and the Hadith, then there's Soviet anti-Zionism, right, which formulated a kind of more respectable left-wing version, a Marxist version. And then there's Western anti-Zionism, which used settler colonial theory to sort of code Israel as inherently genocidal. And they've all influenced each other, right? And it is the case that Hamas views Israelis as sort of inherently evil,

who do not belong. All civilians are legitimate targets because they're all, by their very presence, they are occupying the land of Israel. And they use that term occupation. It doesn't just refer to the West Bank. It refers to anywhere in Israel. And at that level, the settler, colonial, academic ideology does converge with the Islamist ideology, but they are articulated in different ways. So he's misunderstanding my conception of anti-Zionism, and he's also very much misunderstanding how Islamism works. Yeah, I didn't really understand his point because he says they're motivated

by a heterodox extremist sect of Sunni Islam, not by anti-Zionism. So what is he saying? It's just a coincidence that it could have been anybody. This time it happened to be the Jews, but it might have been other, next time it'll be a bunch of Palestinians, but they haven't. He's also really wrong about

how central anti-Jewish ideology is to all of these jihadist groups. I mean, this one of the earliest people to do this was the Mufti of Jerusalem who he absorbed Nazi propaganda he worked with the Nazis he helped to disseminate the protocols

the elders of Zion this classic anti-Semitic conspiracy theory and forgery and later on Saeed Kutub basically built on many of these anti-Jewish ideas in Islamism he was one of the main theorists of the Muslim Brotherhood

which has influenced all kinds of jihadist ideology So Al-Qaeda, for example, it's not talked about that much. But when they attacked the World Trade Center, they explicitly believed that that was the center of the U.S. empire because Jews actually, the Jews were sort of based in the World Trade Center and Jews controlled the world from the World Trade Center. So anti-Jewish conspiracies are central to al-Qaeda's ideology and also to ISIS. How do you feel, we're going to wrap it up.

How do you feel about America suspending its $4 billion euro to Israel? What worries me, again, is going back to Tucker Carlson, is not so much these policy decisions themselves, is that I see that they are basically motivated by this anti-Zionist hysteria and this anti-Zionist craze. And it's the anti-Zionist libeles that tried to construct Israel's response as some great crime, right? some kind of metaphysical, world historical crime.

And that, I think, is what people are responding to and what the U.S. government's responding to, what Tucker Carlson's responding to. And I don't even think it's based in a real kind of policy analysis. I very much agree with you. If this was 2022, and it did go around then that Israel is a very wealthy country now, and maybe they don't need our aid,

and the money could be better. Even though it's 5, 10,000th of our budget, money could be better spent at home. But yeah, I think Israel could probably afford. But now, I mean, people who think that this would somehow assuage the people who hate Israel, no, because they don't, it's not about the money. That's not just like Europe. They don't give money to Israel in Europe and they hate Israel there.

But I think all that it would communicate is we're cutting ties with Israel because we can't morally and good conscience support them anymore. That's what it would mean. And that would be, that. that would be terrible, a terrible injustice. Well, I'm very pessimistic about the future. I don't know, like this free speech thing, even though I shoehorned it in, I really think,

you know, when right after October 7th, I immediately wanted to debate Norman Finkelstein on the show. And people that you would know communicated with me that they didn't think it was a good idea. And I was like, no, it's essential that we take these people on now and early because I'm in a joke like nobody's listening to the commentary podcast

like that's we only only the people who agree with it listening to it they're going to have open road to start bashing Israel in a convincing way especially if we don't think it's in our interest to debate them and I feel that way more strongly than ever we have to up our game

in a more between the eyes plain-spoken, common-sense way to win this logical argument. You know, I know you agree with me that we have a very good case. I think we have the better of the case. I seldom hear people who are representing my side of this argument doing well.

I seldom hear them and I say, no, that's not the answer. it's just always about being outraged at the hidden hatreds of the people they're arguing with. And I'm not saying they're not right about that, but I don't think it's the right tact. Well, I think it is a hatred, but I think you have to explain it to people in a different way. You can't just say it's anti-Semitic because they don't buy that anymore. And because there's something that's almost not exactly true about it because it's this kind of evolved form of anti-Jewish hatred that really is about Israel.

So you have to explain that there is a kind of anti-Israel hate movement based on spreading libeles, and that it's not based in reason. It's not a rational discourse itself. Like going back to what we were saying at the beginning, it's a discourse that doesn't have any falsifiability. It can't handle counter-evidence. It's no better than racism outright. It's no better, but also because it's a discourse that is not able to actually even exist in a space of debate. But it's, you know, it's more than that.

that. Like, we sometimes talk. Like, it should be self-evident to you that killing 20, 30, 40,000 civilians who don't even have barely a military to defend themselves, who are not actually a threat to, you know, invading an overtaker. It should be self-evident to you that this is the right thing to do. That's our attitude sometimes. It's not going to be self-evident to people that Israel has to kill all these. We have to do the painstaking work of presenting the the details as to why these are painful choices. We have to do a better job of explaining that our heart is wrenched by it. But, you know, putting yourself in the shoes. How would you feel if it happened to America? Have you seen the hostage video of the guy digging his own grave?

What would you, what would you have America do in these situations? What about the tunnels? You think it's an honest discourse? You think these are honest concerns? Or is it that they know fully well that Hamas is responsible for... No. No, they don't. They don't. They know fully well that, look, they know fully well what Hamas did. I'm talking about the best of them. Some people are just... But, you know, if you told me, let's say, okay, Israel killed, let's say 60, 70,000 people died. What if

you had to make the case? No, Israel had to kill 2 million. Like, we had no choice. We had to kill every single one. Like, like, at some point they say, I get it, but at some number, you've already destroyed Hamas, you've already destroyed Hezbollah, you're already neutered Iran, you know, I don't know what the answer is, but this can't be the right thing. Don't tell me, it just like, it just goes to the sky, you know, Trump, Trump imposed this peace plan, but were you ready to kill another 70,000? How about 210,000? Like, you know, it's not self-exam. evident that any number is justified by Israel's imperative. You're going to have to explain

that. So my perspective, as someone who's inside academia at the time, and I saw what was kind of the origin of these theories of this activist movement against Israel, and I saw it right there at the beginning, almost as its source, because I see all this anti-Zionist ideology. It comes from academia. It travels into journalism, left-wing journalism, like The Guardian and the New York Times, and it's normalized in international organizations like Amnesty International and Betselem. So what I saw, from my perspective, since October 7th, is the stuff that people were saying in the academy.

Betelm is a left-wing activist group in Israel. It was just gradually mainstreamed. So on a day after October 7th, obviously the mainstream was expressing some solidarity with Israel, you know, Biden was saying even that Israel had a right to respond, et cetera, in the academy, everyone was already saying Israel is committing a genocide. Yes, on October 7th, they were saying Israel is the one committing a genocide. Israel is essentially already committed

this great crime. So two years later, where I see it completely normalized and mainstream, this idea that Israel has committed this metaphysical crime, I don't buy it. And it's impossible for me to buy it because I already saw the exact same narrative, the exact same. It was pre-creative. from those people, but there's plenty of people that can be convinced and that weren't crying genocide from day one, but saw after a- They reached a tipping point. After, you know, the war continued and might have been swayed into the genocide camp, but can be convinced and can be reasoned with it.

To be fair to those people, many of them are using the term genocide, not like you and I are using it with an eye on court decisions and sticking to a actual proper, legal meaning of the term, but they're just using it as a generic term as just an inhuman massacre that cannot be justified of a people. That's how they're using this. Well, they know the connotations. Everyone is aware that the Holocaust, right, is the paradigm of genocide. Everyone has learned what the Holocaust was, both in its scale, both the nature of it, that they were intentionally trying to murder every single person. By the way, I believe that the word genocide was coined in the wake of the Holocaust as a word that newly coined to characterize the Holocaust, the word genocide itself.

So not exactly, but so Raphael Lemkin was this Polish Jewish jurist who coined the term genocide. He was actually already talking about genocide in the 30s, and he had already described the Soviet Union's actions in basically intentionally starving the Kulax and trying to destroy the Ukrainian nation as genocide in the 30s. But his own understanding of genocide evolved. So he wrote a book, I believe in 1944, around then, called Axis Rule in Occupied Europe. And he was describing then German actions in occupied Europe.

And he was talking about Jews, but he was also talking about how the Germans treated Slavs, because the Germans were also trying to destroy other nations, but not always in the same way as they were trying to kind of bureaucratically, industrially mass murder Jews. So Lemkin had kind of a broader concept of genocide, and then it was in, it was after the war with the creation of the genocide convention, that Lemkin kind of arrived at a more legalistic notion of genocide that was more directly fitted to the Holocaust itself. And so many

of these sort of anti-Zinist genocide scholars today, their big argument is, oh, we're returning to Lemkin's sort of earlier, broader views of genocide. And that's how they kind of try and dilute the concept of genocide and say, you know, oh, the Holocaust shouldn't even be in our mind, which is actually a really dishonest maneuver, right? They say, oh, genocide doesn't have to be like the Holocaust. So all of these things are genocide, but of course everyone associates genocide with the Holocaust. And the whole point is to accuse the Jewish state of doing the same crime as the Nazis. And when Ezra Klein sort of interviews Philippe Sands or, or Omer Bartop, that's actually what they're talking about the entire time.

They're all going, you know, how can it be the Israel, which was founded in the wake of the Holocaust, is committing its own genocide. But we can define genocide more broadly than just the Holocaust. And there's, you know, you have to, for people like us, we have to confine our use of the term to the legal definition. Otherwise, unless you're going to expose facto, you know, start redefining 20 or 30, 40, 50, the other wars as genocides, in which case it just becomes a common occurrence. Right, but the legal term genocide does not just encompass the Holocaust and encompasses other. There's very few. There's a Houthis and the Tutsis. I don't know what they are.

What about the American Indians? No, I don't think that's... So that's kind of the complexity, right? I mean, so the fact that the Holocaust is the paradigm of genocides, that we compare stuff to the Holocaust to try and understand if it's a genocide. The whole kind of stream of genocide studies has been a kind of revolt against this, but it's actually not really a problem because, like, in case law, not to get too technical, but like, you always have a precedent. Like, you found a concept in law by having a precedent. And later cases evolved by comparing those cases to earlier precedent. So it's not actually a big deal.

And the Holocaust does give us some of the most extreme and purified example of trying to mass murder an entire people. And Rwandan genocide was another genocide that was not the Holocaust, but was very similar in many respects, and so that we can see that this has actually happened in multiple places, and it's not the same as war. No, and the legislative history is pretty clear, by the way, just to also stick up for the people who are, you know, who's not self-evident

that Israel should be killing all these people. I'm also including in that group, 35, 40% of the Israeli public. Patriots like Ahud Barak, Ehud al-Mert, which, of course, you know, know, there's maybe, you know, partisan politics and their own resentments that go into that, but there are many, on the eye alone, there are many, many patriotic Zionist Israelis who also agree that what Israel is doing is excessive, right? So once you know that, I don't see how you can

not, you have to take things on a case-by-case basis. If, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if, if a guy who's ready to risk his life in his children's lives to fight for Israel thinks that what Israel is doing is excessive and immoral, then how am I supposed to say that some college kid who believes that has to be an anti-Semite? It doesn't hold. This is the problem to me. Many of them are. Well, I'm not trying to see people as hidden anti-Zemites. I'm basically saying there's a kind of anti-Zionist mass movement that's obsessed with Israel and that's spreading libels about Israel. And libeles are claims that are defamatory. They're false.

They're obsessively repeated and often malicious. That doesn't mean that the person who's libeled hasn't done anything wrong or that there aren't even partial truths. Lots of libels. I think we have a fundamental disagreement that needs to be addressed is whether it's pronounced anti-Semite

or anti-Semite. He's Canadian. He's not Canadian. He goes to McGill. My parents are kind of British in South African, so maybe I'm saying it in the British way. Yeah, Semites, yeah. I don't think that being critical of the Israeli government, a war on Gaza, is directly related to this argument, though, of this anti-Zionist obsession. Like, I think that you can be critical of that.

You can think that they've done a bad job or a wrong thing, and that is actually separate from what Adam talking about. Yeah, I agree, I agree. But, yeah, all right. Wow, that's twice in one show. Listen, you have something to talk about that we're going to introduce in our next show. Oh, so we're going to try next show to do a live show, is that right? Yes.

With Josh Hammer. Yes. So we will release information to be 530 on Monday Easter Standard Time, is that correct? Yes. And we'll post the Zoom call number if you want to call in. Hopefully all Candice's fans will call in and we'll have some fun. So, but I'll tweet it out to my meager Twitter followers. Is it anti-Semitism or anti-Semitism then?

I don't know. I just care about anti-Zionism, honestly. I think I've got you because you would say anti-Semitism. I just want to say anti-Zionism, really. Okay. But when you, in any case, yeah, I did hear the South Africa comes through a little bit, I think. The South African? Yeah, it's a weird transatlantic mix at this point.

All right. Well, you know me. I'm big on accents. Yeah, yeah, it's good. Anything else you want to say about the world? About the entire world? About anything else? Is there some unturned stone?

You have wearing a yama because that means you're modern. Orthodox? No, I'm just kind of committed to Judaism. I think it's probably kind of post-denominational at this point. I don't really associate with any particular denomination. Do you go to Shul? Yeah, I go to Shul. You believe in the higher power? I believe Judaism is objectively true. You believe the Earth existed more than 5,000 years? I don't think that is the truth's claim of Judaism. You don't, it's not? No. Okay. Yeah. We're in the 80s now, I think, in the Jewish counter, right? 5780. What is it? 5-786. Yeah, we're in the 80s.

We're in the 80s. That was a good year for me, 86. All right. Well, happy. Not this 86. Happy Hanukkah, too. I'm very happy to know you. You do fantastic work, fantastic. Beautiful writing, by the way. Oh, thank you. I really appreciate it. Those editors at the free press are very good. No, really, really beautiful writing. And that's it, everybody.

emails to podcast at ComedySauror.com I always forget to Harry out, it's okay Stop doing that email to podcast at comedy cellar.com.

Good night everybody.