Sorry I'm late.
I had to stop by the Whites Museum again and get the fingered at FDR.
We know Al-Qaeda, Zawahiri, is supporting the opposition in Syria.
Are we supporting Al-Qaeda in Syria?
It's a proud day for America.
And by God, we've kicked Vietnam syndrome once and for all.
Thank you very, very much.
I say it, I say it again, you've been had.
You've been took.
You've been hoodwinked.
These witnesses are trying to simply deny things that just about everybody else accepts as fact.
He came, he saw, he died.
We ain't killing their army, but we killing them.
We be on CNN like Say Our Name been saying, saying three times.
The meeting of the largest armies in the history of the world.
Then there's going to be an invasion.
All right, you guys, time for our Friday morning interview of the great Sheldon Richman, my partner at the Libertarian Institute.
Welcome back to the show.
How you doing, Sheldon?
I'm doing great.
Thank you for having me back once again.
Our website is libertarianinstitute.org.
We've got a lot of great writers and great podcasts and all kinds of cool stuff going on there.
Check it out.
Hey, man, so TGIF, the goal is freedom.
That's your Friday column.
And this one is called defining anti-Semitism, threatening free speech.
What is the Anti-Semitism Awareness Act, Sheldon?
The Anti-Semitism Awareness Act of 2018 was introduced in May, both in the House and the Senate, the identical bill.
The Senate passed a similar bill a couple of years ago, but it never got to the House floor.
Went into committee and for a reason I'm not clear about, it never made it out.
So we do not, it has been brought back again.
And it's an odd bill as far as I can tell, because it's by its own statement.
It states the purpose at the beginning and it says the purpose is to propose or recommend for consideration a definition of anti-Semitism for educational programs and agencies.
So that's odd.
I mean, here's Congress proposing a definition for consideration.
It's not even saying here's our, here's the definition.
It's proposing it for, it seems like an odd statute.
I don't know of a precedent for that.
Anyway, what it comes out of, we could trace this back to a 2010 colleague, your colleague letter issued by the Department of Education.
This is under Obama.
And that was a letter to state and local education agencies.
The federal government has a lot to do with education, as we all know, not just through money.
And what they did in that letter was to say, in effect, the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Title VI of that act, prohibits discrimination on the basis of race, color, or national origin.
That's the list, race, color, national origin.
Notice the word religion is not in there.
So it goes on to say, but religion attacks on religious minorities, and they named Jews, Muslims, and Sikhs, and other religious minorities, could actually be based on that group's, as they put it, actual or perceived shared ancestry or ethnic characteristics.
And therefore, discrimination against people of those groups falls under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act.
So even though the clause doesn't mention religion, this was a way to get religion into it, right, by saying, well, the attacks on members of these minorities may well be attacks on their ancestry or their ethnicity.
So that's how they brought it in.
Now, for the record, I should point out, because it's going to become important in this discussion, that that letter, that dear colleague letter from the Ed Department, doesn't say anything about Israel or Zionism, just to put that on the record.
Just no mention of it.
So, in 2016, again, still under Obama, the State Department issued a statement, including a fact sheet, which embraced, with some modification, which I discuss in the piece, a so-called working, quote, working definition of anti-Semitism, along with some potential examples of anti-Semitism.
That had been published by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance, which consists of 31 countries, including the United States, and was then being pushed for adoption by a European Union bigotry monitoring agency, things like that.
So it was being very hard pushed by various people and, you know, and to be direct, by lots of pro-Israel lobby groups and Jewish organizations.
In fact, the definition originated with the American Jewish Committee and was promoted heavily to this European agency by the Simon Wiesenthal Center.
Now, here's one of the problems.
Of the 11 potential examples given of anti-Semitism, seven of them specifically mention, talk about Israel.
So the fear from critics of Israel has been that this is an attempt to associate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism.
And I think there's a good case for that.
This is something that, of course, has been used over the years, right?
Critics of Israel, either the founding of Israel itself or the policies after the founding toward the Palestinians, has long been smeared as anti-Semitic and has been objected to, that association has been objected to, by many, many Jews as well as others.
So that's the background.
This bill, these bills, if it were enacted and signed into law, would essentially embrace, indirectly, because it doesn't quote the IHRA definition and examples, but certainly through the fact sheet issued by the State Department, embraces that, even though there are some modifications of it, as I mentioned, as I discuss in the article at length.
All right.
So, I guess, back to the beginning about it being for consideration, put up here, what effect do you see this really having, you know, as it filters down?
It'll end up being hard law by the time anybody hears about it?
Yeah, it may never be hard law.
Here's my fear.
And we can see this playing out.
We're getting a preview of it.
I discussed this in the article, too, for people interested in this.
We're getting a pretty good preview of it in the UK.
Anybody who's paying any attention to the news knows that the Labour Party in Great Britain is undergoing a violent internal civil war over these kinds of issues because the Labour Party itself, its national executive committee, came up with a code of conduct on anti-Semitism.
The Labour Party, and the parties are different over there, they police their members.
They really police their members, and they kick people out.
People join parties.
I don't know how – you know, people don't really join the Republican or Democratic Party, right?
They just say, I'm a Republican or a Democrat, and they vote for those candidates.
But in Britain, people actually join parties, and you can get drummed out for violations of the codes of conduct or, you know, I'm becoming conduct or something like that.
So there has been a row going on in the Labour Party, and actually several people have been booted out, including four or five Jewish members, for so-called anti-Semitism.
Now, they adopted the IHRA definition, but they didn't adopt all of the examples, and they pretty much changed the ones that mentioned Israel, and that has caused other members of the Labour Party to call them anti-Semites, including Jeremy Corbyn, who of course is the leader and sort of the Bernie Sanders of England, of Great Britain.
So we're seeing what's happening there.
It's horrible.
It's a terrible smear campaign.
It's witch hunting, looking for anti-Semites everywhere, even among people who have a lifelong – a long life of opposition to racism.
And so I think we're going to see something similar here, because if this is passed and signed by Trump, and who knows what he would do, but if it's passed – and I don't know why it's been sitting in the committee since May.
I don't know why it's not moved.
But if it's passed, this will give sort of an imprimatur to the people who want to say criticism of Israel is likely or actually is anti-Semitism, and it's being used that way in Britain, and I expect it would be used here.
It would be an additional stamp of legitimacy for people who want to stigmatize criticism of Israeli mistreatment of Palestinians or the founding of Israel as per se, right, ipso facto anti-Semitism.
It will create a presumption of anti-Semitism, and I think that would be a terrible thing.
It would have a chilling effect on campuses, which is supposed to be – they're supposed to be havens of free inquiry without fear.
You can question things.
You can talk.
You can debate.
Teachers can take a point of view in class and assign books and readings, and it would have a chilling effect on that.
If people can say, wait a second, under a definition adopted by the U.S. Congress, this is anti-Semitic, that would just give a big push to this, I think, terrible tactic that has been used by pro-Israel folks to smear and stigmatize and ruin the careers of people who are critical of Israel.
Yeah.
Well, and of course, the way things work with partisanship is, you know, it's probably mostly on college campuses.
It's conservative groups support stuff like this, and instead of saying, you know, unlike these horrible leftists who just want to shut down free speech whenever they don't agree with it, we support free speech.
Instead, they're just like, ha, turnabout is fair play.
So this is their opportunity to just shut down somebody that they don't like.
And then, of course, baked into this, just like with everything about Israel, is a bunch of garbage premises, and should be obviously, you know, fake, as obvious as it is baked in, that everyone knows somehow, it's a scientific fact, that Israel never did anything wrong to anyone.
And that the only reason anyone would ever have to criticize them would be just if you hate Jews because of how much you hate Jews.
And then, oh, sure, you find an excuse to attack Israel because that's the only way you can get away with your anti-Semitism, whatever.
That's the argument.
And it's obviously childish and ridiculous.
I mean, even if you didn't have the ongoing occupation and the history of the Nakba and whatever, there'd still be plenty to criticize about Israel.
You know what I mean?
How about how we pay for socialized education and health care over there?
How about that?
Well, that's right.
And, you know, I was listening this morning to a Palestinian, a British Palestinian woman who's a physician and head of a think tank or something like that on Middle East and Muslim and Arab affairs, making an interesting point.
She says, really, the term anti-Semitism – and she'll get criticized for this, of course – the term anti-Semitism, she says, is really not useful anymore.
What we ought to talk about is we ought to use it as the proper term Jew hatred, because then if you say something like criticizing Israel or the mistreatment of the Palestinians by the Israeli government and the Israeli military constitute Jew hatred.
She said if people put it that way, most people hearing that statement are going to say, I don't see that.
You've got to show me more than that.
How is that Jew hatred?
If you couch it in this more abstract term, anti-Semitism, which has this history, then you can kind of get away with it.
So I kind of like that.
It's, you know, I think we need to ask someone who – if you're ever talking to someone who says, oh, that's anti-Semitic, to criticize either the cleansing in 1947, 48, or anything that's, you know, all the stuff that's happened to the Palestinians since.
The proper thing to say back to that person is, are you saying someone who believes that hates Jews?
I mean, that puts it all on the table.
I think that's a good way to go at it.
I guess the thing that bothers me about this is I don't really understand how this is supposed to work, because it seems like anyone who's actually interested in political discussions and this kind of thing, that they could tell the difference between criticizing Israel and actual anti-Semitism.
It's very few people who end up, you know, tying up their argument with something that condemns all Jewish people for how they all agree and work together or whatever kind of thing.
People don't talk like that, not most of the time.
And when they do, it sticks out like a sore thumb.
And it's sort of kind of the irony of this whole thing about Corbyn and these leftists in England, where, you know, these guys' whole thing is they're civil rightsy types.
They're, you know, in fact, they maybe don't even believe in natural rights.
They just believe in equality under the law of all things, you know, and that everyone should be treated fairly and equally.
Now, we don't like their definition of fairly.
We ought to be equally taxed to death or, you know, whatever, all things are baked into that.
But there's no way that we're supposed to believe that the civil rights leftists and liberals are really the vicious anti-Semites of England, are we?
Doesn't sound right.
Or on campus in America.
For over 70 years, Jews in America, in Britain and in Israel, just to mention a few places, have objected to this presumption of anti-Semitism.
That's what it comes down to.
There's a presumption of anti-Semitism.
On what grounds?
There are no good grounds, but there's a political purpose.
And the political purpose is to immunize the conduct of the Israeli government and the Israeli military and even individual Israelis, like settlers who beat up Palestinians, to immunize them from criticism.
That's all that's going on here.
And we need to make it very clear that that's all that's going on.
It's not about combating anti-Semitism.
There's been no outbreak of anti-Semitism in Britain or the United States.
You can look at polls, you can look at other things, and you'll see that it's something that's confined to the fringes.
Now, maybe we can say that Trump has brought out some of those fringe types.
I can see something to that argument, and that ought to be identified and criticized, you know, very severely.
But it's still a fringe thing.
Nobody in respectable society, conservative or, quote, liberal, is going to identify as an anti-Semite.
Now, you may say, well, maybe secretly he's an anti-Semite, but I don't know.
Secretly, people can be all sorts of things.
It doesn't really help.
And, again, there shouldn't be a presumption.
That's what I'm saying.
If you can show someone actually does hate Jews, thinks Jews control the world, thinks they're a malignant race or some, you know, all that ugly stuff that has been said over the years about Jews.
I totally agree with that people say that.
If you can demonstrate that, then that particular person we can identify as an anti-Semite.
And that wouldn't make his criticism of Israel wrong.
That's still an empirical matter, is the thing set up.
You know, if an anti-Semite says Palestinians were ethnically cleansed in 1948, we can condemn the person and say, but on the other hand, there's lots of evidence that's been, you know, shown by non-anti-Semites that, in fact, there was ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians.
There was ethnic cleansing of the Palestinians in 1948.
So we have to separate those issues.
That's what I'm calling for.
I mean, it's not just me.
Humble me.
That's what we're calling for.
And Jews have always called for that as well as good faith non-Jews.
And that's exactly what the other side, which is not just Jews on the other side, are pushing for, this conflation, this presumption of anti-Semitism.
It's outrageous.
Just like we have a presumption of innocence in the courts, we should have a presumption of non-anti-Semitism, of anti-anti-Semitism among critics of Israel.
And I think it does not show good faith to begin with a presumption of anti-Semitism.
That's really the main point I'm making in this article.
And look, even the author of the definition, the lead author of the definition who was working at the American Jewish Committee at the time, who's a Zionist, self-described Zionist, says when he saw this bill that was introduced two years ago, and then it was introduced also in South Carolina, their legislature was considering it.
I don't know if they passed it.
He wrote in op-eds and in congressional testimony.
He may be one reason why it never got out of committee in the House.
This was the lead author now.
This is not how I meant it to be used.
This is going to destroy free speech on the campuses.
This is Kenneth Stern, who wrote, certainly was the lead author of this definition and these examples.
So even he's saying, I didn't intend it to be used this way.
I don't know what more we need to say.
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Yeah.
Well, and, you know, I don't know.
It seems like on one hand, people are used to this being treated with the presumption of anti-Semitism anyway, if they want to talk about this.
And at the same time, I think a lot of people have learned how to turn that around and just say, you know, give me a break.
Nobody believes that accusation anymore because you wore it out like Pee Wee Herman's name.
You call everybody who obviously means well an anti-Semite.
You know, apparently what it does is it cheapens real anti-Semitism, because if it becomes sort of widely accepted that criticism of Israel on these very solid grounds that I've referred to several times already, if that constitutes anti-Semitism, then that will.
Among some people will say, OK, if that's anti-Semitism, I guess I'm an anti-Semite.
And then they stop distinguishing that from real anti-Semitism belief, you know, that the Jews are an evil entity that all individual Jews are responsible for, that controls the world and orchestrates everything that's bad that's going on in the world.
Why would you want to cheapen anti-Semitism?
It's a horrible commentary that people who want to immunize Israel from any criticism are willing to do it at that price, cheapening anti-Semitism.
Do they know what they're doing?
If they don't, they're really being very dumb and short-sighted.
And if they do know what they're doing, I have to say, why are you doing that?
Why would you want to do that?
Yeah.
Well, and the thing is, too, I mean, I kind of alluded to this earlier about how fake it is that there's nothing to criticize here.
But in this case, there's everything to criticize here.
And I can't find the paragraph in here, but, you know, they talk about, you know, singling out Israel.
It's like, well, Israel has singled out itself.
There's no other country on Earth that has an occupation and an apartheid program the way that Israel has right now.
That's right.
I deal at some length with this charge.
And this is see, this is in the language of one of the original examples from the IHRA.
Using a double standard, they say.
And one thing I should point out, these examples that are given in the original document say that you have to judge an instance of this example if it happens in the real world.
You have to judge it in the full context.
In other words, they couched it.
They hedged it by saying, we're not saying this absolutely is an example of antisemitism.
It may be an example, they say.
So the examples aren't really part of the definition.
Anyway, double standard is one of them.
And as I say in my article, well, OK, let's look at that.
And I give a quick list of Israel's conduct and say, find me another country that does this.
And let's see whether American critics of Israel don't also criticize that country.
So how do we know there's a double standard?
On the other hand, it seems to me the pro-Israeli side is the one with the double standard.
Because if some other country or group, ethnic, religious, whatever you want to call it, group, were doing to some other group what the Israelis do to the Palestinians, American Jews, who generally have been on the side of civil rights and anti-bigotry, would be condemning that.
So that's a double standard.
I think that criticism can be turned right back on them.
Yeah, well, and especially if you turn it right around.
And what if the Palestinians and the Arab states had won all these wars and it was the Israeli Jews who were rounded up in the Gaza Strip?
And what's left in, you know, 22% of 22% of the West Bank over there?
You know, America would go to war.
So talk about double standard.
I mean, think about how intolerable that would be for a day if the roles were reversed there.
Special examples are, they're almost laughable.
One of them is, you know, refers to sort of identifying Jews everywhere with Israel.
So that's considered possibly anti-Semitic.
So does that mean the authors of Israel's nation state law are anti-Semites?
They declared that the state is the state of the Jewish people everywhere, which has always been the pro-Israeli view of Israel, that it represents all Jews everywhere.
Which is obviously nonsense, by the way.
That doesn't even mean anything.
What is that even supposed to mean?
Represents them.
But it's been officially incorporated now into the basic law of Israel, which is like their constitution, in effect.
So that makes them anti-Semites.
Because here they are saying Israel is the state of the Jewish people, not the Jewish citizens of Israel.
That'd be bad enough, because 20, 25% of the citizens are not Jewish.
That'd be bad enough.
But at least it would be confining it to the citizens, people who have chosen to go there, were born there and stayed there and have citizenship.
But no, it's the state of all Jews everywhere.
And that includes people like American Jews, let's say, who don't want to be, don't go to Israel, don't want to go to Israel, don't want Netanyahu to be their prime minister or leader, don't want any foreign government to be speaking for them.
And that also includes Jews who consider themselves former Jews, people who, because they don't, they're not monotheists and they don't accept the law and the Torah and the history and all that.
And they could be very good people, but they just don't believe the religious doctrine anymore.
They may not regard themselves as Jews.
And yet Israel would regard them as Jews because they have a Jewish mother or something like that.
So how presumptuous is that, saying we represent, basically we speak for all of you, whether you want it or not, and you have no choice in the matter.
So why would you blame a non-Jew for conflating the state of Israel with all Jews when the Jewish state says that itself?
Now, I happen to, I agree that no individual Jew should be held responsible for bad things the Israeli government does.
That would be collectivism.
That would be a form of not really racism because I don't believe there's a Jewish race, but it would be collectivism.
Let's just put it that way.
Because you'd be saying, hey, you, Mr. Jewish American who maybe doesn't even like Israel, you're responsible for atrocities against the Palestinians in Israel.
That would be unjust to hold that person responsible.
Yeah, it's Israeli style collective guilt, what they do to the Palestinians all the time.
Somebody you know did something, I'm going to bulldoze your house over it.
They promote that view with the nation state law and the much older view that Israel is the state of the Jewish people, which Jews have objected to from the very beginning.
And I could name names, Robert Elmer Berg, Rabbi Elmer Berger, Alfred Lilienthal.
I mean, it's a long, long list of Jews who have been stamping their foot at this idea from the very moment it was spoken.
Yeah, now you talked about these polls here too, where supposedly, and I think you quote, yeah, Norman Finkelstein, whenever Israel commits another atrocity, it's propaganda stage revival of the new anti-Semitism extravaganza to deflect or squelch global condemnation, he says.
He's written books about this.
He watches this very closely, and he's an extremely thorough analyst and scholar.
I mean, his material is always very well documented.
He reads original documents.
So people who don't like him still have to contend with him because he's too thorough to just dismiss.
He's not to be dismissed.
He shows that every time Israel does something which brings a worldwide condemnation, it goes back to the 87, the first Intifada when kids were having their bones broken deliberately by the Israeli defense force in the West Bank.
There's a book will come out from B'nai B'rith or from the Anti-Defamation League or one of the major Jewish organizations declaring there's a new anti-Semitism on the rise.
That's the term that's now used, a new anti-Semitism.
And, of course, the reason they call it new anti-Semitism is because it's not anti-Semitism.
It's criticism of Israel.
And every time something like that happens, it happens with those horrible onslaughts, military assaults on Gaza, Operation Cast Lead in 2008, 2009, Operation Protective Edge about a decade later or so, you get, oh, my gosh, anti-Semitism is on the rise on the campus.
It's hostile for Jews everywhere.
And there's never any evidence for it.
I report on a Pew poll from, was it last year or maybe this year, and compared to the one they did in 2014, and Americans' views toward Jews is very high.
I mean, it ranks up there.
It's much higher than Americans rank Muslims and atheists.
Muslims and atheists rank at the bottom.
Jews are way at the top.
And on campus, even Kenneth Stern, again, the lead author of this definition and these examples, he says in the quote in the link in my article, he says there's no rampant anti-Semitism on campuses.
It's nonsense.
And the same thing is true if you look at surveys in the U.K.
This is just conjured up to scare people.
I think the anti-Semitism fear has always been very valuable to sort of the major Jewish organizations because it keeps the support strong.
And support for Israel among American Jews, especially younger ones, has been fading because Israel has engaged in obviously atrocious activity toward the Palestinians.
And so younger people are saying, why am I supposed to feel some affection, younger American Jews?
Why am I supposed to feel affection for this country?
Look what they're doing to Palestinians.
We can't take it at face value that if somebody calls some action anti-Semitic that it's in fact anti-Semitic.
It may be, but you would need to look at it.
It's an empirical matter.
Now, I would condemn a person in, you know, Paris or London or Little Rock, Arkansas, who attacked a Jewish person because Israel did something very bad to Palestinians.
Yes, that's a crime.
That person hasn't had anything to do with that.
He may not even approve of it.
But he certainly hasn't performed any actions to do that.
And that would be wrong.
But I could also question whether it's actually anti-Semitic.
That could be an evil act.
Anti-Semitism is not the only evil.
Do I have to say that?
You can commit a terrible act against a person, a Jewish person, and it's not anti-Semitic.
Now, if anti-Semitism and anti-Israelism have been merged together, well, the pro-Israel people are largely responsible for that.
Not that they're responsible for a crime against, you know, an individual Jewish person because of something Israel did.
But they are responsible for merging these two concepts.
That doesn't relieve the criminal I just mentioned of the responsibility to say, well, that merge was wrong.
No, an individual Jew who's, like, thousands of miles away from Israel didn't shoot some Palestinian kid or some young Palestinian emetic in Gaza.
And, therefore, I have no – there's no grounds whatsoever in justice to attack some, you know, Jewish person walking down the street of Little Rock, Arkansas.
That person has that responsibility, too.
But I'm not going to let off the hook the official and non-official lobbyists for Israel, pro-Israel, unconditional supporters of Israel, who tried to plant this association between the Israel, Israeli state and Israeli people, and then the flip side, anti-Semitism and, let's call it, anti-Israelism.
We all are responsible, but let's not merge these things together.
Finkelstein gives an interesting example.
He's been writing about, you know, what does constitute anti-Semitism on his blog.
And he gave the example of a real example that was used.
It was in France or outside of Paris where a mugger, a street mugger looking for money went to an area, I guess, where a lot of Jews live.
And he held up the Jews, you know, a couple or whatever, and took the money and ran away.
So that was promoted in the papers as an example of anti-Semitism.
And Norman says, Finkelstein says, why is that anti-Semitism?
If you look at the figures, Jews are among, you know, Jews are overrepresented, let's say, among the wealthy in France, as they are, I'm sure, in Western countries.
That's not a bad thing.
They've been successful in business and other things, medicine and all kinds of things.
So if you're a mugger looking for the maximum take, right, who was the old bank robber who was asked, why do you rob banks?
He says, that's where the money is.
If you're a mugger and you go to an area where you figure, you know, lots of Jews are walking around, you may do that on the basis of not that you hate Jews, but you love money.
So you go where the money is.
Is that anti-Semitic?
On his face, it isn't anti-Semitic.
It doesn't mean it's good to mug people.
It's bad to mug people.
But it's not anti-Semitic unless you know something more about the person.
But there was no other sign, right?
He didn't paint a swastika on them or say something.
You know, he didn't smear them or slur them as Jews.
He simply took their money.
So I think we need to be nuanced and careful about this.
I am the last person in the world to make light of anti-Semitism.
But I just think stretching this concept cheapens it.
And that can't be a good thing for people that despise anti-Semitism or any kind of bigotry.
And part of this, too, is it goes to the, I think, overall, the very short-term view of the Israeli government and their partisans all the time.
Lying and obfuscating and acting in a way that ultimately is to the detriment of the long-term viability of the Zionist project in the first place.
You know, if they would listen to their peaceniks, they could have given up the West Bank and the Gaza Strip to be a Palestinian state or, you know, 90 percent of a real one.
And, you know, help them have a prosperous society there and a place where the refugees can't have the right of return back to their homes in Jaffa and so forth.
That at least they could go to a nice West Bank and Gaza Strip and maybe settle for that and work something out.
Try to be good neighbors and be good sports about the thing.
But instead, because of this kind of thing, we're not even allowed to criticize them at all.
They end up getting away with bloody murder, but in a way that is basically self-sabotage.
And so now they've basically already annexed all the land from the river to the sea.
But what are they going to do with all these Palestinians?
There's millions of them.
It's basically a 50-50 split.
So now they have to throw away outright.
You know, you mentioned the nation state law.
Democracy is not in there anymore.
Now it's the Jewish state and that whole thing about Jewish and democratic.
Maybe not so much that.
And that's the biggest threat to the Israeli state of all.
So from their point of view, it's this kind of thing that really has set them up to fail.
The same way all the Republicans saying, shut up and worship the flag in 2002 is a big part of what helped get us into Iraq and break American power on the rocks or drowning in the sand of Iraq over there.
Just like we said would happen.
Right.
And, you know, after the 67 war, when those territories were acquired by the military, there were Israelis, high ranking Israelis and not left wingers, but people like David Ben-Gurion, who was the first prime minister, but by now was retired.
But others also, even inside the government of Levi Eshkol, that they said, you know, we can't hold on to these territories.
It's not a good idea because for reasons you just mentioned, we would be inheriting a large Palestinian population.
And so what happens?
And some even warned we're going to end up with an apartheid system.
These are people who are entirely pro-Israel.
These aren't people who want just one singular secular state or think the founding of Israel is illegitimate.
I didn't know that about Ben-Gurion, that he didn't want to stay in the West Bank.
Not that they love the Palestinians, you know, not that they love them.
They can still be racist toward the Palestinians and believe this, that we don't want them to be in Israel because that's a problem.
And, you know, maybe some would have said, well, just let's transfer them, in other words, kick them out.
But that would have been hard to do on the world scene.
They really wouldn't have gotten away with that.
And so what do you do?
You either have apartheid at some point.
You're going to have apartheid or you're going to have to make them complete citizens with total equal rights.
And then Jews eventually won't be in the majority.
The Palestinians have had a higher birth rate and all that, so they would outnumber the Jews.
So there were warnings about that.
Plus, they said, by the way, here's a French benefit if we can trade the land for peace.
And that's where that whole land for peace comes out, right?
We give back the territories and in return we have a formal peace treaty and stuff like that.
So there was definitely a view within the Israeli establishment that was debated, heavily debated, I'm sure.
And a lot of people can't believe that 51 years later they're still holding those territories.
And that's still surprising to people who were in the establishment or have links to the establishment.
They just never thought that would happen.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I was making the argument one day to Ramzi Baroud about, I think it was Ramzi Baroud, about how, you know, really, you know, there was a time for a two-state solution, maybe, you know, which is not his view, I guess.
But it seemed like at one point before the settlements had gobbled up so much of the West Bank to make it, you know, basically impossible without a civil war breaking out in Israel over the removal of those settlers and that kind of thing.
And then his answer is, no, see, actually, this is the Zionist project.
There is, you know, you kind of can argue your counterfactuals, but look at how it's played out.
They've taken every advantage.
They never saw, even after taking, you know, 78 percent of the whole thing.
And then after occupying, you know, in the 67 war, the rest of Palestine, that they never were good sports about it.
They never said, all right, all right, here, you know, fair is fair and whatever.
In any way, they always have taken the fullest advantage.
Eretz Israel, meaning, what, all the way to the Euphrates someday, till they, you know, colonize Kuwait or something.
And so, you know, basically, that is the project.
The Zionist project always has been, from the Nakba on, basically one continuous Nakba, that these Palestinians, they cannot be free.
Otherwise, the Zionist project will not stand.
So this is the only, you know, way that they can see to keep it going, is this permanent occupation, oppression and apartheid.
The flag of the Irgun, which was a pre-Israel, in other words, Zionist terrorist organization, and it ought to be called a terrorist organization.
They planted bombs and killed people and engaged in all kinds of violence against the British and against Arabs as well.
Once, yeah, once the British left Palestine, that party, that militia, which was run by Menachem Begin, who, of course, would later in the 70s become prime minister.
He then formed a political party.
The Irgun basically then converted into a political party in, you know, 48, called the Freedom Party in English, which then in 1988 merged with the Likud Party.
That flag showed Eretz Israel, the land of Israel, including all of Jordan.
So I don't know if it went to the Euphrates.
I don't think it went that far, but it showed Jordan as well.
So and the Israeli declaration of independence in 48 never specified its borders.
And while so so that's always been an issue, there was never a commitment to borders because there was an expansionist agenda.
Well, and that's part of why they can't be an official legal ally of the United States is because the law in America says you can't be an ally of ours unless your borders have been solidified and defined.
That way we know which line we're fighting over if we're going to fight for you.
Well, the idea was we're going to keep our options open.
I mean, the Zionist leaders who became Israel's leaders accepted the partition recommendation from the U.N. in 47, which gave 56 percent of Palestine to the organized Jewish people there who were trying to organize the state and the remainder to the Palestinians.
Now, they want the Jewish side wanted it all.
But the leaders were pragmatic and said, no, let's start with this.
This gets our foot in the door and then we'll see.
For for that very reason, the Palestinians and Arabs generally didn't accept the partition recommendation because they figured this that would be the beginning of the end.
And yet they were seen to be as the rejectionist.
Right.
Oh, you won't accept partition.
You won't.
You won't take only half.
It wasn't half, less than half.
You won't take some.
You're demanding the whole.
But the more hidden agenda, and it's not so hidden because you can you see it in the official documents and memoirs, diaries, et cetera, which have been exhaustively researched and written about.
That was just the opening step, the 56 percent.
And so we see what happens.
You're right now.
Now there's a well, it went to 78 percent, but it's actually more than 78 percent because Area C of the West Bank is another 60 is some 60 percent of the West Bank.
And Israel is claiming that and not even giving any amount of home rule to the Palestinians, unlike an area A and B, which are the remaining 40 some percent or less than 40 percent.
Yep.
And by the way, you know, someone in the Reddit group was asking, what's the best map to look at here?
And I had found a few good ones, but then someone came up and reminded me and came up with that map from the New Yorker article, the one that supposedly shocked Obama.
Yeah, where it said, look, when you combine, you know, the these sets of restrictions and these sets of restrictions and these sets of restrictions, this is what amounts to what is left.
And it is shocking.
Actually, I can't imagine it being surprising to anyone, but it is a pretty bleak representation.
And, you know, worse than most that you would see in terms of where they claim A, B and C are.
But there are other restrictions beyond that that really show you people really should take a look at that.
But so now back to the college campuses and all of that kind of thing, it seems like and this is how it's always going to be in pretty much in business and everything else, I guess.
But, well, that's kind of different.
But in free speech, where once you carve out exceptions, all of a sudden now you have a huge incentive structure for all kinds of special pleading for people to come and add themselves to the exceptions to free speech.
Where, you know, whoever says that, you know, who said in the first place this title, whichever that says that people can't say outright racist stuff on campus.
What if they do want to?
Why shouldn't they be able to?
What about reason will be left free to combat it?
And I'll be the first to concede that this can be a complicated issue.
Sure, the campus is supposed to be a place where there's free inquiry, uninhibited, unafraid, you know, unfearful freedom of inquiry.
On the other hand, I can see the case for a university administration to want to maintain a civil atmosphere.
So there's, you know, there can be a civil and uncivil way to engage in free inquiry.
So that's a very, you know, that's that's that's that's a tightrope.
And I don't claim to have any solution that if I was running a college, you know, I don't want people like screaming slurs at each other.
That doesn't sound right to me.
But I do want free and open inquiry.
So, you know, you got that.
And they should be able to throw a matter of behavior, not subject matter.
That's all.
You know, the federal government should not be putting its thumb on the scale.
I mean, there we can say that at the very least.
It shouldn't be putting its thumb on the scale by by implying even implying that if you criticize Israel, you're you're criticizing you're expressing hostility to Jews.
Qua Jews, you know, as Jews.
And, you know, I think people have also gone overboard this way, this idea of, oh, if anything offends me, that is actionable.
Because, you know, taking offense, that's a highly subjective thing.
And so I think that's a lot of nonsense.
Well, it seems like people on college campuses are highly incentivized to be crybabies now for whatever series of reasons.
Against that.
I mean, come on.
You're grown up by the time you're college.
You're you're you know, you're an adult.
Don't get so offended.
And, you know, ask yourself, am I should I really be offended?
I mean, look, there there were complaints like at Columbia University that there was a hostile atmosphere back in like 2004 or so against a Palestinian professors or Arab professors who were taught something about Israel and Palestine.
And we're all giving readings and on this.
And some Jewish students got offended.
One, I guess, maybe even got yelled at.
So they launched this whole campaign.
In fact, they did a documentary was done called Columbia Unbecoming, pointing out the rampant hostility toward Jewish students who support Israel on campus.
The university investigated it and they said they didn't they didn't see any Semitism.
But they said one professor on one occasion got angry at a student.
Others who witnessed these incidents didn't take it as anti-Semitic or as hostile.
So a lot of that is in the eyes of the so-called receiver, right?
The beholder.
And so do we want to now have like laws sort of enshrining that sort of thing?
And there are people like David Horowitz in his so-called Freedom Center and a new editorial writer and editor at the Washington New York Times about a year now, Barry Weiss.
She was involved in that effort on Columbia's campus.
They're going after professors who were sympathetic to the Palestinians, scholars, people who write stuff, stuff that can be criticized, stuff that they document.
And if you want to attack their documentation, great.
You know, a recent magazine just gave her a free speech award.
They gave her a Bostia prize.
So it's not a free speech prize.
It's a Bostia prize.
What for economics then?
Well, it has something to do with promoting free markets, I think.
I'd need to look at it.
It was I heard the interview with her done by Gillespie and they were talking about the Bostia prize.
It wasn't a free speech prize, but that's at least I don't know in particular.
But but people who are on this campaign have gone after a female woman professor at San Francisco State University.
Lawfare, which is a part of this constellation, has three times sued her and the school and Palestinian students or pro-Palestinian students for their for having, you know, meetings or rallies or literature tables, going and harassing them as being as creating a hostile atmosphere for Jews.
This is Rabab Abdul Hadi, an elegant woman who's a scholar.
And if somebody wants to attack her scholarship, fine.
But instead, they go after her for creating a hostile atmosphere for Jews.
What happened?
It's happened to Columbia.
It's happened with a scholar at Barnard College who an anthropologist who wrote a book about about Jewish claims to the to Palestine.
I mean, actual biological claims and had some things questioning that and also talking about how archaeology in Israel doesn't seem to respect Palestinian or Arab cultural artifacts or cemeteries.
You know, they just go bulldozing things in order to prove that, yes, we have roots here.
She writes a book about this to get that wins an award that's praised by other anthropologists and how much she's up for tenure.
There's an organized effort to stop her from getting tenure, which failed.
And then I would put into this Norman Figelstein, who was not an Arab, not a Palestinian.
He's a Jewish American, son of a son of Holocaust survivors.
Parents were in the Warsaw ghetto and then Auschwitz and one of the other camps.
He's got pretty good credentials in that regard.
He was denied tenure at DePaul University in Chicago because of people like Alan Dershowitz, who put on a huge campaign to stop him because of the stuff he writes, which is all well documented and has been praised by some pretty heavy hitting people.
Yes.
Same thing happened to Juan Cole when he was going to get hired at Yale.
He ended up having to stay at the University of Michigan.
And it was because of, I'm pretty sure it was because of Israel, not the other stuff he was writing.
I'll have to read up on that.
So if there's a hostile atmosphere, it's not toward Jewish students and Jewish professors.
It's it seems it's more toward people who sympathize with the Palestinians or outright, you know, Palestinians or Palestinian Americans or Muslims.
There are many more incidents against people like that.
And as I said, with this Pew poll, Muslims rank well below Jews on this poll about how do you feel about these various religious groups.
Jews are close or at the top.
And so it seems like a very threadbare case that they're making.
And it goes back to what I say.
This is just a campaign to weld into the in the people's minds the association of anti-Semitism with criticism of Israel in order to chill criticism of Israel and inhibit discussion.
And it's going to have an impact in the I don't know about the 2018 election.
It might because of Ocasio-Cortez, although she's backed away.
But it certainly is going to have some implication in 2020.
And if this bill, if these bills come to votes in the House and Senate, what's going to be said about any member of Congress who votes against the bill?
Imagine now you're going to run for reelection with your opponent saying, my my incumbent opponent voted against the official definition of anti-Semitism promulgated by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance.
Can we have a person like that in Congress?
Yeah, I don't know, man.
I kind of think that I think we're approaching have you at long last no sense of decency, sir, type McCarthyite moment here where this is just obviously too ridiculous.
I mean, I'm predicting I'm predicting a lot of backlash from this in both ways in causing more anti-Semitism, sadly, and also causing more criticism of Israel and more resentment against the Israel lobby in America.
But now you're going to try to tell us what we're allowed to say and not say and study and not study and all of these kinds of things.
I resent it.
Look at Britain.
Look at Britain.
I mean, I hope you're right, but I'm not counting the other side out.
Look what's happening in Britain, Britain, the Corbyn and the leaders of the Labour Party are backing away.
And there's now pretty strong indication from things that leaders have said to reporters that they are going to embrace all of the IHRA examples.
And that was the big objection that they didn't embrace the example.
See, they embrace the definition.
If people read the article, they'll see there's a difference between the 38 word definition, which is very confusing and vague, but it's not like crazy on its face.
It doesn't say anything about Israel.
What they didn't embrace were all of the examples, potential examples.
That's where they got flack.
Now, they lie about the Labour Party and say they rejected the definition.
No, they didn't reject the definition.
They just rejected all of the examples as written.
So if it's causing such a row there, I don't know why it wouldn't cause a row here.
We'll see.
I mean, we're different.
We're different.
Americans and British are different.
We'll see what happens.
I hope you're right.
But I wouldn't count the other side out.
Yeah.
Well, I mean, at least I hope there's going to be a fight about it.
Even if it does pass, you know, I hope that attention is drawn.
And again, you know, back to sort of repeating myself from the beginning.
All this criticism of Israel is coming from the left and libertarians, but mostly from the left this whole time.
And so that kind of cancels out denominators with the racism thing.
Leftists aren't racist or they wouldn't be leftists.
And so it must be something else.
And that kind of thing.
It's like accusing Donald Trump of being a Kremlin agent.
Just it doesn't really seem right since he's obviously an agent, mostly only of himself.
And, you know, the few other rich people that he identifies with.
But why would that be the Russians?
You know, he's a businessman from Manhattan, for Christ's sake.
That's whose interests he represents.
It's the same kind of thing here where just it doesn't pass the smell test, really.
You know, there are Nazis and then there's people who aren't Nazis, right?
I mean, give me a break.
Yeah, but, you know, what doesn't pass the smell test to you and me can easily pass the smell test to somebody else.
I just have to allow for that fact.
No, that's true.
I will believe it when I see it.
I'm watching.
By writing, I hope I'm helping to some extent by writing about this and I'll write about it again.
But I think we need to keep an eye on it.
I think we could be seeing our near future being played out in Britain and it has been very nasty.
I mean, the names that Corbyn's being called by members of his own party.
You know, I'm talking about profanity attached, you know, profane adjectives put before the word anti-Semite.
He is an effing anti-Semite, a leader of that party or a prominent person of that party has said.
And so it's really divided, you know, labor sympathizers in the UK, but others have gotten in on it, too.
I'm sure Tories and others are taking some part in this because, you know, there are people who don't want to see Corbyn become prime minister.
He's the Bernie Sanders.
So if you're a free anyone at all sympathetic to the free market, you don't want Corbyn to be, you know, running things because he's got a terrible domestic program.
So there are people who are happy to pile on, right?
Even if they don't care about the other issue, they're happy to pile on because they don't want Corbyn to be the prime minister.
And you've got a whole contingent in his own party, the Blairites, right, who are more centrist, like Bill Clinton types, who also don't want Corbyn and his left wingers to be to be running the party.
So they're happy to pile on.
So he's got a lot.
There's a lot going on here.
The most visible thing is this issue regarding Israel and anti-Semitism.
But you've got a lot of things going on there to try to sabotage him.
And it has been, you know, no holds barred.
They are firing every cannon and bazooka, you know, that they can at this guy and the people who are allied with him.
And I won't be surprised if we see similar things here.
I mean, look what happened.
Cory Booker wears a T-shirt, right?
Senator from New Jersey.
I'm sure he's got presidential ambitions.
He's caught, not caught.
He was out in a public demonstration or something wearing a T-shirt saying no walls in what, Israel or the West Bank.
I forget how it was.
He posed for a picture with some people and they were holding the sign in front of him.
But he was wearing a T-shirt.
I may have said something, but I don't think the sign mentioned Israel, though.
The T-shirt I saw on him said no walls, and then it made a reference to the West Bank and the Mexican border.
When he got flack for that, because he mentioned the West Bank, he said, oh, I didn't know what the T-shirt said or something weird like that.
And then Ocasio-Cortez, who had made a statement sympathetic to the Palestinians after one hundred and what is it, 54 Palestinians in Gaza were shot peacefully demonstrating.
She made a sympathetic statement about that.
And when she was called on it, she in interviews ended up saying, well, I'm not really an expert in this, you know, blah, blah, blah.
Sanders backed down to some extent after he made a sympathetic statement to Palestinians during his primary campaigns against Hillary Clinton.
But since then, he has criticized the conduct regarding Gaza.
So he's been kind of up and down.
I think he somewhat retreated and then he then he comes back again.
So who knows what he's going to end up doing if he runs for president?
He's been unpredictable.
We shall see.
But I'm not going to be surprised if we see what's happening in the.
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UK play out here and it's not going to be pretty.
Yeah.
You know, it's a fun kind of thought experiment about, I mean, he must be too old to run next time, but or to win next time anyway.
I don't know.
But if he had won last time, it would have been really interesting to see, you know, his position on Israel because he's certainly a Zionist, but certainly a two state guy.
And certainly, you know, interested enough and old enough to know the history of the colonization of that last 22% and all of that, as we've talked about.
And so, you know, and he cuts a great character of a Jew from Brooklyn, you know, in every way where he could play that card against Netanyahu so well if he wanted to.
Right.
They're like, what, are you calling me an anti-Semite?
You know what I mean?
He would have had a lot more freedom of action there.
And I think, you know, would have had at least a chance of trying to force the issue better than Obama or some weakling like George W. Bush who backed down.
For people that want to go at him, he's got some vulnerabilities.
You'll notice he doesn't really identify as Jewish.
When he was asked about religion during one of the debates, I think it might have been one of the town halls on CNN.
He was asked about religion and he kind of said, yeah, I'm religious.
And then one of them, Chris Cuomo said, well, you know, what do you mean?
What's what's your religion?
Yeah.
No, but still, I mean, if you're Jewish, he said, well, you know, we're all in this together.
We need to look out for each other.
Now, come on.
I guarantee Bernie Sanders is an atheist.
Yeah, but that doesn't matter.
The point is, if you try to call him an anti-Semite for being hard on Netanyahu over some settlements or something, it's not going to stick.
We'll see.
It's happening.
They even had Larry David was his, you know, caricature on TV or whatever, right?
This very Woody Allen Jewish character.
You could be right, but I could be right.
So we're just going to have to wait and see.
Well, I'm just saying, yeah, anyway, but he lost.
So it doesn't matter.
Hillary cheated.
And so he's not the president.
I'm not saying it would have been good in any other way.
I'm just saying it would have been interesting to see him face off against Netanyahu, because I think they probably wouldn't get along very well.
Because Bernie's kind of an old fashioned communist from an earlier era, you know?
We'll get a chance to see.
We might get a chance to see because he may run again.
You know, I couldn't figure out a way to shoehorn this part into the interview, but I just want to bring it up anyway, because it bothers me.
So yesterday I was watching the King of the Hill.
They had a few episodes in a row.
And then, but after that, it was the Daily Show.
But it was just like a collection of clips or something like that.
And so one of the things was he was talking about Jerusalem and Trump moving the embassy to Jerusalem.
And the part that pissed me off especially was where, you know, he's basically the gag is he's making fun of Trump for saying, I'm going to bring peace, peace, peace, peace.
Does this side want peace?
Does that side want peace?
Can Trump, the real estate tycoon, be the ultimate peace broker and bring peace?
And so then that's the frame of it, as though it's just a war, you know, basically.
And then he even says, Trevor Noah says, well, you know, the Israelis and the Palestinians have been fighting for so many years, all this time.
How's Trump going to bring peace?
And so, never mind the Trump part, that was the part of it is they couldn't say Israel and Palestine have been fighting, right, because that wouldn't work.
So they change it to just because there is no Palestine.
And they already lost.
They're occupied and conquered.
And so instead, they have to change it to the Israelis and the Palestinians.
But so you think that's what they're saying.
And then they immediately refer to at the Gaza border, some protesters have been shot.
And so now it's a border.
And so it really sounds like Palestine.
And then they show the map of Israel with the West Bank and the Gaza Strip are a different color, I guess, yellow on green or something like that.
And so, I mean, it's, it's like listening to George W. Bush talk, you kind of have to infer what he's implying.
But it sounds like what they're saying is that Palestine is this independent country here full of terrorists who are constantly at war against the Israelis.
And we the question is whether Trump can bring a peace agreement, you know, like this is the North and South Koreans or something like that.
And so they've been fighting a long time in place of the Israelis have been occupying what was left of Palestine on the West Bank and Gaza Strip for a long time.
That's peace is can we get and everybody already knows that's the parameters of the whole thing.
Can the Americans get the Israelis to pull out of the West Bank and to lift the siege on Gaza and let them have a state?
That's the question.
That's not it's not a peace agreement in a war.
But when you frame it like that, it makes it sound like there already is independent Palestine without saying it.
And it makes it sound then like obviously they're the aggressors because they're the ones who are brown and use terrorism.
And it's just amazing how much can be how much BS can be baked into a couple of offhand lines describing that situation in a gag about Donald Trump.
Right.
And, you know, Gaza, Gaza is not a distinct land or territory.
It was it was a line drawn basically by the people that came up with the UN partition.
It has no historical identity as a separate, you know, land in any sense.
It is just a strip.
It's a strip.
You know, they drew a line and made a little strip between that line and the Mediterranean Sea.
And and you're right.
It shouldn't be called a border.
Should we call it a fence?
Look, as I say in the article, Jewish critics of Israel call Gaza today a ghetto and a concentration camp.
And I have the links if you if anyone wants to see it.
It's what it is.
I mean, I to this day, you'll hear people say and I see it on Facebook answering me.
Israel withdrew from Gaza in 2005.
That's nonsense.
Well, in a sense, they physically withdrew.
But it's like the prison guards leaving the prison and just taking up positions, you know, encircling the prison and controlling everything.
Entry, entry and exit of anybody or anything.
If you want to call that withdrawal, fine, but don't put some benign sound on it.
They just turned it into an open air prison or, as I say, ghetto or concentration camp.
But those words are coming from and they bomb all the time.
Jewish critics and land access, sea access and air access are completely controlled by the state of Israel.
So if you want to call that withdrawal and independence for Palestinians, I don't know.
I don't understand words because that's not what those words mean.
Yeah.
Well, and that's the whole thing is just to keep the waters muddy and just to keep the whole thing kind of confusing.
Yeah.
I mean, you should say keep the waters muddy because kids, they're dying of poison water because they can't fix the sanitation plants.
Right.
Not just kids, adults, too.
But, you know, I just read a quote the other day of Trump saying that, you know how it is.
Sunnis and Shias and Jews and Arabs and whatever, they've been fighting for thousands of years.
Just a perfect trope for him to believe and repeat and just write this all off as, you know, I guess we're taking these guys side because they're whiter.
Well, that's just a way of saying, look, you know, to the average person, you're busy.
Don't try to sort this out.
You're not going to be able to sort it out.
So don't pay attention to it.
And we have to we have to identify that every every single time.
Yep.
And in fact, you know, I try to bring that up whenever somebody like in an interview asks me about this, that, you know, that was my frame of reference before it was God gave us this land.
No, God gave us this land.
So it's not even a fight over property titles.
It's a fight over magical ones.
And so I'm count me as disinterested in this stupid fight.
You know, but then I something that actually really mattered when I began to understand it was that.
No, really.
One side is just saying this is my land in every sense.
Ask John Locke and Sheldon Richmond.
They'll tell you.
I wrote it with my hoe.
And so I hold my row.
I. Yeah, it's mine.
But no, it's the Israelis who are coming down from Poland and from Germany and from Russia and from New York and saying, I have a magical super property right based on thousands year old religion that trumps your plain old property, right?
The real kind.
And so it's not two sides claiming magical property rights.
It's only one side.
The other side has the regular natural kind.
And that's why they have to claim the supernatural extra higher.
I say the quote, didn't I?
The higher level of property right is because they're not from there.
They're the ones who are stealing.
And so they need B.S. to justify it.
You know, I object to the the cherry, the mythological, the cherry picking of myths.
So you have people say God gave this land to me.
The opening lines of the theme song from the movie Exodus, which I remember seeing as a kid, I think 1960, all excited.
This land is mine.
God gave this land to me.
OK, that's those are the opening words.
And that's almost like an anthem.
It's not the anthem of Israel, but it's almost like a second anthem, maybe.
Well, if you're going to invoke this this mythology, religious mythology, let's go all the way with it.
First of all, God gave it to you by doing what?
By telling Joshua to take the army in and commit genocide against the people who are living in the land of Canaan.
So there's that.
And then if you're going to say God gave the land to me, why didn't you acknowledge it?
Also, God kicked you out of the land for your for sins.
Right.
For not being good.
Good.
Hebrews didn't call them Jews back then.
And that's when they went to Babylon, Babylonia.
And and they were only supposed to come back when the Messiah returns.
And as far as I can tell, he hasn't returned yet because the dead were going to be raised when the Messiah returns.
So what by what right did they go back now?
God didn't tell him to go back.
So if you're going to buy the myth by the whole myth, don't just pick out the little parts you like and ignore the rest of it.
Yeah.
Well, and, you know, I don't know if we ever talked about this.
I know I mentioned on the show in one context or another.
But remember how the first al-Qaeda attack on America kind of proto al-Qaeda, Egyptian Islamic jihad guys.
Their first attack on the United States in the post Cold War era.
It was actually in 1990 was the assassination of Rabbi Kahane, who the Israeli Supreme Court had banned his party for being fascists.
And he was one of the guys who was saying, let's annex the West Bank and kick all the Palestinians out of what's left of Palestine to Jordan and then be done with that.
Back then, that was considered fascism and he was banned.
But Mike Wallace interviewed him and he says to Mike Wallace, look, you believe in all of this, Thomas Jefferson, natural rights, all men are created equal and all this.
I don't believe that it's me and my people versus everyone else and get the hell out of my way or I'll kill you.
Simple as that.
I just I don't believe what you believe about this enlightenment and property rights and blah, blah, blah.
No, it was a reaction to the Enlightenment.
The Enlightenment was about equal rights, inclusion and the threat there among some Jews, not all, not all Jews.
There was a whole movement, Enlightenment Judaism, but the more reactionary Jews feared assimilation.
Golda Meir once said the great two greatest dangers facing the Jews are annihilation and assimilation.
And think about that for a moment, what that really does mean.
And you see this, that a little if you're of that view, if you have the mayor view and keep in mind that the intermarriage among American Jews, like 50 percent marrying outside the faith.
If you believe that assimilation is as great a danger as annihilation, then you need a little anti-Semitism because in a world where there was zero anti-Semitism, you're going to get, it seems to me, more and more what looks like assimilation because people then become completely normal members of their societies.
No, they may still go to synagogue on Saturday and maybe they keep kosher at home or something like that, but they may do what Moses Mendelssohn said, really one of the early reformed Jews of Germany in the 19th century, where he said, you know, be a Jew at home and be a German outside.
There's a fear of that.
There's a fear of the loss of identity.
And this loss of identity is very important in Israel.
You know, everybody knows that the Orthodox rabbis and the Orthodox parties control marriage and divorce in Israel.
And that's often been attributed to the great power that the Orthodox have in Israel.
But I've learned from different people like Gideon Levy and some others that that's actually not true, that when they were given that power when the first Israeli government was set up, the Orthodox had no political power whatsoever.
But the labor rights who were in charge of things wanted that because they wanted to reinforce identification.
They didn't want intermarriage.
There can't be legal intermarriage in Israel.
A Jew cannot marry a non-Jew in the state of Israel.
You've got to do it under the rules of the Orthodox rabbis.
And so it wasn't that they had the clout to demand this power to be part of a coalition government.
It predates their power.
It was a determination to maintain something they could call Jewish identity.
And if you have intermarriage, that risks Jewish identity, that risks assimilation.
And so does it mean – look, Herzl, who was a completely secular guy from Hungary whose family was – his parents were secular, who didn't have his son circumcised and used to have a Christmas tree in his house, covered the Dreyfus trial in France in the late 19th century, which was the framing of a French Jewish officer.
I presume because he was Jewish.
I think that's the understood reason.
I have no reason to doubt that.
He covered that as a journalist, and he says during that time, it's the anti-Semites that make us Jewish.
I mean think about that for a minute.
That's what makes somebody Jewish, that they're anti-Semites and don't like them?
That's a pretty weak reed to hang your identity on.
Somebody doesn't like me, so I have to now adopt this historical identity.
So I think there are all kinds of problems there.
And I think one of the reasons that every few years there's some new fear arises of a new anti-Semitism or a new wave of anti-Semitism is just for this reason, to keep people close to Israel.
I think that's it.
It has nothing to do with God.
It has nothing to do with the Torah, all the things that the prophetic Judaism talked about.
Well, it was pre-Torah maybe, but maybe not.
Anyway, those used to be the pillars, right?
God and the Torah and the commandments and all that stuff, the law.
That's all gotten displaced, which is just what the Jewish anti-Zionists warned against.
They said it's going to end up with a counterfeit Judaism.
God and Torah are going to be kicked out of the temple.
And what's going to be in its place?
The state of Israel.
Or as I like to say, blood and soil.
God and Torah have been kicked out in place of blood and soil.
And I use that term very deliberately.
Think about it, blood and soil.
Judaism is now regarded, Jews is now, that's now regarded as a biological people, not a religious community.
And by soil you mean somebody else's property.
Soil means, yeah, Palestine.
So it is a blood and soil, and it's a reactionary pre-Enlightenment view.
Yeah.
By the way, I found that quote.
I had it right in front of me.
State Attorney Harold Arnon, there is a higher normative hierarchy.
That's the supernatural property right of Jewish Israelis over Palestinians.
Even in the West Bank.
Never even mind so-called Israel proper.
But even in the West Bank.
Yeah, you have property rights and everything, but we have the super kind.
You know, like George III had the divine right of kings.
And that's why Americans were supposed to bow down and do what he said.
That kind of thing.
All right, Sheldon.
Well, we're over an hour and a quarter here.
I guess we ought to call it quits, but good talk.
Great article.
I hope everybody will help pass it around.
Again, it's at libertarianinstitute.org, the TGIF column.
It's called Defining Antisemitism, Threatening Free Speech.
Thanks again, Sheldon.
My pleasure.
Thanks, Scott.
All right, y'all.
Thanks.
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