“Am I Antisemitic?” Candace Debates Jewish Comedian
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Alright, happy Monday everybody.
I got into a lot of trouble.
I was overseas in Europe and somehow I was trending worldwide because I made this statement.
I wrote this. No government anywhere has a right to commit a genocide ever.
There is no justification for a genocide.
I can't even believe this needs to be said or is even considered the least bit controversial to state.
Apparently it was controversial to state.
People got really angry.
I was being yelled at.
And so now it's time for us to weigh in by having a guest on the show.
His name is Ami Kozak.
He is pro-Israel.
He's also a comedian. And he was upset by my tweet.
We're going to talk about that.
That's what's coming up today on Candace Owens.
Do you know what really sucks about this Palestine versus Israel thing?
What I would say is just that nobody's actually having conversations.
It's just people screaming at each other, calling each other's names.
You disagree with me, you're pro-Hamas.
If you disagree with me, you're for the genocide of the Palestinians.
I have said from the very beginning, I find a lot of that to be disingenuous, and there actually needs to be more conversation, more speech, and more understanding for how people are feeling, because...
As is the case when every single time any of these circumstances comes around, a lot more people are in the middle than we're led to believe if you're reading the headlines or if you are reading Twitter, which is an insane place to be.
So if you guys didn't know, last week I was in Europe.
I had to go to Madrid for a wedding, and I tweeted something that I could have never in a million years have imagined would have gone so viral.
Here is the tweet that sets the world on fire.
I tweeted,"'No government anywhere has a right to commit a genocide ever.'" There's no justification for a genocide.
I can't believe this even needs to be said or is even considered the least bit controversial to state.
Now, to be clear, I was not expressly talking about any government, really other than my own, After I heard something that Congressman Brian Mast had stated, which I thought was incredibly dehumanizing, but also listening to the rhetoric on Twitter across the board, there are people that just don't think Israelis are people.
There are people that don't care that Palestinians are actually people.
And it's been something that has been especially disturbing for me.
When we're talking about children, people tearing down posters of Israeli children, as we've covered on this show, people that are saying, who cares if a Palestinian child dies?
Oh, well, they're just a human shield.
It's been gross on both sides, there's no question.
Well, I tweeted this morning a clip Welcome to my show!
Candice, thank you for having me.
Interesting circumstances to be having me.
And we're wearing the same outfit, which is awkward, but I didn't expect to come under these circumstances.
But I am glad and I appreciate that you're having me on.
Thank you. Yeah. So I do want to say, by the way, Ami is a comedian.
This is not what he regularly does.
And this is something that he is just obviously passionate about and he is being impacted by.
And so that's where I think that's probably the best thing to do is that he's not a career politician.
He's speaking to you as somebody who feels that he's being impacted by this situation.
I think it's fair to say that you have been upset with me, perhaps not for what I have said or more for what I have not said.
Do you want to explain? I'll read the tweet that I sent this morning that you responded to, and we'll actually show the clip of Queen Raina that I was discussing so that people have context.
So I tweeted that I agree with Kareem Rania's assertion that antisemitism is being weaponized
in order to silence critics and bully people into compliance.
That Charlie Kirk, Elon Musk, and Thomas Massey have recently been smeared as antisemites
as proof of this charge.
This is the same behavior that we saw from Black Lives Matter activists
and the threat of being labeled a racist or a white supremacist was being used
to shut down legitimate questions about the funding and intentions of the organization,
which in time proved to be fraudulent.
I've never been a person that is fearful to state the truth and to call out the people in organizations that are engaging in silencing tactics, even when the cost of doing so meant that I was caricatured by my own community as a race traitor.
We have a right to hear any and every political debate, free from threats of smears.
My position on this has not and will not shift ever.
More speech, not less.
And if you don't mind, can we just pop in and show what exact clip I'm talking about?
Because you know the internet will then find something crazy that Kareem Rania has said, and then suddenly they're going to be like, you agree with this.
I don't know anything else she said.
I was simply agreeing with this statement that she made.
Let's show that clip right now.
And what we've seen in recent years is the charge of antisemitism being weaponized in order to silence any criticism of Israel.
So defenders or supporters of Israel who cannot defend Israel's actions or conduct, they revert to shutting the conversation down by equating criticism of Israel with antisemitism.
Let me be very, very clear.
Being pro-Palestinian is not being antisemitic.
Being pro-Palestinian does not mean you're pro-Hamas or pro-terrorism.
Okay, so what do you disagree with that she said and what do you disagree with that I've said?
Okay, so what I'll start by saying is that I'll tell you what you want to hear.
It is true that the reactionary immediate response to anything critical or anything touching a certain subject as antisemitism is an unproductive thing to do in general.
And depending on the context of what we're talking about, there are subjects that can be discussed.
And I think leveling that charge too loosely can be counterproductive and can diminish real antisemitism when we see it.
But when we see real antisemitism, to have the reverse instinct to shy away from it and not call it like it is, it has the exact same counterproductive effect.
So my question to you is, Whenever it seems like when you feel this collective pressure to think something or feel something, you have this instinct to question it or be suspect of it.
So in the case of, you know, in some cases, you're correct.
And in other cases, I think In the interest of going against the grain, and I'm asking you the question, like, is there a sense for you that you feel like you need to question something?
Even when it's right in front of your face, people ripping down posters, people calling for the annihilation of Jews.
When we're talking about anti-Semitism here, we are not talking about criticizing Israeli policy.
Israelis have been doing that in Israel for the past year and a half, and no one said these Israelis in the streets protesting were anti-Semitic.
What we're talking about is in the context of October 7th, And then the subsequent celebration of those attacks on college campuses, the harassment of Jewish students on campus, and the celebration of the annihilation of the Jewish state worldwide, we are now talking about not only the double standard that Israel faces in defending itself, as opposed to any other country, we're talking about the double standard that anti-Semitism gets versus other forms of bigotry.
That's what I'm talking about.
I hear you. And the first thing that I want to say is I did condemn the October 7th attacks, just like everybody else did on this show, right when they happened.
So there's...
I don't know. To me, it does feel like we're fighting a little bit of a boogeyman.
People say, well, you didn't condemn the Octobers.
I think everybody agrees that...
Save for the fringe, who there are actually, of course, you can find people that are celebrating, they're happy that Israelis are dead.
But I think the overwhelming majority of people are not happy that innocent civilians were killed on October 7th.
Certainly not on this show.
I can say that without question.
Of course not on this show, but you would agree that on college, there's a professor at Columbia who wrote an article praising the events of October 7th as a glorious attack.
And the reaction to that on the whole is sort of this What's the, I'm not saying to you per se, but I'm just saying what us Jews in the community are responding to is this pass that anti-Semitism seems to get of, well, let's think about it.
I don't know, that professor's still there.
And you would agree that if a white supremacist got up there at Columbia, even if he was tenured and wrote an article praising Charlottesville tiki torch carriers or some white supremacist attack, he'd be gone in a second.
So there's a double standard when it comes to Attacks and racism against Jews that people seem to want to wonder about and wonder what the context is.
And it's very troubling to see that.
So that's what we're talking about.
We're not talking about criticizing Israeli policy in particular.
And I think that for anyone, and even so, like I think you, yes, you and all good natured people criticize the events of October 7th.
To go straight to the instinct of what Americans should do, don't let this warmongering distract you or get you into another war.
I mean, there's a human element to just being sympathetic to the fact that That the targeting of Jews and the worst crime since the Holocaust has just happened.
There's a little bit of a window of solidarity with those people who've been butchered and slaughtered in a very different way than what the IDF is doing in response to it.
Yeah, so what I would say first and foremost is I think there's a lot that's happened in the context of American history and on American universities that we can't forget.
So I think for some people, and first off, I still don't think that you're disagreeing with anything that Queen Rania has said or anything that I've said in terms of we're getting a little too loose with the anti-Semitism claims.
I believe that. My tweet was specifically about Thomas Massey, who is a congressman who is now basically being harassed by AIPAC for consistently voting the way that he has voted his entire time he's been in Congress for every country.
He's treating everybody the same, actually, not treating Israel any different.
That should be commended in Congress, actually.
Charlie Kirk asked a question.
He's the most pro-Israel possible person that is on college campuses.
Talk about a college campus ally.
He asked a question about the military failures on October 7th, and he got castigated as an anti-Semite by the National Review.
I'm calling that out because Charlie Kirk is a friend.
He's also radically pro-Israel.
It was sloppy. It was wrong, and it shouldn't have happened.
Regarding college campuses...
That was more of a timing issue than a principle issue.
Imagine going to the funeral of these people and saying, like, imagine a family had a Imagine somebody had a family whose family was wiped out and you show up at the funeral saying, we need to get to the bottom of this murder.
How are they killed? There was just a tactlessness to it.
Not that he's not pro-Israel in principle.
I think the record shows that, of course, Charlie has been very pro-Israel.
And I'm not questioning that. But for me, I think people objected to that more if we're dissecting it as an issue of tact.
This has just happened, and now you're on Patrick McDavid saying, was there a stand-down order?
It's like, look, we're going to get all of that.
Well, National Review basically implied that he was anti-Semitic.
They didn't say it was a timing or a tact issue, and that's why I rushed to defend him, because it's like, this is a kid that's put in a decade of his life defending pro-Israel causes.
If you're throwing him under the bus and asking why other people won't be allegiant to you, well, this is a good example of why, because we're seeing how How Charlie Kirk is being treated and he has been unbelievably pro-Israel and even his heart.
And when he was asking these questions was pro-Israel.
What happened here? Why did so many die?
I know how quickly I could get across there.
The military failed the people.
I mean, those are good questions to ask.
You know, I would ask these questions as if it was my family member, I would want to know.
I would say they could be alive.
You might not want to know at the funeral.
You know what I mean? You might want a minute to grieve.
And I think Where people's inartful or imprecise critiques of him from the National Review came from was a place of real pain because in the midst of it, it's like literally, I don't know, it was in the raw days following October 7th, he wants an investigation and all that.
And that will inevitably happen.
Of course, we all do want that.
But at that moment, when we're getting footage of children who had siblings killed in front of them and parents murdered in front of them and their scorched bodies on the floor...
I don't think anybody in the Jewish community or outside of that who was sympathetic to the Jewish community wanted to hear any of those things.
So I think that was a matter of tact, if we could just kind of settle what the issue was.
Yeah, and that's totally fine, and it could have been tact, and we could disagree on it, but it was, you know, what he endured I thought was really unfair for what he does for pro-Israel causes.
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That's taxnetworkusa.com slash Candace.
But just to move back to the university discussion, there are a lot of people in America that are sitting here going, okay, well, can you answer why Jews are so special?
Because as white people in this country on university campuses, we are being taught that we are not allowed to have a voice.
We have had to endure exactly what you're talking about, BLM. We've endured much worse than you have because it's in the actual textbooks.
We are being told that we are systematically racist, that we are born wrong because of the color of our skin,
and if we say anything, we'll lose everything.
This is the typical experience on white campuses.
So people, this is not whataboutism.
This is, like, actually what we have been fighting for years.
So it sort of arrived, as I think for a lot of Americans, a surprise when they're saying,
well, now that it's about Israel, which is something that's overseas,
we need to, you know, hand these university professors, we need to do something about this issue.
Why weren't we trying to correct course on this issue?
Why weren't donors pulling their funding out of these universities?
Why weren't these same things being said for these last, I would say, eight years of rampant BLM, white man can't do anything right, actively being taught in the classrooms?
So there are people that are asking that question.
Now, I'm not here to answer that question.
That's an answerable question, though, I think.
And it's not because... Um, anti-white racism is just as evil as anti-Jewish racism to say that, you know, in these groups we're saying, um, when you can get on Twitter, uh, within the past few years and say anything you want about white people, that's not to be done in the same way as Jews.
But look, like white people as a whole, it's very hard to sort of, uh, identify what the singular white community is, but there is a identifiable Jewish community that is targeted.
What do you mean by that?
What do you mean it's difficult to identify a white community?
I don't know. There's like, you know, as far as the common, you know, culture, religion and all that, it goes across, it's very broad.
So I just think when you're seeing an organized effort to call out discrimination from the Jewish community, it is not to dismiss other forms of BLM's disgusting rhetoric or making excuses for judging people based on race and calling white people oppressors.
But you don't see an organized effort to call it out.
Both things can be true.
Did you use your voice and your platform to speak out against anti-white racism as it was happening for these last four years when they were burning down college campuses when white conservatives were coming to speak?
When they were burning people in effigy when white conservatives were coming to speak?
When they were marching and they were breaking in and Antifa was breaking into college campuses talking about white men always being the oppressor?
Did you use your platform to speak out against that?
Well, I didn't quite have a platform as of yet until more recently to be speaking out again.
But again, I'm a Jew, and therefore it's unfair to disqualify or invalidate.
Everyone has subjective things that are more valuable to them.
The fact that my family, my community, my...
Do you love your own children and your own parents more than other people on the street?
Yes, and that's perfectly understandable.
Well, I mean, that's kind of the point.
No, it doesn't mean objectively it's not all wrong.
Yeah, it is all wrong, but why is it that— Let me finish the question.
Let me let you finish.
You're right.
If I was having a conversation on a podcast, I've been critical of all this stuff, all
the woke nonsense for a really long time and this double standard.
And I think that what you're seeing on college campus now is the culmination of the manifested
ideas of the far left idea of oppressor and oppressed and putting Israel into that lens
that Israel is the white settler colonialist power that is the oppressor and the Palestinians
are the necessarily the victim and therefore anything that they do is virtuous.
It's fully consistent with these, with these discussing ideas that have been leveled at
what you're talking about.
So I don't think there, I think there's an allyship there about talking about judging
people not based on immutable characteristics, but as individuals.
And I think these ideas are all coming from stemming from the same place.
The anti-Semitism of the left is the same hatred towards the West, towards the United States, towards the idea of who we Who we put into the oppressor class justifies not just Hamas atrocities towards Israelis, but the bourgeoisie against the proletariat—the proletariat against the bourgeoisie, excuse me. It justifies all these far-left atrocities, and that's what it's coming from.
So I want to take a stand against all of that.
Now, when it comes close to home for me and people are calling for—and I have family and friends in Israel and people are calling for me, yes, it's going to hit a certain nerve because that's like someone saying a friend of yours was attacked or a family member was attacked.
It's going to hit in a different way.
It doesn't make it objectively less wrong, but subjectively.
Don't invalidate my personal experience just because other people are also a victim to the same problems.
But I'm not invalidating it.
I'm actually explaining something because you went on the attack on me, which we're going to get to your tweet, basically saying that I haven't said enough on behalf of Jews.
Well, I'm not Jewish, okay?
So why is it okay that you haven't been using your platform to speak out against white people for the last four years and they've had to endure a bunch of stuff on college campuses, you know, which I have because my son and my children are half white and half black and they're going to have to deal with this world of being told that one is a victim and one is the oppressor.
So I was passionate about that.
I was passionate about the BLM stuff because I'm a black American.
It was my experience. What happened was wrong, okay?
But I didn't then go around and find Jewish people who weren't saying enough and say, well, obviously, this is what you must think because you haven't used your platform to say this.
You haven't said the right words.
That's giving you ownership to my voice, right?
No, but you are speaking about this issue.
So you're coming into this lane to talk about Israel and making commentary and stuff like that.
So if you were not saying much and I was seeking you out to say, hey, Candace, why aren't you talking about this?
You'd have a point. But you are talking about these issues.
No, I actually have not.
I actually have not.
What I have said is that explicit calls for genocide, which was stunning to me to see that in Congress, are completely wrong.
It is frankly crazy.
I have not weighed in on the IDF's response in the same way that I have consistently said through every war, Ukraine and Russia, I don't want to be involved.
I have said I don't want to be involved in Israel and Palestine, all these conflicts.
Okay.
single tweet or a single comment on IDF's response in Palestine.
I haven't said a single thing about that.
I have said it is always sad when a child dies.
And the lack of humanity that I have seen from both sides has been very troubling for
me.
But to say that I have to weigh in and suddenly wave an Israeli flag and say things that,
you know, because you decide that you get to use my platform because it's personal to
you, how is that fair to people?
How is that fair? And then to then go a step further and to suggest that it might be anti-Semitic, which is basically silence is violence, is a leftist tactic, to me feels very extreme.
Very extreme. I think maybe it's that you weren't aware to the extent that which you are weighing in when you say the things that you've been saying on Twitter.
For instance, even in saying, like, if a year ago or out of the context of October 7th you had made that statement about genocide, fair enough, but did you really not think, given the accusations of genocide being leveled against Israel continually by the far left, which is completely nonsensical, when in fact it's the Hamas Charter that specifically, explicitly calls for the annihilation of Israel and Jews worldwide, and yet they're leveling at The Israel side that they're trying to commit suicide, for you to say a statement like that without any contextualization as to where it's coming from, it's surprising to me that you would be surprised by the response and not thinking it's just a provocation or a contrarian sort of stance.
I don't think it's a contrarian stance to say that genocide is always wrong no matter what government is calling for it, especially when it was just a few tweets away from when I stated that what Brian Mast said was wrong and abhorne and should be condemned.
And I still feel that what he said should be condemned.
Let's just play the Brian Mast tweet that I was ranting about because it's just shocking to hear someone pretend that there are no civilians in Palestine.
That's not even a claim that the Israeli government is making, you know?
You can argue whether or not- No, right to the contrary, we're saying that the civilians in Palestine are being used as spin shields.
Yes, yes. So Brian Mast's statement was extraordinary in that he was the first person to suggest that there were no civilians, and that was insane to me.
And I had tweeted leading up to it about Brian Mast and how wrong what he said was, and I literally said that it was genocidal.
This is genocidal language that we're starting to see.
And I do want, in case people didn't hear what Brian Mast said, which I am being critical of my own government in this circumstance, to Let's just roll the clip really quickly so people can hear what he said in Congress.
As a whole, I would encourage the other side to not so lightly throw around the idea of innocent Palestinian civilians, as is frequently said.
I don't think we would so lightly throw around the term innocent Nazi civilians during World War II. I was stunned by that.
I thought that was the most despicable thing that I've ever heard.
I've never heard anyone in Congress deny the fact that there are obviously innocent Palestinian civilians, there are obviously innocent Israeli civilians.
If you want to debate how many innocent civilians are going to be killed when you're fighting terrorism, that's one thing.
But when you start using language to suggest that there are none, you are basically setting the grounds to say...
If we kill all of them, it doesn't really matter because none of them were innocent.
And that is despicable.
And I had to call it out because that's a Republican.
It's on my side.
And it's something that I disagree with.
And, you know, I just thought it was despicable.
Can I ask you a question on the subject of, like, moral equivalence?
Because there's been all this sort of temptation, even from good-hearted people, to draw a sort of moral equivalence.
Like, this is just some cycle of violence.
What do you mean?
Do you draw a moral equivalence between what happened on October 7th and what Israel's doing in response?
I wouldn't use the term moral equivalence, but what I would say is that there absolutely should be a debate, a full-throated debate in a conversation about where the line gets drawn.
If somebody commits 9-11 and we lose 3,500 people, does that give us the permission to kill a million Iraqi civilians like we did?
And I think that that's an academic discussion that should be had.
And wanting to have that discussion doesn't make somebody, you know, an Islamophobe or make somebody, you know, a genocidal maniac.
It almost is required to have that discussion.
These are very serious discussions that should be had.
I... And I give pause when people pretend like there is no, like it just doesn't matter.
If we have to annihilate every single person to avenge 125 people, 1500 people, whatever, then it's totally fine.
That doesn't feel right to me.
Right. Well, in the case of 9-11 that you brought up, I mean, it was a lot more amorphous and unclear who the enemy was, where it was located, who was supporting it.
In this case with Israel, it's right next door and they know that these regimes have been built up by Iran over the years and have continually attacked Israel for decades and Israel has constantly faced existential threat.
It's very clear where Israel's enemies lie and what Israel and who Israel has to fight in order to defend itself.
It's not like it's Israel's making this policy of where do we go?
Where should we go? Like we know where this came from.
And therefore, I think when we are unclear on the moral difference, then what that risks doing is confusing Murder and self-defense.
Confusing aggression and retaliation.
And those are huge moral, dangerous moral mistakes to make.
It's tragic what happens in war when innocent people die on both sides.
but one has to look at accountability.
And all of these people that we mourn for and grieve for when we see these horrific images of war
on the Palestinian side and on the Israeli side, all of those people were alive
on October 4th, 5th, and 6th.
And I think everybody is forgetting that context and forgetting what has brought this on.
There was a ceasefire on October 4th, 5th, and 6th.
And in Israel, retaliating to defend itself, for some reason it gets held to this impossible standard.
Even when it tells people to leave, when it tries to get people to evacuate,
when it drops leaflets and Hamas terrorists force people to stay, to maximize civilian casualties,
to win the narrative of propaganda that the word genocide can get just thrown at Israel
amongst the far woke leftist circles and celebrated by people who would be slaughtered
by Hamas to begin with.
Very strange bedfellows that it creates, but they win the propaganda where they weigh.
I think to make these moral confusions is very, very dangerous.
Well, I think it's dangerous to not have a conversation about where this could lead to.
Because if you told me that 1,500 Israeli civilians led to World War III, you know, I think we should probably have a conversation about that.
And I think when people are asking for that conversation, they're being called anti-Semitic, which is insane.
I've seen this with Vivek Ramaswamy.
You know, he asked, you know, what is the plan?
Okay, you've identified this is the terrorists.
What is your plan of attack?
I'm glad you asked the question, Candace.
Sorry, you're triggered by the fact that Russia.
Thank you for asking that question.
No, no, but wait one second.
Wait one second.
The history of America in these recent conflicts, we haven't been winning, right?
So we go in there, there's no plan.
It's just to fight terrorism, rah, rah, rah.
Russia must be defeated.
Okay, now we're quietly talking peace talks now that we've killed an entire generation
of Ukrainian young men that should not have had to die because there should have been
a plan and understanding of what could actually be accomplished in the region.
We just spent 20 plus years in Afghanistan.
We killed American soldiers, American sons, American daughters.
Like you said, there was no clear plan.
That's a problem. I'm not okay with there being no clear plan after 9-11.
I'm not okay with, well, we're in Iraq for weapons of mass destruction.
never mind, we actually completely got that wrong, killed a million Iraqi civilians, and now we're
going to jump into Afghanistan for 20 years only to give them the billions of dollars, trillions
of dollars in weaponry from American tax. I'm actually never okay with there not being a plan,
and I've been consistent in this. It's fair to call me an isolationist. I've been consistent
in not wanting to be involved in any of these conflicts, but I think what's happening now
is that because there is this understandable anger and understandable rage, you say,
you know, my relatives are there. Anytime you can attach something personally, you can't help but
to suspend some level of rationality where you just say, I want revenge, right? And I think that
because there's not a, if you're saying that there's, you don't know where it's going to end,
you know, now you've got Lebanon and they're talking and you've got Erdogan over in Turkey
and he's giving speeches, and this could put us in the middle of a huge conflict. So it is
incumbent upon us to have, or at least our governments and our congressmen to have a full
throated debate and understanding of exactly what Israel's goals are. If we are going to the people
that are funding this, which we are, right? Like if you're going to assume, say billions of dollars
is going overseas, every American has a right to comment and to ask questions. Of course.
What are you, if you're making an argument about what the logistics should be and not to be
impulsive and to be strategic, fine.
But don't lose sight of where the moral standard is in this fight.
I'm not saying support Israel because I personally have a vested interest in it.
There's a moral difference between Israel and its enemies.
There is a moral difference in this fight.
It is not a two-sided, tit-for-tat thing.
The surrounding enemies of Israel since Israel's creation in 1948 and the modern manifestation of the current Jewish state have sought its annihilation, and they've attempted to do that, and they're very explicit in their efforts to do that.
So the idea of deliberately targeting civilians, like what happened on October 7th, torturing them, butchering them, you do not see is really the idea of dragging civilians through the streets to mobs of cheering crowds.
You do not see streets in Israel named after suicide bombers or candies held out in the streets of Tel Aviv.
You have to understand that by the standards of self-defense, and if you agree that Israel has a right to defend itself, then everything to be put out to be critical and to just take that stance without Full context or maybe just trying to listen and understand from people who are maybe closer to the subject.
That is where I think it's very troubling for people because Israel is the size of New Jersey, surrounded by 22 Arab nations, 57 Muslim countries in the world.
It's a sliver. The only Jewish state in the world.
And what we're seeing now is like the case for a Jewish state has never been more clear given the rise and spikes of hate crimes and anti-Semitism against Jews and seeing how vulnerable the population could be that 75 years ago there was an attempt to wipe them out.
So the case for Israel has never been stronger and yet they're using Israel – the hostility towards Israel is used as the cover for a lot of disgusting, abhorrent behavior and anti-Semitism that you've condemned in terms of ripping down posts of the dehumination of Israelis and Jews.
So what I'm saying to you is there's a moral standard here.
We got into World War II also and World War II was a terrible thing, but we had to defeat the Nazi regime.
For the sake of humanity. We both, I think, would agree on that.
So to be an isolationist in principle, I mean, I would want a world of trade and prosperity and peace.
But if you have regimes that don't believe in that and don't have those values, like Hamas, like Iran, they don't believe in what you believe in, what you and I believe in, coexistence, peace, trade.
They don't believe in those things.
It's a very different ideology.
This is not about a geographical, geopolitical dispute between Israel and Palestine.
This is about an ideological...
Mission to rid the world of Israel and the Jews.
That's what I think people misunderstand.
Yeah, well, Jews live very comfortably in the United States of America, so they're not going to be...
I mean, you know, obviously, Jews are...
They lived comfortably in Germany before World War, before Germany, too.
They did. Doctors, lawyers...
I really struggle when people start using, you know...
Things that have happened in the past that are abhorrent, like slavery, to say that if this doesn't happen, then slavery is going to be back.
Or if this doesn't happen, then it's going to be the Holocaust, too.
I think there's a lot more meaningful chatter and discussion that we can have.
We don't have to resort to that kind of...
History repeats itself if you forget it.
You have to be conscious, and Jews especially.
Unfortunately, I'm a grandchild of...
All four of my grandparents are Holocaust survivors.
So what do you make of the Holocaust survivors and the Jewish people in New York City that are protesting on behalf of Palestine?
That's a great question. Yeah, I think that there's a very strange, bizarre...
I mean, it's the same people that you would condemn as the people of the white people who bow down to BLM protesters, who hate themselves and feel a certain sense of guilt.
They feel a certain sense of...
I think a lot of the ideologies on the woke left, to the extent that things are good and prosperous and virtuous, they condemn as bad.
And the things that are broken morally and depraved, they see as good.
This is the lens by which the far left views things.
And I think these Jews that happen to be politically far left and maybe are not that connected to the Judaism or a culturally, maybe culturally Jewish, but don't have a strong Jewish upbringing.
Not to say that politics and being a Jew go hand in hand with the same political identity.
But my point is just like those, the white people who in mass were bowing down and feeling guilty about themselves simply for being white or people who feel guilty for being successful or the anti-capitalists who say anyone who has something is necessarily bad.
Some people buy into that sort of masochism of hating themselves to gain favor with people who want their destruction.
It's really sick. So would you say that in order to be a Catholic, you have to support the Vatican?
You can't be a Jewish person that just doesn't support the state of Israel.
Is that what you're implying?
No, not at all. I didn't say that at all.
I was saying to support people who want the Jewish people to be destroyed or don't support the right of Israel to exist, you can live your own life and say, I don't really have a connection to Israel.
That's not something I connect to.
It's not something I was raised with an affinity for or a connection to.
That's fine. But to go out there and protest the ability and right of that state to defend itself as a Jewish state when there's plenty of other states in the world and countries that would do the same, but for you to single out this country...
That is problematic no matter what your ethnicity is.
So any legitimacy to a Jewish person that says, you know, we keep the Torah, I mean,
obviously you've seen these protests of Jewish people that are standing out there.
But we just believe that the Zionist movement is entirely political is what they're saying.
And that's nothing to do with actually being Jewish.
Obviously these people are Jewish.
And some, I think some of them are Hasidic Jews, actually.
And they're saying- That's good.
To say that those people are Christians, that's basically what we're...
When making a comparison, they're used as tokens in the same way, you know, leftist white people are used in BLM riots to say, you see, they succumb to our whims and they feel guilty and therefore all white people shall be guilty for crimes of the past that they did not commit.
It's the same kind of tokenism that's being used here, I think, you know, and people are putting them out front and center to say, you see?
And there is, look, there's an ill-informed pacifism that I think permeates people of all stripes, Jews and non-Jews alike, where I think in the face of aggression, to call for a ceasefire in the face of aggression is not moral.
You have to defend yourself.
Otherwise, you roll over and die.
And I think it's a choice between defense and suicide.
Yeah, because I have Jewish friends that are pro-Israel and I have Jewish friends that say that they just do not support Zionism at all and that they think that the creation of the Israel state is something that is political and has nothing to do with actually the Jewish faith at all.
And so I listen to both of those sides.
I try to hear both of those voices.
And I don't think having a different perspective makes any person less Jewish.
And I think it's been problematic to hear, and this is not you, this isn't a criticism towards you, When they say, well, to even have that perspective makes you not Jewish because it's so reminiscent for me of me saying I'm a black conservative.
And they say, well, even to be a black Republican, it's, you know...
Of course. I understand why.
And I would not dismiss somebody's Jewish identity because of their political or philosophical views.
I don't think that's a good argument to say you're now less Jewish or you're a traitor to us.
That's not the reason to support Israel's right to defend itself and to support Israel as a prosperous, free country.
You support Israel because...
And you take the side of Israel because it is inherently a better, morally superior place to so many other places in the region that protect individual rights, that stand for Western values, that stand for free speech and tolerance.
All of the things that we Thrive and appreciate and embrace in our culture, in our society.
Israel identifies with that, if anything, from a secular perspective purely.
Even though, of course, I would admit to having personal connections to it, that's not the reason to support it.
And that's not the reason why someone's lack of support for it makes them less Jewish, per se.
I'm telling you they're less Jewish likely in the sense that their Judaism is probably not as front and center in their life.
And a lot of these people, they're either more secular or it's just not as...
Much of a cornerstone in terms of being raised with a Jewish education or Jewish background.
So that's just me kind of knowing a little bit about that.
I don't want to broad brush it, but I wouldn't dismiss somebody's Jewish identity because of a view.
I would point out why the view is abhorrent.
The view is abhorrent and wrong because you are essentially saying the only country in the world that can exist is a Jewish one.
There's plenty of other countries that can exist based around certain common cultures and identities, but not a Jewish one.
And that's why anti-Zionism is really problematic.
Well, we don't have, we typically, what do you mean, the only country that can exist is a Jewish one?
I'm sorry, I'm just trying to understand that.
What do you mean by that? I mean, there's plenty of countries.
America is unique in that it's a melting pot of all sorts of things, but, you know, we have Japan, Vietnam, China, India, all the Arab and Muslim countries in the world that have common history, common culture, common religions.
We take for granted in the United States that it's kind of an exception of an interesting society that doesn't have a That has that sort of melting pot mentality, melting pot founding, which is great too.
But the idea that only Israel can exist as a Jewish state, but plenty of other states that get no criticism at all from the world stage, they can exist just fine.
That to me is problematic, and that's where the double standard is of why people say anti-Zionism, to single out Israel for this scrutiny, when it is the only country that even – that Arabs in Israel probably live best than many other Arabs in the Arab world in terms of protections of individual rights and freedoms and a bastion of Western democracy and liberal democracy that we hold dear.
For it to get the scrutiny and the obsession that it gets calls into suspicion this feeling that this is more than just being critical of policy.
Have you been to Israel?
I'm assuming you have? Many times, yeah.
Many times. Have you been to Jerusalem?
Yes. Okay, so one of the things that I'm trying to understand is I've been as well.
And when people call it, you know, this bastion of freedom or it's just like America, it's not the sense that I had when I was there.
And again, we had talked earlier on about how our own experiences obviously color our opinions.
And I grew up, you know, in my grandparents' house.
My grandfather grew up in a segregated South.
And so when I'm walking through Jerusalem and you see and they say these are the Muslim quarters, this is where the Muslims are allowed to live, that doesn't feel like a bastion of freedom to me.
So... I don't think it's where they're allowed to live in Jerusalem.
I think it's that there's an Armenian quarter.
It's not saying the Armenians can only live here.
It's that there are communities, just like there's a Jewish community in Jersey here, and there's a Muslim community in here.
To my understanding, it's not restrictions within Israel proper.
I think it is where they have.
At least that's what the rabbi who was taking me around.
He said these are the Muslim quarters, so this is where the Muslims live.
But he didn't say anything about legally saying they cannot live in other places within Israel
proper.
I mean, there's Israeli Arab citizens that have full rights.
Israeli Arabs on the Supreme Court.
I'm only talking about Jerusalem, so I haven't been to Tel Aviv or anything like that.
I'm just talking about particularly.
Well, Jerusalem itself as a city has a division in it where the Green Line divides.
And there's East Jerusalem, that's maybe what he was talking about, not the Muslim quarter,
but East Jerusalem.
Others dispute a territory within the West Bank and East Jerusalem that divides, and
therefore they're under Palestinian authority or even other jurisdiction.
But that's a different conversation as far as what those are.
But Arabs within Israel, if you go to Israel, people would be surprised to see on every
street sign Hebrew, English, and Arabic.
You see a multicultural city.
So keep going a little bit because I'm curious in your experience in Jerusalem.
Yeah, I know. And maybe I'm misunderstanding it, but I think it's worth talking because my understanding from the rabbi was that this is where the Muslims have to live in Jerusalem.
And it looked very different from where the Jewish people were living.
And that, again, that could not be any fault of any person other than this is how they take care of their stuff and this is the way that we take care of their stuff.
But it was noticeably a lot dirtier.
It was noticeably a lot darker than And it just made me feel as a black American and knowing my own history that this is not, this isn't freedom to me.
Like if you can't just decide like I want to, but I want to live on that street or I want to live on this street, but maybe I'm wrong and it wasn't, they were just all choosing to live there.
It might have been a misunderstanding. Imagine if you went into an inner city in the United States.
And somebody told you this is a predominantly black neighborhood and you said it looked more run down.
Would you say that America is systemically racist because of the city?
If I was getting a tour of it, I wouldn't say this is the black quarters, probably.
Or this is a black neighborhood.
But maybe somebody in the group might misunderstand that.
Yeah, maybe I did.
Yeah, I was wanting to ask you about that.
Yeah, yeah, the Alaksa Mosque area.
I mean, a lot of the areas that all religions can go to and walk freely, the Western Wall, these different areas that people can go to.
The only place that is restricted is actually the Alaksa Mosque and the Dome of the Rock, where Jews cannot go.
Yeah, you can definitely feel when you are in Israel that these two groups of people hate each other.
I mean, that was my feeling when I was on the ground.
Like, you know, you could feel it.
And I'm not saying that, like, I mean, you could very much sense to Muslims.
Muslims hated the Jews.
They were sneering as we were walking down, you know, through the Muslim quarters.
I could feel the animosity.
It definitely feels like a place where there's conflict.
You know what I mean? And there is conflict, so it's not really that shocking.
There is conflict in this area.
There are Muslims that hate Jews.
There are Jewish people that I think hate Muslims as well.
But I just always found that interesting when people correlate, because I don't feel that way when I walk through America.
That's not my experience. I don't feel that way when I was walking through Budapest and Hungary.
I don't feel that way when my husband's British when I walked through the UK. So you can obviously tell it's a heavily conflicted area.
Right. I would just stress that when I was there, I was surprised by the opposite effect, to get into cabs and have a driver who's Arabic and was very kind and helpful.
And there's a lot of people in the hotels in Israel.
There's a lot of interactions between Arabs and Jews and hospitals and nurses.
There's tons of people.
You find a multicultural, tolerant society.
Go to Haifa, go all over.
I mean, I've spent—I lived there for a year, and I've been there many, many times.
And I'm always— I always know that people who haven't been here and talk about it in the abstract, you know, because a lot of people, especially on campuses, virtue signaling, talking about subjects that they, you know, want to claim to be experts in because they're international relations majors and they know nothing about it.
You'd find that when you go to Israel, you know, signs in Hebrew, signs in Arabic, signs in English.
And a lot of the restricted areas are restricted for, you know, I've been to areas, you know, Jews cannot go here.
There's There's certainly an air of tension that permeates depending on what's going on, especially the time that you're visiting.
That could have been a factor, too.
I don't know. Well, yeah, to be fair, I was visiting when Trump was moving the embassy to Jerusalem.
Oh, that's a very difficult time.
Terrible time. Yeah, so you could have picked up on something in the air.
There's no question. But that's like after...
You know, there are certain times when there's racial relations in the United States that can feel more tense than ever, but I think to get a surface read of it would do a disservice to the fact that, like you said, there might have been tensions, but just like in the United States, there is no institutionalized racism as claimed by the left, that on paper we have things.
Does that mean there's no racist people in the South that have abhorrent views about black people?
Of course not. We're not saying that you can't say about every vestige of racism, but to make these claims about systemic or institutional racism is the same thing about saying within Israel, That while there's tension socially between people, that there is this systemic I think that's fair.
And then as a final question, I just wanted to ask you.
So without question right now, there has been a total collapse of support for pro-Israel.
I think the quickest collapse, I've been shocked by it.
I've been following it. I've been trying to understand it because I'm very interested when the cultural mood swings.
And my read on it, which is what I've been expressing on Twitter,
is I think what's happened here is that people are feeling like they can't even speak about this subject,
or they can't talk to a person like the way that you and I are speaking
without being called a Jew-hater.
And so it's kind of creating this weird situation where, actually, it's furthering the problem to keep calling
people Jew-haters.
It's furthering the problem to call people anti-Semitic.
It would be more helpful to actually try to see where you connect
and see how you're feeling because it humanizes things.
It's like, listen, I'm not Jewish, so I don't feel as radically
or as motivated as you do about the situation that's happening.
I am being selfish and American and saying I don't want a single dollar to go overseas because we've been in a bunch of useless wars.
And that might be upsetting to hear, but there's no anti-Semitism in my heart when I say it.
It's just me being consistent in how I've always felt until something personal happens to me.
My family's from St. Thomas, and then suddenly I'm like, why isn't every single person aware of the plight of people in St.
Thomas today? Do you think that Jewish people in their emotional state are perhaps contributing to less support for Israel and not realizing that they're doing it unwittingly.
You know, I would say no.
I think the danger is when the Queen of Jordan makes a statement like calling out anti-Semitism when you see it is weaponizing anti-Semitism.
To me, that's creating a lose-lose situation for Jews, an unfalsifiable situation.
Claim that any time you call it out, when you actually see it, when you actually are sounding the alarm bells of people justifying atrocity against Israelis and harassing students on campus, you know, Jews make up what point?
Oh, 2% of the population, 2% of the American population and account for 60% of the hate crimes.
So again, when you're seeing it and calling it out, how are you supposed to call it out when every attempt to do so is met with this, oh, you're just weaponizing anti-Semitism?
And that's where I take real issue with what she said.
I do think there is a sense amongst the Jewish community where we're in self-defense mode.
Israel is at war.
There are soldiers dying because for humanitarian reasons, instead of wiping out and doing an air bombardment, they are going in.
They are trying to rescue hostages.
They are trying to minimize civilian casualties.
People who have relatives and children in the army, we are at war, both in Israel and then there's a domestic sort of propaganda war back and forth of trying to get the message out of what's really happening and what our community is really feeling.
So to the extent that people are misunderstanding it or not really getting it or not on board or not engaged, there's a part of the...
I'm just relaying the tone to you.
We don't care. It's like we have to defend ourselves.
When you're in that mode of feeling like you're being attacked and literally have been attacked, First things first, in the priority of things, self-preservation and self-defense comes first.
How the message is received, granted, a better received message to people around us, will help the cause of us self-preserving ourselves.
I understand that. But if you can't see the events of October 7th and wake up on October 8th, at least not on a policy matter, but on a moral matter, taking a clear stance over which side has the moral high ground, Then the moral compass is kind of broken for you.
If you can't see the difference between what Hamas did and perpetuated onto Israel and Israel attempting to retaliate and respond Why isn't everybody calling for an immediate, not ceasefire, return of the hostages?
Why isn't everybody calling for immediate Hamas to surrender?
The people who perpetuated, the regime that perpetuated this attack on Israel, that started this current campaign, it all started on a single day.
And why the world is not, in the West, the good people of the world aren't unequivocally condemning Hamas and further saying, return the hostages and surrender.
Because if they did that, there would be peace.
If Israel surrendered, there would be no Israel.
So that is what we're feeling.
So yes, I'd love to dialogue more and have people understand.
And I realize that the narrative about Israel, like you're saying, has failed in a certain respect to get that message out.
I don't think it's helpful or productive to call anybody opening their mouths or curious about a subject anti-Semitic and shut them down and dismiss them.
That could push people further away.
But again, that concern of people getting distant from our community...
It's just there's not enough bandwidth right now to engage with that world and correct the narrative and defend yourselves and call for your protection.
Do you know what I mean? So I want that conversation to be productive and constructive, but I also want the outside community to give us a little benefit of the doubt that if we're a little emotional and a little bit on edge, we have good reason to be.
Yeah. Well, I hope you felt that I listened to you entirely.
I don't buy that you think everybody's anti-Semitic.
I don't buy that you think I'm anti-Semitic.
And I hope that you were able to understand why it is that some people just don't feel close to this issue.
And it may seem selfish.
It may seem wrong. I would vote like Thomas Massey.
I genuinely would vote against sending a single dollar to Israel like I was vocal about not sending money to Ukraine or any other country.
It's nothing personal. It's just I am very much America first.
I'm looking at what's happening in America right now.
I've been talking about what's happening at the universities.
There's a million ways I would spend that money.
And first and foremost, it would be to defend our own borders.
And I don't say that to, you know...
I can understand that as a policy matter, as a foreign aid, how one believes about foreign aid, the libertarian isolationist position.
I fully understand it. There were people who were fully pro-Israel in the world way back when who used to also say no foreign aid because it entangles us with America in ways that we can't have our independence.
There's a pro-Israel argument made in some respects.
But in the immediate aftermath of a massacre of Israelis, of allies in the West, not because it's just personal to me as a Jew, but because this is your strategic ally in the region that American interests and Israeli interests are very much aligned with.
To start making policy prescriptions, it felt a little too soon when I saw people like you doing it in the aftermath of people who are basically like us in terms of values being slaughtered.
That, I think, was the tactless mistake of people who—I can respect policy prescriptions and political positions and consistency.
I can respect that. But I think that was the issue.
Well, they instantly came out and said, we want to give them $14 billion.
So we instantly had to respond to it.
If they had been more tactful and maybe suggested two months after the fact, we wouldn't have talked about it.
But this stuff is happening now.
You know what I mean? So— If it's being put up for a vote, we've got to talk about it.
If it's coming out of my paycheck, I've got to talk about it.
And so I agree.
Sometimes it seems tactless if you're talking about it while people are still burying people.
But I really wanted to assert the fact that I always disagree with this, and it's never going to change.
But I'm extremely grateful to you for coming on the platform because I promise you, you'd be shocked at how many people have these opinions and then don't want to talk about them.
With people that have slight disagreements and because it's easier to yell at each other on Twitter.
And I think it's really important to hear each other as humans and understand how people are feeling.
I appreciate you having me on for the opportunity to have a constructive conversation.
More speech is the best policy.
Sunlight's the best disinfectant.
We agree on that. So, thank you.
So, the last thing I'm going to ask you to do is your Jordan Peterson impression because I think it's appropriate right now.
Aha! Well, you know, Candace, you know, it's like...
When you put out a tweet saying what you said, you're walking the line between order and chaos, you know, and taking a clear moral stance.
You know, Jordan Peterson said, give him hell, Netanyahu.
And that was kind of appreciated in the immediate aftermath as opposed to, you know, giving policy prescriptions on the Abrahamic Accords.
Now, he did discuss it.
But I would say that Israel has to stand up straight with its shoulders back, and that's that.
And don't see the linguistic territory to ideologues that you detest.
That's just way too good.
As someone who just spoke with him in London, that is charming.
It's scary. I would say that.
And beware of conscious bodies.
Not just unconscious. Because, you know, we're also refugees in Montecito, my wife and I. So it's been hard.
I got separated from my family.
It's disgusting. Well, anyway.
Ami, thank you so much for joining us.
And hopefully we'll have you back to do more impressions and not be talking about why everybody wants to kill each other on Twitter.
In peacetime.
Bye. We look forward. Bye.
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All right, ladies and gentlemen, that is all the time that we have for today.
I'm looking forward to seeing your comments.
I'm sure some people are going to say, Candice, bring on somebody that's pro-Palestine.
I'm open to do it. I think we need more discussion, not less of it.