All Episodes
Previous Next
July 21, 2020 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole
01:08:30
Brian of London
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Welcome to the DelingPod with me, James DelingPod.
I know I always say this, but I really am excited about this week's special guest.
He has been on my radar for many months, if not several years.
I know him from Twitter.
His name is Brian of London.
Well, that's a Twitter handle.
And I think I'm going to love Brian, even though I've only just met him seconds ago, because Brian's from Israel and I kind of, I'm in love with Israel, even though I've barely been there at all.
And Brian's going to talk to me about important things like why I'm so similar to Deron from Fowder.
You know, it's my One of my favourite TV programmes.
And why I'm probably an honorary Jew.
I think I probably am, Brian.
Do you think?
I mean, look at me.
Well, you work for Breitbart.
Yeah, yeah.
Look, I'm neurotic.
I'm brilliant, obviously.
Very intelligent.
I'm kind of aggressive.
I don't take prisoners.
No, I'm not suggesting that the IDF don't take prisoners, but you know what I mean.
Yeah.
I think I'd probably get on, wouldn't I? If I would discover a bit like in Daniel Deronda, where the author, sorry, the main character discovers suddenly that he's Jewish.
I think I'd be a good Jew.
Listen, you know, this happens more often than people realise.
And especially, in fact, gosh, we're going to go off on a tangent right from the start, but Spain, Spanish Jews, there's all sorts of people in Spain And actually South America too.
There's whole sort of sections of the world that had been Jewish and lost it.
And when they come back to find some sort of Jewish heritage, they feel a kind of comfortableness with it that is hard to explain by all the normal methods.
Yeah.
So, you know, I'm not saying you're not, but...
Yeah, well, you know, I mean, funnily enough, in the last podcast I had a chat about I like old school Church of England, if there ever was such a time before it went wet, you know, I like being part of the, that as being as part of my heritage, but at the same time, you know, I certainly wouldn't complain if suddenly I found myself eligible to go and live in Israel, you know, as a Jew.
So let me explain, you know, the reason I'm called Brian of London is that I grew up in British public school, you know, London, and went to a Northwest London public school with the whole...
I've lost my English, you know.
What's the thing you do in the morning at school when you all sit there in the headmaster?
Well, chapel.
Oh, assembly, I suppose.
Assembly.
Yeah, we had chapel too, but I tended not to go to those.
But we had assembly every morning.
We sang hymns.
Onward, Christian, soldier.
I know the lot of them.
I can do them.
I do all of them.
Jerusalem, obviously.
We love Jerusalem.
That was my upbringing.
And until 11 years ago, I lived in London.
And then I made what we Jews call Aliyah, which technically means go up.
And that's how I come to be in Israel because I wanted to leave and bring, I wanted to bring up my Jewish kids here because it feels right.
You know, there was a double thing.
It was a pull for Israel and a push from London.
Unfortunately, I didn't feel comfortable there sort of being Jewish and I had a sneaking feeling of That it was going to get more complicated to be Jewish in England.
And it did.
And you're right.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
We can talk about that in a bit.
Tell me what were the culture shocks?
Because you're in a way my emissary to Israel.
You can describe what it's like being an English person, then going out to What would I find weird if I suddenly became Jewish and I discovered that I could go and live in Israel?
What would be the really weird things that I would discover?
Well, first off for me, obviously language is an issue.
I married a Jewish woman actually way back and she came to live with me in England and we had one child and we moved here whilst the second was on the way.
So I'd been on and off backwards and forwards to Israel with her family But I'd never learnt Hebrew properly.
So I got here.
Unfortunately, I didn't go to the language lessons that I should have done.
I went straight into business.
So my Hebrew still sucks.
I get by.
But I can't read and write.
I mean, it's a struggle to...
I can read a menu at a restaurant.
And so, I'm a PhD educated physicist and I'm functionally illiterate.
That's frustrating.
It's frustrating and it does mean that when it comes to like internal Israeli politics, I'm not reading as much as I should.
I'm better on the sort of world view of Israel than I am on the minutiae of what goes on here because it's not explained in English and it's not explained anywhere in English.
So that's the culture, that keeps you slow.
I thought the Jerusalem Post would be, is the Jerusalem Post not There's Jerusalem Post and then there's an English version of Haaretz and Haaretz is like far hard left.
Haaretz is is beyond Guardian.
The Jerusalem Post unfortunately has slid to the left.
The Times of Israel was invented a few years back and that's also gone left.
So they're really the only things that are right and in English there's a thing called Arutz Sheva which means channel seven Which is a website.
That's right-wing.
And then there's real dichotomy.
Finding good central stuff here in English is hard.
So that's the first culture stuff.
But then more than...
You know, that's the technical stuff.
But there's just...
The country is so weirdly not Jewish in the way that most...
See, most people outside of Israel...
The most of the Jews they know are the westernized Ashkenazim, the sort of Europeanized Jews.
Israel is a massive mix of Jews from Arab countries which makes up Jews from Arab countries and from North Africa and that the Spanish sort of group of Jews fits in with the North Africans and It's this big mix and then we've got Yemeni Jews, we've got the differences across the Arab world and then Persian Jews.
We came from so many different places to here that the cultures are just massively diverse.
The food's diverse and I find that the psychology is really diverse.
So I went into business here with my brother-in-law who's part Ashkenazi and part Iraqi.
His father came from Iraq and his mother came from Poland.
You know, crazy mix like that.
Where else in the world do you find Iraqi and Polish?
And when you're doing business, the Jews who came from the Arab lands have a very different mindset to Westernized Jews.
It's just you only start to understand it when you live amongst it.
And then you've got 20% of the population that's actually Muslim Arabs, and then you've got some Christian Arabs, and then you've got Druze, and then you've got on Mount Grishim, which is 10 miles from here, you've got those sort of remains of the Samaritans, you know, real people who call themselves Samaritans today.
And they used to live down in Hebron, which used to be called Shchem, but they've moved out of Sorry, not Hebron.
Nablus is the Arab name for it.
They've moved out because they don't get on very well with the Arabs.
So you've got these...
And then we, you know, we've got Aramaic Christians up in the Galilee and they're kind of the closest thing you'll get to a Jesus style of living because they're actually...
Yeah, there's actually a very famous photograph of me In the office of a guy called Father Nadaf with Tommy Robinson.
That's why it's famous.
And on the wall behind is, is it?
I can't remember who's on the wall.
It might be Menachem Begin is on a photograph.
So we're in an Aramaic Christian priest's office with Tommy Robinson wearing an IDF t-shirt, me wearing a Mossad t-shirt standing there.
I mean, it's just the craziest, stupidest picture.
And the white nationalists throw it at me all the time.
But it was just a meeting we had because we were up there.
And this thing of driving across the country and meeting all these different, completely different people.
And to think, you know, to have someone tell me it's an ethnostate or a monoculture, it's the most ridiculous thing.
I think people outside Israel, they think we're all Woody Allen or Alan Dershowitz living here.
And it is just so not like that.
I've got to ask you, Brian, in the area where the Samaritans live, is the suicide rate dramatically lower than in the rest of the country?
I have a feeling they have nothing to do with that.
I know.
Every time I hear that name, that's what I think of too.
Sorry, I couldn't resist.
Okay, so it's not full of Of Woody Allen.
So you've kind of disabused me of that particular fantasy.
But presumably I'm right on the fact that a lot of the girls in the IDF are just fantastically hot in their car keys.
I'm going to have to plead the fifth.
Yes, let's not talk about...
I know.
But it's the women in general.
You know, one of the things...
You know, I grew up in London.
You know what the weather's like and everything.
And one of the things here is that...
You know, my life is...
I'll tell you where I am.
I'm on the very northern edge of Tel Aviv and I'm about 1.4 kilometers from the Mediterranean Ocean outside this window, which I can't turn the camera around.
This window actually has a one centimeter thick steel shutter because the room that I'm in is the secure room in my apartment, which is technically a bomb shell.
Does everyone have one of those?
Is that part of the deal?
All recent, all buildings I think for the last 15 or 20 years have had a bomb shelter in them.
Prior to that there would always be a communal bomb shelter, but they've largely done away with communal bomb shelters and what they do is when they build it, you know, this is like a nine-story building, they build the central Column of the building where the elevators are and around there, you know, there's four apartments per floor and there's one room in each apartment that's right in the core of the building.
Steel, you know, thick door like this with steel, thick steel shutter that I can slide across the window.
And, you know, it's not When we know that there are increasing tensions, which has happened sort of two significant times since I've been here, you know, then we prepare the room.
We make sure it's tidy.
We close the steel shutter and leave it closed.
And then the alarms go.
You've got to hear where we are.
If the missiles are coming from Gaza, we've got about 90 seconds to get into this room and shut the door.
Down next to Gaza, it's 10 or 7.
And that's...
90 seconds is plenty.
It's not a very big apartment, I can assure you.
You can find all your kids in 90 seconds and get them in here.
But, you know, I have sat in this room with the door shut, with the shutter closed, with the siren going, and it is a real proper World War II style.
You know, it's nasty.
And then I've heard this, like, boom, boom.
Which is the sound of Iron Dome exploding above us.
And then you go out and look on your balcony and you can see the trails.
I've done that.
It's real.
It's not a joke.
Yes.
And buildings like mine, there's a famous one actually, I think, at the end of the last, I think in 2014, a building very similar in construction to mine was hit in Richon-Lizion, which is just to the south.
took a direct hit from one of their bigger grad missiles and everybody was fine but I mean the building was a total mess but people were inside their shelters you know the living rooms were just hanging in the air but the central core remained undamaged that's that's very interesting so it is real okay and tell me yeah what I mean,
how much of Israel is there?
Is there a kind of countryside that you can retreat to?
Could you go out for a walk and not encounter other people?
Could you get lost?
Well, you can.
You can very, very easily in basically the country without putting a map on the screen.
Once you get past Jerusalem, A little bit past Jerusalem to the south and you draw a line.
There's a big city called Beersheba, you know, the arrival of the Queen of Sheba.
That city from there all the way down to this tip of the south, which is Elad.
It's just desert.
It's empty.
It's staggeringly useful.
And in fact, I used to have a friend who used to live, she used to live down there.
She's moved in a town in the middle of the desert called Arad.
And to go down there with my wife's mall car, which is a big Jeep, and then just drive off into the...
It's fantastic.
I love doing that.
And then also, if you go to the north, the north's a bit more crowded, Galilee, and there's the Golan Heights.
But you can drive around in the Golan Heights and you can go for walks.
But in the Golan Heights, the one thing is you do every now and then come across a barbed wire A barbed wire marked area and there's a sign that says landmines.
So, you know, we haven't completely cleared all the mines everywhere.
Right.
Yeah.
But presumably you get checkpoints manned by hot IDF chicks.
You don't get out of the country.
Yes.
Yeah.
What are those hats about?
Let me tell you something about the checkpoints.
Okay, so if I drive from here to Jerusalem, there's two roads, okay?
One road is the original road, it's called Highway 1, and it kind of goes straight there.
And Jerusalem is a bit south of Tel Aviv and to the east and up 800 meters.
But there's a second road, which we've built more recently, and that road technically cuts through the disputed territory.
So when you go on that road, you have to go through a checkpoint.
So you leave undisputed Israel, you enter disputed Israel.
And then when you get to the other side of this little bit in Jerusalem, you pass through another checkpoint.
Now, going out, it's unguarded.
Nobody looks at you.
But when you go back in you have to slow down, go over a few speed bumps and a bored soldier looks into your car.
Oftentimes it's a woman and there's actually a psychological reason.
We use small women to do this checkpointing point because it turns out that aggressive young Arab males, this doesn't always apply, they don't want to attack the women But if they're trying to kill themselves, if they see a big guy, they will go for it.
But this is something I heard a few years back and I think it's changed now because we had a running over incident just four weeks ago where one of these guys committed suicide by, you know, he drove into a young woman.
She was thrown actually because she was okay.
But then one of her colleagues, another woman, just drilled the guy when he got out of the car.
Yeah.
I think this is changing, but for a long time that was actually, and it's still one of the reasons, that the guards at these places are, you know, oftentimes small women.
Strange, but, you know, somebody did the work.
And what's that?
You still have lots of my hat question, which is a separate question.
What is with those hats that your IDF wear?
They're really sort of...
I think it's camouflage, that.
There is a proper Kevlar helmet underneath, but then there's all this other floppy stuff.
You mean for the combat units?
Yeah, yeah.
It's just to disguise where the head is.
If you're going to be crawling around...
You don't know where, you know, it just makes a much larger area.
Oh, interesting.
It's confusion and deception.
Right, I see.
That's good.
I remember a while back, I remember passing through Israel for some reason.
I was on the way to somewhere else.
People were quite aggressive, or at least, yeah, quite rude, quite brusque, I think.
Is that still a characteristic of Israel?
You know, when I got here, yeah, I think service industries have come a long way, actually.
We had a really bad, bad kind of reputation for service industries, but I think that that's definitely improved.
You know, look, the country's growing up all the time.
We're so young.
Yeah.
You know, from England, I remember a story from, I think it was one of the Oxford colleges, a friend's father.
You know, a visitor comes from America and asks the porter, you know, is this building pre-war?
And the porter says, this building is pre-America.
Well, Israel is...
It's so new, yet also...
It's post-war.
...England.
Yeah, it's post-every war.
But, you know, the country itself, the modern nation of Israel, 1948.
But you go to Jerusalem and you're walking around on roads that are, you know, between three and four thousand years they've been like that.
Yeah, or did those feet in ancient times, to definitely walk through Jerusalem.
Like Jerusalem now, one of the things I always tell people to do is the tunnel tour, what's called the tunnel tour.
So what you know as the Western Wall or the Kotel is the Western retaining wall of the mound of earth that just holds up the place where we used to have our temple.
That's all it is.
It's not very important.
It's just a wall that holds back a big pile of earth in a place called Mount Moriah.
This is something that very few people know.
That site where today we have the Golden Dome and not a temple, that's the site of Mount Moriah.
Mount Moriah is where Abraham was supposed to sacrifice Isaac and he didn't.
In fact, right at the point of the Holy of Holies, where the holiest point of the temple was, is supposedly the spot And that's exactly where they've stuck this golden dome and the mosque to the side.
But that wall that you see, the paving that's underneath it, what you can do is you can go through, there's a tunnel that they've excavated which goes down and it goes down a heck of a long way because you're only seeing the upper third of that wall.
The rest is underground.
And when you go along that wall, you eventually wind up on paving stones that are Jesus era, you know, minus 2000.
Zero.
And you can do it, you can get there.
You know, I've spoken to so many Christians who come here.
You know, when I used to live in England and I would come here and I'd fly back and I would sit on the plane next to, you know, pilgrim tours that were going back to their church in England.
I sat next to one, am I allowed to say big black woman?
And she was this South London kind of evangelical church.
Yeah.
She spent four hours And I honestly, I didn't mind telling me about every tree was matching the description she read from her Bible.
I won't do the accent, you know, that sort of Jamaican.
Yeah, yeah.
I could just, it was just, it was the most amazing heartwarming experience to realize she had lived her whole life reading a book and then she'd come here for two weeks and everything had been confirmed.
Yeah.
Yeah, and also, contra the current Archbishop of Canterbury, it sounds like she didn't have any problem with the fact that in most iconography Jesus is white.
Oh God!
Did you follow that?
Nonsense!
So embarrassing.
What has he said now?
I haven't seen the most recent, but he's like...
He's going to have a look at all the statues, all the statues and effigies and whatever in the church, just to see whether they're...
They're contentious and might need removing.
And also he's concerned, you know, about the fact that Jesus has been portrayed as white when in fact, you know, actually probably he was, oh, I can't remember.
It was just really embarrassing.
But then, you know, look, I have this notion of Israel being kind of Like my dream country, full of people like me because it's kind of, it believes in free markets and it doesn't go with political greatness.
That's just not true is it?
It's actually quite left.
Yeah we've got a horrible mix here going on because we've got this, there was definitely a whole big socialist thing going on.
The whole kibbutz movement.
Yeah.
And the earliest days was this left wing.
It was massively dominated.
And in fact, you know, it's even to call Netanyahu is one of the most free market guys there is.
But it's still impossible to say that this thing is a free market here.
It's horribly corrupted by unions.
And we're having, you know, even with the Covid thing going on, the teachers unions and it just...
Everything is a mess.
And it's interwoven, competing grabs.
I mean, Netanyahu did in the 90s, managed to sort of, he did a sort of almost Thatcher-esque thing.
And things moved here quite dramatically.
But I would still say, and I must say, it's easy to start companies.
It's relatively easy to hire and fire people here.
But we do have a good working health system, which I like.
The health system is actually three or four competitive but sort of state-supported insurance models, but they're not like profit.
You don't see waste.
You see them like, you know, I know that they buy secondhand computers and stuff like this.
So it's done smartly.
It's kind of NHSE but But then the other thing is you can also, you can top up with private healthcare at not ridiculous cost.
And there isn't the stigma that England has to that, you know, oh my God, he's got Bupa.
Again, it's a lot of contradictions.
I mean, we are not, we're ferociously, like we've had all of this stuff with the Watching our cell phones and contact tracing.
And there's been some pushback, you know, sort of, should we just let the Shin Bet?
Okay, the Shin Bet is Fowder.
The guys in Fowder are working for what's called Shin Bet, which is the internal security services.
The Mossad really has no impact on Israel day to day, inside.
Is the Mossad external affairs?
The Mossad is external.
That's stuff going bang in Iran, maybe, perhaps.
Who knows?
Oh, look, it's on fire again.
But the Shinbet, we know what they do here.
And they do the Fowder stuff.
And they really do do that.
I mean, I kind of know people who know people.
So, yeah, Shinbet is MI5. Mossad is MI6. Or the DGSSE. Yeah, exactly.
That's the split.
But they're following, they apparently can just turn on some button and follow all our phones.
I have no idea.
I'm really technical.
I kind of deeply understand this kind of stuff.
I still have, and none of the press has gone into any detail over what they think they can do.
Hasn't seemed to help, but You know, there was a little bit of a pushback.
You know, people started to call the High Court here.
But then again, we've got this Supreme, this High Court here that's very left-wing and they're the ones fighting with Bibi and dragging Bibi through what I consider mostly nonsense.
And you know what gets me about it?
It's embarrassing because the numbers are so ridiculously small.
I mean, We're going to take out, it's like $50,000.
Are you kidding me?
Come on, come with a proper case!
It's so sad.
It's so sad.
Because, yes, I have been noticing about how Israel's been responding to the whole coronavirus bollocks.
And I have to say, you're not really that much better than us, are you?
You're still a bit shit.
Still a bit overreacting.
Yeah, well we've now got to wear those stupid bastards.
You'd think, one of my theories, I have a lot of theories about how sort of force majeure creates, shapes peoples.
So you would think, wouldn't you, according to my fantastical theory, that Israel Because it deals with life and death on a daily basis, because you could get blown up by a suicide bomber on the bus or whatever, that therefore they would have no time for political correctness or for largely imaginary faux pandemics like coronavirus.
And you'd also think, again, in my dreams, that Israel, like Jewish medics, like real scientists who know their stuff, No, okay.
So I think how we dealt with it to start with, I think, was actually fantastic.
We shut our borders really early.
We shut down flights from China.
Then we quickly, in fact, we had one flight coming from Seoul in South Korea that my friend was supposed to be actually flying back on.
That flight landed, half a dozen Israelis got off and they sent everybody else back to Seoul.
I mean, we really...
No, it was fortunate.
Have you seen World War Z? World War Z. We did that.
You see, that was fantastic.
I loved that scene in World War Z. I loved its understanding of Israel, where Israel keeps out the zombies because it's hardcore.
But then, foolishly, Israel makes a mistake.
Yeah, that's right.
They make the mistake of singing Which attracts the zombies and also don't they show a certain amount of weakness and the weakness is where they get punished and the zombies are over the walls and that's it.
There's a lesson there.
Don't sing, don't show much.
We were good at the beginning.
We've had a very low death rate and we did come together and things like food supply, that the country is sorted for.
We can feed ourselves.
If we shut down from the outside, we'd lose a lot of nice-to-have stuff, but we can functionally feed ourselves properly.
We've got all the wheat we need.
We've got all of the subsistence stuff that we need to get going.
We've got all our own water.
Energy-wise, we'd be in a bit of a problem long-term without oil deliveries.
But we've got a lot of gas now.
I bet you'd be really shit on sausages, pork and lobster.
I bet you don't have any of those.
We've got pork herds, but actually there's a really bizarre ruling, which is you can't allow them to walk on the ground.
So any pork farmers, and there are Arab pork farmers, Christian Arab pork farmers, they keep the pigs off the ground.
They have to have wooden slats on the way to walk.
Yeah, it's like decking.
Look it up, honestly.
So as long as I didn't discover I was actually Jewish, I could be, I suppose, a non-observant to you, couldn't I? I could buy bacon.
I could buy bacon.
It's there.
That's good.
And do you?
Do you, Brian?
I tend not to.
I like shellfish.
I'll eat a lobster when I'm in London, but I don't seek the stuff out here.
Let's...
You know this is again this is the one of the dichotomies between the religious and the non-religious and then there there are some people who are like secular to an extreme so they'll go out on a Friday night to eat to eat a burger with bacon and cheese on it you know to break as many rules but let's switch this round so it's like what makes me Israeli I mean for me This
is an indigenous identity.
OK, it's what Judaism and being Jewish is, is it something that happened here?
We had our national genesis on this land.
Now, our story has got Egypt in it and and, you know, Abraham came from Ur, wherever the hell that is.
But the genesis of the Jewish story, when when Abraham buys A cave to put his wife in.
It's in Hebron.
It's the first recorded property purchase.
I've checked.
Try and find me a Greek one.
They didn't write it down.
The first recorded property transaction in history is buying the cave that has become now the tomb of the patriarchs.
Where the patriarchs and the matriarchs of the Jewish tribes are buried in Hebron.
So to say Hebron is an Arab place is just, it's the most extreme form of cultural appropriation you can imagine.
That's where our story, we made a land purchase, we, my forefathers, and the deed of that land is written into a book that the whole world calls the Bible.
That underpins the identity here.
And when I say I'm indigenous, I mean Judaism and me with it.
The language that we have revived.
You know, my friend is a Canadian First Nation.
He's from a tribe called the Métis, which is in northern Canada.
He explained all this to me.
He said, Jews and Israel, you're the greatest example of an indigenous people getting their land back.
We're the best one ever.
Nobody's ever done what we did.
In fact, we did it so well that the UN definition of indigenous people had to be subtly tweaked to exclude us.
You know how they do that?
So they've got all these rules for what makes you indigenous.
Do you have a culture that was born here?
Do you speak a language that's got continuity going back?
Yeah, yeah.
Does everything in your culture matter more when it's in the place where you come from?
All of these things are added.
But then what they added was...
Are you an indigenous people is one who is not powerful in their land, so is a minority.
Oh god!
So they added this freaking intersectional power dynamic thing.
So it's like you can be indigenous, you can strive for indigenous power.
As soon as you get it, no, you're not indigenous anymore.
How brilliant is the US? I have to say, Brian, looking at you, if you were in Fowder, I don't think you'd be very good at undercover passing as an Arab.
This you have to understand.
Again, I'll tell you a story back to 9-11.
I know Jews who were in America and were in the UK around 9-11.
When 9-11 happened, Every security service in the world said, geez, we really need much more Arabic.
And I know Jews who put themselves forward, who are like the Founder God, and they didn't want to touch them.
They only wanted Muslim Arabs.
And, you know, this is the thing you don't get.
There's a friend of mine here called Professor Mordechai Kadar.
He's famous for one YouTube clip ages ago when he was on Al Jazeera.
And he was brought up in an Arab village in Israel.
He's an older guy.
But he's a professor of Arab studies.
He can pass as Arab anywhere and he can do different accents.
And he was on Al Jazeera and that he got into an argument with the host because the host said Jerusalem is mentioned in the Koran.
And he pulled out, you know, my friend Kadar, he pulled out the Koran.
This is all in Arabic and said, show me where in the Koran it says Jerusalem, because it doesn't.
Jerusalem is not named in the Koran anyway.
Just there's an oblique reference for this mosque.
We've got so much of our population This is going away now to a certain extent, but when they grew up, they grew up in Arabic households.
The spy, you know, the thing with Sacha Baron Cohen that was on Netflix about, you know, that's how he was able to do that in Syria.
Yes.
You forget what it is and how much of our population is split between Then we've got the million Russians, the descendants of a million Russians who arrived here in 10 years.
You want to hear an immigration story?
This will make your heart.
Yes, because between 1989 and 1999, 10 years, just after the Berlin Wall, Israel had one million Russian Jews.
One million.
We were four and a half million people, Jews and Arabs, at the beginning of that period.
And over the next 10 years, we took in 20% of our population.
It's a story of...
My God!
...that has never...
I mean, you'd think Merkel was bad taking in two million Syrians into, what, 70, 80...
How many people in Germany?
80 million or something?
Yeah.
We were four and a half million.
We went to 5.7 million in 10 years.
Yeah.
It's a story of mass immigration and mass absorption that's never, ever been equaled anywhere in the world, ever.
Nobody's ever done anything like this.
And how did it work?
Was it good?
Well, what happened, I mean, the significant effect for me, you know, 20 years down the line is that It's press one for Hebrew, press two for Arabic, press three for Russian, and there's no freaking four for English.
I mean, that's the difference.
And now the kids of those Russians are Israelis and speaking Hebrew, and they're just into the mix.
And the difference is they came here to be Jews.
We've got an idea what our identity is here.
Now, our identity isn't just religious Orthodox Jews.
It's a whole range of religiosity.
But culturally, you know, we stop for Yom Kippur.
That's...
Again, this is like, I lived out all my life as a Jew outside Israel.
So I come to live here and the very first year when Yom Kippur rolls around, which is the day everybody fasts, you know, as a Jew in England, I used to take the day off school and stay home.
My kids thought, my friends thought it was a, you know, you know, a strange DOS thing.
A DOS, you know.
But what happens when you live in Israel, the whole timetable of the year is built around that.
And so when it happens, it's a national event.
And Yom Kippur is very special because my kids, for example, would call it the bicycle holiday.
Why?
And I went and checked this.
There is actually no law on the statute books, but nobody drives.
And when I say nobody drives, I mean it is really dangerous to try and drive.
So In religious areas, every Shabbat from Friday night to Saturday night, it's like this.
There are no cars on the roads.
But on Yom Kippur, it's everywhere, except the Arab.
The Arabs tend to break this.
But even then, you can't drive through my neighborhood in a car on Yom Kippur.
You just, you mustn't do it because there are four-year-olds on bicycles driving right down the middle of every road.
I you know my kids you know they've got older a bit now but I've driven on the motorway you know six lane highway and we just ride our push bikes there for fun just because you can because it's the one day a year and it sort of looks like a post oil apocalypse Mad Max type thing because there's no cars the air air pollution we're not even going to get into global warming but I'm not a believer in anthropogenic global
warming, but I don't like ground level air pollution.
Turns out, three hours after everybody stops driving and all industry shuts down, we even close the airspace.
If you look on one of these flight radar apps at like two o'clock in the afternoon of Yom Kippur, the planes start doing big diversions.
You're not allowed to fly across Israel.
And the air gets cleaner and you can't hear the rumble of the motorway and it's fantastic.
And it's one day a year.
It's an amazing experiment.
It's a social...
And even the non-religious Jews observe this.
Now, again, I told you there's no law because we don't have a religious law saying don't drive.
It's just stupid to drive.
And everybody just organises their life.
But one day they're not going to need their car.
I mean, you stay home, some people fast, some people don't, but there is a national observance to it.
I mean, it's the same thing that you get in England on Christmas.
Christmas feels different and special, but you're losing that.
That's what I mean is that, so when we took all these Russians and even if they weren't observant or whatever, they came here, but they came into a system where they were Pretty much forced to learn Hebrew or at least the next generation had to learn Hebrew.
The timetable of the year, the observances, the Passover holiday, all of this stuff means that we have a strong sense of national identity and we know what we are.
And when you bring immigrants into that and you choose only immigrants who want to assimilate It doesn't mean we want Yemeni Jews to be like Polish Jews.
We don't.
In fact, one of the things I'm most sad about is that Yemeni Jews had an indigenous culture in Yemen that goes back way before Islam.
Think about it.
You know, Jews have been in Yemen for 3000 years.
They've got modes of speaking.
They've got Yemeni, like we go to the beach, the lifeguard at the beach He's from a Yemeni family, sort of unbelievably good-looking guy with huge hair, fantastic surfer.
Yemeni, religious, puts on to fill in.
It's a shame that that culture, you know, the sort of distinction of Yemeni Jewry, we now have to maintain that in Israel because it's been...
Yes, it's a bit like sort of tigers at the zoo.
You understand?
And I would for sure class Yemeni Jewry as an indigenous identity.
There's no two ways about it, but we can't hold on to all of it.
It'd be nice if we could.
Yathrib was a Jewish town before it became Medina.
I'm not advocating for the greater Israel project of taking over the whole Middle East.
No, I think I could sense there might be ructions were that to take place.
So we've now, I want to say two things.
First of all, I want it to be known to you and to God that the fact that I'm doing this podcast with you now is not a substitute for Dick and James go to Israel.
That's still gonna happen.
And when you do, I'll tell you, this is the promise I will make to you.
Your tour guide will be a woman called Kay Wilson and she's a qualified registered Israeli tour guide who has the distinction of having been hacked to within a millimetre of her life by two Palestinian terrorists and she survived.
Unfortunately her friend didn't.
Great story.
I'll put you in touch with her.
And she survived and wrote the most amazing book out of the experience and the recovery and the PTSD and all of this stuff.
And she'll be your guide and she was our guide actually with Tommy.
And you go everywhere, you see where Jesus, you see the fishing boat.
The country is just breathtakingly diverse.
You've got to come.
No, no, no, it's going to happen.
I mean, listen, it might even have been this year had it not been for this bloody stupid COVID nonsense.
Now, and tell me, Fowder, is it as big in Israel and in Palestine as it is in, you know?
Yeah, apparently it's huge across the Arab world because they got to see how we really do stuff.
And it was big here.
It was very big here.
I had to wait, unfortunately, longer than you, because whilst I'm sort of passable with some of the Hebrew, I can't read Hebrew subtitles for the Arabic and I'm hopeless on Arabic.
So I had to wait until Netflix put English on it.
And then and then not only that, Netflix spent another six months before they showed it on Netflix Israel.
And in fact, what's happened, what's gone out now is that one of the writers has written something called Tehran, and that apparently is a huge hit.
But again, the same problem, that's in Persian, so Farsi.
So I've got no chance with that.
So I'm going to have to wait for...
What's Tehran about?
That's about the Mossad and whatever's going on in Iran.
Oh, is it?
When's that coming at?
Well, it's been shown here and Apple TV have bought it.
So, you know, it'll be shown at some point.
But Founder, you know, when I watch Founder, one of the interesting things about watching it, when at least you can follow the Hebrew, is like they play some subtle games.
So like there's a scene, we won't give too many spoilers, but there's a scene where the Bedouin Girlfriend of the boxer.
She knows now that Doran is an Israeli.
So they're standing in the hallway of her school in the Arab town and he's speaking Arabic to her.
She's answering him pointedly in very good Hebrew and she's doing it deliberately standing in the hallway of this Arab place and He's speaking Arabic, she's speaking Hebrew, and she's making the point, I know you are a Jew, and she's doing that deliberately.
And because she's a Bedouin, she's an Israeli citizen, but she's an Israeli Arab citizen and she's in the Palestinian Authority areas.
Now, if I want to travel to Hebron or Amalek, there's a big red sign And it says entry to this area is prohibited for Israeli citizens.
But the sign doesn't really mean that.
It means Israeli Jewish citizens.
Because Israeli Arabs can go in there, no trouble.
But if I were to go in there, basically the sign says it's illegal for me to enter because nobody wants the hassle of rescuing me later.
You know, if I get into some trouble now, I have been in a couple of times to some areas that I'm not supposed to go with with the right guides and so on.
But I take risk, you know, and that's all those areas where Doron is, you know, when he's living in the in amongst them.
This is it's risky stuff just for, you know, I've done business with Arabs in Nablus.
Nablus is in the northern It's part of Judea Samaria.
It's in Samaria.
Samaritan Samaria.
Nablus, you know, I've had a client, someone I sell stuff to, and he's always been inviting me in there, but I've never gone.
I could go.
I could go with him, but it's just I feel nervous.
Now, I've got a sales guy who's part Arabic.
He used to go in.
And he would go in, sit, have a drink, have tea.
He'd go past the security checkpoint and they'd look at him and they'd know he was a Jew.
But because of who he was with, they would know that he was okay to be where he was.
What can happen is some kid can just know that he's a Jew and stab him.
Because you never quite...
They play all sorts of games throughout that program with the language like that.
You know, they flip.
Like, the other thing that happens all the way through it is when Doron or when one of them is undercover, even when they're in Gaza, and they're talking on the phone to the controllers, and I don't...
I asked someone if this is true, and it is true.
The controllers are speaking to them in Hebrew, and they're answering in Arabic.
And I'm like, Why don't you just make it easy for them?
You all speak Arabic, just speak Arabic.
Why give them the chance?
But they're having bilingual conversations.
If you're really paying attention to the subtitles, you can see brackets around the Arabic and it's like there's a code but I cannot hear the Hebrew and I'm thinking like he's undercover.
He's like crawling around some house.
Why are you talking to him in Hebrew?
So you said that it's popular in the Palestinian Authority areas and across the Arab world, is that right?
Because is it Okay, so obviously it gives away the Israeli security services secrets.
That's partly appealing, presumably.
But is it also...
Because in an odd way, Fowder is quite sympathetic to...
No, it's empathetic to the Muslims and the Arabs.
It doesn't sort of...
They're not just cartoonish baddies.
It gets their mindset.
It feels their pain, I think.
Yeah.
One of the writers, Abhi Israov, I don't know if he still does, he wrote for the Times of Israel for a while, and I would put him on a centre-left sort of political spectrum.
And so he does have a tremendous amount of sympathy for the day-to-day cases.
And like in the most recent series, Series 3, you know, there was a big strong undercurrent of the fact that Doron kept doing stuff that just made a whole thing Spiral out of control and they were giving you the whole cycle of violence type argument and I can't say you know I don't like that because you know I fundamentally see an issue of there
is a reason why Israel and Jews have to be here and Once you detach yourselves from whether we should or shouldn't be allowed to have a Jewish state in Israel, then you can get into this cycle of violence nonsense for the rest of your life and not understand that...
Look, you know, bad stuff happens.
People with guns, if there are people with guns, then there are people who get killed.
And sometimes it's justified, sometimes it isn't.
But the fundamental nature is I know that if we laid down all our weapons, we'd be slaughtered.
If they laid down all their weapons, we'd have a shot at peace.
And it is a fundamental truth.
You know, I keep giving this example, you know, on Twitter constantly.
You're committing genocide, the genocide of the Palestinian people.
And you draw them a graph and you say there were 600 and 700,000 Palestinians in 1948 and there's three or four million today.
Show me another genocide.
The line I say is that Jews excel in almost all walks of life.
I mean, we're off the charts in literature and Nobel Prizes and all of this stuff.
We're crap at two things.
Professional golf.
Find me a professional golfer who's won a serious major title, who's Jewish.
It's very difficult.
And committing genocide.
We suck at that.
I mean, you know.
We've got more tanks than the British Army has horses.
And don't even get me started on how many tanks the British Army has.
I think we have 700 frontline Makava tanks, four and five.
And our tanks are the best in the world.
They've got this trophy system.
They're invulnerable.
You can't shoot rockets at them, whatever.
You know, we can flatten Gaza in an instant.
You know, it's an afternoon's work.
Why do we not do it?
Because we're not genocidal, because there's nothing in the Jewish makeup that would allow us to commit wanton wholesale slaughter.
We just...
There might be a few aberrant individuals who will pick up a gun and go kill people, but they are aberrant and we treat them with the horror and we really don't like them.
Whereas on the other side, they venerate these people and give them pensions, which you pay for with your taxes.
Yes, that's very true.
I can see why you'd find the lefty elements within Fowder annoying at the same time I think you know as an outsider with an outsider with antennae which are quite carefully tuned to spotting any examples of kind of lefty sell-outness and stuff I think what Fowder captures very well is that that thing as of we love death like you love life there's very much that dichotomy between the Israeli view of the world where they're
You know, when they, after an operation's over, they hang out with their mates, with their Habibis.
They have their, they have their beers and their cigarettes and they go to clubs and the clubs are Western.
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
I know, but I just, I love, love spotting you every time a card appears in the script.
And at the other end of the spectrum, you've got this death cup.
I mean, that's what it is.
It's just, maybe the Palestinians don't want to go along with it, but it is.
Again, when you sit down with actual real Arabs and Palestinian Arabs, if you can get them to a point where they're comfortable and they don't like Islam, they're not fans of it, they won't say that, and they can't express that, and they'll eat on Ramadan but only if they're very certain nobody's looking.
It's that kind of thing.
You know, when I was in England, the reason I'm called Brian of London is I started blogging back in the earliest days of blogging, you know, soon after 9-11 and podcasting.
And I did it under a pseudonym because I was saying stuff about Islam and I was, you know, hardcore into the counter jihad stuff.
And funnily enough, coming to Israel, which has got many, many, many more Muslims around us than anywhere in England, even, you know, 20% of Israel is Muslim.
Let alone the disputed territories.
Somehow it managed to soften my views on the way people react with their Islam here.
But Founder didn't pull punches in that.
In fact, I think the very first lines spoken in Arabic of the third series is Allah-u-Akbar and then they're in They're reciting Surah 1 in the mosque.
And Surah 1 is, we curse those who've gone astray and we curse those who've been led astray.
And this is part of the daily, this is the most repeated prayer.
Cursing those who've gone astray, that's you, that's the Christians.
Sorry, that's us, that's the Jews.
Those who've been led astray are the dumb Christians who follow the Jews.
You know, it's like...
That's fundamental and so I can't be too hard on people who have that drummed into them from 18 months.
And that's the tough part of it.
But like I walked around, the one time I've walked around one of the refugee camps in Bethlehem and that was when I went in there with Tommy and we went in with a guide.
My friend Kay set this up but she did not go in because They don't the security services watch over her because that you know something bad happened to her they don't want anything else to happen to her so her friend services said it's okay if your friends go in with this guide but you're not allowed to go in don't go in and she takes their advice very seriously so we went in Tommy was nervous as hell because he's thinking you know it's like this is I'm walking into the middle of a Palestinian
refugee camp, but it's not a refugee camp with tents.
It's just a bad neighborhood.
You know, the housing is packed slightly together.
There's no playgrounds.
And it's been kept that way as just a bargaining chip.
It's horrible because this one was in Bethlehem, but there's another one in Nablus.
I can drive to a hill.
You look down on Nablus.
There's this modern Arab town with nice apartments like you saw in Fowder.
And then in the middle of it, there's this dirty old grey horrible bit and all around it are nice new apartment buildings.
They've been living like that way for 40 years.
It would be the work of two years to build a whole bunch of nice housing just to the side, go in there with bulldozers, knock it all down and then build nice houses.
And the money has been there.
Billions have flowed in, but they don't do it.
And so all through this refugee camp that we walk through, on every wall is a mural of another terrorist and another terrorist and another terrorist.
You know, the woman who killed everybody on the bus in Haifa, the one who took over the aeroplane.
These people are literally on the walls.
That's the Messi and the Beckhams.
That's what these kids see.
as their hero and how do you get out of that and the worst part is they've been shoveling money at these people for this so long and this is what you've got it's it's a manufactured problem I mean Islam's going away and jihad won't stop but oh my god it's been made so much worse by by do-gooder lefties Brian I I've so enjoyed this conversation
that I want to have another one with you.
I'm coming to tell you in a few weeks.
Are you going to tell me now or later?
I'll tell you a little bit.
I'll just tease it.
Give me the short version.
I've got to go and have my neck is completely buggered and I've got to go.
I've got an appointment.
But you tell me this thing.
I'll tell you just the high level pitch.
A friend of mine is a lawyer from Australia and I'm helping him.
And together he and I are representing, we've got about 450 people so far, all people who held cryptocurrencies in 2018 and together we're suing Facebook, Google and Twitter in Australia for about $300 billion because they banned the entire cryptocurrency industry from advertising They did it all almost at the same time.
And this is an illegal cartel in Australia.
And we're going to sue them in Australia in a massive class action.
And we're almost at the point of having to file this thing.
Yeah.
I had cryptos then.
Does that mean I'm eligible?
Yes, I'm going to send you the link after this.
You can sign up, no win, no fee.
You just put your name down, say how much you had.
You can even do it anonymously, actually.
And you will be in line for a little bit of the damages that we can manage to pull out of these guys.
So you mean the value of my cryptos was reduced as a result of this cartel?
Correct.
Yeah.
And there's other business losses.
Businesses went out of business.
Exchanges did far less And then it got even worse because not only did Facebook actually lead this, at the end of this January 2018 they put into their financial terms and conditions that cryptocurrencies are frequently associated with misleading and deceptive practices and they banned all advertising related to cryptocurrencies.
And then, in fact, they extended it and they kind of made it for anything related to blockchain.
Meanwhile, at that same month, we later discovered, they formed an internal division of Facebook, which they called Libra.
They staffed it up because we can see the profiles of the woman who went to head it, and she started work that month.
And 18 months later, which is sort of middle of last year, they announced Libra.
So they banned cryptocurrency advertising and a year later they come out with their own cryptocurrency proposal, which is not going to go anywhere.
We don't even need to prove to the Australian court that they did that deliberately because it actually doesn't...
They broke the law without that.
But oh my God, does it look bad.
And I'll tell you another one, just the last thing.
Jack Dorsey of Twitter, he's not blameless.
In January of 2018, Jack Dorsey was being very proud and tweeting about the fact that on Cash App, which is owned by Square, which is owned by him, you could buy Bitcoin.
And he also banned advertising by most cryptocurrency companies on Twitter.
So he's pushing it on his platform and banning it for everyone else.
And this is a cartel.
And America has got all the right laws for cartels for price fixing, but they don't have the right laws for restriction of supply of essential goods and services.
And that's what Australia has.
And Australia, you know the Australians, they're all about fairness.
They hate unfair.
You know, they're not cheats, except for some ball incidents.
But the advantage we have in Australia is that Facebook, Google and Twitter are hated there because all they've done is they've destroyed journalism in Australia, like they've destroyed it everywhere else, and they're just money collecting buckets.
Pour money into Facebook, Google and Twitter.
And Facebook, Google and Twitter ship it off to Ireland and other tax havens.
So they've got no political cover in Australia.
And they don't have hordes of in-house lawyers.
They're going to have to hire lawyers.
And we're going to sue.
And that's...
Well done.
...file soon.
And so when we file, that's when I'll come back and tell you more.
Okay, that's great.
Brian, it's been lovely having you on the podcast and I'm really looking forward to seeing you for real in Israel.
And yeah, thank you very much.
And thank you for confirming that I am very similar to Daron, apart from my maybe a little skinnier.
You're skinnier?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
You might even run better than me.
You always looked a bit bad.
I don't think I box better and I'm probably not as good at Killing people with my bare hands.
No, I'm not.
That's the other thing I want to do.
How do you pronounce it?
Krav Maga.
I wanted to do Krav Maga.
Actually, there's a great place that will teach you to shoot as well.
Just give you the feeling of what it is.
I went on a shooting course one time and I had this big German guy screaming at me while that was the exercise.
Things were popping up and he was screaming in my ear.
That whole stress.
That's what I want.
Yeah, I want women holding babies and I want to see whether I kill them or not.
That's exactly, yeah.
Good.
May I remind my lovely special listening friends all around the world that freedom isn't free and you can sponsor me on Patreon or subscribe to Star and you can get early access to all my brilliant podcasts like this one.
You can obviously help fund Dick and James Go to Israel and you get my spectator column and you get to hang out with a community of like-minded folks so it's a really good deal so think about that and thank you again to Brown of London and bye everybody!
▲
Export Selection