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May 21, 2023 - The Delingpod - James Delingpole

01:48:27

Miriam Elia

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	I love...
	Welcome to The Deling Pod with me, James Delingpole.
	And I know I always say I'm excited about this week's special guest, but I really am kind of extra excited about this one.
	Miriam.
	Miriam.
	Normally, by the way, I precede the introduction with a word from our sponsor, Hunter & Gather.
	I've been mentioning them at the beginning of every podcast, and what I hadn't twigged was They only wanted to sponsor me for every other podcast, so I've been giving them a bit of extra by accident because I'm so disorganised.
	Anyway, if anyone else wants to sponsor me as well, they can because I'm obviously worth sponsoring and this podcast has huge reach.
	But anyway, Miriam Elia.
	I'm really excited.
	I met you.
	We met, hi Miriam!
	Hi!
	We met, did we not, at that pub that we go to after events at the Emanuel Centre.
	Yes.
	And I met you and two of your friends, it was like my Jewish fan club, wasn't it?
	Yes!
	You are my Jewish fan club, you and your, what are your lovely friends called?
	Tanya but she's I don't know if she's Jewish and some is actually Buddhist but I do know.
	Oh so you're so you are you basically you are my Jewish fan club.
	Yeah.
	And so we talked about all these weird, amazing, esoteric things which were just right up my alley, and I think actually are going to be right up the alley of 99.9% of the people who follow the Deleon pod.
	But you are a woman of many parts.
	I am.
	Because before we go on the really crazy shit stuff that you're into, I wanted to give a plug to these wonderful books that you produced, which are kind of parodies of the Lady Bird.
	Nothing to do with Lady Bird, but they're called Dung Beetle books, so Dung Beetle is a completely different insect to Lady Bird, so there's no connection.
	But there was that other series, wasn't there, where they bought up the rights of the Ladybird pictures and recaptioned them.
	They basically took me to court and then tried to suppress the... So the first book that I ever made was this one which was called We Go to the Gallery which was an artwork and then they just tried to destroy the artwork and then took me to court.
	They lost and whilst that was happening I couldn't publish it but they stole the idea and gave it to two Comedy writers who were a bit crap.
	And then they did the Ladybug.
	That's the story, yeah.
	It was all over the newspapers at the time because everybody wanted a copy of this book.
	Did they sell?
	Mine did, yeah, in the end, but I had to wait a year and a half to sell them.
	But I illustrated them as well.
	So it says that there is nothing in the room.
	Peter is confused.
	Jane is confused.
	Mummy is happy.
	There is nothing in the room because God is dead, says Mummy.
	This is my favourite one.
	Yeah, the lockdown one.
	I've got We Do Lockdown.
	And I'll show you the page, well here's the page that I rather like.
	Which is, I'll read it.
	We are shopping for emergency supplies.
	There is no lemongrass, says Mummy.
	Oh dear, says John.
	I'm starting to understand what life was like in World War 2, says Mummy.
	So they're not actual Lady Bird Book pictures or are they?
	No, I illustrate them.
	I paint them.
	So it takes me about a year to paint them.
	So you actually did a picture of 1950s style mummy freehand?
	You didn't base it on anything?
	No, so first I do a collage and then I do a gouache painting from what I can kind of fit together of that reality.
	But yeah, it's a painting.
	But it takes a long, long time.
	Where do you find the original pictures of the 1950s mother and children?
	So what I did is I have a woman that looks like that and I photograph her in situ with the kids but in a blank space with nothing.
	So almost like just sort of looking at the world.
	Which is how the original Lady Bird book illustrators worked.
	Um and then I put them in a new context so during the lockdown obviously there was just so much to look at and so much to take in and I had her explaining the whole thing and kind of uh kind of Well, taking the piss, really.
	And then I do a painting.
	The hard bit is doing the painting, but the first bit is just to create an idea of how they're going to document what's going on around them.
	And then I have to write everything as if I was talking to a five-year-old.
	Actually, you are even more talented than I imagined.
	And so did you recreate the fashions of the period?
	Yes.
	Or was your friend wearing... No, I have to do everything.
	I've even designed the book.
	I was at the Royal College of Art and I did printmaking and illustration.
	But I also had a good way... I was good at writing.
	So, you know, one-liners.
	So it all came together with my books, basically.
	But one thing I would say, I was the only person in England to satirise the lockdown and create something that was available in a bookshop.
	And it was number five in the Times Literary Chart, so it did very, very well.
	But I was the only person actually sort of parodying it while it was happening.
	And all my pro-lockdown friends I thought it was really funny, which I found really disturbing.
	Oh really?
	So they got the joke and at the same time they were part of the joke?
	They are the joke, yeah.
	They are the joke?
	Yeah, because the ones, the comedy writers who got given the Given the gig, which was stolen from you by the owners of the copyright to the Lady Bird books, they're not awake, are they?
	No.
	Deep sleep.
	No.
	They're boring.
	Like a lot of comedians, there's only so far they'll go, and it's not very far.
	Not very far.
	For all their apparent edginess.
	Yeah, they don't even ask you the basic questions and it's like... I very, very early on in the whole thing, I sort of woke up to something and realised it was seriously wrong.
	And even if you didn't agree with... I mean, even if you didn't go to another level of thinking about it, you could at least go, this is so immoral, this is so cruel, you know.
	And everyone I knew was like, well, we have to keep Granny safe.
	So that's when I did the one that I was most happy with was when they imprisoned the grandma.
	And it says, oh, we can't see Granny for at least another three months.
	And the kids say, but we haven't seen her since Christmas last year.
	Don't care about her anyway.
	I was thinking that the art schools back in the day, probably in the 50s and the 60s, were sort of hotbeds of revolution and counterculture and all these trendy kids went on into the music industry and they created all these groovy pop art and stuff.
	I imagine that that ship has sailed a long time ago and that now art students are achingly conformist.
	So yeah, they're so scared of causing offence, they're very just conditioned basically.
	They don't... I think one of the things I had as an upbringing was that I had a sort of counterpoint to alternative culture in that I had quite a strong grounding in Orthodox Judaism and that's one of my realizations was that a bit like Christianity, it kind of runs against what the mainstream is asking you to do.
	It's about taking responsibility for your own life, sovereign decisions and things like that.
	The other way is going, no, no, you're free, you're free, you're a sexual being.
	You're like, well, what is this?
	What is your freedom?
	What is this freedom that you're talking about?
	It's an illusion, maybe.
	But I think I always juggled somewhere between the two.
	So it kind of enabled me maybe to sort of step back and understand that a bit.
	So tell me, I was really interested in the Orthodox Judaism stuff, because am I right in thinking that you've got, your parents are two different types of Jew?
	Yes, so my mum is an Ashkenazi, which is a sort of
	Well, any Jew that you ask will say we're from Israel, but ethnically they're a very close group, the Ashkenaz, and they're from kind of Eastern Europe, so Russia, Lithuania, Poland, around there, and they came to England around the 19th century for the Industrial Revolution and things like that, and also to escape the persecution in Eastern Europe that was terrible, but I'll get round to that.
	And the other group of Jews is my father, who's a Mizrahim, who are Arab Jews, who basically never left the Middle East.
	So they are communities that are probably dating all the way back to Abraham and before.
	that there were just maybe slightly mercantile like working class that didn't pose a threat to the establishment or whoever moved in at the time they were just kind of allowed to carry on and his his father was from Syria which is you know northern Iraq around there and my grandmother was from Lebanon but essentially they were like very much everyone was named after their grandfather for
	Thousands of years and they just didn't move.
	And then my dad was like the black sheep of the family and got into art school.
	And ended up over here.
	And you were telling me that they have very distinct ideological positions.
	Yeah, I only sensed it like maybe five years before when Brexit happened.
	I thought it was very odd, and also Trump and all this stuff, that all the Mizrahi side of my family, and literally any Mizrahi I met, any Iraqi, Iranian, Yemeni, Syrian, They're dark, they speak Arabic and Hebrew, basically.
	They were all pro-Trump, pro-Brexit, you know, get out of the EU.
	All of this, and any Ashkenazi was like, no, the global, we need a global this and that, and you know, it was the worst decision ever.
	It was almost like, it was a slow realisation, I was like, I've never met a Mizrahi that, and I was more like my father, like I voted to leave.
	I'll be honest with you, I didn't give it a huge amount of thought.
	It wasn't an all-consuming decision at the time.
	I was just like, oh, do I have to?
	Okay, well, freedom, okay, yeah, sure.
	And I just found that very interesting that there was this split on an ethnic kind of thing.
	Why is that?
	What's going on there?
	Ideologically, the Ashkenazi, when people down the rabbit hole talk about Jewish conspiracies and stuff, and how it's, you know, the evil Jews running the world, I think what they're really talking about is the Ashkenazi strain of Judaism, who seem to be, they're the ones who pushed the Bolshevik Revolution, for example, they're the ones behind
	Well, yeah, exactly.
	I was going to say cultural Marxism.
	They go Marxist.
	Yeah, if they reject their Judaism, they tend to go the other way.
	So, yeah.
	It's both spiritual and political.
	At this point, I'm not really sure I can tell the difference, but I was really interested in communism at school, not because I was a communist, but I was just really fascinated by the whole structure of it and the rhetoric.
	And I found a lot of my Eastern European friends were very kind of awake because they were like, OK, we lived under communism.
	But essentially it takes away from what we talked about earlier about the individual moral compass.
	When you're either an individual or you're part of this collective.
	I mean, essentially all of us are a bit of both.
	Like, you're part of a collective and you're an individual.
	But the collectivist morality is dangerous.
	And that's where society's heading.
	And it's a kind of, it's a throwback to communism.
	But what I started to realise was that it's not new, it's actually like thousands of years old.
	It goes all the way back.
	Well, yeah.
	Well, I mean, where are you on the origins of the Ashkenazim?
	Because let me float a theory past you.
	You know, I don't know enough about this yet.
	But, am I right in thinking that the Ashkenazim are essentially the descendants of 9th, 10th century Khazaria, when the kingdom, or whatever it was, the Khanate of Khazaria converted en masse to Judaism.
	They were given a choice.
	- There is that, but then there's also that they share the same PNA with the Kohanim, which go back into ancient Israel.
	So I think it's a mixture of things.
	I think what I do know is that all Ashkenazis are descended from four women.
	So at some point a tribe came into Germany in Alsace and sort of like Southern France.
	And then they had a lot of children.
	It was like a genetic bottleneck so you tend to find that also they carry a lot of I mean I'm Ashkenaz and my son is disabled and a lot of the The Ashkenazi Jewish women have tremendous problems with that, because it was quite a tight bottleneck.
	I would think it was a couple of thousand years ago, but I would say that there is a relationship between the people that left Israel and wandered.
	There's also the trade route, so that's another thing coming out of Iraq and Syria and going into sort of North Africa, Italy, Spain.
	A lot of Jews were trading along there.
	So I don't think that the Khazarian thing probably happened, but I think there's other roots in, if you know what I mean.
	But what I do find interesting is not the ethnic identity of the Jew, it's that when they reject the Judaism, they go towards another extreme, which is the complete antithesis.
	It's like the opposite of their faith.
	Yeah, yeah.
	It is curious.
	Is there a kind of a snobbery among... Do the Mizrahim feel more properly Jewish than the Ashkenazi?
	Because they're more religious?
	No, it's not about being more religious.
	They just think that they're from the Middle East.
	So they say, oh those are a bunch of communists, those guys.
	Right, right, right, right, right, right.
	They call them the Siknaj.
	Siknaj is like, you know, a bit, they believe they're lesser, and also the Ashkenaz believe the Mizrahi a bit less, like they're not, it's very odd to have a mixed marriage, like my, my parents are both artists and they, they love each other, very, very happy, but it's not so common to have an Ashkenaz and a Mizrahi marry, but maybe in the modern age it is.
	It's, yeah.
	And what about Sephardic Jews?
	Are they different?
	I don't know too much.
	They're from Spain.
	I know that.
	They were mercantile traders.
	I can't say because I don't know too much.
	I can only talk about what I know.
	But I would think that most of them are not like the Ashkenazi.
	Sephardis are more like the Mizrahis.
	And is there a physical difference?
	I mean, if you met somebody who said, right, I'm Jewish, could you work out whether they were Ashkenazi or Mizrahi?
	Yeah, pretty much straight away, yeah.
	So what are the tells?
	Do you know what?
	It's so... I mean, yesterday I was at a Jewish women's convention for
	Jewish women with children with disabilities and it was just like being in a room with your family even though I don't get on with them I was just like it's just like you look at the facial features the way they make expressions the way they laugh everything it you know if you put a bunch of Italians in a room together they're gonna know it's just kind of obvious to you but the Mizrahi's yeah it feels slightly different feels more like Arabs or Levantine people you know like Right.
	Egypt.
	Egyptians.
	They often throw me off actually.
	If I meet Cypriots and Egyptians and people like that, then I get confused.
	Because they're more difficult to tell apart, I would say.
	Miriam is one of my favourite names.
	My boss, when I was a mainstream media journalist, I worked under something called Miriam Gross and I loved Miriam.
	Well, she's still with us and it is one of my favourite names.
	Is that characteristic of Ashkenazim or Mizrahi or is it just the general kind of What, Miriam?
	Miriam is a biblical name.
	Miriam, yeah.
	It's like the sister of Moses.
	Yeah, we tend to have biblical names.
	I guess I'm named after my grandmother.
	I've got one too.
	You do, yeah, exactly.
	Yeah, but I'm new to... I don't think there were any Jameses in the Old Testament, were there?
	I don't think so.
	I've actually got it here, the Old Testament and the New Testament, next to me, so I was going to check that.
	I can check that for you, but I don't think so.
	But then... Oh!
	Do you know one thing I really envy you?
	I mean, presumably you speak Hebrew and can read ancient Hebrew.
	I can read ancient Hebrew, yeah.
	But my understanding is not great.
	I have to read the translation into English to really know.
	I'm kind of... Yeah, but you... But I can read it, yeah.
	At least you've got a bit.
	Yeah.
	Because, you know, I'm really into the Psalms.
	Yes.
	Obviously I read them in translation, I would just love to, because I'll bet there's an extra dimension that you get when you read them, because the translations are not quite perfect are they?
	No, not quite.
	But what I find interesting is the rituals as well and everything with it.
	It's not just the words, there's actions that you have to do.
	It's very ingrained in you as a child if you're doing it all the time.
	I became less religious when I went to art school because I kind of got sucked into all of that.
	And again, it's about destroying something of your identity, I think.
	Very interesting.
	What brought you back to religion?
	My son, I have two sons and my oldest son has a mitochondrial disease which is really awful and it's inherited from my mother and The Ashkenazi side.
	And I was just kind of living with it.
	This was before the lockdown.
	I sort of was living with this knowledge that, you know, my child wasn't maybe going to live into adult life or walk or speak or any of those things.
	Thank God now he can actually walk and he's doing very, very well.
	And he communicates to us through a computer.
	He's very clever.
	But yeah, I think that uncertainty and dealing with that and sort of finding a bit of faith, really, to deal with the situation and give him a good, happy life and live in the here and now, changed my perspective on things.
	And then the lockdown came and I just felt like everyone was going one way and I was going the other, you know, that I wasn't going to go down that path.
	Because if you go down that path, You know, if I lock anyone, I remember someone from the NHS calling me saying, lock your son indoors for, you know, two years.
	Yeah.
	And don't let him go around the park.
	And I just said, you'll kill him.
	That will kill him.
	You know, you're insane.
	And they were like, you're insane.
	I was like, well, what do you mean?
	Like, you can't lock anyone indoors for any reason.
	Like, it'll make you weaker, right?
	So very quickly I said to my husband, this is completely irrational.
	So I took him out every day, rolled him around in the mud, got him out trying to get him to walk.
	He eventually learnt to walk.
	That was also a very religious experience because he was poor.
	very moved by that and at the same time I was I was illustrating this book and you know coming home looking after the kids coming back illustrating looking up and just watching everybody around me descend into fear of what they couldn't they couldn't control and deceiving themselves into thinking they were controlling something you know Yeah, yeah, I'm totally with you.
	I think that the lockdown, as so much of the last three years, everything that they were telling us was the opposite of what is true.
	So they were telling us that they were doing this for our health and safety and actually they were killing us.
	My dad, Just before lockdown my dad had some operations on his heart and he got given this leaflet saying After your operation, you must go walking regularly and take lots of exercise and stuff.
	And then suddenly, he was told by the authorities, you can't walk anywhere.
	And they were closing.
	He lives in Malvern.
	And the Malvern Hills Conservatives, who were incredibly woke, I mean, hideously green and stuff, They closed the car parks.
	They closed the car parks in case anyone was tempted to go for a walk on the Malvern Hills.
	And my dad became really militant.
	He became really aggressively red-pilled in response to this and would insist on having his walk.
	And I'm sure that It's one of the reasons why he's alive today, that he ignored the authorities.
	Ignored everything!
	I remember going up, I had this Nissan Cube, you know, with a space on the back for the wheelchair and the two boys, at the time my youngest was one years old and a four year old who still can't walk or speak.
	And I remember just driving lonely through North London.
	and going to see my parents for Shabbat every Friday I was like I'm going to your house I'm not doing any of this locking myself outside and you know yeah see you in three months all this it's all rubbish this is all rubbish like the reason we have an immune system is because we all mix yeah And that makes us happy.
	So I insisted on going against everything and again with Sid I made friends with local mums who were also a bit worried about what was going on and got all the kids to play together and things and we'd break into playgrounds so I had a pair of pliers and I would go around shopping after, you remember they were brought in after Playcrafts?
	Excellent, excellent.
	We lived in central London in a little flat and we'd go around and we'd just take the wire clips, take the hazard tape and then we would write notes saying if you put up hazard tape we will rip it down tomorrow.
	Oh, brilliant!
	Brilliant!
	He would throw our kids over the gates.
	I taught them from a very young age how to break into a playground.
	And that's how Sid started doing his pull-ups, because then he could get up to go over.
	He let go of my hand and walked independently for the first time.
	And it's just incredible.
	It was like there was about 10, 15 kids.
	So in their head, there was no lockdown.
	They had this family.
	They had everybody around them.
	It was incredible.
	And all the middle class friends of mine that live in the suburbs, you know, with their big extensions, you know, all the kids went nuts.
	They actually followed it.
	So, it was a very extreme time.
	This is the kind of parenting, I think increasingly we have, as parents, we have a moral duty to teach our children to ignore the authorities, to even despise the authorities.
	I knew this instinctively, I used to live near Dulwich Park And whenever I took my children, when they were toddlers, to Dulwich Park and I saw a sign saying, this bridge, this ornamental bridge has been closed because the surface is slightly slippery and therefore we decided for your health and safety you can't...
	I would encourage them.
	I would take them past the signs and say, look, we're going to walk on this bridge.
	Or when it said, do not tread on the ice.
	I mean, I knew, I knew how deep the water was, you know, when the pond froze over, you know, it was like, it was like maybe up just above your ankles.
	So we went on the ice again.
	And you, you'd see all these, all these passers-by going, tut-tutting.
	I imagine, did you get anyone tut-tutting when you were down, when you were cutting through the tape and stuff?
	Yeah.
	Did you?
	What did they say?
	I had a guy, oh these men coming with black masks on, you know, like.
	How dare you?
	Here's a ticket you can take to court.
	And I would rip it up in front of their face.
	I'm completely insane.
	I'm not talking to anyone in a black mask.
	Who are you?
	A criminal?
	You know?
	I was just like, this is just so wrong on so many levels.
	Your morality is upside down.
	You're making people worse.
	And I was right.
	You're making me feel like a lightweight.
	Yeah, it was really hardcore.
	Imagine having a disabled child and a toddler.
	And like... And I breezed through it.
	I realised you just have to be as happy as possible, enjoy life as possible.
	You know, and Sid did eventually learn to walk.
	Which, with Leigh's syndrome, is really not given.
	It's really not given.
	A couple of weeks ago he walked around Hampstead Heath.
	That's three and a half miles.
	So, and he's going strong.
	He's six years old.
	He's incredible.
	He's like a, he's very beautiful.
	He's like an angel.
	Absolutely beautiful boy.
	But he, I think if it wasn't for him, I don't, I don't know.
	Maybe, maybe he just like taught me something about uncertainty and like feeling that you're in control.
	You know, you just have to be as tough as possible.
	It's like what you said.
	And he fell and he fell.
	He falls a lot, but gets up, gets up.
	But all this safety is...
	Yeah, well exactly.
	I think we're on our own, aren't we?
	We can't trust the authorities to... obviously they're not going to save us.
	We can't trust other people generally to save us.
	It's up to us to forge our own path.
	Yeah, that's what I've done.
	And I think it's very interesting, like, you don't necessarily need to talk about things so much, you just need to do, you know, we have allotments here, we, you know, we do gardening, all the kids running around, none of them have a television.
	It's great.
	But you just start to realise that... I was talking... Yeah, sorry.
	No, no.
	I was talking to somebody who is down the rabbit hole, but possibly not as far down the rabbit hole as we are.
	And she was saying to me, well, OK, I was on this kind of action group and that action group.
	And she named some of the ones that I would consider to be actually controlled opposition.
	These outfits with profile.
	I think that they are designed to corral us into containment pens and sort of, yeah, to muzzle us slightly, to contain us.
	And she said, well, what can I do?
	Then I said, well, I think it's a bit like, it's a bit like Jesus and the disciples.
	When Jesus was spreading the word, he You know, his 12 disciples, each of them converted 12 people or however many, and so it went on.
	He didn't say, I want you to form an action committee, and we're all going to be part of this action committee, and it's going to be called Christianity Now, and it's going to be... No, that's not how it worked.
	We go out into the world, and A, we do, we practice what we preach, and B, we spread the word.
	I imagine you're like me.
	The actual doing of something is way more important than the pontificating or the thinking about it.
	Because communism fails because they just pontificate about this ideal world and then in the meantime everything goes to hell.
	What I've learned maybe since coming out of it is I can see things in this way and I understand that a lot of people don't see things in this way but But it's what they do that counts.
	If they help me with my son, if there's a community that comes together and is living in a good way, that's more important.
	Your actions are far more important than what you profess to believe, because everyone sees something differently.
	The only thing that worries me, though, is the logic of those people that supported the lockdown.
	Because they will do it again.
	Yeah, I know, I know, I know.
	Sorry, I'm interrupting our train of thought here because this is a really good conversation but I see that you are only like 10% uploaded.
	Have you got really shit internet by any chance?
	Oh, maybe.
	I can go, it was good yesterday but it's a bit Am I kind of cutting out a lot?
	No, it's not that.
	It's just that I'm thinking... I've had this before where I had a podcast where I was with a guy in Canada and he was lit in the backwoods.
	His channel didn't upload and it was a real nuisance.
	10% uploaded?
	I'm 95% uploaded.
	Should I change my direction?
	uploaded but I but it should I mean it's not recording it well I think what I think we'll have to cut this this bit out because it's boring for people to do just I'm just I'm just trying to think of a a different strategy maybe going on to a different
	I could use my hotspot on my phone sometimes that's more powerful yeah Yeah.
	We could do that.
	I'm just thinking what to do now.
	If I put this on... Are you doing it on a computer?
	Yeah.
	Or on your phone?
	On a computer.
	Um, um...
	Oh, hold on.
	I could just change to iPhone. Just hold on a sec.
	See if that speeds things up a bit.
	No, that didn't that didn't work.
	No, no.
	I think what I might try and do is do it on a different thing.
	So we'll park this part.
	I'm going to stop it and we're going to try a different thing.
	OK.
	So I'm going to stop it now.
	Okay.
	I'm really glad that you've made a cup of tea because that's exactly what I would have done. -
	And people who, if this section, oh my God, my hair, oh my God, it's awful the way it sticks up like bloody Tintin, you know, it's really, I tell you what, it's really shit being, I'm sure it's shit being a woman as well, but it's really shit being a man and losing your, you know, like Samson.
	The power resides in your hair.
	The Bible knew, didn't it?
	He's a great hairdresser, yeah.
	It's, you know.
	Anyway, I think, I think that, presuming that the first half has recorded on a different channel and presuming that, otherwise people are just going to be saying, well, who's James having this random conversation?
	Okay, she's called Miriam.
	Miriam Elliot.
	Oh, by the way, you were going to tell me about your surname.
	Yeah, well, yeah, that kind of relates to my father's community.
	Yeah.
	Well, so basically, my father is from Lebanon, but his father is from Syria, from a very, very, very old Jewish community that basically, you remember I was saying earlier, they never left from sort of, probably four and a half, five thousand years more.
	And my surname, Eliyah, is a Syrian Jewish surname, but some Christians have it too.
	And it's called, it means Yahweh is my God.
	Eliyah.
	See?
	The Y-A-H.
	Yeah.
	Eliyah?
	Oh!
	Because I've done a podcast with Sonia Elijah.
	Yeah, I've noticed that.
	That's a similar thing, yeah.
	But those names go back thousands of years.
	And they basically, so when they So when they rejected Baal, which is what I'm going to come to.
	Yes, I'm looking forward to this bit.
	He changed their name to sound like the new god that they were worshipping.
	Abraham is like the ultimate iconoclast and he comes from the same place, Northern Iraq.
	So Northern Iraq and Syrian is where Judaism sort of starts.
	Around the time of the development of the phonetic alphabet, which is really interesting.
	So they go away from communicating spiritual ideas using pictures and stone to concepts that you could write in a sentence.
	So when they're destroying the previous religion, they have this new god, Yahweh.
	Right?
	Right!
	When are we talking here?
	We're talking about four and a half thousand years ago.
	They inscript this new god into their names, so that the surnames of these families are about getting away from the old system and into the new, which is really interesting.
	What I'm interested in is the conflict spiritually between Yahweh and Baal.
	Yes.
	Yeah.
	Well, before we go into that... I've actually had something that's been going on for... It's always been toing and froing forever because it's kind of like a manifestation of the human condition, like between love and fear.
	Yeah.
	But what I find interesting is my name is essentially related to people that started everything.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	Do you understand what I'm saying?
	I do.
	But before we go on into that particularly interesting and deep rabbit hole, have you ever listened to any of... Do you know about Cliff High?
	No.
	Cliff High is not of our party.
	I mean, he's way down the rabbit hole, but he's in a slightly different... Do you come out the other side?
	Cliff is basically Team Alien.
	And Cliff believes that L is basically, these aliens, the things that we think of, that we rationalized as God or Yahweh or whatever, was in fact aliens from another planet and transmitting all this, you know, and they could do amazing things, God-like things, obviously, because they had spaceships and stuff.
	Right.
	And I don't buy into this, but There is definitely a strand of my audience which I think subscribes to this stuff.
	I don't know.
	I can't say what I think about it.
	What?
	You can't say?
	Well you can't confirm either way Miriam.
	This has been a bloody waste of time.
	I don't think anyone can tell you the whole truth but you can only ever see things from different perspectives.
	But then I'm not a relativist so...
	The only way I look at it at the moment, I mean, obviously I'm always open to new ideas, but the way I look at it is through a kind of between this projection onto those two deities and what kind of world that creates.
	And I found that in the lockdown, all the very religious Jews in Israel were not following the lockdown.
	And were like having weddings and bar mitzvahs, and do you remember?
	In Jerusalem they were all partying.
	Were they?
	And in Tel Aviv where they're very anti-religious, you know, they're very anti-Hashem, all of these concepts, they were all locked up in a kind of complete, like, earnestness.
	That's interesting because I know Israel had it hard, the Israeli government.
	Yeah, but what I found interesting is their religiosity.
	Usually your perception from where you're standing before the lockdown is Tel Aviv is so free, you can be gay, you can be this, you can be that, you can party, you can eat any food in the world, you don't have to be constrained by these archaic laws.
	And in Jerusalem, oh look, look at the women in their long skirts, just like baby factories.
	I've heard that one.
	So that's from where I'm standing.
	And so then the lockdown happens and it's like the ones that are supposedly in a prison of religiosity are free.
	They're enjoying their life.
	They're not answering to the government.
	They said, sorry, you can't lock old people up.
	Are you crazy?
	God wants us to love everybody and carry on living.
	We're supposed to be a life-worshipping religion, right?
	Yeah.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Not a death-worshipping religion.
	And then the party capital of Tel Aviv goes completely, like, my ass.
	So that was a very interesting realisation.
	And also, like, having my auntie in Jerusalem, who's very kind of, like, anti-the religious in many ways, She was like, oh, these awful religious people getting on the bus without a mask on.
	Spreading their disease everywhere.
	I was like, wow, this is so nuts.
	I made sure not to tell anybody how I felt about it, because I'm quite empathetic to people.
	And I just try and just take it all on and kind of humor them a bit.
	But I found that very interesting.
	So there was this kind of very obvious light and dark that was forming, right?
	Yeah.
	Well, I mean, expressive of the dual nature of the universe.
	Well, of this, of the materium and presumably as above, as below, so above.
	Sorry, you asked me the question.
	No, no, it's a conversation.
	So you can say whatever you like.
	Just go with your So, very early on in the lockdown, I felt that it was a spiritual crisis, more than anything.
	And I also felt that I was being asked to break laws that I considered to be very important, like seeing my parents.
	You know, looking after people in my community, looking after my son, as in not locking him up.
	You know, I thought, well, two weeks ago, if you saw an old lady crossing the road with the shopping, if you were a good person, you would go and help that old lady cross the road with her shopping, right?
	Now she's a spreader of disease and the best thing you can do is leave her alone, right?
	So it was almost like the moral world had sort of turned upside down, and the collectivist world is all about, it's not you anymore, it's everybody else.
	So it's like, oh, I'm doing this to save everybody else.
	It's like, well, you're destroying everything.
	You're destroying all the businesses, you're destroying old people's lives, you're destroying children's lives.
	You're literally, like, covering your face to me was like a, you know, because your face is like a holy thing.
	It's like the thing that makes you you.
	So to remove it spiritually is like to say, I no longer exist, I'm just part of a group.
	And we're trying to control a disease, which to me was like, you could just throw, that's like thinking you can throw a stone in a pond and control the ripples.
	You can't, right?
	Yes.
	So when I started to think about the moral upside down, I started to think about Judaism because Judaism transmits the moral Ideas of Christianity into the whole world.
	The Ten Commandments.
	The story of Moses receiving the Ten Commandments.
	Going up a mountain and saying to everybody, you're responsible for your own life.
	Comes down and they're all worshipping their old God.
	And that's when I kind of started to think about the religion that Judaism ended.
	Because obviously when you're in cheder or in Sunday school and they talk about the sacrifice of Isaac and things like that, you don't, there's part of you that goes, what kind of a person would do that?
	Like, what kind of a world would that be normal?
	Like, that's nuts.
	You know, of course it's wrong.
	It's easy to know that that's wrong, but is it, you know?
	So the more I kind of delved into the religion, the kind of upside down religion that Judaism Quite violently ended, for good reason.
	The more I was sort of having lots of understanding about things and a lot of rituals that I grew up doing, not kind of understanding why I was doing them.
	But by understanding the religion that we ended, I understood that the rituals that we did, like, you know, Jews don't mix meat and milk.
	There's all this stuff.
	Yes.
	That the religion before was doing that.
	So it's kind of, You had a lot of Christians going on about, you know, Satan and the devil and things like that, but I kind of wanted to go a bit deeper, understand, well, that's your perception of it.
	What is it?
	You know, does it have a set of rules?
	Does it have gods?
	Does it have a logic to it?
	And the more I found out about this ancient religion, which is apparently Dead and gone.
	Almost everything, the LGBTQ, the Black Lives Matter, the whole pantheon of woke, everything, it just sort of went, oh my goodness, this has all been done before.
	This is not new.
	Because you're living in this crazy world.
	It's like, no, actually, there's a logic to it.
	And the more I understood about biolism and And also the fact that the Old Testament, to read it in a way where you're like, oh, actually, all these stories are about the destruction of the previous religion and the development of a new god.
	But the actual understanding of that was mind-blowing.
	I don't think I've ever thought about it like that, to think about the golden calf.
	Yeah, I went quite deep into it.
	So the golden calf, we know that Baal and Moloch, they're often represented by a bull, aren't they?
	Yes, so basically there were three gods.
	El was the sort of father god, and this is all happening across Mesopotamia, Iraq, Syria, and I think probably as far as North Africa.
	I think it had a huge following, this religion.
	And El's kind of like the master god of them all, and he has a son called Baal.
	And Baal is often represented with the horns, the horned god.
	And he's the god of like the material and he's the weather god, so he's the climate change god.
	Interesting.
	Interesting.
	Holding a lightning bolt.
	And I wanted to know exactly who this God was.
	So because the first story in the Old Testament is Abraham destroying his parents' idols, you know, smashing up the idol shop.
	So I wanted to know what the idols represented and what they meant to people.
	Because that is quite a story, really.
	So he's often, so Bell is often pictured holding a thunderbolt and the first time I saw him was in the British Museum, which is, there's so much in the back room in Mesopotamia, northern Iraq on the ground floor.
	And he's, so there's a god, I've actually printed him off With his jolly hat.
	He's got a sort of jolly, noddy hat.
	This is Baal.
	Oops.
	Do you see?
	With his jolly hat.
	He's got a sort of jolly...
	No, they're not like they put...
	A noddy hat.
	Noddy hat.
	Yeah, I'm as sad as it...
	Do you think Noddy was a Baal worshipper?
	But, no, it's interesting that arms...
	So it says on the inscription that he gives with one hand and takes with another.
	So he controls people through abusing them and simultaneously giving to them, which made me think automatically of the lockdown.
	Yes.
	Good point.
	So you abuse people, you take away their very fundamental rights, their own dignity, and at the same time you put £1,000 in their bank account whenever they want it, you know?
	Yeah.
	So Baal controlled the weather and everything else, so people really worshipped him.
	He was like the power deity.
	And he was married, or had a partnership with this woman, Asherah, who, if you see the owl symbolism there, it's quite
	used a lot now but she was um essentially like a a stability goddess so uh she basically they were really into polyamorous sex and people thought that sexual um inclination would bring you closer to El and Baal so there was a regular like temple orgies and all this stuff And I learned a bit about the structure of the society.
	What I found really interesting was like, you know, this was recently unveiled in, I don't know if you've seen this.
	No.
	What is it?
	This, so just before the lockdown, like a year before that, they, they, um, they unveiled the Arch of Baal.
	This is the Arch of Baal in Trafalgar Square and also in Times Square in New York.
	No.
	Yeah, you can see it.
	Boris Johnson opens it and he says in his speech, it's so nice to have a dedication.
	He goes, this has stood through thousands of years.
	It has withstood the Muslims and the Christians and, you know, everyone else has tried to bring it down.
	But this is really a monument to the God of love.
	He described it as the God of love.
	What is it?
	When does it date from?
	Do you remember when IS was going through Syria?
	This was in 2016.
	Yeah, with Palmyra and stuff, yeah.
	Yeah, so they destroyed this arch.
	Remember, there was an uproar about it.
	But the Baalist Arch, a lot of people were like, well, that's where they used to regularly sacrifice children.
	And this is the religion that Judaism outlawed, basically.
	So it's older than Judaism.
	The arch is covered with motifs of nature, so they were really into nature worship.
	Is this all beginning to click?
	Like Queen Charles, yeah.
	They were very into the greenery, nature worship.
	So it was a kind of class-based system in which you had an elite at the top with the power, the money, and the sexual urges that they thought brought them closer to a spiritual high.
	And everyone else was just like a disease to be controlled at the best.
	And the way they saw the system was like nature is on top and man is beneath.
	So nature is a force to be worshipped and man is like A thing that, you know, is productive but needs to be managed.
	It's a collective mush, you know?
	Your life has no more meaning than this slug, you know?
	That's how they saw the world.
	Yeah, yeah.
	That's what ecologists think.
	It's completely reversed.
	Man is divine.
	Man is, you know, created last and has a responsibility for the world but has more...
	what right to life you know it's your your life is not the same as someone stepping on a slug or do you understand it's not you're not worshipping nature well this is what this is what it says in in in psalm 8 that that god has put all things in subjection under man's feet yes so reverse this is the reverse yeah this system is the complete reverse
	And just briefly, that arch, was that arch shipped over from Palmyra and put in Trafalgar Square?
	It was recreated and put in, oddly enough, the two world's financial capitals, which I found very odd.
	And Johnson, I can't call him Boris, it's too matey, he sold this as a kind of a love god.
	I suppose he was to a degree.
	No, it was a very brief comment, but I just went, oh!
	That's an interesting way of describing it.
	It was an archaeological find from the destruction of ISIS.
	You understand, like, it was sold in that.
	But there's a spiritual significance to that, like a porthole, you know?
	Like an unleashing.
	And this is just before the lockdown.
	That's extraordinary.
	It is, isn't it?
	So the more I saw this, I thought nature worship.
	Well, there's the green movement.
	Climate change is baal.
	You know, the weather is controlled.
	Collectivism in itself, the material, you have the golden calf, so that will bring me on a bit to the story of Moses, but really also the LGBTQ, so the worshipping of sexuality as a sort of, like an incredible thing to be celebrated, like that makes you a good person because you're one of these groups of people, and really it's just your Your inclination, you know, it's not a mitzvah.
	You haven't done anything to be like, wow, you're great.
	You know, it's like people having their sexual identity as they're kind of like, yeah, so I've got more right to speak than you.
	That's really odd.
	You're right, but it makes perfect sense within the context, within the religious context.
	You haven't mentioned, oh yes, carry on with that, yeah.
	Well, she is the god of multiple sexualities and infinite genders.
	This is it.
	The reason that the Abrahamic faith kind of ended this was because they realised that the real thing to be worshipped was the family, you know, the man, the woman, the children.
	That was the continuation of the people, whereas this was something else entirely.
	So that kind of tied those ideas together.
	You haven't mentioned the child sacrifice yet.
	That's the story of Isaac, which is obviously in the Bible that Abraham goes to kill him because he believes he should, and then God goes, oh no, no, no, I don't want you to kill your children anymore.
	So basically the Biolists regularly killed their children, which is quite tragic, but that they believed that doing that rewarded them with Money and wealth, and they lived a good life.
	They thought that that sacrifice to the gods was, you know, what you had to do, which kind of really makes me think of women today, kind of sacrificing the future for their career or their material thing, you know, that they're kind of breaking that chain.
	There's something in that.
	Yeah.
	Last off was this, the Eye Gods.
	I'm sure your listeners are all familiar with the All-Seeing Eye.
	There was a place called the Eye Temple in northern Syria, which was filled with images of the All-Seeing Eye, which was also popular.
	It was like the symbol of El.
	You can still see these things today.
	It's a repetition.
	But what I found so interesting was the parallels became really quite strong.
	And also seeing things in advertising and in art and generally in the media, the iconography of it all.
	Going, oh, well, that looks like something from 4,500 years ago.
	I mean, it was a bit of a wow moment when I connected the two.
	It's everywhere.
	I was in London the other day, at the pub opposite Baker Street Tube, and they were advertising their new range of beers.
	And one of them had this single eye, this all-seeing eye in its iconography.
	And you're thinking, these people are playing with I think a lot of it's unconscious.
	I do think a lot of people just use icons not because they know anything about what they mean.
	I think 99.9% of people don't.
	They just go, oh, well, they're doing it.
	It's in fashion.
	I'll do it.
	Yeah.
	But it does mean something.
	And postmodernism was genius in that it deceived everyone into thinking that nothing really means anything and everything's just a big joke.
	Yeah, and I wonder who invented postmodernism.
	It's at the same importance, presumably.
	It's very interesting.
	Just one question.
	So the Abrahamic religions, or Yahweh, replaced El as the god of choice.
	But given that we know that we live in a dualistic world, and there has always been good and there's always been evil, Who do you think was the force for good in the era of El?
	And was El in some way also Yahweh or not?
	I think it was.
	It wasn't as simplistic as like, let's get rid of this guy and replace him.
	People had their traditions and had their ideas, but it was about this idea that that wasn't the true God, that these weather things and these sexual things were not Really the thing to be worshipped, maybe, that there was something higher than that.
	And it's really weird, it comes at the time of the development of the phonetic alphabet, which I find interesting, because we're going away from reading and writing into emotional, everything emotional, the use of emojis all the time, and symbols more than words.
	We're going back to symbols more than words.
	But do you understand that when the alphabet comes and it's like, okay, now we can think conceptually, we don't have to have this bit of stone with a weird owl God or the emotional, it goes away to the more moral.
	The 10 Commandments are moral guidelines for how you live your life.
	And they're the highest, you know?
	So if the government comes along and says, ignore them, you know that there's something not quite right, you know?
	Yes!
	Does that make sense?
	It makes so much sense, Miriam, that I'm almost frightened by how much... It's a shift towards the physical and the material and the sexual to the moral and the higher, and that trajectory.
	I think the story of Moses is all about that.
	When I understood what Baal, with the horns and things, basically it was the Jewish people going back to their old They're all God.
	They didn't just fashion a calf for no reason.
	They could have, there's many things they could have fashioned.
	They fashioned a calf.
	So it's going back to the, the emotional, the physical and material and the sexual, which are easier.
	Much easier things to worship.
	And superficially more attractive.
	I mean, you know, we all.
	Yeah.
	Yeah.
	And the child sacrifice and all of that was part of the development of feeling as if you were, you know, a powerful person and you could control these things.
	So if a new religion comes along and says, no, it's completely insane, stop doing it.
	I think you've helped answer a question, which I think a lot of, particularly the kind of more sort of Squidgy Christians.
	I mean, it's something you hear a lot from Christians who've been taught about Jesus' love and all that.
	And they say, oh, I can't relate to the Old Testament because the God there, he's so wrathful and brutal.
	And you've got the For example, that psalm, the one about the rivers of Babylon, you know, we sat down and wept.
	And there's a scene at the end where it says, you know, the joy of bashing the children against the, you know, of completely wiping out the enemy.
	And people can't relate to that because they think, well, this is horrible.
	He's killing, you know, this is genocide.
	But in the context of history, what this God is doing is saying, I do not want children being sacrificed.
	It's a deal-breaker.
	I cannot have it.
	It's so destructive.
	It destroyed the entire system.
	The entire form of worship and ritual is all... One of the things I found so interesting was Jews never eat meat and milk together.
	I don't know if you knew that.
	I do.
	Explain it to me.
	My whole life, I've never understood why, but my mother has one kitchen for... one sink for meat and one for milk.
	Yeah.
	And you can't mix the two.
	If you're making a dish with meat, you can't add any dairy to it.
	Very, very strict.
	So, why?
	You know?
	Why?
	Yeah.
	I was reading about what the barlists did before their...
	They're polyamorous sexual orgies for Elle.
	They would basically get a goat that was about to give birth, and as the calf was coming out, they would kill it and serve the calf in the mother's breast milk.
	Okay.
	That was the bestest thing you could have at a barless feast is the calf in the breast milk of the dead calf in the breast milk of the dead mother.
	So you're saying it's a goat then, not a... It's a, it's a, this isn't a child.
	It'll be a kid.
	Yeah, but the idea that you could never, you, so construct laws are coming against all of that.
	They're saying you cannot, you cannot do that anymore.
	That's cruel.
	That's cruel to the mother and the child and the symbolism.
	So they reversed it, so they were like, you can't have meat and milk together.
	There's certain things you can't do.
	They started the covering up at the end of sex worship.
	That was really, really important.
	It was about keeping faithful to your husband, your children.
	All of those things run against the religion before.
	I mean, the meat-milk thing is incredible, because I never understood my whole life why But I think what I'm trying to say is when you understand something in contrast to something else, then it makes sense.
	I totally agree.
	I do think it's a shame that you're not allowed to eat... You can't eat shellfish, can you?
	That might have been more to do with being in a desert.
	Yeah.
	Which is probably just common sense.
	Yeah.
	No, I agree with that.
	You don't want a dodgy oyster.
	I've had one before and I'm not having it again.
	Oh, there you are.
	That was God punishing you for breaking his law.
	He's definitely got it in for me.
	But interesting, like the lightning bolt that, you know, that you see quite a lot nowadays.
	People have a lot of lightning bolts and symbols and things like that.
	Bowie as well has that.
	The genderfluid.
	Yeah, the Adolf Brigade does.
	It's also very...
	Linked to that religion.
	Yes.
	Do you think Zeus was El?
	There was probably different manifestations of the same idea all the way across the Mediterranean.
	Definitely.
	By the way, where did you discover this stuff about Baal and about the religious practice before Judaism?
	During the lockdown, I kind of just had this... I had a friend who was also interested in it, and I was very interested in stepping back and looking at this new system where the morals were upside down.
	And I was thinking, where do my morals come from?
	Okay, so they come from faith.
	Okay, so what's my faith?
	Okay, it's this.
	And what's the Christian faith?
	Okay, it's this.
	Yeah, that makes sense.
	They connect.
	But what's the opposite of that?
	And I didn't know.
	And I saw these sort of childish depictions of Satan and stuff and I thought, that's a bit like Disney-ish even.
	I want to know what this really is.
	So yeah, so I basically looked at the Old Testament in a new way.
	It was just like a kind of... It's understanding that it's about ending a system.
	And then I started to think, well, maybe that system hasn't ended.
	Maybe that system is in full swing.
	It never went away.
	It never went away.
	Yeah.
	And now we're actually actively celebrating that system.
	Yes.
	What I meant was, are there any key texts that you recommend to people who want to find more about this?
	There are quite a few things that I've found and put together, which I can send you articles and things that I've found.
	And I think also looking at things like the Arch of Baal that I showed you, that was unveiled.
	Do you know what?
	My goodness, you know, and also it's just what I wanted to talk about, was it conceptually, how it fits the whole thing, the green, the climate change, the LGBTQ, everything.
	It just kind of, it lends itself so perfectly to it.
	And most importantly, Baal ruled through fear.
	Yeah.
	You've made me want to go to the Mesopotamian sections of the British... Because, hitherto, I've gone, well, I can't... Why should I care about these?
	But now I understand the significance of it.
	I'd like to know the enemy, actually, because the enemy's all around us.
	When people talk about the Babylonian mystery religions, is this what they mean?
	Yeah.
	I'm only at the cusp of understanding it all.
	Like, I'm trying my best to sort of put it all together.
	And like I said, just understand things in contrast.
	Sometimes to see a sort of truth, you have to see something with its opposite.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And also the number of times, like hundreds and hundreds of references to Baal and El in the Old Testament about, you know, Elijah defeating the prophets of Baal.
	So they were always up to their old practice!
	I'm actually still reading the Old Testament and I'm struck by how many times God is lamenting the fact, or is furious at the fact, that the children of Israel are going back to the old gods.
	They're building groves, and they're building Asherah poles, and they're sacrificing, they're putting children in the fire.
	Because they can't resist it.
	Because like, this is a sex and drugs and rock and roll cult, and it's much more fun than the kind of... That's basically it.
	It's very seductive.
	Very, very seductive.
	Yeah, I mean, who wouldn't want to sacrifice their children to bar?
	Yeah, exactly.
	Obviously, what you're saying, I think it's brilliant what you're saying.
	I tell you what, you're going to be inundated with people wanting to get you to do this, to say this stuff on their pods.
	I mean, you're a great discovery.
	I think it's just an insight, you know, and I'm not, I'm not claiming to be some expert.
	I just trying to, it was a very deep insight into it and I find it very interesting and anyone I speak to about it goes, Oh my gosh, I didn't make that connection.
	It's, it's, it's, it's a brilliant insight.
	I'm, I'm, I'm so impressed.
	Um, and, and fascinated.
	- I did.
	So, what was I gonna ask you?
	It's gone, it's gone.
	It was something about- - They are horrible.
	- Oh yeah, that's right, yeah.
	So obviously most of this stuff is, most people have not even considered this and because most people don't really have a religious framework, they've been encouraged to become secular and stuff.
	They'd be encouraged to become secular and stuff.
	But I would imagine that the elites, the people who really run the world, the predator class, I call them, are fully aware of this stuff, fully aware of the connections and always have been because because they've continued the traditions the mystery traditions since that era.
	Well, one of my thing is, so when the Black Lives Matter thing happens, I sort of was very like it all kind of happened with the lockdown.
	It was all one thing melted into each other.
	And again, Again, it was collectivism, so it was kind of nitpicking at the past in order to influence how people felt and divide the population, which I thought was divide and control, wasn't it?
	And a lot of people I know who are called people of colour were feeling the same as well, that this is very, very unusual.
	And I think also within Judaism there is that as well, that the collective identity of suffering overtakes the kind of individual sovereignty of the here and now, particularly with the Holocaust.
	Yes.
	Which I'm not going to deny happened.
	Of course it happened.
	Most of my friends lost everyone in their family growing up, including a lot of my family.
	But what I found really interesting was that when you're a young Jewish person and you say, why have we been through so much suffering?
	Like, why have we been thrown out of every country and gone for the next country and the next country?
	This didn't happen to the Mizrahis, it happens to Ashkenaz, and you're always told, oh, it's because they sent out these reports saying that they were worshipping a horned god and sacrificing children and all this stuff.
	You know, the blood libels.
	The blood libels were awful and they spread around Western Europe and that was why the pogroms happened.
	Yeah.
	You know, we will take your Christian child and kill it for blood, all this stuff, which when you're a young Jew, you're like, my God, that's appalling.
	Who would do that?
	That's horrific.
	Like, this is the antithesis of anything a Jewish person would do.
	Like, this is awful.
	And then I suddenly had another kind of like, oh, but that's what someone that was practicing Baalism would do.
	Yeah.
	Hmm.
	Yeah, well, exactly.
	Look, put it this way.
	Oh my God.
	Which I think for a lot of Jewish friends was too far to go with them.
	But I thought that's very interesting that the exact thing that we were persecuted for and kicked from one country to the next is like, and then I start to think it's like, you know, when you accuse someone of something that you're doing yourself.
	And who are we most hated by?
	I always thought to me, who are Jewish people most hated by?
	Is it the idea that I'm sold now that suddenly someone irrationally hates me because of my race?
	This is the racist, sort of secular, modern argument.
	And I'm thinking, well, actually, possibly the person that most, most hates me is the person that I've destroyed their religion.
	If you see what I mean.
	Like, if your religion is about the complete annihilation of the religion before in every conceivable way, then would you not make some effort?
	Yeah, well, hey, listen, you're on... If you make a whole liturgy of books, the Old Testament, Exodus, all of this, and it's all about the destruction of the previous faith, as in every story in it is like a parable as to why the previous faith is wrong.
	Do not do this.
	Would you not make a few enemies?
	Yeah.
	Particularly people that were benefiting from it, or like...
	That was just a big connection moment for me.
	I just didn't stop swallowing... I mean, the racial theory is that's one that Hitler used, but that's a very superficial... It's like, hey, here's the science, you know?
	Do you see the way I was talking about it?
	Listen, I...
	I totally see where you're going with this and I don't think I need to make it any more explicit than you have.
	Those with eyes to see will see it.
	But it's certainly the case that if throughout the course of the Torah is what you call it, isn't it?
	Yeah, all the founding stories are all about the Throughout the Torah, which presumably is a period of thousands of years, I mean it must be at least two or three thousand years.
	It's not an overnight revelation, it's like a long... Again and again and again and again and again and again.
	The children of Israel are turning to the old religion, the evil religion, for reasons we've established.
	And yet we're suddenly asked to believe that somehow, in recent years, they completely cleaned up their act and they didn't go back to the old religion because we live in post-religious times and we're all rational humanists.
	I was talking about that the other day, about post-truth.
	That word, well, that's just lying, isn't it?
	Yeah, yeah, it is, it is, it is.
	You can't use the word truth, you're acknowledging that truth existed at some point, and then you went against it.
	So, this has already been, like, just about the most interesting podcast I've ever done, but there's more, isn't there?
	No, no, well, okay, it's up there.
	But you told me... I don't think it's the children of Israel.
	I think that these gods and this mindset exist in every single person in the world.
	Like, I think it's a choice that each one of us has to make.
	I think, depending on... Oh, for sure!
	The Jews will go with whatever's going on, you know, at the time.
	Well, also Miriam, by the way, you think about how long ago the Children of Israel were.
	I think it's highly likely that a lot of us were descended from the Children of Israel, whether Jewish or not.
	I mean, I'm pretty sure that... It's all metal.
	But what I wanted to ask you was the other really interesting thing you told me.
	It was you, wasn't it?
	It wasn't one of the other girls.
	about the great, all those 19th century, sorry, why Napoleon went into Egypt and why those great sort of Victorian collectors, you know, the Germans and the English ones, went to pillage, if you like, the ancient architectural sites and trying to get certain artifacts.
	That was you, wasn't it?
	I think that's really interesting, but would it be to accrue all these idols?
	Yeah.
	It wasn't actually me that said that, but I would say that I would make that connection.
	Why were they there?
	Well, so you know how... I'm sorry it wasn't you who said this, because I was hoping you were going to elaborate on this theory, but we'll run with it briefly.
	You know how the entertainment industry gives us these truths about the true nature of the world, whether you want to call it predictive programming or revelation of the method.
	And often they do it through really quite popular film.
	I mean, for example, The Hunger Games was setting out what's in store for us, living in districts connected by, you know, we're all treated like serfs, by the capital, and they're all decadent and so on.
	The Hunger Games was written by a woman who I think grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, which is the epicenter of the deep state and the military-industrial complex, so she knew where she wrote.
	But what's Indiana Jones doing?
	He's going to all these ancient sites in the same way that the Nazis did, of course.
	I mean, you know, it's perfectly true, as those films suggest, that the Nazis were sending their collectors out to collect these occult symbols.
	Because the stuff is real.
	We've been encouraged to think that religion is a kind of, we've all grown out of it.
	Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
	Yeah, we have.
	But I think the realisation I had was that the secular world isn't as secular as one might think it is.
	Well, all these things... Look, if these things didn't mean anything, if they didn't have power, why would we live in a world run by people who are obsessed with signs and symbols?
	You think about the dollar bill.
	It's not that we're run by people, it's that we are.
	This is where I disagree.
	I think it's us going back to our own kind of... We copy each other.
	You know, we copy each other.
	If everybody puts the mask on, I put the mask on, suddenly everyone looks like an armed robber.
	That's fine.
	Everyone else is doing it.
	So, like I said earlier, if a company puts these kind of... You know, you go on Facebook, everyone's going like, yeah, yeah, this, all the time, my whole life I've seen this.
	This is the Mollah Horns.
	Oh yes, tell me about Moloch.
	Is he different from Baal?
	No, it's all the same deity, but it's like a rotating series of names for the same deity.
	So this is what I've discovered.
	It's like, um, you would have, like in the Hebrew Bible, Yahweh has different names as well, which, you know, Hashem, there's others that you can't say that are too holy, but there is, there is different ways of communicating the same, um, paradigm.
	And in the Kabbalah- Why does he have different names?
	So the tree of life is the tree of Abraham.
	So the tree of family, children, continuation.
	Tree of death is Lilith and all of these kind of archaic old gods that control through fear and death and celebrate.
	This is really interesting.
	One is suppressing the sexual and one is like elevating the sexual.
	Because all I knew when I was born was like, oh, in the 1960s, there was the sexual revolution and now everyone's free.
	Yeah.
	And before they weren't free, it's like, OK, OK.
	The sexual revolution was definitely part of the site, but we're going back here to the to the cultural Marxist Marxist, the Frankfurt School.
	I mean, they this is really interesting that Karl Marx himself studied the occult.
	He was very interested in this.
	So he was interested in ancient religion of thousands of years ago.
	Yeah, he dabbled in it, yeah.
	So those kind of ideas would have... That's why I wanted to know more about it, because I believe that there is a spiritual side to the secular, like the secular isn't as secular as you think it is.
	Because all of the hand-washing and the lockdown and it was all, you know, you remember the anti-back and the march, it was all ritualistic.
	It seemed to me very, very early on like religious behaviour.
	As someone that was raised in a religion, you always had to cover your hair and wash your hands before you go into the temple.
	You always have to cover yourself, wash your hands.
	And I was like, oh wow, this is a religion.
	Yes.
	This is a type of one.
	It would be interesting if you discovered that Baal worshippers wore face nappies, did they?
	Maybe!
	I wouldn't be surprised.
	I wouldn't be surprised.
	They just saw the world in a very similar way.
	In a very similar way to how we perceive things now.
	The climate disaster.
	All of this.
	Well, that's, you see, this is what, look, I know you, your line is, you're obviously not quite as out there as I am, although you're pretty out there, I have to say, Miriam.
	So your line is that these are merely human impulses and that nobody's really orchestrating this thing.
	Yeah, I don't know.
	I mean, I think that, for example, Can I tell you something really funny?
	Yeah, go on, tell me.
	So, after We Do Lockdown came out and I came back to my studio and I was contacted by Marina Abramovich, who's... You weren't!
	Yeah, and she writes, her husband writes to me and says she's a huge fan of your work, she thinks it's hilarious and she particularly liked the Lockdown book.
	Would you like to come and meet us?
	So I went to meet her on my bicycle, you know, just going up to Mayfair and, and we, we, we sat there for maybe like an hour and she was like, Oh, I've got this show coming up at the Royal Academy and I really want you to make a book about whatever you want to make a book, you know, like about me, maybe, whatever you want to do, you know?
	I don't know.
	And obviously, for two years, I've been kind of looking into all the esoteric symbolism.
	I thought of all the people in the world to contact me.
	I'm not a very well-known person.
	People like my work, but, you know, this person to contact me, to ask me to make work about them, that's really special.
	And she said to me, it's crazy, she said, everyone thinks I'm a Satanist.
	Yeah.
	Why could that be?
	I put my tea down and I went, I wonder why they could think that?
	That's crazy.
	Some nutcrackers out there.
	Whoa.
	So that's where I am.
	So then I, I messaged Jerry and said, like, I've got to do, I had a show in Poland, so I had to do that.
	Uh, and, um, Yeah, I found an answer to her.
	She's very sick at the moment, apparently, but I'm now kind of like, how do I approach this?
	Or do I?
	I don't know.
	I don't know.
	I have an answer to it.
	They're very funny.
	Everything I do comes out as comedy or satire or something.
	It just does, but it's...
	It's about mocking that, in a way.
	What a bizarre thing to happen.
	That is about as bizarre as it gets.
	I think it's one of those questions where you really have to ask God, don't you?
	Yeah, I think God has made this happen.
	Well, exactly.
	He's got a sense of humour, hasn't he?
	He really has.
	He that dwelleth in heaven shall last unto scorn.
	The Lord shall have them in derision.
	Yeah.
	But then I wrote something while I was in the seaside.
	It just sort of came to me.
	And I sent it to my friend, Arthur, who wrote Father Ted.
	He's a very, very brilliant comedy writer.
	Arthur Matthews.
	Yeah, and he thought it was really, really funny.
	My answer was to... She's had three abortions, Marina Abramovic, so she said that to have children is a disaster for your career, you know?
	In a way, she's kind of right, you know?
	It's hard to be a mum and to work.
	I'm a mum and it's hard.
	Yeah, you can't serve the beast system and... Yeah.
	It's tiring.
	It's a full-time job, serving the beast.
	Serving the bull.
	But you can mock it from the outside, right?
	Yeah.
	So I thought to cast her as...
	She's from the Yugoslavian communist era and she's a bit like a weird fairy tale witch character.
	I don't know, like something out of a Hans Christian Andersen.
	I've written her life as if she had seven children and lived in the woods.
	Have you done that?
	I've written a fairy tale about her life and that she's secretly a contentious conceptual artist that wants a solo show at the Royal Academy of Yugoslavia.
	But she's a really devoted mother to her seven children.
	That's just great.
	I think she'd probably like it.
	She won't allow me to do it, to be honest.
	I think she'll find it funny.
	Of course she will.
	Also, Miriam, you have got the... Artists can get away with murder.
	You know that.
	I do.
	We can, can't we?
	We can.
	You really can.
	I mean, I've never murdered anyone, but... No.
	But it's something I've noticed.
	I've got quite a few friends who are either very successful or quite successful artists.
	And the thing I've noticed about them is this...
	It's a kind of supreme selfishness in a way.
	The point they're making, their expression of their artistry, takes precedence over everything else.
	And you can't argue with it because it is their art.
	Their feelings.
	It's how it works.
	And I respect that because it means that they keep a sort of purity of vision.
	So I think that you have that fantastic get out of jail free.
	Look, I'm an artist.
	This is what my muse was telling me to do.
	Sorry, Marina.
	Sorry that I've given you seven children.
	I know you don't really like them, but there it is.
	It gets up, chops the firewood, changes the nappies.
	It's great.
	It's great.
	Like your other life, you know, your other life that you never had.
	I had lots of ideas about that because she always says her work is about taking the limits of pain and suffering of the human being to an extreme, you know, how far can I take this?
	And I thought, well, the one thing that you've never done is given birth.
	And that's really taking it to the extreme of pain and human suffering, you know, and I've done that and I'm still laughing, so.
	Yeah, yeah.
	There were lots of things I thought.
	It was very, very funny when I wrote it.
	I don't know how it will be received.
	I don't know if it will.
	Well, I don't know.
	But it's just mission, isn't it, to do something like that?
	I think it's brilliant.
	I think it's very amusing.
	It's very piquant.
	Now, before we go, How do you think all this ends?
	Do you think God's got this and do you think we are approaching sort of judgment day or what?
	In your eschatology, how does it?
	That I don't know.
	But one thing I would say is that if you sacrifice your children and put yourself first, I'm going to go against nature so much, you'll die out by your own accord.
	Yeah.
	You know, like you, that's when they go on about sustainability, it's probably because they are unsustainable.
	Sustainability, I often think about that, that's a word about continuation, like about Being sustainable is being able to go into the future.
	If you're not having any children, then your nihilism will effectively delete you anyway.
	It's just we just have to make sure that we don't all get dragged down with them.
	Yes.
	Amen.
	It's already a battle that you have to fight.
	The only thing you have to do is sustain life and enjoy life and continuation.
	But as for anyone that's chosen that path, it's like... What are you going to do?
	Sit around with your... That's why I thought it was so funny to set her with seven kids, you know, fourteen grandkids.
	Because, like, the wisdom of... You haven't got any!
	Do you know what I mean?
	I want to read this book.
	Have you illustrated it yet?
	No, I'm just looking at keeping it in line with everything else and I was looking at Snow White, you know, kind of like a fairy tale.
	Yeah, of course.
	Because she sort of reminds me of something from one of those books, you know.
	And it turns out her favourite thing is Hans Christian Andersen.
	So, There's so many things that it fits.
	I get this idea and I'm like, ah!
	Eureka!
	I think it's really good.
	Miriam, where can... Sorry about the... It was just awesome.
	I'm just thinking, well, I'm sort of thinking it's lunchtime and you've probably got stuff to do.
	My hair needs to grow some more.
	Where can people find your stuff?
	It's dung beetle books.com.
	So dung beetle was because when I made, we go to the gallery, I was being sued by penguin and they said, we're not allowed to use this, this ladybird anymore.
	So I used a dung beetle because it was like, you know, from shit comes learning.
	That's the motto.
	There's a reference to the all-seeing eye on the front cover.
	We see the sites as full of things about what we've been talking about, basically.
	Oh!
	The decolonisation of the British Museum.
	It's entirely empty.
	Can we go and see something else, Jane?
	I'm looking forward to reading that one.
	I haven't looked at that one yet.
	We see the sites, yeah.
	A lot of woke people find my work and think it's very funny.
	You're right, when you're an artist you can get away with a lot.
	You can, you can.
	It's a bit like the jester in the medieval courts.
	That's my life, yeah.
	Well, good on you.
	Save the unsaidable.
	That's my life, yeah.
	That's your, well, good on you.
	So, yeah, anything else?
	You've got your website, that's it, isn't it?
	Yeah, if you do a link to it, then maybe people could... Yeah, I'll get my people.
	I will let you know about the Marina book if I do that.
	Yeah, I'd love to know.
	I think people would love to know how that resolves itself.
	Yeah, I mean, I think it's good to have an in.
	With the other side, just in case it all goes tits up and we are herded into, you know, death camps again and they just want to sacrifice us all to their, to Baal.
	You might at least get a special kind of, you know, you might be put in the artist's, you know, it's a bit like The pianists in those Holocaust movies that get, you know, they survive because they... I don't know.
	Yeah, yeah.
	But she told me quite a lot when I met her about all of that and from her perspective.
	And it was very, very interesting.
	Like, how can you use so much symbolism and not think that that might affect people?
	It's very odd, the whole thing.
	You know?
	Well, yeah.
	This is a whole other conversation.
	The degree to which these people know what they're doing and... I don't know.
	No.
	We can't get inside their heads.
	That's the thing.
	All I can do is, like, humour what they produce and the world they create.
	The things that they're doing, you know.
	It's almost like she's asking me to hold a mirror up to her.
	Like, she's asking me to do that.
	She is.
	She totally is.
	Yeah, yeah, yeah.
	And maybe you'll get further commissions.
	You might get commissioned by Bill Gates.
	By... Who else might you get?
	I mean, yeah.
	It could be your...
	Who, sorry?
	I don't know if I could do that.
	These people are so fucking evil!
	Well, no, because the big one, the boss, would be Hillary Clinton, I'd say.
	Would you get Hillary?
	I wouldn't do that.
	She scares me.
	Very scary.
	What?
	What?
	Lovely Hillary?
	Lovely little Hillary, yeah.
	Lovely Hillary.
	OK.
	Miriam, I was really looking forward to this and my anticipation has been entirely justified.
	It really was fun.
	Everyone, if you love this podcast, and of course you do, don't forget I'm on Patreon, Subscribestar, Locals, Substack, and you can buy me a coffee.
	I like being bought coffees.
	Lots of people like to do that.
	Yeah, oh yeah, thanks Miriam.
	I'll buy you one one day.
	I get these weird people who say things like, are you doing this because you want to help the world?
	Or are you doing it because you want to make a living?
	And I'm thinking, well, we're both.
	One doesn't exclude the other.
	I want to save the world, but I want to have a reasonable standard of living so I can enjoy the world.
	Before we all die.
	Before the horror.
	That seems a reasonable... I'm not being greedy, am I?
	No.
	Exactly.
	I do my books, I'm completely independent.
	Publish them, print them.
	That's right.
	You and I are blessed in that we are both outside the beast system, because it's entirely voluntary whether people support us or not.
	You can see this.
	People can watch the stuff for free.
	But if you want to do your bit for, well, for fighting the beast system, you've got to support people like us.
	I think this is the way forward.
	There is an independent life that is possible.
	So you have to do that.
	Yeah.
	Miriam, I really hope I see you again.
	You know, either outside a pub or we have coffee.
	You won't be able to have milk.
	You won't be able to have a flat white if you've just had a beef burger.
	Not if you had a burger.
	Yeah, exactly.
	How long?
	What's the gap?
	I think it's about 25 minutes.
	Half an hour.
	Oh, that's all right.
	Yeah, but that's a bit broad.
	You can't have a beef burger and just sit there for half an hour and be like, I was thinking about the problem actually.
	When you make shepherd's pie, you can't put a bit of butter on top to give it a nice crispy... It's not great.
	You can't do that.
	You wouldn't fry your bacon in butter.
	It's just that my mum is a lot more observant than me, so she would probably take that more seriously, but I don't know.
	Oh!
	I haven't asked you, just very... Sorry, before we go.
	Wigs.
	Who are the ones who wear the wigs?
	The Hasids.
	The Haredim.
	I saw quite a lot of them yesterday, actually.
	So, I've heard two reasons why they do that.
	And I'm not sure which one I believe.
	Well, go on, give me them.
	One of them is quite insane, but there used to be a lot of pogroms in Eastern Europe.
	So people would just come in and just kill a load of Jewish people living in a town.
	And they didn't want them to rape the women, so they would shave.
	By having a wig you could just kind of throw it off and become less attractive.
	Yeah.
	Because obviously a woman without hair isn't as attractive.
	Yeah.
	That was the one.
	Then there is a whole thing about covering your hair which is kind of in all faiths, particularly in the temple, and that it just got taken a bit further of just like literally getting rid of your hair and having a fake one.
	That doesn't make sense to me because why would you just replace it with more hair?
	I don't know.
	I think the first one might tragically be true, because you don't get that in Mizrahi or Sephardi populations, but you do in Ashkenaz.
	Ah, interesting.
	Yeah, yeah.
	And they're the ones that have been through quite a lot of, let's say, ancestral trauma.
	You are a mine of information.
	Don't take my word for it, but those are the two reasons that I've been told.
	And that kind of makes sense to me.
	Yeah, yeah, totally.
	I think my great-grandmother had it.
	What, a wig?
	Yeah.
	But obviously, I grew up with a feminist mother, so... Oh, go on, show me your nose.
	Show me your nose.
	Again, in profile.
	It's actually quite nice.
	I like your nose a lot.
	What kind of nose is that?
	Is that Mizrahi or is that Ashkenazi?
	I can't tell.
	There's no like a borderline on my face.
	It's probably... I think she's probably more my dad's.
	My dad's got this nose.
	So it's Mizrahi?
	Yeah.
	My mum's got more of a... Yeah.
	There you are.
	But we have this kind of weird like squidgy bit here and then like a thing.
	It was difficult growing up with it, because, you know, in Northern Europe, people have the little... Disney nose.
	Oh, what, the little bobbly, sort of, ski slope nose?
	Yeah, yeah, and I didn't, but... I don't care anymore.
	What's my nose?
	Hang on, what's mine?
	Yours is quite... Isn't it quite... It's British, really, isn't it?
	It's quite similar.
	Like, from the side, you've got a bridge like mine.
	It's quite... I'd say it's quite... it's quite... I don't know.
	You've got the same bridge here.
	I have, yeah, yeah.
	I have.
	It could be like Irish or something.
	Does your dad have it or your mum?
	I'm not sure.
	I think my dad's... I'm trying to look at the picture while it's...
	Of course, Rose, it's not possible.
	It's like trying to look at the back of your head.
	But my children are like, really, they look so different.
	My youngest son looks kind of like Middle Eastern.
	He's like very, very dark.
	And my oldest one looks English, completely English.
	It's pretty strange.
	It's weird, isn't it?
	All are different.
	Although we should never take one of those genetic test things.
	Did you?
	I did it before I knew what was going on in the world.
	Yeah, I know.
	I mean, they've got us over a barrel, haven't they?
	It's a bit like Facebook, how we started out thinking, oh, isn't it great sharing all this information?
	And then you think they've got you.
	In the same way, when they've got your genetic code, they can just invent the thing that kills you, or whatever.
	Sorry, Miriam.
	Bye.
	I didn't know it was 2014.
	Yeah, I know.
	I didn't know.
	I didn't see it coming.
	I mean, I felt like before I bit off, but I didn't realise how bad it was until 2020.
	Well, they're one step ahead of us all the time.
	That's the thing, because they are, because they're barl worshippers.
	And that's the deal.
	Right.
	I think we should, I think we should, we should, we should go otherwise, because we'll just keep, we'll just keep rabbiting on.
	And I love it, but... Oh my God, is that the time?
	Geez.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Exactly.
	All right.
	Don't forget, no, it won't get edited.
	What you've got to do though, please, is leave your machine on so that the other bit uploads.
	Okay, yeah, I will.
	It's only done 20%, so I'll just leave it on.
	Yeah, exactly.
	Well, but at least it's working.
	Okay, I'm going to end recording.

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