Gad Saad argues in Suicidal Empathy that excessive empathy ignores reality, citing cases where felons or rape victims feel guilt for perpetrators. He contrasts Islam's proselytizing nature with Judaism's exclusivity and attributes US-Iran tensions to 1953 oil interventions, though Rogan emphasizes local regime responsibility over 47 years. Saad claims anti-Semitism stems from Jewish market dominance as scapegoats and details his own death threats at Concordia University following Quebec's open-border policies for Islamic immigrants. He predicts a "slow death" for Montreal if Muslim populations exceed 10%, urging listeners to recognize religious incompatibilities with American liberties to protect freedom. [Automatically generated summary]
And the previous person that he had been entangled with didn't want to, whatever, press charges because she didn't want another black man to be in prison.
Oh, boy.
So I hope to get into the book in a second.
But the other big news is that this past year I've been a visiting scholar at Old Miss, University of Mississippi.
I had taken a two year leave from my school in Montreal.
Starting this summer, we are moving permanently to Oxford.
So the Lebanese, Jews, Canadians are going down to Oxford, Mississippi, and we're very excited.
So, the wood cricket is an insect that abhors water, it wants nothing to do with water.
But when it is parasitized by a neuro parasite called the hairworm, the hairworm needs the wood cricket to happily and merrily commit suicide by jumping into the water because that's the only way that the hairworm can complete its reproductive cycle.
So once the hairworm hijacks the wood cricket's ability to think and to invoke its survival instinct, it erases its survival instinct, then it is owned by the hairworm.
And so I use that principle to explain suicidal empathy.
And so the way that I originally had the epiphany to use the parasitological framework so, parasitology is just a study of host parasite interactions.
So, a tapeworm is a parasite, but that.
Parasitizes my intestinal tract.
But a subfield of parasitology is neuro parasitology.
Those are the parasites that need to go into your brain, altering your circuitry to suit their interests, including ideas.
And that's how I came up with the parasitic ideas of the parasitic mind.
But in order to fully tell the story, I then had to say, but a lot of the mechanisms by which people seem to be completely hijacked in terms of their ability to think critically is really coming from an affective place.
And so, how can I explain that?
And so, what I argue in the book, and then we can drill down to endless examples if you want.
I'm not saying that empathy is a bad thing.
Because even though the book is just dropping, there's already been maybe 10 articles that have been hit pieces against the book, which of course, people, it means people haven't read it yet, where they say, you know, here comes the dark Jew who is trying to promulgate the idea that empathy is a bad thing.
He's a neo con right wing guy, an Elon guy, a Donald Trump guy.
I'm not saying that empathy is bad.
Empathy is actually a very important virtue to have.
In order for you and I to have a meaningful conversation, I need to put myself in your mind and vice versa.
That's called cognitive empathy, right?
Theory of mind is something that typically autistic children fail on very early in life.
That's how you diagnose them as being autistic.
So there's nothing wrong with well modulated empathy.
The problem with empathy, like most things in life, is if there's too little or too much of it.
Aristotle explained this to us thousands of years ago via his golden mean.
If a soldier is not courageous enough, if he's cowardly, it's not good.
If he's too courageous, he becomes a reckless martyr, that's not good.
There's a sweet spot in the middle.
I argue empathy follows exactly that rule.
Too little of it, you're a psychopath.
Too much of it, if it's hyperactive, if it is invoked in the wrong situations toward the wrong targets, you end up with suicidal empathy.
Yeah, I don't even necessarily know if it's empathy at that point.
It completely becomes illogical and ideological.
You just subscribe to whatever the ideology says and you ignore the reality.
Like this man that pushed that guy in front of the train.
Like, this is a violent criminal, and he had been arrested numerous times, I think more than a dozen.
And it was very clear there was something very wrong with this person.
He probably shouldn't be just running free, victimizing people.
There was another one where someone pushed this old guy down a flight of stairs into the subway and killed him.
Same situation, same kind of person, person that had been in and out of jail.
You know, every one of these people starts off as a child, every one of these people starts off as a baby.
And I can only imagine what kind of household they developed in.
I can only imagine what kind of abuse they suffered.
I can only imagine what happened to them.
And that's horrible.
But once they reach adulthood and they start victimizing other people, we've got to do something as a society.
Now, I don't know what the tools are to rehabilitate a person like that, but I know that they're not being employed.
There's not a whole lot of evidence of there's any successful program where they're taking a person like that.
Doing something with them that completely changes their personality and the way they interact with humans and releases them out in the world and they become a much better person than they used to be.
So, I call them in the book, I call them blank slate felons because if you remember the term blank slate, so in the parasitic mind, I talk about social constructivism.
Everything is a social construction, it's the tabula rasa premise.
We're born with empty minds with no individual differences in our potentiality, and it's only our unique life trajectories.
And our unique patterns of socialization that end up making us who we become, which in a small sense, that's true.
My life experience and yours is an indelible part of who we are as individuals.
But there are individual differences.
People are born with different proclivities eventually of committing crimes or of being NBA players or of being the next Einstein.
It's a very hopeful message, though, to start with the blank slate premise.
Because if you and I are both parents, I would love to subscribe to the idea that if only I knew the exact schedule of reinforcement of my how to ensure that my child becomes the next Lionel Messi or the next Albert Einstein, he too can become that.
That's a lot more hopeful than thinking, you know what, I don't think my son has the morphological features that are ever going to make him to be the next NBA star.
He's too short, he doesn't have the right athletic tools.
And so it's easy to understand why people can be parasitized by these ideas.
This person of color.
Was born into a white supremacist society.
So he's already been victimized by society.
And for you to now punish him by having him, you know, in the penal system, you're doubly punishing him.
So shouldn't you give him a second chance?
And by second chance, we mean 186th chance.
That's part of suicidal empathy.
But suicidal empathy doesn't even apply to only that.
The victims of rape are themselves suicidally empathetic towards their rapists.
I think, I don't want to misspeak, but I think he was deported to the screams and lamentations of his victim.
There is a woman who was raped in Germany, and when the authorities were trying to find out, More about who the perpetrators were, she lied to them and said that they were speaking in German, even though they were speaking in Arabic and Farsi.
Because if she had truly said what their language was, then those communities would have been marginalized.
So, you know, there's just an endless number of, like a litany of these examples.
And therefore, suicidal empathy is really pervasive once you recognize the mechanism.
I think, again, it goes back to the one two punch of parasitic mind and suicidal empathy.
In order for the fertile grounds to be available for suicidal empathy to barge in, I first have to have certain ideas that are implanted in your brain.
So, let me give that sounds very abstract.
So, let me give you a concrete example.
Cultural relativism is a parasitic idea that I discuss in the parasitic mind.
It basically says who are you to judge the beliefs and the practices of another culture?
Shut up, racist, right?
So there are honor killings, shut up.
There are child brides, shut up.
There are female genital mutilations, shut up.
Don't judge other cultures.
Well, if you internalize that parasitic idea that it is not appropriate to ever judge the cultural practices of another culture, then that renders you impotent when you're making judgments about who should be let into your country, about whether you want an increase of people who hold those views or not.
Therefore, that leads to the suicidally empathetic position that all immigrants are equally likely to assimilate within the American ethos or the Western ethos.
So, we started off with internalizing a parasitic idea called cultural relativism, and that lays the foundation for then the suicidal empathy of open borders.
It's very odd that people want to come here, but when they come here, they want to essentially turn it into a smaller version, at least their neighborhood, of where they came from.
And a lot, I mean, if it were only that you don't speak English, I mean, to me, that's bad enough in that you're not going to be part of the fabric of the greater society.
But fair enough, that's not an existential threat.
But if you're then going to be advocating for many of the cultural beliefs that are perfectly antithetical to the whole society, Then we have a problem.
And you and I have talked very often about Islam and so on.
Some people, I think, I mean, I wonder what you think about this.
Do you think more Americans are willing to have an honest and open conversation about this issue, or are most still sort of the proverbial ostrich and they think it's gauche to talk about religion?
You know, people on the right are more than willing to talk about it.
There's very few people on the right who are empathetic about some of the differences that these religions have and hold, and some of the rules.
That they would like to apply, like Sharia law.
Whereas there's a lot of people on the left that are terrified of being called racist, terrified of being called Islamophobic or fill in whatever phobia, transphobic, whatever it is.
They're just terrified.
They're terrified of being labeled.
And it's interesting because that side of the political spectrum, the people on the left, are the quickest to pull the trigger and accuse someone of being something being racist, sexist, homophobic, whatever it is.
They're the quickest and the most vicious when it comes to attacking people based on them not going along with whatever narrative that's been established, which is interesting because they're the ones that also like to call people fascists.
But that is a form of fascism.
It's not like if you look at fascism, it's essentially most people think of it as right wing authoritarianism.
But it is also, if you look at the definition of it, it's also a complete Adherence to whatever narrative is being promoted.
You don't think about that when it's left wing, like left wing progressive fascism sounds like an oxymoron, but it's a mindset.
The problem is you're hiding this mindset in an ideology that you think is righteous.
You could say the same thing about religion, because this is also what people do with religion, because it is the right thing.
It's the right thing to do.
Throw the gay off the roof.
Like, it's like, it's really kind of fascinating.
Like, when you see, like, queers for Palestine, you're like, hold on.
Like, it is a wonderful thing to empathize for the Palestinian people and to think that they shouldn't be bombed into oblivion.
So he he goes and intercepts this woman who's at a I guess like a you know free, free Palestine uh you know rally and he says, Oh, you're you're for Palestine.
She goes, Yes, she goes, Well, what do you think about their positions on uh you know queer people?
She goes, Well, I'm queer.
He goes, Oh, you're queer, so what do you?
What do you think about what they would do to you?
She goes, Well, they would kill me.
She goes, But then you still support them?
She goes, Yes.
He goes, But it doesn't bother you that you're supporting a group that would kill you for the way that you are?
She goes, No.
The fact that they would kill me doesn't mean that they don't deserve my support.
Well, that's the wood cricket, right?
I mean, there is no evolutionary mechanism that says I'm going to build an affiliation with a group that I know would kill me.
But she is so kind.
She's so empathetic.
She so transcends the earthly survival instincts.
That she has ascended to a higher plane of suicidal empathy.
So it's a different situation because if there were no attacks on Gaza and Gaza was its own autonomous or completely separate state and it wasn't controlled by Israel and there was no conflict.
I doubt they would have the same mindset.
Like the mindset is coming out of watching the destruction of Gaza.
And so then instead of saying, hey, we shouldn't just be bombing this city into oblivion and supporting this, instead they go all the way and support the ideology of the authoritarian rulers of this area, which is kind of kooky.
But it's like, but it's much like a religion.
It's a you can abandon all logic.
As long as you adhere to, and you have to, in fact, if you want to be accepted.
And this is one of the things about the left is like there's never someone left enough.
And when you think you're left enough, they move the border, they move the boundary lines.
The goalposts are like a mile further to the left.
You're like, oh God, I got to support drag queens teaching kids now by themselves?
No parental supervision?
Twerking?
It's like it just keeps getting nuttier and nuttier to where any protest of it is.
Heresy.
And that's where it gets very strange and it behaves completely like a religion.
So I talk in the book about something I introduce as cultural theory of mind.
So, theory of mind is, as I discussed earlier, it's at the individual level.
For you and I to have a meaningful conversation, I need to be in your mind and vice versa.
Cultural theory of mind is the same principle, but it operates at the cultural level.
So, if culture A is Has a set of values that it adheres to.
And if it presumes that those values are processed in exactly the same way by the other culture, and that's a wrong presumption, I argue that that culture then lacks cultural theory of mine because it is assuming that its values transcend in exactly the same way to other cultures.
So if you take, for example, the values that we hold dear in the West, magnanimity, generosity, kindness, Empathy, they're interpreted in other societies as weakness, weakness, weakness, and weakness.
And this is why I don't remember if I mentioned this to you before on the show or not.
In Arabic, when people would speak to me, I mean, many years ago before, I mean, now they recognize me, so they're not going to be as forthright in their positions.
But 25 years ago, they would all tell me, the West is a woman to be mounted.
My family were part of the last remaining minuscule community of Lebanese Jews.
Historically, there was always a small but pretty vibrant Jewish community.
Most of the Jews had left prior to the start of the Civil War, which happened in 75.
I was 11.
Because they had already read the writing on the wall.
So most of my extended family, my aunts, my uncles, my grandparents, had left to various places, most of them to Israel, but some of them to Montreal, Canada.
That's why we ended up going to Montreal ourselves.
But my parents had refused to leave because they were very well entrenched within Lebanese society.
They had nice business and so on.
My older sibling, I have three other siblings.
One is 14 years older, one is 12 years older, and one is 10 years older.
The one who's 10 years older is the Olympian judoka that played in the Montreal Olympics in 1976.
So they already had left Lebanon prior to the start of the civil war because they had started facing some Jew hatred difficulties and even in tolerant, progressive Lebanon.
Unfortunately for me, being the last 10 years younger than everybody else, I was still a kid.
We got caught up once the civil war broke out.
Some really bad things happened during that first year, but then we were able to.
Thank God to escape to Montreal.
But then my parents kept returning to Lebanon because they still had business interests.
So they would go back to Lebanon from 1975 to 1980.
On one of their return trips to Lebanon, they were kidnapped by Abu Nidal's group Fatah.
And some really bad things happened during their captivity, very much like the stuff that you hear about on October 7th.
But luckily, They weren't killed, they were able to, you know, be freed.
I mean, they weren't freed through a commando operation, they were freed through the connections that my parents had.
My mother's best friend was a Syrian woman, Syrian Muslim woman, who was the personal dresser of Hafiz al Assad, the father of Bashir, the one who was recently deposed.
And so, through him, my siblings.
Reached out to this woman, her name was Ihsan.
I think she's passed away now.
She got the father involved.
He reached out to Yasser Arafat, who was the head of the PLO back then.
As I understand the story, Yasser Arafat said, Well, I don't even know whether they're with one of our groups.
Let me make some calls.
But at the time, there was sort of a battle between Yasser Arafat and Abu Nidal.
And he said, If it's the Abu Nidal gang that took him, You know, good luck, and it was the Abu Nidal group.
But I'm guessing there was some money that was exchanged.
My parents were freed.
When my father returned, he had a temporary facial paralysis akin to when you have a really severe stroke and your face is completely disfigured and asymmetric.
And so for about, I don't know how long it was, maybe a month or two, his face was completely asymmetric.
Probably due to stress, the things that happened to him, yeah.
Uh, and actually, I mean, some of the stuff I may have briefly mentioned on this show, but here's a part that I'm almost certain I didn't mention.
At one point, the militia group was trying to get my parents to sign a confession letter that they are Israeli spies.
Which, if you met my parents, you would know that that's not a very likely reality because it turns out that if they signed that, then they could legally execute them.
And the guy who had started this whole thing was the owner of the building where my dad owned the store.
And if they could now get rid of them, the store would execute them.
So, it wasn't even like a religious thing, it was for one of the seven deadly sins of greed, at least as I understand it.
And, anyways, and so at one point they had separated my parents and they were trying to put a lot of pressure on each of them to sign this thing.
And they go to my mother and say, You know, admit that you're a spy, whatever, Israeli agent.
And she's like, Are you crazy?
I mean, just go ask my husband, you know.
And they kind of mockingly say, Oh, well, your husband has gone to.
Join his God, meaning that they've already killed him.
So then my mother is in her little cell and they're doing bad things to them.
And she hears my dad late at night in some other part of wherever they were keeping him.
He had a very whooping kind of cough, like a cough as if, actually, I have a similar cough.
I used to be asthmatic, so I have this very deep and loud cough.
And so she was hearing that cough, but she wasn't sure if she's just hallucinating this in her thoughts or whether it was real.
Well, it turned out that they hadn't killed them, but they were just trying to lean in on her.
And this is why, I mean, many times when I've come on this show, you know, I've talked about some of those difficulties that, you know, all religions are not indistinguishable from each other.
Now, that religion has very, very different edicts about how to conduct yourself, even when you're walking on a sidewalk, than maybe an Abrahamic faith, whether it be Judaism or Christianity or Islam.
So the idea that ultimately all religions are simply preaching the same indistinguishable thing in slightly different ways is simply not true.
But it feels good to think that, right?
It's empathetic for us to think that.
We should never speak amongst.
Mixed company about politics and religion.
So, therefore, if I start saying something that might be pejorative of another religion, that feels icky, that feels gauche.
And that's why, by the way, earlier you mentioned that when we're talking about this, when I asked you, Are Americans more likely now to talk openly about Islam?
You said, Well, the Democrats are more terrified to do so than the Republicans.
But even the Republicans are, to some extent, suicidally empathetic because if you watch, even the ones who very forcefully criticize, Islam as being incongruent with American values, they'll always use linguistic coverage to protect Islam.
So, political Islam and Islamism is an indelible, inherent feature of Islam.
Much of Islam is Islamism.
So, if you do a content analysis of all of the canonical texts of Islam, which are the Quran, the Hadith, the deeds and the sayings of Muhammad, and the Seerah, which is the biography of Muhammad, you could do a quantitative analysis of how often it is preaching.
Brotherly love?
How often is it really concerned about the infidels?
How and so Islam in its nature is political.
Why?
There are many reasons why, but let me just give you one.
And then if you want to drill down, we can do so.
Islam is a fully proselytizing language, religion, meaning that it is incumbent in an ideal world to turn the entire world into the one true faith.
It is a peaceful religion if by peaceful it means the following.
Eventually, The entire globe, every millimeter of the globe, will be united under the unifying flag of Allah.
Now, let's take, for example, Judaism.
And it's not because I'm Jewish, but it's just to compare.
Judaism is precisely the opposite it is an anti proselytizing language.
You're not allowed to proselytize.
As a matter of fact, if you proselytize, let's say I try to convince you, Joe, you know, why don't you join the tribe?
So, it is literally in the canons of Judaism to try to dissuade the prospective convert to coming into the fold because the idea is to have a costly signal of your commitment, your religious piety to want to join the group.
So, it is a grind, it's very hard.
In Islam, you just have to say the one proclamation, the Shahada, one sentence, and you're in.
Now, try to get out.
There are apostasy.
Laws against you getting out.
So, the circuitry of Islam is one that is expansionist.
That's why you have two billion Muslims.
One out of every four human beings is Muslim.
And it only took 1400 years for that.
So, from a marketing perspective, as someone who studies consumer behavior, Islam is a brilliant marketing religion.
It has found a way to get a lot of customers and adherents.
Sucks at marketing because the entire circuitry of Judaism is meant to keep it very, very small.
Geopolitics, Nuclear Fears, and Self-Interest00:10:02
And so, which one is likely to lead to greater problems?
The one that is meant to ensure that all of us become Muslim, or the one that says, even if your uncle wants to become Jewish, we're going to put the barrier so high that nobody will ever become Jewish.
So, we still have only 15 million Jews, roughly, in the world, almost the same as we had before the Holocaust.
Judaism sucks as a marketing religion, Islam incredibly successful.
The concern is the amount of influence that it has on the United States government, how we got into the Iran war, why we give them so much influence over our military, over our decision making, over our politicians.
I mean, AIPAC famously Promotes and supports a tremendous amount of politicians in the United States.
That's the big fear is that there's an inordinate amount of influence that Israel has over foreign policy, our decisions, and even our political structure in the country.
Do you think there are multiple countries that would share in the recognition that probably an Iranian regime that hasn't Eschatology that basically says the end of times requires that there is sort of death to everybody before the final, you know, Imam comes back.
Would it be a good idea for the Brits or the Romanians or the French or some of the other, the Gulf countries, would they be happy if Iran had a nuclear weapon?
So to frame the issue of the US is attacking or is involved in the attack on the Iranians as, you know, The United States doesn't have personal agency.
They're all wood crickets that are being puppeteered by this incredibly powerful lobby called Israel.
That simply doesn't pass the smell test.
Of course, Israel has shared interests with the United States, as most allies would, where they both agree that probably an Iranian regime that has nuclear weapons would not be a good thing for world peace.
And so, because these two countries have maybe greater testicular fortitude than the NATO countries, it seems as though the The Israelis are puppeteering the Americans.
But do you really think that Donald Trump is sitting and saying, you know, had I not been such a weak guy with no personal agency, I wouldn't have fallen sway to the incredibly influential Zionist lobby?
Well, it's not just incredibly influential, it's the amount of financial support they gave his candidacy and again, all the different politicians that are beholden to Israel.
That's the concern that a lot of people on the right.
And on the left, have here in America.
Most people in America do not support this war.
It's the large percentage of people think it was a bad idea.
There's also a deep concern that he is only in office because of the war and he has corruption charges in Israel and that in order for him to stay in power and for him to avoid going to trial, he has to continue war.
Let's suppose you go to see your physician and your physician says, Hey, Joe, God forbid, it looks like your blood sugar is very high, and I'm going to classify you as now, never mind, pre diabetic.
I think you're diabetic.
And if we don't manage your sugar levels, there will come a day where I can tell you exactly what's going to happen.
We're going to have to amputate your extremities.
You're probably going to lose your eyesight.
You're probably going to have sexual dysfunction, and you're probably going to have some cardiovascular incident.
That doesn't happen on day two of you having been diagnosed with diabetes.
With diabetes.
Like there's a trajectory, and at some point, there'll be a tipping point where until then, none of the diabetes complications happened.
And why am I saying all this?
Because I can't comment as to whether he's been lying all the times when he said there's two more years left, or one more year, or six more months.
But surely we can grant the American government enough leeway to presume that if they thought that at this point it's the right time and it is now intolerable.
For them to go another day with the current reality that they probably had some intelligence that suggests that they are close.
So I can't comment whether Netanyahu was pulling our eyes, but surely it can't be that the Israelis are so manipulative in their puppeteering that they've pulled the wool over the American eyes.
And really, there's no danger that the Iranians were posing and we've convinced the Americans to go to war.
They had said that their missiles could only reach a certain distance.
That proved to not be true because of the Diego Garcia missile launch.
So they have missiles that are capable of reaching Europe, and that was not something they had said before.
We know that they have enriched their uranium beyond what they need for nuclear power and that they're within striking distance of developing a nuclear weapon.
But wasn't it true that they had put See, it's hard to know as me, as a person sitting on a podcast studio in Texas, exactly what their ruling had been.
But that they had only done this in order to avoid the possibility of them being attacked, that they would get close to a nuclear weapon so at least it would deter some potential attacks on them, and that they were doing this out of self interest.
There's a large group of American politicians that did not want this war, that did not think it was warranted to attack Iran at this point.
So I think I've mentioned on the show before this distinction between deontological ethics, absolute statements.
It is never okay to lie, versus consequentialist ethics.
It's okay to lie if it is meant to spare someone's hurt feelings, right?
So if your wife says, Do I look fat in those jeans?
You put on your consequentialist hat and you say, You've never looked more beautiful because maybe she's put on a bit of weight, but you don't want to hurt her feelings.
So you lie.
And for most of us, we go through life, in most instances, putting on a consequentialist hat.
To have, for example, a deontological principle that says that I am always an isolationist.
Do you understand what I mean by here, deontological?
Meaning that it doesn't matter what the environment is out there.
I, as America, will never interfere in wars over there.
That Can't be an optimal strategy, right?
Because, so for example, if you were a deontological pacifist, you say, under no circumstances do I believe that violence is the solution.
Well, what would usually happen to a society if it adhered to deontological pacifism?
They'd be attacked, they'd be eradicated, right?
So it can't be that for some of these geopolitical issues, there is a rule that in its nature is deontological.
So many of the Americans that are anti this war are very, very staunchly steeped in sort of a libertarian slash deontological isolationist perspective.
Now, in many cases, I would completely agree with that position in that it's not the Americans' position to have to go and be the policeman of everywhere in the world.
But let's contrast it, say, with when World War II was about to happen, the appeasement strategy of Chamberlain, right?
This guy with the little mustache has, don't worry about it.
I absolutely have no design to do anything bad.
You swear, Adolf, it's all good.
Yeah, yeah, don't worry.
Promise you really don't, even though you're moving all of your stuff, you're a good guy, right?
I can trust you.
Yeah, yeah, of course you can.
So, appeasement only works if the other person is someone that can be fully trustworthy.
It is almost incontestable that if the Iranian regime in its current form could ever cause great damage to everybody, not only Israel, right?
I mean, the Gulf countries are not exactly putting up barriers against this war because.
They are also the enemies of the Iranians.
So it's undoubtable that, of course, the Americans have the Israelis in their ear pushing for their self interest.
Saddam Hussein and Geopolitical Intervention00:15:21
But that's also called the reality of every nation on earth.
Every entity fights for its own interests.
But that doesn't mean that the Americans are so lacking in personal agency, are so gullible, are so easy to puppeteer that there must be this Zionist lobby that otherwise is pushing us into an unnecessary war.
Maybe another three years, maybe another five years, maybe another 10 years, it would have resulted in a disaster.
So, if you are a universalist and you want the Iranian people to maximally flourish, forget about Israel.
Don't even mention the word Israel.
Do you not want these 90 million people called Iranians who have a deeply rich historical heritage to flourish?
I've had many graduate students who are Iranians in my classes and so on.
They're some of the most modern, secular, Outward looking Westerners that have been choked for 47 years by a really nasty regime.
So maybe we could celebrate that if all this goes well, 90 million people are going to be freed.
And I could say that statement without ever invoking Israel.
They realized that the British Petroleum Company was making a ton of money and they wanted to nationalize oil, and we got rid of them and they installed this Islamic regime.
There's a lot of consequences for that down the road.
Obviously, the worst side of it was what happened to the Iranian people.
When you look at the photos and the videos of Tehran from the 1950s and 1960s, I mean, my God, it looks like a Western society.
Women wearing skirts and Everyone looks very modern and Western, and then it became this fundamentalist religious country that it is right now, this Islamic country that it is right now.
They're under a regime that murders protesters.
They famously murdered some high level wrestlers.
There was an Olympic gold medalist at the United States.
The UFC tried to get involved and try to keep him from getting murdered.
Yeah, they do horrible things.
There's no doubt about it.
It's a terrible regime.
There's a really good argument that that terrible regime is in place because of the CIA and because of the United States government, because the British Petroleum Company, because we intervened.
We've done that in the past.
We did that with Libya.
This is the reason why Muammar Gaddafi was out.
We had Russell Crowe, who's a brilliant guy on the podcast, was explaining the history of Libya and how great it was for Libyan people when Muammar Gaddafi was in power.
That if anybody wanted to get an education anywhere, they had.
Some certain skills or talent in some certain area, they would fully pay for their education overseas.
They gave everyone a house.
Everyone who lived there had a home.
I mean, people were educated.
And he was trying to set up something akin to the United States, but the United States of Africa.
And they were like, we can't have any of that.
And so they got rid of him, and Libya became a failed state.
We have monkeyed in other countries for our own interest for a long time with horrible consequences for the people in those countries.
So, how much of the Islamic regime coming into power in 1975, if you have 100 points that you want to allocate to either it's the U.S. that causes it versus there's an Islamic regime with its theology that is really nasty, how would you allocate the points in terms of the cause of that reality?
But the idea that there are causal networks is such that in this complicated web of causal networks, you can always find a particular entity that you can try to link back all of the causes to that entity.
But so that's why I asked you to allocate the 100 points.
I wouldn't be the guy to answer that.
I'm going to answer off the top of my head, and it's completely speculative.
So the numbers I'm going to say are not.
Let's ascribe 10 out of the 100 points to whatever power the US wields in that region to have allowed that regime to come in.
But that regime carries the other 90 points of the 100 because they are the ones who, for the next 47 years, implement the reality that the common Persian is going to experience.
Everything in the world can ultimately be linked back to oxygen.
To the United States, to the military complex, to the Zionist lobby.
Because in some very facile way, all of those entities are connected in a meaningful way in this causal network.
But is using Occam's razor, does it really make sense to blame, for example, people say ISIS is really due to whatever, Israel?
I mean, in some facile way, you could.
Draw the causal link of how there was a vacuum that was created by the US when they debathized Iraq that allowed an extreme.
Allowed an extreme.
So, do we blame ISIS on American policy or the Zionist lobby?
Or does ISIS itself have any personal agency in terms of what it then does for the next 10 years that it's in power?
Let's suppose that the night before an eventual dictator that was going to become a dictator, his parents felt particularly amorous that night.
And what made them amorous to then eventually conceive that guy who became a dictator who killed three million people is that they played Barry White music.
Because Barry White's music is baby making music.
So it is, in a very silly way, absolutely true that had Barry White not been such a great singer with a deep voice that makes the ladies drop the panties, then those two parents of the eventual dictator would not have had sex that night.
I think people have been getting it on from the beginning of time, and they probably would have done the exact same thing that night if it was Barry White or Barry Manilow.
Good for the people in many ways, pretty nasty guy in other ways.
There is no egalitarian, beautiful leader out there.
They've never existed because the cold, hard reality of running enormous groups of people that are in conflict with other groups of people is you're going to have to crack some eggs.
You're going to have to do some terrible things, especially in those regions of the world where if you don't have an incredibly strong armed guy, then religion comes in and it becomes the strong guy.
So you have it in Egypt, you have it with Saddam Hussein, with Hafiz al Assad and then his son.
So, those guys are, if you're a universalist who wishes for individual liberties and freedoms to flourish for everybody around the world, then you're probably not supporting these guys.
But by the way, that last sentence, I would argue that that's because of the Americans' lack of cultural theory of mind, because they presume that the desire to have democracy around the world is exactly what everybody wants, and therefore.
They're culturally blind to the fact that other places around the world may not share our own affinity for democracy.
Now, but do you, okay, so the Americans come in, they create a bad set of ecosystems that permits for ISIS to flourish.
At what point would you, in your causal link of explanations, shift from The catalyst of the Americans having done something that allowed ISIS to flourish to then saying, starting at time T, my causal weaponry is going to be targeting ISIS moving forward.
So, think about all of the people that have suffered horrifyingly as a result of ISIS.
If you are an individual that's walking around who is the recipient of that brutality, what would make more sense if you're engaging in statistical inferencing?
Would it be to say, you know, the guy that's about to string me up because I looked at a girl wrong and he's going to cut off my penis and my arms because I touched a girl?
I really can't blame ISIS because really it's American foreign policy that intervened in Iraq.
You know how under Sharia law there are very strict rules about that govern the dynamics between men and women, right?
So I was just being hyperbolic, but let's say whatever the punishment is, you stole a loaf of bread, under Sharia law we cut off your hand, right?
So let's say you're a 12 year old kid.
Who just stole a loaf of bread from the souq, and the ISIS commanders have caught you, and they're about to institute Sharia law by cutting off your hand because you're a thief.
Would it be natural for you or your parents, the parents of the 12 year old who are crying because they're about to see the hand of their child cut off, would they say, I really can't be upset at ISIS and their brutality because ultimately ISIS only came in because of the geopolitical intervention of the United States?
But the root cause of the daily evil that the Iraqis go through.
Cannot be put on the broad shoulders of the Americans because then that removes the personal agency of the actors in their daily lives that are causing them all the pain.
But there is a reflex, and dare I say, forgive me, a suicidally empathetic reflex that renders you somehow progressively sophisticated if you always turn all of the world's ills on your own society.
I think the whole weapons of mass destruction narrative was complete bullshit that was cooked up to give an excuse to go over there and take over the oil.
Okay, so let me maybe, as the distinguished professor of the Declaration of Independence Center for the Study of American Freedom, I hope the University of Mississippi will be happy that I'm defending the United States as a Canadian, not yet American, but inshallah soon.
Is it not true that the default reality of Every unit, whether it be an individual, a grouping, a country, will typically, all other things equal, try to pursue policies that are in its best interest, right?
So when Trump says America first, MAGA, and all this, that's what he's appealing to, yes?
So does the U.S. ever do things that might be less than savory because they're pursuing their selfish interests?
100%.
And we can come up Right.
But that makes them a country made up of these things called human beings.
In other words, no society has ever been created that is made up of these utopian machines that, as they navigate the world, they look to the other for their, unless they are suicidally empathetic.
So the U.S. is made up of real human beings endowed with real brains, whereby they might say, hey, maybe if we take their oil and concoct a strategy, now, is that.
Good or bad, we can debate it.
But in the grand buffet of societies that have ever held power, does the U.S. and never mind the power asymmetry that the U.S. has vis a vis everybody else, is it the most restrained society ever?
If the United States today said, we need more beaches, all the Caribbeans are becoming the 51st state, could anybody do anything about that?
So I think it would be good, certainly for Americans and me as an honorary American, to say, Does America do sometimes things that are less than perfect in a utopian world?
100% yes, you're right.
I can see that.
Does it wield its power in the most gentle ways compared to what it could do and compared to what other societies, if they had that power, would do?
Well, they're taking advantage of the openness of American society.
They've infiltrated universities, they've infiltrated a lot of tech sectors, they've sold American military a bunch of cell phone towers that are surrounding military.
Military bases that may or may not be transmitting data.
We've had to kick Huawei out of the country because it turns out that a lot of their equipment could be used for spying.
They buy farmland all around military bases.
They're doing a lot of things to take advantage of our silliness, but that's because we should have better laws to prevent what's essentially not our friends from doing that.
You can call them an enemy nation or whatever you want to call them, but we shouldn't be allowing a foreign nation that we are.
In conflict with to control land around military bases.
I mean, if we're doing the ledger of sort of cruelty and evil, we could talk about how the U.S. versus China wields power around the world.
But how about internally, domestically?
We had a guy called Mao Zedong that was kind of pretty brutal.
That if we do the history of China in terms of how many millions of people were killed by that regime versus anything that's happened in the U.S., has the U.S. been perfect in the past 250 years?
So to me, once I. Maybe that's why the University of Mississippi was keen on having me come.
I mean, I look at the United States as someone who, thank you for your earlier question about sort of where do you come from, Gad?
Tell us your story.
Some of the biggest defenders of the United States are typically, it might sound paradoxical, but if you think about it, it's not, are usually immigrants who have sampled from the wide variety of buffets of societies out there.
Therefore, we know that the anomaly called the United States is truly an anomaly, whereas the American wakes up.
In his life.
And he thinks that the liberties and freedoms that you have in the United States are just the default value.
That's just the way it is.
It isn't.
That's what makes the United States great.
So for me, by the way, that also explains why people think, for example, that I defend Israel because I'm Jewish.
There is an element of that.
I mean, most of my family's in Israel.
But it's really, I defend Israel because many of its values are congruent with those that we hold dear in the United States.
So given the region of the Middle East, If I'm going to send my daughter or yours to some university to study, I would much rather for her to be in a society in Tel Aviv or Haifa than I would in many of the other places.
So it's in that sense that I'm pro Israel.
So if you ask me to allocate 100 points to how much of my support of Israel is due to the fact that many of its foundational values are similar to those of the United States versus the fact that I'm Jewish and Israel is a Jewish state, I would say 80 20.
For the latter, meaning that I am defending the civilizational values of Israel in a very, very difficult and belligerent neighborhood.
But it could also be the case that a bank robber or pedophile goes back to Thailand if there are no extradition mechanisms to bring them back to the United States.
So, my position of defending the United States or Israel or whomever else really stems from some foundational values of liberty and freedom.
There is no conceivable place in the world where, given the neighborhood that Israel exists in, one would conceivably defend any of those other societies.
Instead of Israel, if the metrics that you care about are personal liberties and freedoms, we could then debate specific policies and you'd be completely in your right to say, I don't like when the Israeli government does this.
But, well, let me ask you, and forgive me for asking you a personal question.
If, let's say, your daughter today said, Dad, I'd like to go and study one year abroad and it's going to be somewhere in the Middle East, you, Joe Rogan, how likely would you be?
To support her going in the Middle East to a university other than in Israel.
And by the way, I'm loving the openness that many of these countries are exhibiting.
And I'll tell you a quick personal story and then I'd love to hear your opinion.
I was approached by Al Arabiya.
Al Arabiya is the premier news network.
From they're Saudi, but they were actually located in Dubai.
And Riz Khan, who was the anchor that was flying from Dubai to interview me in Montreal for Al Arabiya, he used to be the main anchor, I think, at BBC Global or CNN Global.
I said to Riz, Are we going to be talking about things like Islam and these kinds?
He goes, Yeah, yeah, feel free to talk about whatever you want.
I said, Well, I'm not worried so much about me, but you're going to have to go back to that region.
There is a package of cultural richness in the Middle East like no other.
And I come from the region, Arabic is my mother tongue.
The spirit of generosity, the spirit of loyalty when you're in the group, the hospitality is like no other.
Actually, I recently was telling some folks in Mississippi that.
The Mississippians remind me as though they were honorary Lebanese because they're so, it's that southern hospitality, really like over the top wanting to make you feel good.
So there are elements of the Middle East that have such a fabric of richness that if we can mine that and quell all of the tribalism associated with religions, I think it could be one of the most fertile and rich places in the world.
Now, it depends what we do with Islam.
If Islam is something that you practice privately as part of a long historical narrative, so for example, I'm Jewish, I'm very wedded to my Jewish identity, but I don't take many of the edicts of Judaism seriously in the practice.
I don't light the candle at 421 for Shabbat because if 422, God would be upset at me.
But if I went to the rabbi, he'd say it has to be at 421.
So if there is a way to maintain the Islamic heritage, there's Islamic architecture, there's Islamic poetry, there's Islamic philosophy.
There was a period under Islamic rule where many of the ancient texts from, you know, Greek philosophy were safeguarded by Islam, right?
So it's not as though.
That entire civilization is void of incredibly rich things.
But there are unfortunately elements of the religion that are not congruent with Western values.
If there is a way for us from this side of our mouth to honor Islamic architecture and poetry, and from this side of our mouth, forget the parts that say kill, kill, kill everyone, then I think you could have wonderful flourishing.
You know, there's a really good argument that the reason why.
ISIS and these various radical organizations exist is because of the United States meddling in all these countries for decades and decades.
I don't know if you ever saw it, but Glenn Greenwald was on the Bill Maher show.
And Glenn, he's a very brilliant guy, and he had a very balanced take on it.
And he was arguing with Bill Maher versus why they behave the way they do, and making the argument that a lot of it was because of the United States intervening.
In their countries, that we've been over there and meddling in their countries and being meddling in their policies and their government for so long that this is the reason why these things happen in the first place.
I don't know if you've ever seen it.
It might do a good thing to play it because it was kind of interesting to watch Bill Maher kind of push back against it.
But Glenn Greenwald is very well read and really understands the history of this region.
Many of the positions he's taken I've really liked.
He does seem to have a bit of the self flagellation reflex when it comes to it all comes down to something that the U.S. has done that's evil or something that Israel has done is evil.
So, to our earlier conversation, there are features that ISIS believes in that they believe in independently of anything that the U.S. could have ever done or will ever do.
But if they were flourishing and we hadn't intervened in their country, do you think it's possible that the rest of the Middle East could be in a similar position?
Not to say that Saudi Arabia is perfect.
The Jamal Khashoggi thing is horrific.
I mean, just that alone.
This is a big criticism for a lot of the American comedians that went over there and participated in the Riyadh Comedy Festival.
It's like, do you not know what this regime did to an American journalist?
But is it possible that these countries could have evolved in a very similar way and become Yes.
That's why I love coming on the show whenever you have me on.
So if you crack a book, I don't mean you, but anybody who's listening to this, crack a book to say, okay, let me look at the number of military conquests where Islam was the offensive.
Party, right?
Not we were deep.
For example, people say, oh, the Crusades.
Well, the Crusades were a retaliation to hundreds of years of Islamic aggression.
It didn't come out of nowhere, but there's always what I call the amnesia of causality.
People always forget what was the original starting point.
Under Islam, as I said, the primary canonical requirement of Islam is to render the entire world Islamic.
Now, again, that doesn't mean that every Muslim believes this.
That doesn't mean that every Muslim leader believes this.
But we're talking about what's in the canons of the religion.
It is a violently expansionist ideology.
I mean, nothing could be clearer.
I've explained this previously on the show, but if you allow me, I'll explain it again.
Everything in Islam is broken down into two camps Dar al Harb and Dar al Islam, the house of Islam and the house of war.
Any country that is not yet under Islamic dominion is classified as under the house of war.
That's literally the words.
Now, any country that has ever become under Islamic dominion, ever, and then Islam loses, canonically, it must revert back to Islam.
So, Al Andalusia, right?
Andalusia in current Spain was at one point controlled by the Moors, right?
Muslims.
Therefore, when now you hear a lot of these Islamic extremist guys saying, Inshallah, we will get back Al Andalusia.
It's because once it became ours, it must always belong to us.
The same argument applies for Israel.
Even though Israel has thousands of years of lineage of the Jews to that land as the indigenous owners of that land, the fact that then Islam took over that region means it belongs to Muslims.
Now, we may tolerate the Jews to live there, but there can't be.
A Jewish state there canonically in the religion.
Okay, so those are just facts.
You could study the history of Islam to count.
Okay, there are currently 57, well, if you include the Palestinian territories in the Organization of Islamic Cooperation, the OIC, there are 56 or 57 countries that are part of that block that are Islamic.
Each of those countries, once upon a time, started with zero percent Islam.
Many of those countries were Christians, by the way, right?
Egypt was Coptic Christian.
Syria was tons of Christians.
Lebanon, within my lifetime, I was born in a Christian majority country.
Today, within my lifetime and yours, it has completely flipped to Muslim majority.
So, wherever Islam goes, sometimes it might take five years to flip it.
Sometimes it might take 500 years.
But as the Taliban explained to us, the American soldiers have the watches, we have all the time in the world.
So it's a long project.
So when Islam comes into the United States, it's not as though suddenly the United States of America is going to become under Sharia law tomorrow morning.
But if you have the imagination to extrapolate in two, three hundred years, if you were to repeat Dearborn and Patterson, New Jersey, And Minneapolis into 20 more cities, 50 more cities, 100 more cities, would you be living in the same United States?
They think it's a Trojan horse, and that under the guise of progressivism and democratic socialism, that you're going to open up the door and eventually you're going to have a call to prayer in the middle of Times Square every day.
As soon as I'm in New York and I go to one of those, I mean, I don't as much anymore because my stomach's a bit more sensitive as I get older, but let's say one of those street vendors, I right away put away my Star of David because I'd love to have my Shawarma without spit in it.
The fact that I now even think of that and that that's a reflex that I have today, That's not a reflex I had 15 years ago.
Well, what changed are the demographic realities that cause that there's a greater number of people that are triggered by the Star of David.
Demography is indeed destiny.
So, you and I could fully agree that most Muslims are perfectly lovely.
And I mean, I'm the first one to say this because I come from that culture.
No Muslim has ever killed me, no Muslim has ever raped me.
But I do know that I've spoken to many Muslims before I was known and they knew who I was who say things about the Jews that would make Hitler and Himmler go, look, guys, we also hate the Jews, but I think this is too much Jew hatred, even by our standards.
So, there is an endemic feature of Islamic societies that renders the Jew as the ultimate shaitan, the ultimate devil.
He's demonic, right?
It's everywhere, it dictates every interaction.
I'll just give you a couple of examples.
In Sharm el Sheikh, which is a Red Sea resort area in Egypt, and Jamie is welcome to fact check me if he wants.
And I think in 2010, there was a spat of Uh, shark attacks on tourists, yeah.
And Sharm el Sheikh, do you remember after the investigation by the Egyptian authorities what they concluded?
No, want to take a guess?
No, it was that there is very, very clear evidence that those sharks were Zionist trained because what, yes, sir, because because the way that you can harm the Egyptian economy, certainly in that region, is to render the tourism activity lesser if you have a you know many attacks, and so.
I'm not saying every Egyptian thought this, but this was coming from the authorities saying that there's really very clear evidence that those sharks were Jewish assholes.
Yeah, I think that had something to do with the shark activity.
Israeli conspiracy theory.
The attack sparked conspiracy theories, possible Israeli involvement.
Egyptian television broadcast claims.
From Sal Sinai government, Mohammed Abdul Fadil Shosha, that Israeli divers captured a shark with a GPS unit planted on its back, allegedly by Mossad.
Describing the theory as sad, Professor Mohammed Hanafi of Suez Canal University pointed out that GPS devices are used by marine biologists to track sharks, not control them remotely.
You know, this kind of tough parental Asian excellence and so on.
So, Amy Chua introduced the term, I mean, the concept is not hers, but the term is hers market dominant minorities, meaning when you have a small, minuscule group of people.
In any cultural ecosystem that are boxing well above their weight class.
Now, in many cases, you'll have, for example, you have Lebanese, non Jews, Lebanese, who are the business owners all over West Africa.
So they are fitting that market dominant minority.
They're a small minority, but they carry all the business.
Okay, so it's not as though it's only the Jew that's the only market dominant minority.
Wherever you have market dominant minorities, you have animus towards that group because the greater group, many of whom are not being successful.
Look at that group with animus, with envy.
The Jews, wherever they are, are always, by definition, short of Israel, are always a minuscule group that is always boxing well above their wives.
I think predominantly it's really a punishing cultural of excellence.
And if you want, I can share a story from my own personal background.
And I don't know if I've ever shared it on this show.
So I did my undergraduate in mathematics and computer science.
Pretty serious stuff.
Then I did an MBA, both at top universities.
Then I was going on to pursue my MS, Masters of Science, and PhD.
One of the places that I had been accepted for my PhD was at UC Irvine.
I ended up going to Cornell.
At the time, my brother, the judo player, was living in Newport Beach, and he was keen to try to convince me after my MBA to work with him and put on hold going on for my PhD.
When my mother found out of his design to try to convince me not to pursue my PhD, when I returned to Montreal to their house, She says, Can I speak to you in this room?
And I'm thinking, Oh, am I in trouble?
She goes, I want to talk to you.
What's up, mom?
She goes, I'm hearing that you're thinking of maybe putting your studies on hold.
I said, Well, no.
She goes, Well, I just, before you say anything, do you want people to know you as somebody who dropped out of school?
So, from now, that's a very powerful story because in my mother's eyes, having an MBA and then taking a break before I pursue a PhD was something that would bring shame to the family as someone who had dropped out of school.
Now, do you think that if a group of people have internalized that level of excellence, are they likely to be successful or not?
If another group of people thinks that getting good grades is acting white, is that A recipe for success or not, right?
So, cultural values matter for whatever reason, whatever is in the water of the Jewish home, they tend to excel.
So, now wherever they are, they're doing really well.
Well, I wanted to be an actor and play in the Avengers and I didn't get the part.
Who controls Hollywood?
The Jews.
I wanted to get a small business loan and I didn't get it because my numbers weren't quite correct.
Who controls the banks?
It's the Jews.
So, it becomes very easy to attribute or ascribe.
All of my individual and collective failures on this minuscule group of people for all of my failings.
Thomas Sowell, whom I know you appreciate, yes, gave arguably the greatest one word answer that I've ever heard.
At one point, he was appearing on some show.
This is not too long ago, maybe 20 years ago.
He's now 95, and I think it's a travesty that he hasn't won the Presidential Freedom Medal.
I pray that President Trump gives it to him before he passes away because he's deserving of it.
He was asked once, Professor Sowell, what do you think it will take for people to stop hating the Jews?
So you're right, in the United States that's the case, but in some of the ecosystems in the Far East where they are a minority, I think it's the, I don't know if it's the Malays, I can't remember the exact grouping.
You have the almost the exact same animus for that group that succeeds a lot.
And actually, Thomas Sowell has done those analyses.
So, in other words, the point is it is what I'm describing is not singularly relevant for the Jew, but it is universally relevant for the Jew because there is no other grouping of people that is as successful in as many places and yet minuscule in all those places.
So, the Armenians also get.
That treatment in some ecosystems.
The Lebanese get that treatment.
Indians get that treatment in some ecosystems.
So it is not a unique feature of only animus towards the Jews, but the fact that in so many societies you turn to the Jew to blame your problems, I think stems from that.
Don't you think you could also make that exact same argument that those same people that are small in number but hyper motivated, And hyper successful would also be much better at influencing policy in the country that they live in.
For instance, one of the reasons why Momdani won in New York City is because when they had the mayoral debate, He was the only one that said he's not immediately going to go to Israel.
A lot of people were shocked by that.
They were like, Why is everyone saying they're going to go to Israel when they win as the mayor in New York City?
It didn't make any sense.
People were kind of confused by it.
New York City's a mess, it's got a lot of problems.
This one guy said, I think I can serve Jewish Americans better by staying here in New York City, and I'm not going to go to Israel.
Everybody was like, Thank God someone said that.
Because all the other candidates, it seemed, at least to me as an outsider, We're being heavily influenced by the Jewish lobby.
I've been a professor for 32 years, so I care about the ideas, the bad ideas that flourish within the university's ecosystem, hence, parasitic minds with salah empathy.
If you do a histogram of All of the nations that contribute to try to alter the types of ideas that are promulgated on American campuses, which lobby or which country scores way higher than anything you could ever hope for from Israel?
From other countries, specifically influencing our education system and doing it within their best interest by donating a lot of money, by funding programs, by having a lot of foreign exchange students.
So the reflex for a group that has its own interests to promulgate are going to do exactly that.
That's why they're called a lobby group.
So if from this side of our mouth we care about the fact that there is a Zionist lobby, it cannot be that from this side of our mouth, We don't care about the fact that there are Islamic based funding to all of the American universities that have parasitized your daughters and mine in ways that should be problematic because it's your daughter.
So, any Near East studies program, also known as political science program, also known as government program.
So, at Harvard, you call it the Department of Government, right?
All those schools will then produce kids.
All those kids are called John Smith and Jethro Roscoe, but yet they are on the front line after October 7th wearing their kefiyeh, stopping Jews from going to class.
And that happened at UCLA and at Wellesley and at everywhere and at Concordia University, my university.
What caused that to happen?
It's because there is one particular viewpoint that becomes the norm on university campuses when it comes to these geopolitical realities.
So, By the same way that I can be frustrated if Mario Cuomo is concerned about going to Israel when he is running for mayor of New York, I should also be very concerned that all of these Islamic countries are having a free fall, free for all with all of our children's things.
But yet, I don't see many people concerned about that.
It is that double standard that then makes you go, hmm.
Why are you, who lives in Iowa, so concerned about it?
Maybe there are really valid reasons for you to be concerned about the pro Israel lobby.
And let's have a conversation about that.
But then, are you honest enough to have a similar discussion about other ways by which we tilt our policies and our children's brains?
One, I mean, if it's directly through funding, you fund a $30 million whatever.
You're probably not going to have faculty members who are going to be incredibly vociferous in their anti Islamic rhetoric if you have that.
I'll give you an example.
When I was potentially going to come, maybe they don't want me to hear this, but so be it.
When I was, one of the places that I was being recruited at was potentially the University of Austin, right?
And I came, I mean, they were going to make me an offer.
The University of Austin doesn't have a tenure system, they have a constitution.
It's a different kind of system.
Of course, what allowed me to not be canceled, I would have been canceled 30 years ago for all the things that I say and all the things that I write, is that I was protected by tenure.
And so I was very concerned about whether the fact that they don't have tenure, what happens if tomorrow.
And I remember having a conversation, I won't mention his name, but you can probably guess who it could be, where I said, What happens under your constitution if tomorrow you get a $30 million donation from Muhammad Beltalik Tilal and he says, You know that little Jewish professor who's going on Joe Rogan and talking about bad things about Islam?
That has to stop.
His answer was the gentleman that I was, my interlocutor, was, Well, we're on the same team.
I fully support what you're saying.
Well, you support what I'm saying until money talks, right?
I can pick you a number, a donation number, where you're no longer support with equal alacrity my criticism of Islam.
Well, and by the way, to that point, so when I now got this beautiful position at the University of Mississippi, I don't have tenure there.
I don't really care that much.
But they put a clause in the contract that says that my rights to say, speak, and write whatever I want will be protected with the same staunchness that the First Amendment offers me and that tenure would offer me.
So even though I'm not officially there, a tenured professor at this stage of my career, I don't care.
But they enshrined it.
So what I So, to our earlier point, I think there is a way whereby I could put a load of money in front of you and say, So, how much do you now support freedom of speech for Gad Sad?
And I'm saying, maybe you're right that the University of Austin guys would never buckle to that.
But Harvard government department did buckle.
Columbia University under Edward Said.
Do you know who that is, Edward Said?
Edward Said was a kind of very pro Palestinian guy who was kind of a big shot in their political science department.
All of his teachings at Columbia University were.
Rather skewed in terms of being anti Israel.
And so the students that come out are going to be a product of what we taught them.
It's not surprising that they're all wearing kefiyeh.
And you think that this is directly because of funding and not because of what they've seen, the horrors of what's happened in Gaza?
Because I think that's what's turned most people that have no affiliation with any university because it's not all university students that are reacting the way they're reacting.
They're reacting because of what you could see when you see Gaza.
It's true, but we can go back to a time before October 7th and I can point you the difficulties that I faced at Concordia at not being able to walk around on campus freely also held true before October 7th.
So we know that we could eliminate the retaliation.
And I just, we could go to that and we could talk about that and maybe that should be publicized more.
But what I'm talking about is the people that I've encountered in the United States that really generally didn't have an opinion about Israel at all have had a very negative opinion about Israel because of the response to October 7th and because of what they've done to Gaza.
By the way, I'm loving today's conversation has a different timbre to it, but it's keeping us sharp.
I like it.
So, thank you for keeping me on my toes.
Let's suppose that I had a rule in my head that says I only get incredibly irate and animated if an MMA fighter commits a crime.
But when I see the exact same crime committed by anybody other than an MMA fighter, I don't have the reflex to be upset.
Would it be what aboutism for you to say?
How come you got upset when the MMA fighter did this, but when the non MMA?
That wouldn't be what about him.
Because what you would be saying is, I want cognitive consistency from you, Gad, that if you're upset that an MMA fighter commits a crime, you'll be as upset when a non MMA fighter commits the exact same crime.
The guy in Iowa who has never heard of the Middle East but got rightly upset at what he saw in Gaza.
Why wasn't that guy?
If he is an honest purveyor in his moral calculus of any innocents being killed, I'm asking you, I pose that question to you.
When he sees the thousands and thousands of Yemenis that were killed, the children that were eradicated, much more than the tune of whatever happened in Gaza, every single individual, let me go on record.
There are many, many different ways by which Yemenis.
Have died as a result of the conflicts in Yemen.
There are a huge number of people that were killed in the fight between Sudan and the South Sudanese.
I mean, really, in the many hundreds of thousands, right?
So, if I am just an Iowa guy, my moral calculus operates according to the following rule Whenever I see innocent people being killed, it drives me crazy.
I am outraged.
Therefore, if that's the rule by which I navigate through the world, I will look at The October 7th victims and say, Those Jews didn't deserve this.
I'm pissed.
I will look at the Gazans that were killed who were innocent and I'd say, Those Gazans did not deserve it.
So far, so good.
Yeah, we agree.
Okay, I will look at the Syrians and say, That is not right.
I will look at the Ukrainians that were being butchered endlessly by Putin and say, That's pissing me off, and on and on, right?
But if it would appear that my calculus is abiding by the no Jews.
No news mechanism, then I have a right to say, how come you're focused only on when it seems that the mean Israelis are killing the beautifully peaceful Palestinians and your moral outrage never gets invoked across all of the panoply of much greater disasters around the world?
Well, I think initially in October 7th, people were very outraged at the attack on the Israelis.
They were horrified at what happened.
The videos that we saw were terrible, videos of people cheering in the streets when they were bringing the Israeli captives.
But then the difference between the capability of the Palestinians in Gaza versus the Israeli army, which is one of the most ferocious and capable armies in the world, and the devastation that they did to Gaza, the city, just the city alone, where you see apartment buildings, hospitals, everything just blown to smithereens.
There's a complete difference in power.
What you're talking about in Syria, I'm assuming this is a civil war between similarly armed people killing each other.
The last thing I would tell you is that, well, we allowed it to happen because we've been wanting to blow up Gaza for a long time and take it over and turn it into a big resort.
And we also know that on record, Netanyahu has said that they fund Hamas so they can control the size of the flame because they don't want the democratically elected people to take over and turn Palestine into a state.
Whether it was proportionate, whether it could have been adjudicated differently, we can discuss all that.
And all that, you can discuss it without ever worrying about being called anti Semitic.
It's totally within the fair bounds of having those conversations.
But what is true is that if Israel wanted to eradicate Palestinians, it would take them a lot less time than when you and I have been talking on the show by orders of magnitude.
Again, it's totally fair to discuss what constitutes a proportional thing and so on.
But I take a broader view, which is Israel exists and you have two choices.
You can keep creating generations of your own.
Whose entire daily animation of their objectives is to eradicate that place.
That place, or you could recognize that every single millimeter on earth has at some point been owned by someone else.
Is that not true?
I mean, is the definition of history not the accounting, ledgering of who owned what when?
Now, in every other conflict that has ever existed throughout all of human history, there is a winner of that conflict and a loser, and people move on.
We had to leave under imminent threat of execution.
It's very unfortunate.
We lost everything.
We moved on.
We made a life for ourselves.
Our home was stolen by Palestinian people.
I never held any animus towards Palestinians.
I moved on with my life.
One day I was interesting enough to have the privilege of appearing on Joe Rogan's show.
My daily animation is not to go and kill people for things that were done to us.
And very few people have had.
Things happen to them as what happened to us, right?
Jews were exterminated in the Holocaust.
It didn't create an endless litany of Jewish terrorists throughout the world trying to get back.
So, in every part of the world, we are now in Texas, that land was owned by someone else before the United States came along.
We are sitting, quote, on stolen land.
In Canada, we are sitting on stolen land.
It's called history.
Most people are able to move on and say, hey, the dice went this way or that way.
Let's Hold hands and let's build a better future.
You can't do that if canonically the Jewish state should not exist.
Doesn't Hamas say in their charter, every Jew that is anywhere, we will find him and get him?
So, did that make sense that they would be the leaders of that region?
Wouldn't it have been much better for them to train their kids to becoming neuroscientists and podcasters and classicists and physicians?
But that's not what they chose to do repeatedly for nearly 80 years.
The minute that that clicks and they say, you know what, you have this part, we have this part, let's shake hands and let's be one family, the problem will go away.
So I agree with you.
The images are very jarring, right?
I'm also a very empathetic, loving guy.
But I also know the reality, which is I've never heard Jews saying, let's kill all Muslims.
Always hear the opposite.
Jews are an existential affront to Islam.
Muhammad on his deathbed said, Promise me that you will rid Arabia of Christians, but really the Jews.
So, how could you have a coexistence between two people when one people wants to eradicate the other?
So do you think that if Israel didn't kill 70,000 people and completely destroy Gaza, that more than 70,000 people would have died during the same time period?
He was taken in one of those sweeps of Palestinian militants to prison.
He was diagnosed with a brain tumor, a deadly terminal brain tumor.
The Israelis, you know, the mean Israelis who are killing everybody, because the Hippocratic Oath, in their view, supersedes any other calculus, the The Israeli neurosurgeon doesn't say, F this guy, he's killed tons of my fellow co religionists, screw him, let him die.
They operate on him and they save his life, right?
So let me ask you this, Joe.
If you and I, let's put ourselves in the mind, right?
I was saved by the hands of the Jewish Israeli neurosurgeon, otherwise I would have died.
Then he was let go in one of those swaps.
Would that have not bought you sufficient existential empathy to say, probably I shouldn't then spend the rest of my life being the architect and repay the largesse of the Israeli neurosurgeon by doing October 7th?
He was one of the guys who you saw him in one of those rubbles and a.
Drone comes in and he's covered in rubble, and then they take him out, right?
Well, if you and I, if I could put myself in your mind, if we had been ardent haters of a group, and then that group had shown us tremendous compassion and generosity by literally saving our lives, that might have shut off my hatred to that group.
Radicalization, Animus, and the Oslo Accord00:14:10
For example, Bridget Gabriel, the Lebanese Christian woman who grew up in the Lebanese Civil War, like I did.
Had always been taught as a Lebanese Christian that the Israelis are terrible and evil, they're the problem for the whole region.
But then she escaped to Israel, was welcomed in Israel.
She completely flipped because she saw that they were nice human beings that treated her well.
And then her brainwashing was no longer there.
Well, if I've literally taken a brain tumor out of your brain, in that brain of yours, could I have not bought a bit of existential empathy for the Jews?
The brainwashing that happens straight out of the womb, where the type of animus that is shared regarding the Jews is so outlandish that it would make Hitler and Himmler squirm in unease.
If you can get rid of that brainwashing, you will learn to see the other as an equal human being.
Many, many valedictorians of universities graduate, they're Muslim.
Some of them are in hijab.
That's happening in Israel.
You go to medical school, the valedictorian that's chosen is a woman in hijab.
Does that seem like it's animus?
In the Knesset, in the parliament of Israel, there are tons of Muslims that serve, right?
As I was walking around all over Jerusalem, everybody that I was interacting with was in Arabic.
They were fully.
Israelis who were Muslim, right?
I have tons of pictures with all of them.
Some of them recognized me.
There was no animus.
Why?
Because they've internalized the reality that I am part of a country that is made up of, it's a Jewish majority country, but it's a place where everybody has equal rights, right?
There are people who serve in the highest judiciary that are Muslim.
Is there an Islamic country where the opposite could be said?
Also, interesting when you look at the statistics of the polling statistics of people that support the war with Iran in Israel versus the United States, and it's way more people support the war.
Obviously, I live in America and I'm immune to the effects of being surrounded by people that hate me and want to blow me up.
I could only imagine what that's like for the national psyche.
Of living in a place like Israel, being surrounded by.
Look, there have been governments in Israel covering the whole gamut of political orientations.
And while, to your point, I think there is greater animus towards Israel today than maybe in the past, I've always known there to be Israeli animus in many places.
For example, at my own university, Well, which I will be leaving shortly, Concordia has been colloquially referred to as Gaza University for 25 plus years.
Benjamin Netanyahu in 2002 was not able to speak there.
The first source was when I told you earlier that the brainwashing that's going on American campuses where Jethro is now also wearing the kefiya.
But also the demographic realities.
Of the West in general, including the United States, are such that we've let in people from those societies at a much greater number than in the past, right?
Negative opinion, disfavorable, dislike, whatever the number, whatever it is.
It's a measure of your either proclivity, affinity, or disdain for the Jew, whatever the wording is.
If you get 95, 97, 98% of.
Polled people saying that they don't like the Jews, and now you let into your country, your host country, hundreds of thousands, if not millions of those people.
Do you think that Jew hatred is going to go up or go down?
So, in Quebec, for example, as I may have mentioned previously on the show, Quebec had a very open policy towards Islamic immigration, and the reason that in Quebec it was so is because the most important sense of personhood in Quebec.
Is that you maintain your linguistic identity?
We are French.
We don't want to be subsumed by the mean English language.
So, therefore, since many of the immigrants coming from Islamic countries were also Francophone, in their infinite wisdom, the Quebec government said, hey, you know, here's a great idea.
There was a 1997 civil war between the Algerian government and hardcore extremist Muslims.
The latter lost.
So, they were fleeing from getting killed by the Algerian government.
Why don't you open the borders for them to Quebec?
The decapitations will happen only when they say bonjour to you.
So, given that they will address you in French before they behead you, don't worry about it.
Let them all in.
I'm obviously being facetious, but the point is that hundreds of thousands of Islamic immigrants came to Quebec.
So, the only so all of those threats were online that necessitate, but then we had to file with Concordia a Montreal police report, so on.
In 2022, I had an in person threat, so a A guy came up to me.
I was walking with my then, so 2022, so four years ago, he must have been nine.
I was walking with my nine year old, 10 year old son, and this guy looks at me, he goes, Are you gatsad?
I said, Yes.
Then he kind of composes himself to kind of deal with the hatred he feels, and he goes, I'm not going to do anything to you out of respect for your son today.
And so then the detectives got the footage of that, you know, because it was outside of the building.
And then, by the way, I couldn't, they didn't want to show me a lineup of things, of possible things, because it would be racist to do so.
So, the process of a police lineup, which is the most fundamental mechanism of identifying a perpetrator, was viewed as racist because the guy who levied the death threat to me was black.
I think he was maybe Somali.
He looked Somali.
So, I took a two year leave from Concordia University and I'm now leaving in large part because it became.
Difficult for me, if not impossible, to be a high profile Jewish professor who supports the right of Israel to exist.
An understanding of these things, more knowledge about these things, and to these people that are trying to get elected and that are dealing with their constituents, that this is a politically dangerous thing to bring up.
But, you know, the reason why I love, I mean, and I'm going to get threats for this.
The reason why I appreciate Trump is precisely because he implements things that most politicians wouldn't have the testicular fortitude to do.
But that's what you want in a great leader, right?
Most people come in, do their time, parasitize the system, and then leave having accomplished nothing.
The reason why Donald Trump has had not one, not two, but three assassination attempts is a testament to the fact that he is a danger to the status quo.
Why?
Because he does things.
Whether you agree with him or not, he's bold, he's fearless, he doesn't give a shit.
To your point, most politicians would rather go, la, la, la, I don't want to hear it.
Until it's too late.
The playbook is very clear.
Depending on the number of Muslims in a society, you can exactly predict the level of conflict.
And that statement that I just said holds true, notwithstanding the fact that most Muslims are perfectly lovely.
Both those statements are both veridical.
So when you are 0 to 2%, you're just a quiet, exotic minority.
When you're 3 to 5%, you become a lot more engaged politically.
When you become 6 to 10%, you start creating Sharia no go zones.
We don't want your dogs here.
This is not tolerated in our zone.
Look at Britain.
Look at France.
So, in the same way that I can predict the trajectory of diabetes, and no, I'm not saying that Muslims are, I'm drawing an analogy.
I am explaining a trajectory.
So, if you wish to protect the liberties that make the United States so uniquely wonderful.
In the full range of societies that have ever existed, recognize that all religions are not equally likely to be congruent with the American experience.
If you do, you'll survive.
If you won't, your future descendants will rue the day you were born.
Protecting Liberties for Future Generations00:00:27