Dave Smith and Robbie the Fire Bernstein dismantle Douglas Murray's viral claim that anti-Zionism is inherently anti-Semitic, refuting his assertion that global outrage post-October 7th targeted Israel rather than Hamas. They expose Murray's reliance on anecdotal Canadian attacks to mask historical occupation realities since 1967 and his contradictory stance on U.S. funding versus alleged universal support for Israel. Meanwhile, Gideon and Medi debate whether Palestinian displacement constitutes grassroots ethnic cleansing or violent eviction, challenging Murray's focus on war losses while ignoring ICC warrants against Netanyahu and ICJ genocide rulings. Ultimately, the episode argues that criticizing Israeli military actions and occupation does not equate to hatred of Jewish people, exposing Murray's flawed logic as a defense of indiscriminate slaughter rather than genuine self-determination. [Automatically generated summary]
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Vegas Comedy Club Plans00:02:47
Fill her up.
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We need to roll back the state.
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Our prisons are flooded with nonviolent drug offenders.
If you want to know who America's next enemy is, look at who we're funding right now.
Every single one of these problems are a result of government being way too big.
You're listening to part of the problem on the Gas Digital Network.
Cheers your host, Dave Smith.
What's up, everybody?
Welcome to a brand new episode of Part of the Problem.
I am Dave Smith.
He is Robbie the Fire Bernstein.
How are you, my good friend?
I'm doing well.
Vegas was a blast.
Some fun shows.
Got to see Dead and Co at the Sphere.
It's good times.
Yeah, you told me it was a great show.
Yeah, I usually don't like Dead and Company, but that might be the best concert I've ever seen.
Really incredible.
Well, that's people are saying it's a cool.
I did say when you first said you were going out to that concert, I was like, yeah, that's like at the sphere, that probably would be pretty cool.
I bet they're going to do cool stuff.
And you show me the pictures.
They did.
I'm a new man with a longer penis, Dave.
Really?
That's what it did for me.
New confidence.
I saw the Lord himself and I feel good about life.
For the record, the sphere does not stand behind these promises, but take it from, take it, take anecdotal evidence for what it's worth.
Yeah, it was a lot of fun.
I've been a bit under the weather.
But aside from that, the crowds were really great.
And the wise guys out there in Las Vegas is a cool club.
If you can deal with Vegas, you'll have fun there.
And if people want to capture this new longer penis energy, come out to Porch Tour.
I'm spending all of July out on the road.
I got White Bear Lake, Minnesota this weekend, then Bethlehem Play at PA, Pittsburgh, PA, Richmond, Virginia, Virginia Beach, Raleigh, North Carolina.
Really getting into the Carolina, Virginia section for a nice chunk of road that hopefully my car survives for.
Well, hell yeah.
There you go.
If not, we'll get you a new car.
We'll figure it out.
Okay, I'm, oh, the mothership is all sold out, guys.
So I actually just found that out this morning.
The Sunday show is sold as well.
So hope to see a lot of you guys.
Hopefully a lot of our fans bought tickets before all those other comedy mothership people bought them all up.
But we got Nashville Zane's coming up in July.
Be back in Dallas and Fort Worth.
I'll be at Orlando speaking at the Young Americans for Liberty conference.
New York Comedy Club in Stamford, Connecticut.
That was the one we had to reschedule.
We'll be doing that in August.
Bricktown Comedy in Tulsa, Detroit House of Comedy, the Comedy Club of Kansas City, a whole bunch of places.
ComicdaveSmith.com for all of those ticket links.
Looking forward to hitting a lot of these spots.
Debate Snooty Brit Takes00:06:36
So come see me and Rob in a town near you.
All right.
So I wanted to start today's show by, okay, so I've had this.
This has happened a few times now.
I'm sure, Rob, you remember back several months ago where we did a segment on the show about Douglas Murray had debated Jank Huger on Piers Morgan's show.
And I see on social media that a whole bunch of people love, I guess, like shoving it in my face or something like that, where they're like, oh, Douglas Murray just destroyed this guy.
And oh, Dave, you know, even though, by the way, I've publicly challenged the guy to debate and I don't know him.
So I don't know how to do this other than to just say it into a microphone, which has gotten me some pretty big debates in the past.
So, you know, it's not the worst method.
But I've said many times, I'll happily debate Douglas Murray on the topic of Israel.
Piers Morgan, I'm on that show regularly now, and maybe they can set it up.
But people still, even though I've challenged him on social media and on the podcast and stuff, people still go, oh, this is why you don't want to debate this guy because he's the guy who destroys all your thing.
I guess like I'm out there winning a lot of these debates on the war in Israel.
So then when people find this guy, they're like, ah, this is, take this, Dave.
Like he's the antidote to all the bullshit you've been saying.
So this has happened a few times.
I think this is maybe the third time where I've just gotten a lot of people, you know, saying to me, oh, did you see Douglas Murray like fuck up your side at this debate the other day?
And then I go and watch it and I'm just totally unimpressed.
I was like, how do you guys even think he did anything here?
Anyway, for the record, I did not, I just heard about this this morning and I watched about half of it.
And evidently it was, it was at the monk debates, which is like a pretty famous like Oxford style debate thing in Canada.
And they evidently, they won the debate by the Oxford rules of, you know, they, they, the crowd votes beforehand and then votes afterward.
And then you see who moved more people.
You know, it's not a flawless metric.
There's no flawless metric of how to judge debates exactly, but it's, you know, it's, it's debatably the best.
And so he, they did win the debate.
And from what I saw, Mendy Hassan, who was the guy who used to be over at MSNBC, who got canned, he did, he messed up at one point where he just totally got like Lord Balfour quote wrong.
And I didn't see what happened in the second half of the debate.
So it is possible that like at the sport of debating, those guys lost the debate.
I don't know.
I'm not really going to take an opinion on it because I haven't seen the whole thing.
But just watching Douglas Murray's opening statement and his and his first rebuttal was just like, I mean, I don't know, almost everything the guy is saying is just so ridiculous.
And so I just figured, well, why not go through it on today's show since this is a new thing that's kind of going viral and we could talk about it.
Now, just to set the stage for this here, one of the things that's kind of interesting about this debate, at least to me, is that the topic of the debate was not the history of Israel and Palestine.
It wasn't whether Israel is an apartheid state.
It wasn't whether Israel is just or unjust in prosecuting this military campaign over the last eight or nine months or whatever it's been.
The topic of the debate was, is anti-Zionism anti-Semitic?
So it was, is it anti-Semitic to oppose Zionism?
Which, I mean, I don't even understand how that is possibly a debatable topic.
Like it's just, it's such a ridiculous claim to say that there's a political movement that it is racist to oppose.
Like by definition, you should never be allowed to say that.
As soon as anyone gets into the realm of politics or a nationalistic movement, you've forfeited the right to say you're a bigot if you're opposed to this, right?
That would just seem so common sense to me.
But anyway, possibly treat Jews who are anti-Zionists.
Oh, they're people than Jewish anti-Semites?
They're anti-Semites.
Yes.
Yes, that is the answer.
That is, I haven't watched the full debate, but I've gotten enough.
I've gotten enough to hear that from Douglas Murray.
Yes, the answer is that me and you are also anti-Semites and every other Jew who's out criticizing Israel for that.
That's it.
If you think that like, whatever, if you think the way Israel treats the Palestinian people is wrong, the only answer is that you hate Barry the dentist.
Like that's the level of argument that you have to deal with to even make it.
It's just, it's too absurd.
Anyway, I just, I feel like, and forget even like, I will grant that like Douglas Murray is, he's talented at what he does and he's got verbal abilities and stuff like that.
Snooty Brit.
Yes, he's got that snooty Brit thing going for him.
But forget even that of who's better at the sport of debate.
Just for the sake of taking these ideas apart and demonstrating how profoundly weak they all are, I figured we'd do that.
And also I do think that, you know, seeing as how it's a very important thing going on in the world right now, it's not just that Israel is involved in this like mass slaughter campaign against the Palestinians,
but it's also the fact that I think for anybody being honest with themselves who is at all educated on the topic, you know, there's Israel has a very unique relationship with the United States of America and let's say has a fair bit of a fair bit of influence over our foreign policy.
And so it's kind of important for people like us who, let's say, passionately oppose U.S. foreign policy, particularly over the last 20 plus years, to deal with this issue.
All right, guys, let's take a moment and thank our sponsor for today's show, which is Small Batch Cigar.
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World Condemnation Plus Canada00:09:46
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All right, let's get back into the show.
So anyway, we can start it here with, let's start with Douglas Murray's opening statement from the other day at the Monk Debates.
Well, thank you very much, Rodyard.
It's a great pleasure to be back at the Monk Debates.
When I was last here a couple of years ago, I just returned from the front line of the war in Ukraine, where I was with the Ukrainian armed forces.
And for most of the last eight months, I've been in Israel and Gaza following the war there as closely as I can.
And I won't go into all the details now that I could give you of what's happening.
But I would just put it in perspective in this way, first of all.
What happened on the 7th of October was not just a massive attack on innocent people inside Israel.
It was the equivalent to about 6,000 Canadians being massacred and burned in their homes in one day.
It's the equivalent of about 1,500 of your fellow Canadians being taken hostage.
You know, you would have thought after an attack like the one that Hamaz instigated that started this terrible war, you would have thought that there would be some sympathy for the world, from the world.
You might have thought the world would pay attention to the attack and at least pay attention to the people behind it.
You might have expected, like me, that there might have been a worldwide opposition to the terrorists and rapists and murderers of Hamas.
You might have thought there would be hatred around the world erupting at the government of Qatar and its mouthpiece, Al Jazeera, its funding of Hamas and its hosting of the leadership of Hamas in Qatar.
You might have thought there'd have been an outpouring of rage at the Islamic Revolutionary Government in Tehran, but no.
There was an immediate outpouring of rage against the state that had been attacked.
Let's pause it right here.
Let's just go through some of this.
When does Harry Potter show up?
I mean, he's doing everything he can to summon him.
That's for sure.
So look, on the first note that, you know, last time I was here, I had just gotten back from Ukraine.
It's like, yeah, that's right.
And you got that war completely wrong also.
You know, he's one of the people who went to Ukraine and then said, look, if we arm them, they can win.
I don't know how clear he was on what his definition of winning was, but he was wrong on that one.
And he's wrong on this one too.
And of course, you know, it's kind of interesting to start this thing with a big, you know, appeal to emotion, which is reasonable enough that obviously talking about October 7th was a truly horrific event.
And so you're going to work up some sympathy from that, understandably.
It would make sense if like this debate was happening on like October 25th or even November 10th, maybe even into December.
But, you know, like the first thing, at least that just pops out in my mind is that when you sit here and you go, look how many people were killed on October 7th and think about the proportion of what that would be in Canada.
That would be as if, however, many Canadians were killed, right?
Which is, again, I never exactly liked the logic of that, like somehow killing, you know, like if there's a family of six next door and there's a family of two here, killing one person in the family of two isn't like way worse than killing one person in the family of six because there's a smaller family.
So I don't like the argument that like the proportion somehow indicates something.
I think that's kind of missing the mark.
But the thing that jumps out at you right away is that, well, look, the population of Gaza is much smaller than the population of Israel.
And by any count, by anyone's count, more innocent civilians have been killed in Gaza by multiple factors.
You know what I mean?
Like by orders of magnitude, more innocent people have been killed in Gaza than were killed on October 7th in Israel.
So it's just a little bit odd to start out with this like, oh, this would be like, you know, even though it was 1,200 people killed or 1,400 people killed, this would be like, you know, whatever, 50,000 Canadians killed or something like that.
It's like, yeah, well, if you take the war in Gaza, you're going to get to a much higher number than that.
So to start, that doesn't work.
Aside from that, this idea of almost like creating this parallel reality where Douglas Murray is going to say, you know, you'd think, you would think after something like October 7th, the world would condemn Hamas.
You would think that would happen, right?
At a minimum.
And that almost kind of sounds compelling in a way until you like just stop for a second and rub two brain cells together and go, oh yeah, and they did.
They totally did.
What world are you living in?
What world are you living in where Hamas was not condemned?
Now, you could say not every single person in the world condemned Hamas.
You could say you can find extremist voices, perhaps, who didn't.
But by and large, to sum up the reaction, dude, to this day, we're talking eight, nine months later of this brutal military campaign that's been carried out that again has killed far, far more innocent people than were killed on October 7th.
Still the first thing.
Every goddamn show that I'm on, every debate that I've done, everything, you always get asked, do you condemn Hamas?
You always, of course, have to first and foremost say, yes, we condemn Hamas.
What happened on October 7th was wrong.
Now can we get into the thing that we're here to debate?
You know, like it's, and the fact is that the powerful institutions around the world were unanimous on condemning October 7th and condemning Hamas.
So that one is just, again, it's like one of those things where it's like, you're entitled to your own opinion, but you're not entitled to your own facts.
It's just factually not true that there was an absence of a condemnation of Hamas.
That's just not true.
He then immediately pivots to why there wasn't a condemnation of Qatar.
Again, I think that there certainly was condemnation of Hamas.
Much of Hamas's political leadership lives in Qatar.
So okay.
But, you know, it does kind of raise an interesting question there.
You know, Qatar is an ally of the United States of America and maybe not technically an ally of Israel, but wink, wink, nod, nod, totally an ally of Israel.
And this is why Benjamin Netanyahu can send the head of Mossad two weeks before October 7th to Qatar, Qatar, to make sure that the funds keep going to Hamas, because that was the plan, to prop up Hamas.
So you never have to give the Palestinians their own state.
So it just seems like by the same logic he's using here, like if we do want to condemn Qatar, shouldn't we also kind of look at the fact that this is a country that has a, let's say, a working relationship with the United States of America and Israel?
And not only was there not, let's say pre-October 7th, not only was there not pressure on Qatar to stop funding Hamas, as has been reported in the New York Times and many newspapers in Israel, there was actually pressure on them to continue.
So I'm just saying that you might ask yourself those questions also, just following this same line of logic.
Then he throws in condemning Iran, which is kind of like, okay, but it's never been, perhaps the reason for that is that there's never been any evidence that demonstrates that Iran was connected or involved with October 7th, specifically.
The other thing here that obviously Douglas Murray is leaving out, and this might be part of what the reaction that he's talking about to October 7th is, is that, you know, October 7th didn't happen in a vacuum.
Criticized Prison Policy Shape00:15:27
And it's almost like all of these guys try.
It's like their entire case rests on acting like this was Canada and the United States of America or something like that.
You know, these were just two sovereign nations who happened to be living next to each other.
And then a bunch of people.
Yeah, what's your camera's acting weird there?
All right, whatever.
Let's keep going.
They act as if these were two sovereign nations living next to each other.
And then one day for no reason, these savages just attacked from this neighboring country.
Like everything was cool until then or something.
But of course, anyone who knows anything about this just knows that's not the case.
And the reality is that it's the, look, these things are never perfect.
And I know everyone tries to jump on these examples and, you know, say, well, that's not exactly literally true.
But if what is conjured up in your mind is like two sovereign states living side by side.
And then one just decided to attack the other group because they just hate those people so much.
They're so barbaric and so backward and so primitive and so evil.
They just hate those people for being those people, their immutable characteristics or the religion that they practice or their genetic heritage or something like that.
So they attacked and killed them.
But a much closer analogy would be like a bunch of people in the toughest gang in a prison broke out of that prison and went on a killing rampage and took a bunch of hostages.
Now, again, people say like, well, Gaza is not a literal prison and there's differences between a prison and that is okay.
The people in Gaza have been dominated by the Israelis for longer than the Soviet Union occupied Eastern Europe.
It's there are, there's over a million people who were born into that.
Substantially more than that, probably, but certainly the million people who are 18 and under in Gaza, all of them have just been born into this.
Now, Israel, after the creation of the state of Israel created the refugee problem that drove so many people into Gaza, they won a war against Egypt and Jordan in 1967 and occupied the Palestinian territory ever since.
Now, they will say that they pulled out in 2005.
And you can go read some Dove Weiss Glass quotes to see what that was really all about.
As Sharon's top advisor put it, it was to put the peace process in formaldehyde.
But even after what they called the disengagement, even after 2005, Israel, since then, has maintained complete control over Gaza.
I mean, down to like whether they're allowed to come and go, whether they're allowed to have an airport, which they're not, they're allowed to have a seaport, how far they can fish off the coast, how much they can trade with the world, whether they're allowed to have potato chips or cookies or all types of stuff, like every detail.
Their tax revenue is collected by Israel.
Like Israel rules the Gaza Strip and has since 1967.
And the thing about people is that they don't much like being ruled by foreign militaries.
And so, yes, this is a dynamic.
It's not as if one group of people, or even as people like Douglas Murray won't exactly say, but will seem to imply that it's kind of the same as the Nazis attacking the Jews.
Like as if there's a parallel between the ruling government attacking a helpless people and a helpless people lashing out at the people of a ruling government.
Not saying either is okay, but they're definitely different.
That might be part of why the world reacted the way it did.
Anything you want to add, Rob, or you want to keep playing?
I agree with everything you said.
And he's playing a real dirty trick when he goes, the entire world didn't condemn this because we did until Israel took it as an opportunity to kill innocent civilians.
And then as that continues to happen, everyone went, hey, you can't do that.
So to pretend like people weren't outraged over what happened or even us at the time going, hey, you had an opportunity here where the world was on your side and now you're blowing it by killing innocent civilians and destroying their homes.
So yeah, we would all just be talking about how outrageous what Hamas did to this very day if Israel did not take it as, oh, look, this is our ticket to go kill innocent civilians.
Yeah, that's right.
Well, look, even just to make your point and just like a little bit stronger even than that, think about the circles that I run in as somebody who's pretty critical of Israel and particularly of this, the war over the last eight months.
And I, you know, there's people in whatever, like in our camp or whatever, that Scott Hortons and Connor Freemans and, you know, Kyle Anzelov and Dave DeCamp and like all the anti-war Libertarian Institute guys who are like known for talking about this issue a lot.
All great, by the way.
Go give those guys a follow if you don't already.
You think about Daryl Cooper, the other people who I've been kind of like on the debate circuit with, like I did a two-on-two debate with Jank Uger.
I've been on breaking points with Sager and Crystal.
I don't know.
I'm missing out on it.
But people like Brianna Joy Gray, who just got canned from Rising at The Hill.
Just all these people.
Every one of them condemns Hamas.
Every one of them condemns October 7th.
Even in my world of critics of Israel, it's unanimous to a person.
We all condemn Hamas.
We all condemn October 7th.
So the idea that the greater world didn't condemn them, it's just in no meaningful way is that true or accurate.
It's just a false reality.
It is not the case.
Israel also couldn't have done more to ruin the sympathy that they were given by people by displaying ads on kids' networks on YouTube, which was very strange.
And then I guess to this day, I'm still, because off of your recommendation, I've been reading the Churchill and the Unnecessary War book, Taffy Cannon's book.
And they talk about, I think it was World War I, people getting suckered into it because of false claims of extreme violence.
To this day, I still am unclear to what extent, I guess, rape and baby killing actually took place.
I'm unclear.
I haven't, I can't say like as a definite either way, but it sure seemed like Israel was running with some very extreme questionable stories right at the top where it's like, guys, what happened was atrocious.
Why do you gotta, why do you gotta play this up?
And why do you gotta do ads on kids' shows?
And they start, yeah, and it's almost like a game that they're playing where they wildly exaggerate some of the atrocities that happened.
And then if you point out, you go like, oh, this is completely unsubstantiated.
They go, so you're downplaying October 7th?
And it's like, no, I'm saying like, let's tell the truth.
And so not only that, but one of the things that's amazing that the pro-Israeli side gets away with doing is like arguing that nobody condemned Hamas and nobody supports Israel while we're literally funding the war.
While we're arming and funding the war and passing all types of legislation in states in America about what you can and can't say, like whether you can criticize the war or not.
What counts as anti-Semitic or not?
Like all this crazy, and that's federal legislation, you know?
So it's like, wait a minute, how do you get both of those?
Either you're in a world where nobody condemns Hamas and nobody supports Israel or the most powerful governments in the world are all funding Israel's war.
You can't have both of those.
All right, let's keep playing.
Bring back our girls we had 10 years ago in the war in North Nigeria, which I also covered.
Bring back our girls.
No international campaign saying, bring back our Jewish children.
Believe all women, we've been told for years.
But turns out, not if the raped women are Jews.
Israel is the only country in the world which when it's attacked, gets attacked more.
You know, the interesting thing about anti-Semitism is, as my late friend Jonathan Sachs said, it's a shape-shifting virus.
It moves across the centuries.
When you could hate people for their religion, the Jews were hated for their religion.
Then you couldn't hate people for that anymore.
So people hated the Jews for their race.
And then after the 20th century, people realized that wasn't such a great idea either.
Now, the Jews are hated not for their religion or their race, but for having a state.
People around the world hate them so much for it that Israelis are attacked when they have hostages taken.
And this is to remember the 100 hostages still in captivity in Gaza, who if they were given back by Hamaz today, the war would be over.
And they're also attacked when they rescue their hostages.
All right, so let's pause it right there.
Listen, I do understand, I guess, if you're already pro-Israel and you just want someone to confirm your bias, how like Douglas Murray does have a way with words and has this kind of charismatic, you know, quality to him.
But like what he's saying here is just such bullshit.
It's just like, oh, it's all so ridiculous.
There's no merit to the argument whatsoever.
First of all, to go through this thing of like anti-Semitism is a shape-shifting virus and blah, blah, blah.
And throughout history, there was all this sort of, and this is, and so this is just another form of that.
It's just another form of that same thing.
I mean, just think about how ridiculous this would be if applied to anything else.
Like if I were to be, if, if I were to be critical of, say, black people in America today, okay, let's say I was criticizing the black community and I said, look, there are these problems, the kind of violence worshiping culture amongst kids, you know, loving things like gangster rap, you know, like high crime rates in your communities, your families not sticking together,
much higher than average illegitimacy rates, things like this.
You could agree or disagree with that.
Okay.
You could, I'm not even saying that, right?
You could, there's lots of different ways you could attack that.
If you disagreed with the argument, you could say, let's say you could say, well, actually, the crime rates aren't higher.
And I have some data to indicate that they're not higher than that.
Or you could say, well, there are these policies that lead to these higher crime rates.
Or you could, right?
Like you could have an argument about that.
But if your response to that was hating black people is a shape-shifting virus.
And a thousand years ago, when people hated black people, they did it for all these messed up reasons.
And you're just now the latest version of that.
You'd recognize that's not a counter to the argument.
You've in no way dealt with the argument that someone's making or the criticism that someone's making.
And this is not criticizing a group of people like black people.
This is criticizing a government, a governmental policy.
And I'm sorry, you don't get to just say it's shapeshifting.
So if there were criticisms of Jews in the past that were bullshit, that means you can't ever criticize Israel.
Or it's just a shape-shifting virus.
That's ridiculous.
And to say Israel is criticized for having a state is not in good faith dealing with what the actual criticism is.
It's not that they're criticized for having a state.
They're criticized for their treatment of the Palestinian people.
What their government does to the Palestinian people, whose territory they have controlled since 1967.
That's the criticism.
The criticism is not of Israel getting its hostages back.
That's ridiculous.
This is like, I mean, it's on the level of when like if there's a like a thug, you know, um, who's like, I don't know, whatever, shouting obscenities and threatening people, and then they get tased by the cops and you go, oh, they tased him because he was black.
Like basically what he's saying is you're only criticizing them because they're Jewish.
Oh, Rob, they're criticizing them for getting their hostages back.
Is that really what they're getting criticized for?
I thought it was the babies they killed.
Like, that was the criticism.
The criticism wasn't that they got hostages back.
Israel said, Israel said 100 people got killed in that mission.
And then the health ministry in Gaza said like 280 people got killed.
So I'll say right now, I don't know.
I don't know what the answer is.
But like, even if it's Israel's numbers, which I doubt, you know, like, let's get real, the number's probably higher than what Israel is admitting.
But even if it's Israel's numbers, okay, so they killed 100 people to get Thor back.
Okay, let's say 50 of those people were Hamas militants or people who were firing at them or housing the hostages or something like that, which is a, I'm being very generous in these estimates.
Okay.
Let's say it's Israel's number and let's say 50 of the dead people.
Okay, you still killed 50 innocent people to retrieve Thor.
That's the criticism.
Not retrieving your hostages.
Sorry.
That's just not that that's such bad faith argumentation.
You're not actually grappling with what anybody is saying.
It's just that this is what's nuts to me is when I see people send me this video, oh, Douglas Murray just tore these guys apart.
And you're like, what?
What do you think this is?
This is nothing.
All right.
Any comment, Rob, or should I keep playing?
No, well said.
I think it's like with this logic, what action could the Israeli government take that you would be allowed to criticize?
I mean, at the moment, they're killing civilians, but I'm saying like, what action could they take where I could go, hey, they shouldn't be doing that?
Where the response wouldn't be, well, that's just because it's really your deep-rooted anti-Semitism.
And if you could hate Jews for being Jewish, you would do that.
But since that's not culturally appropriate, you're only you're just criticizing these people for baby murder because you really hate Jews.
Yeah.
Well, you know, someone, I got into this back and forth on Twitter the other day, which pissed a lot of these guys off.
But I think also a lot of people didn't follow exactly what I was saying, which maybe is on me.
Maybe I could have been a little more clear about it.
But there is this argument that, so basically, when you're dealing with this, when you're dealing with the pro-Israeli side, and I've done a lot of these debates at this point, so I'm kind of used to it.
There's, it's always one of two arguments.
Both are equally absurd, or maybe one's a little more absurd than the other.
But one is that there are no innocent Palestinians.
Like that was, that was the Laura Lumer position that when we debated.
I mean, I'm not exaggerating.
That was her position.
Bad Guy Vote Logic00:02:03
There are no innocent Palestinians.
They're Muslims and all the Muslims are bad and they voted for Hamas.
So and they haven't overthrown him yet.
So there you go.
Now that argument is just.
Well, that's pro-geminocide towards all Muslims at its core.
What are you calling for?
It's a genocidal argument whose logic is identical to Osama bin Laden's.
Literally the exact same argument Osama bin Laden made, that the U.S. citizens are fair targets because we have elections.
And so we're complicit in the crimes of our government.
It was bullshit when he made it and it's bullshit when the Zionists make it.
But of course, I mean, it's just the argument falls apart immediately under any scrutiny because like, I don't know, there's a million kids in Gaza.
So first off, a five-year-old in Gaza didn't vote for anything.
They weren't even alive the last time there were elections.
And even if they did vote for anything, it doesn't matter.
They're five.
You know what I mean?
They're just not.
You are innocent by definition at that age.
So, and that's just dealing with five-year-olds.
There's lots of other adults who are also innocent civilians.
Anyway, the other argument that you'll get is like there are innocent civilians and it's terrible they're dying, but it's all Hamas's fault.
None of it is Israel's fault.
And that argument almost leads you to reducto absurdimet as you just were.
Like, okay, so Israel could just do whatever they want.
You know, and like I said this to someone, someone said to me on Twitter recently, and they go, if you take hostages and people are killed in the process, then it's on you.
It's all on you, the people who took the hostages.
And I said to him, I go, okay, so imagine somebody takes some hostages or holds some hostages in a school and your local police come by and they go, well, the bad guy's in the school, blow up the school because we got to get the bad guy.
So he blows up the school and kills all the kids.
Are you telling me there's no responsibility on your police department there?
School Woke Homeland Defense00:15:43
They're just, their hands are completely clean.
They could just say, well, there was a bad guy.
We were targeting him.
We have, yeah, sure, it was the bomb that we dropped that blew up the school, but it was the bad guy who did.
It's like, just take this thing to its logical conclusion.
Obviously, the argument that you have zero responsibility for the babies that the bombs you're dropping kill is so ludicrous, you can't even believe grown adults make it.
You can't even believe with a straight face that anyone would make that argument.
It's like, yeah, okay, that's a bad guy in there.
There's still a responsibility on you to do absolutely everything you can to make sure you don't kill babies.
That's civilization 101.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
All right, let's keep playing.
You know, the interesting thing about anti-Semitism is the Jews can never win because historically they've been hated for being rich and for being poor.
They've been hated for integrating and for not integrating.
They were hated for being stateless.
Remember, rootless cosmopolitans, the far right used to say.
Now they're hated for having a state.
Today, the only really acceptable form of anti-Semitism, aside from the sewers of the far right, the only real tolerated form of anti-Semitism is anti-Zionism.
Zionism, as we've just heard, is simply the right of the Jews to self-determination in their historic homeland.
That's all.
Anti-Semitism, as we've also just heard, is double standards against Jewish people or cruel and unfair treatment of people because they're Jews.
This isn't very far away from home here.
If this isn't anti-Semitism, can the audience here tell me why the following things have happened since October the 7th?
Why in a Montreal suburb, a synagogue should be firebombed, as happened in November.
Why there should have been gunshots against the Shiva?
Why in Toronto, a bookstore owned by a Jew should be attacked?
Why a Molotov cocktail was thrown through a Jewish community center in Montreal?
Why a Toronto Jewish deli in North York was firebombed?
Why in Toronto, the Orthodox synagogue was vandalized.
Okay, let's talk to two men fired.
So, first of all, Elizabeth, man, I don't know the details on all of these claims, what happened in Canada.
I do know this is all completely irrelevant to the debate topic.
This is just pure theater with no substance whatsoever.
And by a couple of those claims, there was like a bookstore whose owner was Jewish was attacked.
And you're like, can I get the details on that story?
Are you just saying because the owner was Jewish?
Like, was it done because the owner was Jewish?
But let's just assume it was for the sake of argument.
Do you guys get why I say that all these right-wingers who are like pro-Israel just become the woke?
Isn't this just like the most woke argument ever?
Like, if you were to say, like, there isn't a real problem with systemic racism in America, and then they just listed off like 12 things that happen to black people that are crimes.
And you'd be like, okay.
So like, were the police called?
Because we got laws on the books against that.
And yeah, you should call the cops and those people should be prosecuted.
Okay.
What the hell does that have to do with whether you can oppose Zionism and not hate Jewish people?
What?
I mean, even as he laid it out there, which is all kind of lame, like, you know, when you say, oh, if you oppose Zionism is simply the belief that Jewish people ought to have self-determination in their historic homeland.
Well, okay, but like, that's not exactly what anyone really objects to.
And if you're talking about Zionism as actually exists, like actually existing Zionism in real life also involved the ethnic cleansing of the local population out of that area and has since 1967 involved the occupation of the people who were cleansed out of that area.
That's what people are objecting to.
But this just listing off, there were some things that happened to Jewish people.
Look, when you're talking about a country like the United States of America, just hundreds of millions of people, or even a country like Canada, which is many tens of millions of people, these are big countries.
And to rattle off 12 examples of something bad doesn't prove anything.
I mean, yes, it proves those things were wrong and they should be reported.
Again, much like with the woke left, so many of these stories end up being hoaxes or exaggerated or things like that, that it actually does make you want to go through them one by one before you just accept them.
But seeing as how this is Canada and I don't pay that much attention to like random, you know, local crimes in the country of Canada, I'll just take him at his word, which I shouldn't, but I'll take him at his word that all these things happen and happen the way he said that.
But that doesn't describe anything, right?
And everyone who doesn't isn't like a full-blown pink-haired college 20-year-old leftist should recognize this cheap tactic for what it is.
It's like, that's not how you measure whether a society is racist.
That's not how you measure if a society is prejudiced against a group.
Listen, Jewish people in the United States of America and in Canada are a tiny percentage of the population and they are overwhelmingly successful.
Now, as Douglas Murray pointed out there, there are some far fringes of the right that might demonize that.
But to the rest of us, that's just like, no, they're a successful group of people.
That's okay.
That's fine.
I don't think Jews should be demonized for their success.
But let's not pretend they're not successful.
Let's not pretend that Jews in these societies are being held back.
You know, it's the stuff we talked about with that woman in Florida grilling DeSantis on how, you know, how terrifying it is to be a Jew in Florida.
Give me a break, dude.
This is just, again, it's like saying no one condemned Hamas.
This is so removed from reality.
I don't even know what world you're fucking talking about, dude.
What world are you talking about?
I'm Jewish.
I'm a public figure.
I talk about being Jewish fairly often.
It's known that I'm Jewish.
I travel the country without security.
You know what I mean?
Like, I'm not at that level of fame.
I don't have you.
I'm very touchable.
You know what I mean?
I meet fans after shows.
I hang out with people.
So weird.
Just never experience any of it.
Never.
Just not a problem whatsoever for me or anyone I know.
This is all just nonsense and this proves nothing.
And you can, and again, just to be clear here, because sometimes with these debate tactics, you do almost have to explain the debate tactic to people before they can see it.
I think most of the people who listen to this show are probably wise enough to see this already.
But if it needs to be explained, what he's doing is appealing to emotion strictly to get you to stop using the logical part of your brain and start using the emotional part of your brain.
Think about how terrible October 7th was.
Think about how terrible this bookstore that got vandalized was.
Are you on the side of that?
No, then support me.
But there's just no connection.
There's no connection between October 7th, these random attacks in Canada, and whether or not you can oppose the Zionist agenda without hating Jewish people.
Zero connection to any of it.
Yeah, the eight minutes of the, frankly, I'm just disgusted tonality gets a little bit old.
Speaking to what you were saying, though, his definition of Zionism, which was what?
It was self, just self-governance.
Self-determination in their historic homeland.
So I guess though, by that definition, so it can include genocide, but that's just the way that they want to exercise their self-determination.
And how dare you oppose someone's self-determination in their ancient homeland, even if they had to come back and forcibly take some of it.
But that doesn't matter.
It's just the self-determination.
It's a nice little title that I guess once you grant someone they have a right to self-determination.
So I guess they can engage in any sort of violence in any capacity because you gave them, you know, the right to self-determination.
And that's the higher principle and the higher cause.
Yeah.
Well, for people, if you've done like more like deep reading on the history of Israel too, it is very similar to how.
Okay, so there'll be like, so Benny Morris is like one of the most, if not the most prominent Israeli historian.
He was kind of the most famous of the new historians.
Elon Pape was another Israeli new historian.
And Pape is much more critical of Israel.
And Benny Morris has in later years become a total apologist for the Israeli government.
But the argument when you get down into really reading their works and listening to their interviews and their back and forths with each other is like Benny Morris, the guy who's apologizing for Israel, he has admitted in the past, I think he admitted that the Palestinians were ethnically cleansed and then kind of walked that back years ago.
I think once he even said something like, it's a shame they didn't ethnically cleanse all of them because the rest of the history wouldn't have been so contentious if they had.
Whatever, however you feel about that.
But his argument is essentially that like, yes, a lot of Palestinians got kicked out in 1948 forcibly.
Many others fled.
So like they weren't all kicked out.
But this happened under the fog of war and it wasn't really like a centralized plan and it wasn't like executed from the top down and this wasn't the goal of Israel.
So it's like, it's almost like that's where you're left with the debate.
It's like, oh, okay.
By the way, that's seemingly worse.
At least like you can point at the Nazis and go, they were very successful at genocide, but it's because they removed a lot of people from the process and kind of kept it under wraps.
Right.
I was just doing this.
I was just doing this.
And so individually, not everyone was evil in the culture.
They weren't aware of it.
To say that it's not systematic or from the top, then you're saying that there's actually such a flaw in the Jews living in Israel that they all spontaneously have decided alone to engage in violence and genocide.
Ron, are you telling me you're telling me a good old-fashioned grassroots ethnic cleansing isn't any better than a top-down authoritarian?
A totally decentralized grassroots ethnic cleansing is what we're dealing with here.
But again, the thing that, look, there's a few things that totally destroy Benny Morris's like laughable case on this is number one, the distinction that like not all of them were forcibly removed, but some of them were.
So like he'll admit that like at Dair Dair Yassan, there was like atrocities committed, like children killed and women raped and stuff like that, and they were forced to leave.
But then he's like, oh, but in all these other areas, they just fled.
Like the war broke out and they just fled.
And you're like, yeah, that's what ethnic cleansing is.
There's never been an example of ethnic cleansing ever where every single member of the group was individually had a gun put to their head and told you have to leave.
You don't have to do that.
What you do is you go into a couple villages, you commit some atrocities, and then you intentionally spread the word about it.
And then word gets out and everybody else figures out the deal.
And they go, we got to get the hell out of here.
So it's just totally ridiculous to even like start slicing and dicing the percentages.
Like once, once enough people are violently evicted, then the whole group was in effect violently evicted.
And then the other thing that really just tears down his logic is even if there were people and there were some who were just fleeing from the war, well, they weren't allowed to come back to their homes.
And there's no rule that says if you flee your home, you therefore forfeit your property rights.
You know what I mean?
Like it's not like if I hear gunshots outside and I grab my family and get in the car and get the hell out of here, I still own my house.
You can still come back to it when the dust settles.
Anyway, this is a similar type of argument that it's just like, oh, well, we just believe in self-determination for the Jews in Palestine.
It's like, okay.
But the objection is people who also believe in self-determination for the Palestinians in Palestine.
That seems reasonable.
All right, let's keep going.
The other week on a Jewish girls' school.
If it isn't anti-Semitism, tell me why just a week ago pro-Hammaz protesters tried to go through Jewish areas in this city shouting not just Allah Akbar, but, and I quote, sorry for the language, fucking filthy fucking Zionist pigs, dirty Zionist rats.
Not an easy chance.
Have you heard that language before?
The Jews have.
Now, look, if you are interested in this motion, just bear this in mind.
It's not about Netanyahu.
It's not about this war.
It's about double standards.
And one question hovers over it above all.
The question of who would protect the Jews?
Who would you trust to protect them?
The Europeans?
The Arab world?
No.
History shows only one people will protect the Jewish people.
The Jewish people.
That's what Zionism is.
Thank you.
All right.
So I guess that last line there is like, people were like, oh, you don't want to deal with this Douglas Murray guy.
He's got some arguments.
I mean, it's just, unfortunately, it's just empty nothingness.
It's meaningless.
It's nothing.
First of all, history doesn't show that only the Jews can protect the Jews.
History shows that the Jews weren't so good at protecting themselves, right?
Like, I don't exactly know what point that is.
It's also strange to me, particularly if you know anything about who Douglas Murray is, that he takes this shot at Europeans.
This is very strange how this happens to be linked in with like being like radically pro-Israel.
It's like, who's going to do it?
The Europeans?
Yeah, you know, those garbage people who let the Holocaust happen?
As if it's like all of Europe's fault or something like that.
But like, I don't know.
I mean, yeah, for the most part, I don't think Europeans would allow a Holocaust to happen right now.
Pakistan Law Assad Lose00:15:22
I know we're never supposed to say that.
But again, he can sit there and say it's not about the war.
It's not about this.
It's about whether the Jews are allowed to protect themselves.
Again, though, what's the issue with that?
That's a total obvious straw man.
Nobody, even in my camp, in my circles, nobody is arguing against Jewish people protecting themselves.
Who would obviously me and you both support that?
We are Jewish people.
Yes, we believe Jewish people should be allowed to protect themselves.
Self-defense is probably the most important, the most basic natural right.
That's not what the question is.
The question is, do Jewish people have the right to indiscriminately slaughter innocent Palestinians?
And then do they also have the right to dominate them and to occupy them for decade after decade after decade?
That's what the argument's about.
And it's very convenient that nobody on the pro-Israeli side actually wants to have that argument.
You never want to talk about that.
That's, listen, I'm not saying you can't find some people.
You know, sometimes you'll use the term, nobody's saying this.
Okay, that's not literally true.
I know there's with social media today, you could find anybody who's saying any crazy thing.
But in general, even amongst the people who are like critical of Israel, that is like a crazy fringe position that nobody else is really taking.
That's not what anyone's saying.
So his whole thing, his whole opening statement here came down to October 7th was bad.
Lots of people hate Jews.
Jews have a right to protect themselves.
Okay.
You're just arguing with yourself.
And maybe three crazy people.
I don't know.
I'm totally unimpressed.
So that was his opening statement.
Let's play a little bit of his rebuttal too, and we can also respond to that.
And then I guess we'll call that an episode.
Lots to talk about on the next one.
Quite a lot to reply to there.
Let me first say, Gideon, you started with a peroration about me not mentioning the Palestinian casualties.
That's because I started by mentioning the war.
And there is no law of war that says you're allowed to start a war and then complain when you lose it.
Okay, let's pause it right there.
Because this is another thing that comes up constantly in these debates, right?
It's like, haha, you lost.
all right loser you don't get to complain when you're losing a war like oh okay yeah i don't i don't think anybody's really arguing that the palestinians aren't the losers in the conflict with the israelis like you think that's a point in your favor fine but um there's i don't know yeah they didn't even lose the war in 1967 by the way the palestinians didn't didn't start it Egypt amassed some troops.
Israel launched a preemptive attack.
Jordan got involved.
And then Israel responded by attacking Jordan.
And the Palestinians get dominated forever because Israel won the war.
It's okay.
Is that what Western civilization is?
Is that the height of like modern morality?
That if you lose a war, all of your people are just doomed to subjugation forever.
All right.
Doesn't seem right to me.
And him saying there's no law that says if you start a war, you get to complain about losing it.
It goes, well, there are lots of laws around war and collective punishment is illegal under international law.
So yeah, there are those laws.
The International Court of Justice has deemed this a plausible genocide.
The International Criminal Court has issued warrants for BB Netanyahu.
Like, yeah, there actually are laws about how you fight wars, if that's your argument and appeal to the law.
But forget that.
It's like, look, people are typically very collectivist when it comes to war, you know?
Like people like Douglas Murray, who I'm sure have cheerled for every disastrous war over the last 20 years, you know, if Saddam Hussein does something, then they go, Iraq did it.
That's not really true, right?
First of all, Iraq was a majority Shiite country ruled by a minority Sunni population's dictator.
Okay.
And the boys fighting in Saddam Hussein's army were conscripted.
They were forced into, but this isn't even that.
This isn't even a government.
This is Hamas, a gang, you know, a gang who won a plurality of an election once.
But so what?
All the people, because of October 7th, essentially, what is the argument here?
Because of October 7th, no Palestinians have any rights whatsoever.
They're all just evaporated.
Okay, if that's your logic, fine.
But then also apply that logic to Israel, to the United States of America, right?
How much of us, how about the wars America's embarked in, which I'm sure Douglas Murray supported over the last 20 years?
Do we all just lose our rights?
Are we fair game to be killed because of that?
Or is it only it's only when like a guerrilla terrorist organization does it, but not when a well-trained, well-armed, well-financed military does it?
Then somehow it's, it's, it's different in moral character or something like that.
Again, just ridiculous arguments.
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All right, let's get back into the show.
Eric, let's keep playing.
And if Medi cares about the Palestinian casualties, as I'm sure he does, then tell your bosses in Qatar to tell their friends in Gaza to stop the war and give back the hostages.
All right.
Let's pause it again, because it's just every goddamn sentence is more bullshit than the last sentence.
So I just, sorry, it's hard to get through this.
This line that's come out that I've heard this a lot of...
People, the lady I was arguing with on Piers Morgan the other day used this one.
Just stop the war by giving back the hostages.
That's it.
Just stop, which is like, first of all, I don't even know where to start first.
Okay, I guess first, I'd say even Benjamin Netanyahu is not saying that.
He's not saying if you just return the hostages, we'll end the war.
That's not the deal.
The deal hasn't been offered at all.
He said the full eradication of Hamas.
That's different than just giving the hostages back, right?
That would require like a full surrender of all of Hamas.
And then, of course, Israel could just say, that's not all of Hamas.
We have to continue this.
So it's at best, it's not at all a guarantee that just releasing the hostages would end the war.
And more reasonably, it almost certainly wouldn't end the war.
But also, and then what?
And then what?
Does Gaza get self-determination as you define Zionism?
Do they get self-determination after that?
Do they get to form a state after that?
No, of course not.
So just surrender and then you can be subjugated for eternity.
That's the role you're supposed to play.
Why do you think that might not be acceptable to a group of people?
Oh yeah, because that wouldn't be acceptable to any group of people.
No group of people would ever accept that and not keep fighting back.
That's just a fact.
A fact of human nature.
Gideon says Israel needs nothing more than criticism.
Israel doesn't get criticism.
Wow, he doesn't even read his own country's press.
By the way, you said the other day in an interview, Gideon, I couldn't care less about the Jewish state.
So we know very well where you're coming from.
Let me just say a couple of things about the that I didn't get to in my opening remarks, but are important.
You know, if you didn't throng the streets of this city or any other for the actual genocide going on in Sudan, not the one that Medi and Gideon pretend is happening, but the actual genocide going on in Sudan, if you didn't spend weekend after weekend doing that, but you did come out for the post-October the 7th protests, you're an anti-Semite.
If like maybe you once sent a tweet condemning that, it doesn't give you quite enough smoke cover.
You know, if you protested not a bit, didn't set up a tent when Basha al-Assad was killing six times the number of people in a decade that Israel and all of its enemies have lost in 75 years of war, you are an anti-Semite.
And I would just add one other thing.
I know that Media has tried to reframe the motion.
I'm not going to allow it either.
You know, maybe there is somebody in the world.
Pakistan was invented, created as a state around the same time as Israel.
I reckon that if this debate tonight without Pakistan, Pakistan started a lot of wars, it suffered a lot of wars, it suffered a lot of casualties, caused a lot of casualties.
But you know what?
If somebody said, I don't, I think Pakistan should be abolished.
They just don't have the right to a state.
And although they had one set up for them many decades ago, we should abolish it.
I think people would say, hmm.
And then if the person said, oh, by the way, although I want to abolish that state, I have no problem with the Pakistani people.
Please.
Please, of course, you.
All right.
So let's stop there and just end this nonsense.
Okay.
So we could wrap it up.
Let me just tear apart these last couple.
points, I guess you could say it.
Okay.
So yeah, if that's what they said, maybe you'd be like, I wonder if these guys hate Pakistan or whatever, Pakistani people.
But what if instead of saying we should abolish the state of Pakistan, which neither of his debate opponents are saying and almost nobody on the other side is actually saying, but let's just say you said, hey, I don't think Pakistan should be allowed to occupy India and I don't think Pakistan should be allowed to slaughter innocent women and children in India.
That wouldn't sound like you hate the people of Pakistan that much, would it?
That would sound just like a very reasonable position.
And that's what the critics of Israel are saying.
I'll go a step further with that.
Imagine you created a state of Pakistan and within the state of Pakistan, you had a whole bunch of people that said, hey, I don't really like this new government.
And then that new government treated those groups of people terribly.
And they said, hey, I don't like this Pakistani government.
And then you said, oh, you must be anti-Pakistani.
You're like, well, what am I?
I live in Pakistan.
I'm part of the pal, I'm part of this Pakistani group.
And I'm telling you that this government that you just said cannot own my land is being real mean to me.
Oh, you're an anti-Pakistani.
So I hate myself?
Yeah, it's totally ridiculous.
And look, his thing about saying, if you're not protesting the genocide in Sudan, but you are protesting the genocide in Palestine, then you're an anti-Semite.
If you weren't out in the streets over Bashar al-Assad killing people, but you are about this, then you're an anti-Semite.
Come on, this is just the stupidest fucking argument.
I mean, like, look, first of all, that just doesn't follow.
That does not logically follow.
Like, if I'm, if I was came out, let's say there was a black guy who murdered someone and I was like, he should be brought to justice.
And someone went, well, you didn't say anything when a white guy killed someone.
It doesn't prove that I'm a racist.
It's like, I don't know.
It could just be, I happen to read about this one.
I didn't read about that one.
Am I right or am I wrong?
Should the murderer be held to justice or not?
Right?
The question is whether you're right or wrong.
The question is not, have you consistently applied this to every single area in life?
It's like, if, so like Michael Malice, my good friend, Michael Malis wrote a great book about North Korea.
He went to North Korea.
He studied North Korea and he wrote a book about North Korea.
It's a really interesting book.
I highly recommend people read it.
It's called Dear Reader.
If you were to go to him, well, how come you're not writing a book about every other authoritarian regime?
You must just hate the people of North Korea.
You get how that's stupid, right?
That doesn't make any fucking sense.
That happened to be the one he got interested in.
He happened to go there.
He happened to research the history of the country.
People are allowed to pick areas that they care about.
And that doesn't, you can't deduce from that that there's some like horrible or ulterior motive.
And in fact, you would only even go down this ridiculous line of thinking if you knew you couldn't actually defend the policy.
You knew you couldn't actually defend North Korea's government.
And so you have to change the subject to something else.
By the way, as somebody who has been quite outspoken about the disastrous war in Syria, it was actually started by the Americans in 2012.
And there were plans to overthrow Bashar al-Assad for many years before that.
And yeah, he didn't just start killing his own people.
It's that Obama decided to start funding all of the anti-Assad moderate rebels.
You remember them, Robbie?
Those real moderate members of ISIS?
Yeah, that's so there's a bit more to that story.
But the idea that like, oh, if you didn't protest that one and you protest this one, we can deduce from that that you're a horrible person that just hates these guys is just stupid.
I don't know what else to say.
Anyway, happy to debate Douglas Murray anytime.
And to all you people on social media.
I'm giving the blueprint, so it should be easy.
Yeah, there you go.
You have my arguments here.
I've done a whole bunch of these debates.
You could basically figure out everything I got to say on the subject.
Anyway, all you people on social media sending me this stuff, as I said before, to quote George St. Pierre, I am not impressed with your performance.