Nov. 6, 2015 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
01:09:51
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| Joining me on the show this week is author, speaker, and associate director of the Henry Jackson Society, Douglas Murray. | ||
| I've been familiar with Douglas' work for almost a year now. | ||
| His name kept popping up in my Twitter feed after the Charlie Hebdo shootings. | ||
| Like last week's guest Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Douglas has been a relentless defender of free speech, even when it isn't popular to do so. | ||
| Part of my awakening about the regressive left came around the same time as Charlie Hebdo. | ||
| This is where I should tell you that Douglas Murray is a neocon. | ||
| The word neocon sounds kind of evil to me, sort of like a decepticon. | ||
| I was really impressed with Douglas' clean and clear explanation of why free speech must be protected | ||
| at all costs, and that's one of the issues we're gonna talk about today. | ||
| This is where I should tell you that Douglas Murray is a neocon. | ||
| The word neocon sounds kinda evil to me, sorta like a Decepticon, and like Decepticons, | ||
| neocons are big on world domination. | ||
| Or are they? | ||
| Well, that's what we're gonna find out when we talk to Douglas today. | ||
| You know, we get so lost in throwing around labels all the time that we hardly know what they mean anymore. | ||
| As I understand it, a neocon is someone who wants to spread democracy through military intervention. | ||
| And we all know how well that usually works out, right? | ||
| Well, this is just generally thought of in the American lens, but is it the same for the British? | ||
| I wanna find that out. | ||
| Am I way off altogether? | ||
| I wanna find that out too. | ||
| And that's what we're going to talk about. | ||
| Some of you might be thinking, Dave, you've been labeling the regressive left for weeks now. | ||
| How is that different than labeling someone a neocon? | ||
| I think the thing is here that we had to identify what the regressive left stands for so that we could also identify what we stand for. | ||
| As I've said before, I felt the need to talk about the lunacy on the left because there just weren't enough voices amplifying the battle of ideas that you guys all want to have. | ||
| That's why you're here and that's what I'm going to continue to do. | ||
| So today, as I sit here with someone firmly on the right, a scary neoconservative, let's all have a battle of ideas and actually listen to what he says and then formulate opinions on those ideas. | ||
| Let's not do what the regressive left does, which is label someone and then prejudge everything they say based on that very label. | ||
| I think there's going to be agreement, disagreement, and everything in between. | ||
| And it's our ability to have those honest conversations and know that people we disagree | ||
| with can feel as just and as principled as we do. | ||
| That's the spirit that I'll continue to do this show in. | ||
| While I do want to continue having these types of conversations, I also want to assure you | ||
| guys that we're going to be widening the net around here as well. | ||
| I want to talk politics, science, culture, and more. | ||
| Of course, free speech and the battle of ideas will always be a mainstay, but I don't want to become a one-trick pony either. | ||
| Next week I have two people who are putting many of the ideas we've been talking about into action. | ||
| David Keyes and Faisal Almutar from AdvancingHumanRights.org. | ||
| They're using the tools of democracy to help advance human rights in parts of the world where the people are most affected by the ideas we've been talking about. | ||
| The point is, I'm going to keep mixing it up. | ||
| Keep letting me know what you guys think and who you want me to talk to. | ||
| Most importantly, let's keep pushing the conversation forward so we can build bridges where others would just tear them down. | ||
| Douglas Murray is an author, a journalist, an atheist, a neoconservative, and an outspoken defender of free speech. | ||
| Douglas, now that I've labeled you all sorts of things, welcome to the show. | ||
| Very nice to be with you. | ||
| I told you right before we started that, you know, we've only been doing this show for about two months now, but you by far, I've had more requests to have you on than pretty much anyone else because you seem, you seem to be like this sort of hub of free speech and free thought. | ||
| And that even though I think maybe we don't line up exactly politically, people wanted to see us sit down. | ||
| So I'm excited that you took a little time here. | ||
| I'm very pleased to be able to. | ||
| I look forward to airing our differences. | ||
| All right. | ||
| So first, what I want to start with is the word neoconservative because it's really the first thing that if someone Googles you that pops up that you are a neoconservative or a neocon. | ||
| Now I know, since I come from the left, this is a real buzzword for my people. | ||
| They freak out on this, think that you're some sort of imperialist, this kind of thing. | ||
| So first I thought, let's just get what the definition of neoconservatism is from you first. | ||
| Well, it's quite nice to know that's the first thing that comes up on Google with my name. | ||
| I expected far worse. | ||
| Neoconservatives were basically people who moved from the left in the post-war period in America and famously described themselves Thanks to Irving Kristol as being liberals who've been mugged by reality. | ||
| The truth is that now, I wrote a book on neocons about ten years ago now, and the truth is that the word neoconservative is so Filled with pejorative connotations, everyone thinks they know what they mean by it. | ||
| I read a book partly to correct those misapprehensions. | ||
| I don't think it was remotely successful in that regard. | ||
| But I'm not that bothered about the term. | ||
| I think it is interesting, and it remains interesting, the movement of people from a liberal position, as it were. | ||
| But apart from that, I think it's got relatively little Right, so I think within an American context, it basically means using military force to spread democracy. | ||
| Right. So I think within an American context, it basically means using military force to | ||
| spread democracy. Is that fair to say? | ||
| No. I mean, actually, mainly, neoconservatives in America were not interested in foreign | ||
| The first, certainly, the glutch weren't. | ||
| But certainly in recent years it's been perceived. | ||
| I wouldn't say that in terms of bringing democracy. | ||
| I think the most striking Neoconservative foreign policy idea was really that idea that you could use military force for humanitarian means. | ||
| It partly solved a sort of imbroglio that had occurred for a long time by that point, which was that people on the left, broadly speaking, didn't believe in the use of force, and people on the right, broadly speaking, didn't think that humanitarian catastrophes were the sort of thing you use the military for. | ||
| Neoconservatives were few people to sort of meld these things together and say, actually, as in the Balkans, The use of military force to alleviate human suffering, and to prevent, in that case, even worse genocide than occurred, was a good thing. | ||
| However, I mean, as we all know, the last ten years, if it's possible for a neoconservative to be a liberal who's been mugged by reality, then I think it's probably possible now to be a neoconservative who's been mugged by reality as well. | ||
| Right, so I guess this is why labels just suck in general, because I think what you're saying is there's various lines through here, that you could be someone that does believe in nation building, and obviously there are some people that do believe in nation building, and then you could be someone that just purely believes on intervening on humanitarian regards, and probably several other things beneath that, right? | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| I think that thing of there being a sort of coalition of people from left and right who certainly met, I think, in the 90s over the Balkans, met again in a bit in the early part of the last decade, but I think since that alliance that occurred has certainly gone its own different ways. | ||
| Okay, so that's, I just wanted to start there just so that people have a little bit of a sense of the word and don't get too hung up on it before all the commenters start yelling at you right out of the gate. | ||
| So I wanted to start also with that where I became familiar with you was right after the Charlie Hebdo attacks in France because you were all over the media and I saw an interview, it was a discussion on Al Jazeera And you were incredibly, I thought, lucid and clear and clean in your explanation of why we can have no give when it comes to free speech. | ||
| So I thought you could possibly explain that for me. | ||
| I'm uh... | ||
| yeah that wasn't the warmest interview I've ever had that Al Jazeera one | ||
| I think it, you know one always tries to be polite of course but | ||
| it was a bit much that within twenty four hours of the twelve people being shot dead in Paris | ||
| uh... that Al Jazeera invited me on and I wanted to have a discussion about what this would mean about the allegedly nascent European hatred of Islam and Muslims and so on. | ||
| The so-called backlash thing. | ||
| And I was fairly furious about that because I thought that this was obviously diverting attention from actual dead bodies on to potentially, you know, hurt opinions, hurt feelings, and so on. | ||
| And anyhow, I did actually, it was a pre-record for what it's worth, and I went back afterwards and said to a colleague, well, they're never going to wear that because I think I did at some point give the interviewer, who was sitting in Doha, a piece of my mind about the fact that he seemed to | ||
| well he didn't like it let's say when I pointed out he lived in an unfree | ||
| country and was working for an unfree media and that I wasn't answerable to him. I still haven't | ||
| actually got the fee for that interview. | ||
| I've not been asked back either. | ||
| Yeah, I'm guessing the check is not coming in the mail, so I would just let that be. | ||
| So what I liked about that, though, was that you clearly, so yeah, you called out the interviewer in Doha, but really, you were really calling out your own media, right? | ||
| You were calling out people in the UK, and you were calling out people in France, and probably in America, and all over the place, that sort of we were doing this to ourselves literally before the bodies had been buried. | ||
| Yes, well, you know, It's worth recognizing, in a way, when you've lost, and we've lost every round of the free speech wars in recent years, from the Satanic Verses affair onwards, we always sort of get a technical, there's always a technical way out we allow ourselves, you know, I mean, after the Satanic Verses, you know, thank goodness Salman Rushdie remained alive, but basically everybody has been, as has been often said, internalized the fatwa. | ||
| There's never been another book like the Satanic Verses published. | ||
| There probably won't be in our lifetimes. | ||
| After Charlie Hebdo, you know, people walked through the streets of Paris, world leaders in that sort of preposterous parade through Paris, and Parisians holding up pencils as if this was an act of defiance. | ||
| No, an act of defiance would have been if everyone had marched through Paris holding a cartoon of Mohammed, the act of defiance on the part of the media that was so desperately trying to find a way to be showing alliance with their slaughtered colleagues. | ||
| The best the media could do was to sort of repeat the same weasley excuses they've been doing for 10 years since the | ||
| Danish cartoons affair and try to save their dignity. | ||
| I mean, it's a very undignified site. | ||
| I think the media after all, you've got to remember it probably | ||
| awards itself more awards than anyone else in the world. | ||
| I know firemen and policemen don't don't don't have endless award ceremonies for their bravery and give each other | ||
| medals and so on but journalists are doing it all the time. | ||
| There is lots of journalistic bravery. | ||
| Don't get me wrong. | ||
| But the reason why we keep on failing in this is because actually our media as a whole and most individuals just don't | ||
| want to make the kind of stand which if we made it 20 years ago, we wouldn't have to keep on going through today. | ||
| Right, and I suppose that's why people are responding to you the way they're responding to you and responding to what we're doing, because it seems late. | ||
| At this point, by us talking about free speech, it seems so late and overdue. | ||
| And I think that's why there's been this sort of groundswell of support for what we're doing. | ||
| Do you agree with that? | ||
| I hope so. | ||
| I was a bit pessimistic there about the possibility of another Satanic Verses book, but look, things could change. | ||
| But it certainly seems to me that a lot of people are increasingly aware of the fact that we live in an age of extraordinary cowardice, and an age of cowardice that masquerades as an era of truth-telling. | ||
| You know, I mean, but these things are very confusing, I think, for most people when they're living through them. | ||
| You know, if you'd have said, if you'd have said, I don't know, in 1999, if I'd have seen you, you'd see me, and one of us had said to the other, you know, the 21st century is going to be racked across the Western world with blasphemy wars. | ||
| Right. | ||
| You'd have thought you must be drunk, or at the most, if you believed that prediction, you would have said, well, how did the Spanish Inquisition come back into Europe? | ||
| How did that occur? | ||
| How did the Catholic Church return to medieval times and start burning heretics? | ||
| Well, no one would have thought that in 2015, newspaper offices across the world ...would be debating whether they could show a little cartoon of some guy, just, just, just, not even of the person, I mean, not even as it were accurate photo fit of Muhammad. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Just anything which they then say could be called Muhammad. | ||
| You wouldn't have believed that this would be the thing that broke the Western press, but it, but it is. | ||
| Yeah, so was one of the most infuriating parts for you that actually what Charlie Hebdo did was incredible satire making fun of all religions. | ||
| So I saw in that Al Jazeera piece and in another piece where people were saying that this was racism, what they were doing was racist, but actually it was the reverse of racism. | ||
| They were fighting for the principles that the left is supposed to believe in, right? | ||
| Well, let's not forget the fact that we live in an age when everyone not only has an opinion, but is expected to have an opinion. | ||
| And most people, therefore, have to mug up very fast on things they know nothing about. | ||
| So after Charlie Hebdo in January, a lot of people were just cropping up on things who had almost certainly never actually seen a copy of Charlie Hebdo, never actually read it or seen the cartoons or knew anything very much about it. | ||
| But one of the immediate attacks on the dead journalists was, of course, to say they were racist. | ||
| That was probably, for me, the thing which fired me up to keep going during that period. | ||
| I thought it was and remain under the belief that it was intolerable that a group of people could go through the front doors of a newspaper office in Europe and gun people down with Kalashnikovs. | ||
| And then for their fellow travellers to, as it were, mop up afterwards by saying, well, They were kind of racist anyway. | ||
| I don't know much about them till 24 hours ago, but I'll say they're racist and then nobody needs to mind. | ||
| I thought that was a real low point. | ||
| You know, we've been calling them, it's a phrase that Majid Nawaz coined, the regressive left. | ||
| And is that really where they have failed us as a society more than anything else? | ||
| By this meme that everything is racist, everything is based in, you know, if you say anything, you hate women or you hate gays. | ||
| All of this, this idea that people on the other side that you disagree with can't be as principled as you are. | ||
| Is that where the left has really failed? | ||
|
unidentified
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Well, you want me to start with describing where the left has failed? | |
| Then I'm going to push you on some other stuff. | ||
| How long have we got? | ||
| We've got time. | ||
| Look, the problem is several things. | ||
| Firstly, just because people aren't religious doesn't mean they don't still want to be thought to be good by their contemporaries and their peers. | ||
| And it used to be quite straightforward to demonstrate how you were good. | ||
| Today, we're sort of making it up on the hoof. | ||
| You know, I don't know. | ||
| Be the most frenetically supportive person ever of whatever the latest rights issue is. | ||
| But really, the deepest desire of, I wouldn't say it's even the left, it's just whatever this movement is that's been so gripping in recent years to so many people. | ||
| I think the predominant thing of it is that people want other people to be racist. | ||
| They want people to be racist. | ||
| They want Nazis. | ||
| They are fighting a war that was effectively finished consummately 70 years ago, and they don't seem to realize it. | ||
| Or they want to look as brave as the people who fought Nazism, but they can do it from their home on Skype or Twitter or Facebook. | ||
| And, you know, these people are in so many ways disappointed people because the number of Nazis around these days is quite small in number, thankfully. | ||
| I mean, there's a supply and demand problem. | ||
| There's an enormous demand for Nazis, but not much of a supply. | ||
| So people go scouring around the social media, political landscape, desperately trying to find people who they can call Nazis or racists in order to position themselves as therefore anti-racist or anti-Nazi. | ||
| These people need this because they need to feed off it. | ||
| And their great hope is that they can call everybody else racist, win, and then be the only person standing who's not a racist. | ||
| It's terrible. | ||
| I mean, these people are not only fighting, as I say, a pretty much dead battle, but they're wasting their lives in the process. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So is that where the meme of Islamophobia has come in and been dealt with in such a dishonest way? | ||
| I'm going to guess that you wouldn't argue that there's no people that hate Muslims, right? | ||
| You agree that some people just hate Muslims, right? | ||
| Sure, and people hate all sorts of people, yeah. | ||
| Sure, people hate people because of their color or their religion or whatever. | ||
| So their sexuality, whatever. | ||
| But this idea of Islamophobia seems to me that it's taken on this new thing where you're not allowed to hate an idea, not people. | ||
| Yeah, I think this is one of the most successful ways that anyone's come up with in recent years to shut down debate. | ||
| It's no surprise that the people who started off the term Islamophobia, the people who were keenest on it from the outset in the 1990s onwards, were Islamists. | ||
| They wanted to portray themselves as the only defenders of Islam against these haters, these people who hated all Muslims, hated the religion. | ||
| It's been a trick that's been going on for a very long time. | ||
| Wait, just to clarify that. | ||
| The word came from the Muslim Brotherhood, right? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| I mean, I don't think people realize that. | ||
| They think it came from some think tank, probably in the United States. | ||
| No, it was just picked up by such people. | ||
| And I think we're in a real problem here, because still, most people, when they hear the cry Islamophobia, think, oh, this must be some racist problem and so on. | ||
| And the problem is, among other things, that it's scooped up any and all criticism of anything to do with Islam. | ||
| And that means that if you come out with a criticism of the Muslim Brotherhood, for instance, a group which is eminently possible to criticise, you are being Islamophobic. | ||
| If you say you don't like something, which may well be very fundamental to the Islamic faith, you are being Islamophobic. | ||
| And that, for the time being, and I think this will change, and it may change very fast and very nastily, but for the time being, Islamophobia trumps most other things. | ||
| So, for instance, you could be the most outspoken feminist of your generation, but if you said something that was Islamophobic, Islamophobia would, for the time being, trump feminism. | ||
| And so on. | ||
| And gays, by the way, go really down and low in this pecking order. | ||
| No one really cares about that. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Actually, people seem afraid to talk about the fact that ISIS is literally throwing gays off the roofs of buildings. | ||
| There's no outrage over that, right? | ||
| It should not be easier than this. | ||
| ISIS throw gays off buildings. | ||
| Criticize ISIS, and what's more, criticize the ideology that they are coming from. | ||
| I mean, ISIS pose an enormous problem because ISIS don't get their ideas from nowhere. | ||
| They didn't invent them yesterday. | ||
| They always publish long scriptural explanations from the Quran and Hadith of why they're doing what they're doing. | ||
| Now that doesn't mean That people should say, ISIS throw the gays off the buildings, therefore all Muslims hate gays, therefore all gays or anyone else should hate Muslims. | ||
| Obviously not. | ||
| Of course, yeah. | ||
| But obviously you have to identify where the problem comes from. | ||
| And, I mean, you know, I look around and I find ones of people willing to do this at the moment. | ||
| You know, just a quick one, you know, I mean, you always get reached to the National Union of Students in Britain if you want to reach for a bunch of idiots, but the National Union of Students in Britain recently Didn't condemn ISIS because they said that it would be Islamophobic to do so. | ||
| So while ISIS are throwing gays off buildings and raping young girls for the alleged crime of being a Yazidi or a Kurd or from a Muslim sect that the men rapists of ISIS don't believe in, if you criticize that, you're Islamophobic. | ||
| Look, as I say, people are caught. | ||
| They're caught and it's terrible, terrible They better be fast. | ||
| I fear that they're not. | ||
| and non-thinking, and everyone's got to find a way to help them think their way out of | ||
| it. | ||
| But they better be quite fast. | ||
| They better be fast. | ||
| I fear that they're not. | ||
| So what would you say to the people that would argue, well, we really created ISIS because | ||
| we went into Iraq, which now, by most accounts, was the wrong war to go into. | ||
| I'm not sure if you agree with that. | ||
| And then by leaving so quickly, the way we did, it was a breeding ground, it was fertile ground for religious extremism and all of this awfulness to happen. | ||
| So that it's not just about religion, it's also about the geopolitics. | ||
| Can I make a point, which doesn't always go down well with American audiences, but I think is worth pointing out as an outsider as well. | ||
| Because a part of the American thought disease on this is now in Europe as well, but it started with you. | ||
|
unidentified
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We give you some bad ideas and you give us some as well. | |
| This American self-obsession This American idea that nothing in the world can get screwed up unless it's because of America is an intellectual disease you've got to get over. | ||
| The world can go to hell without America doing anything. | ||
| The world can go to hell without America lifting a finger. | ||
| But every time anything in the world does go to hell, Americans ask themselves, what is it we did or didn't do that made this happen? | ||
| That's why you still see the amazing example of not only the President of the United States, but other senior figures in American politics, even wanting to apologize for, you know, the era of the Crusades. | ||
| I'm sorry, this stuff happened centuries before the British even discovered, you know, The early cities of America and so on. | ||
| I mean, this happened before the US was founded. | ||
| You keep blaming yourself for things before the creation of America and nobody is fooled apart from you. | ||
| I had a friend some years ago who went to interview Yasser Arafat, an Iranian friend, a journalist, a very distinguished journalist from Iran. | ||
| He went to interview Yasser Arafat some years ago and he said at the end of his interview, It was a knock on the door and one of Yasser Arafat's goons or male friends or whoever said, Chairman Arafat, the American delegation is here to see you. | ||
| And my friend thought he had a scoop and he said to Arafat, who is this American delegation? | ||
| And Arafat said, it's a delegation that's come from the US to apologize for the Crusades. | ||
| And Arafat burst out laughing. | ||
| Everybody laughs at this apart from you. | ||
| ISIS was not created because of George W. Bush. | ||
| Al-Qaeda wasn't created because of Bill Clinton or George H.W. | ||
| Bush. | ||
| There are things that America can do well and things that America can do badly. | ||
| And there are things you've done that haven't helped. | ||
| There are things that Britain has done that hasn't helped. | ||
| But it is not all because of you. | ||
|
unidentified
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Right. | |
| So I do agree we have a way of making everything about ourselves. | ||
| Maybe it's because we're a young democracy in a lot of respects, so we're still in our infantile phase perhaps. | ||
| Do you guys not have that in England? | ||
| Because obviously England has done all sorts of imperial things, a far richer history of imperialism than the United States. | ||
| But you're saying you guys don't have that feeling? | ||
| It doesn't exist at all? | ||
| Britain could teach America something about imperialism, and it could teach America something about post-imperialism. | ||
| We've been going through this for decades, and rightly so. | ||
| Britain, like all countries after their height, looks over what it's done and wonders whether it was a force for good or ill in the world. | ||
| We have periods where we We seem to think we did no good and other times when we realize actually that on balance maybe things were better than that. | ||
| Maybe we did more good than we did harm. | ||
| It's always in the balance. | ||
| It goes up and down and perhaps so it should. | ||
| But the fascinating thing to me again about this is it's so one-sided. | ||
| I mean, you know, we hear all the time about what empires do and about the British Empire and about the mandate in Palestine and about America's really quite minimal involvement or at least quite brief involvement to date in the Middle Middle East and so on. But you know, why don't we ever talk | ||
| about Turkey? Why don't we ever talk about... One of the most important and longest and | ||
| largest empires in human history was the Ottoman Empire. I never hear anyone from America or | ||
| Britain or anyone else saying, you know, the Turks have got so much to answer for. Nobody | ||
| ever says the Turks have done so much wrong in the Middle East and until we punish them | ||
| sufficiently... | ||
| You wouldn't hear this. | ||
| It's only people in America and Britain and the rest of the West who are so self-obsessed and know so little history and what we think is. | ||
| We will be able to solve it if we beat ourselves up. | ||
| And we could beat ourselves up for every year we have in the future. | ||
| And it still wouldn't solve the problems in the Middle East. | ||
| It wouldn't solve Iraq. | ||
| It wouldn't solve Syria. | ||
| It wouldn't solve Turkey. | ||
| It wouldn't stop ISIS. | ||
| It wouldn't do anything. | ||
| It's a luxury. | ||
| It's a luxury that I think is a kind of decadent luxury. | ||
| I don't approve of it. | ||
| You may have got that idea. | ||
| I think I got that idea. | ||
| So it sounds almost like, sort of like, you see this as like a disease of the Western mind, sort of, that we've, our society, because of our freedoms, has moved so far past some of these other places that we turn everything on ourselves. | ||
| We don't realize, sort of, how good we have it, or something to that effect. | ||
| And, well, it's laziness. | ||
| I mean, it's laziness masquerading as moral sophistication. | ||
| You know, if you go to a dinner party, I mean, I know you're in LA, so this is squared for you there, but if you were to go to a dinner party and somebody was going to say something about Afghanistan, and you wanted to say something really clever about Afghanistan, you would probably say something about how terrible American involvement in Afghanistan has been. | ||
| If you cited any other power other than a Western power's involvement in Afghanistan, it's not so sophisticated. | ||
| If you go for America or you go for Britain, you go for yourself, you look like you know something about Afghan history, which, let's face it, Very few people do. | ||
| You start to look like you know about Afghan history, and you also look like you're so morally sophisticated that you can even beat up on yourself. | ||
| And what it means, among other things, is you don't actually have to pay attention to the world. | ||
| You don't have to go anywhere. | ||
| You don't have to really think about things. | ||
| You don't really have to keep up to date, because every time anything happens, you can say, well, there was that time, and you know, and just come up with some date. | ||
| And hey presto, you walk away looking like you know something and looking like you're someone. | ||
| Yeah, you know, it's funny, I never thought of it sort of through the prism that you're presenting it right now, but I think Turkey's a really interesting example of this, because if I'm not mistaken, since 1974, Turkey's been in occupation of half of Cyprus, right? | ||
| Isn't that, they're in occupation of a sovereign nation, right? | ||
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unidentified
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You've stolen one of my most salient, important points. | |
| I should have gone around to you. | ||
| Okay, you, all right, so I just tossed it up for you, take it away. | ||
| No, I mean, Cyprus is the most startling example of all. | ||
| You know, Turkey is a member of NATO. | ||
| And is in occupation of part of a European country. | ||
| And I never hear anyone talking about this. | ||
| I mean, you know, unless you have Cypriot friends, no one ever raises Cyprus at dinner. | ||
| Whenever anyone's got a placard on the street marching up and down saying end the occupation, they're never talking about Cyprus. | ||
| Right. | ||
| No one ever raises it. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because they don't care. | ||
| And they don't know. | ||
| And I know, I mean, these things, you can only point these things out and hope that over time the trickle down of this information gets somewhere. | ||
| You know, but as I say, in the meantime, people have got a very narrow set of facts and the easiest way out is to think it's our fault. | ||
| All right, so I want to delve a little more into Israel and Palestine and the imperialism and how it all happened. | ||
| And right, people never talk that it all started with the Ottoman Empire and then the British Empire and the mandate and all that stuff. | ||
| But before we get to that, let's just do a little bit quick on Syria right now, because it seems to me by every estimation it's no longer a country under any Under any circumstances that we consider a functioning country. | ||
| And it seems to me that we're at this point also basically just in a proxy war, we the United States, pretty much in a proxy war with Russia. | ||
| Am I completely oversimplifying it at this point? | ||
| Well, no. | ||
| I mean, it's not quite a proxy war with Russia. | ||
| It's something else. | ||
| Look, the truth is that Syria, the end game in Syria, as it were, which I think we probably are in now, is the end game that Assad and the Iranians always wanted, which is Assad against ISIS. | ||
| Um, because if it's Assad against ISIS, they know that the world will not back ISIS. | ||
| And, you know, earlier this year Assad was interviewed by Jeremy Bowen of the BBC and, you know, Assad, you know, talked about the opposition as these terrorists of ISIS. | ||
| And, you know, Some years ago, he wouldn't have been able to get away with that so much. | ||
| He still can't completely get away with that line now, but some years ago, he certainly couldn't. | ||
| I knew and worked with some members of the Syrian opposition more than 15 years ago, I think, to begin with, and knew that there were people who were very good, who wanted their country not to be run by the Bashar al-Assad family forever, and wanted Syria to be the great country it could be. | ||
| All of their hopes have gone. | ||
| Most of those people are dead now. | ||
| And Assad has got what he wanted. | ||
| The Iranians have got what they wanted. | ||
| No one will bag ISIS, quite rightly. | ||
| So in the end we'll allow Assad to remain in power. | ||
| Look, this is to some extent what happens when we don't take any interest and don't really get involved. | ||
| I've always been against us intervening in any major way in Syria for one reason in particular, which was that I always said that after Iraq and Afghanistan we should realize that We clearly don't have the desire, the willpower, or | ||
| producer people anymore in your country or mine who want to spend, you know, 20 or 30 years in this | ||
| country governing bits of it, helping with infrastructure problems or anything else. | ||
| We're good at going in and doing the first phase, but we're no good at the follow-up. | ||
| And we should realize that. | ||
| And in the meantime, not be responsible for any country's collapse whose... | ||
| Nation-building afterwards, we really don't want to do. | ||
| So you're not a very good neoconservative then, I think, because wouldn't all the people that are going to label you neoconservative would say, you should be for all these things? | ||
| Well, the people who do the labels never listen to what you actually say. | ||
| So what should we do then, basically? | ||
| I mean, without really belaboring Syria, because I know we could talk about it for two hours, I mean, at this point, watching this country just collapse and Russia fill the vacuum, what should the role of the West be? | ||
| I don't think we have much of a role now. | ||
| As I say, the opportunity for backing the good guys, that window closed very early in the conflict. | ||
| The truth is that the future of Syria is not going to be in American hands. | ||
| It probably never was. | ||
| It certainly never was going to be in British hands. | ||
| Iran will win in Syria. | ||
| Russia will win in Syria. | ||
| Bashar al-Assad will win in Syria. | ||
| And everyone else, including most of the Syrian people, lose. | ||
| That's the endgame. | ||
| That's the result. | ||
| You may like it or not like it, but that's the result. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I basically agree with you on that. | ||
| How much of this do you think is that it's very obvious that Obama just wanted out of this part of the world? | ||
| He just simply wanted out. | ||
| And the way we left Iraq and everything else, I was against us going into Libya, I was against Syria, all of this stuff. | ||
| But to your earlier point, it seems like even if we do something, everyone hates us, and if we don't do anything, everyone hates us. | ||
| Is that the ultimate irony here? | ||
| Well, it's an irony. | ||
| There are many others as well. | ||
| But yes, I mean, it is true that when America acts, it gets blamed, and when it doesn't act, it gets blamed. | ||
| And sometimes that blame is worth listening to, and sometimes it isn't. | ||
| I mean, to some extent, you have to listen to who it comes from, I would say. | ||
| When people who criticize America or her allies or a country like Britain do so uh... as helpful critics you can usually tell | ||
| and when people criticize america or britain or any other country and | ||
| they're speaking as enemies you can also tend to tell | ||
| as so you know that there are lots of things that we can learn from this period | ||
| i would think it would be very regrettable if america decided that the | ||
| response to all of this would be the but america would side well we'd know whenever loved us anyway | ||
| so we're going to have you know you and i'm not going to kick around | ||
| anymore lacrimosa jenna bush like line | ||
| and i i i hope that i i hope that america doesn't take that view but | ||
| now obama as as i have a little silence in the last of the bomb on | ||
| this i mean Obama's predecessor found all sorts of ways to mark out the Middle East, but Obama has as well, wholly new ways in some ways. | ||
| Obama was meant to be the president who brought the troops home and brought peace in the Middle East. | ||
| You know, he did a bit of that, but he certainly hasn't brought peace any more than the waters receded and all that other stuff. | ||
| It's been a very... I think the Obama presidency, at the end of it, people will realize, not that his predecessors were terrific and that he wasn't or anything, but that the noblest aspirations can all go wrong in wholly different ways. | ||
| Yeah, doesn't that Egypt speech, the speech he gave in Cairo, which really was the reset, doesn't that seem like not just a different time, it almost feels like it was from a different planet at this point, right? | ||
| Yeah, as did the Russia reset and as does the Russia reset now. | ||
| You know, after 9-11, Dick Armitage famously said to the Pakistani ambassador, who was saying, you know, the usual guff about, you know, when ISI and so on don't know who we know about Al-Qaeda and all this sort of stuff. | ||
| Dick Armitage was said to have banged the table when the Pakistani ambassador said, you know, there's a lot of history. | ||
| Armitage said to have banged the table and said, history starts today. | ||
| It's a very noble threat, but it's never true. | ||
| History didn't start on 9-11. | ||
| It didn't start with the beginning of the first Obama administration. | ||
| I wish we were wiser about this. | ||
| Anyhow. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Well, I think in a world of Twitter and Vine and short videos, our attention span just is frayed to the point that people just forget history. | ||
| People just don't really care about history. | ||
| So one more quick thing on Syria and then we'll move on. | ||
| The refugee situation in Europe, which I'm seeing these videos every day coming out of all sorts of different, you know, from Denmark and Sweden and Germany, just, it sounds like an absolutely terrible situation. | ||
| And what I think is most interesting about it is nobody had heard about any of it a month ago. | ||
| I mean, it basically started a month, maybe five, six weeks ago, something like that. | ||
| Before that, it seemed like there was no refugee crisis, and now it seems like an epic refugee crisis. | ||
| Well, I don't know, look, say that from there. | ||
| That's at least what we were getting mainstream here. | ||
| Well, in Britain and across Europe, I mean, certainly Southern Europe has been going on for a very long time, obviously, and Southern Europeans, Italians, and the Greeks in particular have been asking for help for a very long time. | ||
| And if you go, as I did earlier this year, to the island of Lampedusa in the south of Italy, it's nearer to Libya than it is to anything else in Italy, including Sicily. | ||
| You can see the graves of migrants who tried to get over going back 15 years or more. | ||
| So it is quite a long developing story. | ||
| It's true that every year in recent years, when you get towards the summer months, there's a surge. | ||
| Obviously, it's easier to cross the waters during those months. | ||
| This is, by the way, I mean, this is such a hugely complex story, and it's one that really we're all getting wrong. | ||
| It's a classic example of the sort of Twitter age not being really fit for purpose, because this is one of the most extraordinary and vast migrations that we've seen, and it's being misunderstood by almost everybody. | ||
| The majority of the migrants who are coming into Europe are not from Syria. | ||
| The Syrians comprise a minority of the migrants. | ||
| You can pick your percentages. | ||
| Some people think it's around 20 percent, some people up to 40. | ||
| It varies obviously between the points of entry. | ||
| uh... but uh... the vast majority are coming from all over the world so people | ||
| from bangladesh of people from and coming from uh... and the father east and that their | ||
| people the majority i would think i might make my own observation | ||
| uh... coming from uh... sub-saharan africa and so when you hear statesman uh... saying and pundits and | ||
| others say well you know | ||
| we need to solve syria for instance and then will solve the migrant crisis | ||
| These people don't know what they're talking about. | ||
| Even if it was in America or Britain or any other country's gift to solve the humanitarian catastrophe of Syria, that would only solve a part of the migrant crisis. | ||
| What's your plan for Eritrea? | ||
| Has anyone got one? | ||
| Has anyone thought of one? | ||
| Can anyone point to Eritrea on a map? | ||
| We are so not fit for purpose in rising to this challenge and all that can happen, I don't know if you see, I mean to lower the tone somewhat, Benedict Cumberbatch, one of my compatriots, was on stage in London the other night, finished the performance of Hamlet and berated the crowd and berated British politicians for not bringing in enough people. | ||
| That is the clever, caring thing to say at the moment. | ||
| We must open our doors. | ||
| Refugees welcome. | ||
| Do you know what? | ||
| In the UK, a recent poll showed only 7% of the British people want immigration into the UK to increase. | ||
|
unidentified
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7%. | |
| It's the same across Europe. | ||
| People don't mind accepting genuine refugees, but no one knows what to do with the number of refugees, genuine refugees, who are coming. | ||
| And absolutely nobody knows, including Chancellor Merkel, who having saved Europe in the financial crisis, has now totally floundered on the refugee crisis. | ||
| Angela Merkel doesn't know what to do. | ||
| The European Commission just recently tried to force quotas on European countries to take migrants they couldn't and didn't want to take. | ||
| And as the European Commission issued that, they admitted that that number they were talking about was not fit for purpose because the number was so much higher. | ||
| What I'm trying to This is a continent-wide catastrophe, which we are at the beginning of. | ||
| And I think, as I say, we haven't even begun to rise to it. | ||
| And we're going to see, I think, terrible things. | ||
| Winter's coming. | ||
| Sweden is now putting refugees in tents because it's run out of properties. | ||
| Sweden took the view, let's show the world how generous we are. | ||
| Let's be, they said, a humanitarian superpower. | ||
| Now they're going to have to raise taxes, they've got increasing public opinion against them, and the top party in the polls in Sweden, the humanitarian hyper-power of Sweden, is the party that's generally called Far-Right. | ||
| That's now top of the polls in Sweden. | ||
| And we're going to see that everywhere. | ||
| Yeah, is that what's coming next? | ||
| Because that is what I fear, that I think somebody like Benedict Cumberbatch, I think there's some well-intentioned humanistic thing going on here. | ||
| Well, I don't know about that, actually. | ||
| I mean, maybe. | ||
| Maybe they just want to look like they're doing that. | ||
| But it comes back to a really core mistake in our era. | ||
| If you want to be generous, be generous. | ||
| But don't demand other people to be generous for you. | ||
| The head of the Scottish Nationalist Party a little while ago said she would be willing to take in a Syrian family. | ||
| It's months since she said that and as far as I know there are no Syrians living with her. | ||
| One of the top members of the Labour Party said the same thing months ago. | ||
| So far as I know she hasn't got a Syrian family in her house. | ||
| I think this is posturing, and really it's not sincere, because if you said to those people, look at the numbers that are actually coming, and look at the numbers of people who say they want to come, you will realize that it is not only economically but societally unsustainable. | ||
| You would have to realize that. | ||
| Yeah, so under the best of circumstances bringing these people in would be extremely difficult and basically what you're saying is we're doing this or this is being done under the worst of circumstances because there's just simply no controls here. | ||
| Well, nobody knows who's coming. | ||
| Most people destroy their papers before they get here. | ||
| Most people pretend to be Syrians even when they're very obviously not. | ||
| And the truth is, as I've seen in covering this story in the south of Europe, The truth is, is that once you're in European waters, you're in Europe and you never go back. | ||
| There's no particularly good way, even when this was at a low point, there was no particularly sophisticated way to work out who was who and to work out who was genuine and who was an economic migrant. | ||
| And that whole system is basically broken down now. | ||
| So once you're in, you're in. | ||
| And I think this is going to obviously prove a potentially breaking challenge for Europe. | ||
| Germany is meant to be bringing 1% of its current population in addition every year for the foreseeable future. | ||
| Who pays for that? | ||
| Who pays for those people? | ||
| I mean, you know, I'm not heartless about this. | ||
| I would like to see everywhere genuine refugees get asylum in countries, hopefully return to their countries and help rebuild them when they're safe again. | ||
| But I would like genuine asylum seekers to get asylum. | ||
| But at the moment, the whole thing is so tied up that actually I think that Europe's heart is going to harden towards all of these people. | ||
| And in that lack of attention to the detail, I think, yes, across Europe we see a catastrophe starting. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| What do you make of the Gulf countries? | ||
| You know, Kuwait, Bahrain, United Arab Emirates, etc. | ||
| I read this morning that the six main Gulf countries have taken in zero refugees. | ||
| Yes. | ||
| These are their brothers, are they not? | ||
| I mean, what's going on here? | ||
| Brothers in the same way that the Palestinians are their brothers. | ||
| We'll get to that next. | ||
| Well look, the Gulf state countries bring in no Syrian refugees and one Kuwaiti official In a recent interview, was asked why, and said, in an interview in Arabic, it's on the net, said that the reason was because Kuwait, you have to understand, he said, we are very fragile countries. | ||
| We can't take in all these people. | ||
| They are traumatized, they come from a different culture. | ||
| It's a different culture, Syria. | ||
| We can't put up with them in the Gulf. | ||
| Right, it's much more like Sweden. | ||
| Why don't you go to Norway, Sweden, and so on? | ||
| And you see, it's another thing of people's good instincts being used against them. | ||
| Europeans don't hear that. | ||
| What Europeans see is catastrophe. | ||
| What did we do? | ||
| We must be responsible. | ||
| What's our responsibility? | ||
| We must do this. | ||
| We must do it even if it breaks us. | ||
| And over in the Gulf, They're taking in zero people and they don't give a damn about it. | ||
| And frankly, I think they probably find it quite funny that the Europeans have fallen for the idea that this whole catastrophe is the fault of the Europeans. | ||
|
unidentified
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Yeah. | |
| All right. | ||
| So I do want to move on, but I have to back up for a second. | ||
| So what do you think in the mind of someone like Angela Merkel? | ||
| What do you think she's actually thinking? | ||
| She has to know that it's not sustainable, right? | ||
| And I get it, she's either trying to have these lofty goals of trying to do something on humanitarian grounds or whatever, but what do you think really is going on in her head? | ||
| Also knowing that, as you said before, this probably is going to strengthen the far right in Germany. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, Germany, it may not actually be possible to solve it, because in Germany, for all sorts of obvious historical reasons, if you say, for instance, if you say in Britain, I don't know, we might have a migration so large that British culture and British society will basically be over. | ||
| If you were to say that, it's not true at the moment, but I mean, if somewhere down the road you were to say that, you would still get most British people sort of think that, you know, We're a nice guy. | ||
| We enjoy ourselves as a country. | ||
| We've been broadly enforced for good in the world. | ||
| They wouldn't want Britain to be over. | ||
| Germany has a different thing. | ||
| There are a lot of people in Germany who, for historical reasons and some understandable historical reasons, basically think that German guilt can never be Wow. | ||
| alleviated and that anything other than the destruction of germany could never | ||
| never read germany of its sins now my own view is that those people may be in the years ahead | ||
| themselves in a minority | ||
| i think it's quite hard to tell young germans that because of something their | ||
| grandparents did they have to abolish themselves as a country was a society | ||
| but they've definitely got the problem harder as you can see that in angela merkel's response | ||
| angela merkel when she was asked recently at a press conference by a nice | ||
| german lady who just sort of said you know isn't this isn't this a problem for our country | ||
| And I'm concerned for my country. | ||
| It was just brushed off by Angela Merkel as if this woman was some whack job weirdo who'd come from Racistville. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| And you see this all throughout. | ||
| Let me give you one other very quick example. | ||
| These Pegida protests, which I don't agree with. | ||
| I'm concerned about them. | ||
| But I think that they are They're all sorts of things. | ||
| They are obviously an anti-Islam protest, but they're also an anti-migration protest and all sorts of other things. | ||
| But it's a legitimate use of people's time. | ||
| It's a legitimate political grievance. | ||
| It needs to have an airing. | ||
| Angela Merkel uses her New Year message to say that the Pegida protesters have coldness in their hearts. | ||
| If instead of that she'd said, The Islamists who the Brigitte protests are mainly concerned about have coldness in their hearts, and we as Germans must be careful not, in response to this hatred, to become hateful ourselves. | ||
| Then that might be something. | ||
| But you see, Angela Merkel's problem is she can only deal with secondary problems. | ||
| She can't deal with the primary ones. | ||
| I said that would be a final point. | ||
| Final, final point. | ||
| I don't know if you saw it, but the other week a fascinating thing happened at the UN in New York. | ||
| Angela Merkel was sitting next to Mark Zuckerberg for lunch. | ||
| And unfortunately, Angela Merkel's microphone was hot. | ||
| Everyone in politics has had a hot mic moment. | ||
| But her mic was still on at possibly the worst moment it could have been for her. | ||
| I'm amazed it hasn't been picked up more. | ||
| But she sat down to lunch beside Mark Zuckerberg in September in New York and said, whilst the mic was on, to Mark Zuckerberg, What can we do to stop people writing anti-immigration things on Facebook? | ||
| And Mark Zuckerberg says we're working on it. | ||
| Now look, I say this as clearly as possible. | ||
| If you want to create a volcano in Europe, the best way to do it would be to shut down and stop legitimate public feeling about things and to say that is no good. | ||
| Saying that you object to the migration on Facebook, it should be stopped. | ||
| That is the biggest way, the fastest way to make sure the volcano blows out of the side. | ||
| Yeah, and it seems so obvious to me that this is what the regressive left has done by labelling everyone who doesn't agree with them racist. | ||
| They've created a situation where good intentioned people, liberals, are now finding themselves agreeing on a lot of things with people on the far right who they agree with nothing else on. | ||
| It's the danger. | ||
| That's the danger. | ||
| I think the fact is that what the left has done in recent years with the term racist has basically ended up denuding the term of having any meaning, or much meaning anyway. | ||
| Because if everybody can be called a racist at some point, and generally, very often at least, for very spurious grounds, it means that you've basically got no terminology left when an actual racist comes along. | ||
| I can sort of sense that people just, they're going to end up not caring in the future. | ||
| I've always said I want this solved. | ||
| I want this problem, this sort of problems dealt with in order that they're not dealt in the coming decades by Marine Le Pen and the Jorg Haider-ish elements in Austria. | ||
| But, you know, too few people listen. | ||
| Yeah, yeah. | ||
| I mean, I totally hear that, and that's why I'm trying to bring this message, that if we have to get the left back, otherwise we're just going to hand everything over to the right, which would be a disaster. | ||
| All right, let's talk a little more about the Middle East. | ||
| Let's talk about Israel-Palestine. | ||
| We can probably knock that out in just a few minutes and everyone will be satisfied, right? | ||
| Yeah, sure. | ||
| 30 seconds. | ||
| 30 seconds, let's do it. | ||
| So I thought maybe the best way to do this, because I do know how much you know about history, where should we start with this? | ||
| Because what I'm noticing lately is that, you know, as we're seeing the stabbings and the shootings and all this, the debate is rarely about what's happening right now, but now the debate's starting to be, ah, the partition plan, ah, the British mandate, like now it's starting to be unfurled And people don't understand history, as we alluded to earlier. | ||
| So where is a good place, if we're going to have a decent discussion and try to get some common ground here, where is a good place to start with the Israel-Palestine situation? | ||
| I think the only place you can start is from where we are, really, and an acceptance that, on the part of people who are broadly anti-Israel, an acceptance by those people that Israel exists and that it's not going anywhere. | ||
| You know, I've spent a lot of time there and in surrounding areas, in the West Bank and so on, and spoken with a lot of Palestinian representatives and so on, and one of the saddest things is when you hear them talk about the occupation and you discover they're talking about the occupation from 1948. | ||
| Because then you say, you know what? | ||
| You're giving your future generations no hope. | ||
| You're selling them a lie. | ||
| You're telling them that we'll get back Tel Aviv, you know, we'll get back the whole of Jerusalem, we'll get back Haifa, and so on. | ||
| It's not going to happen. | ||
| They're selling their young people a crock and I think it's a tragedy. | ||
| If they accepted that Israel's not going anywhere, and Israel felt confident enough that the Palestinians accepted that, Then the negotiations for the border dispute are frankly quite straightforward. | ||
| You can see them on the ground. | ||
| You can see where basically the Israelis have won and basically where the Palestinians have won. | ||
| And you can see the basis for what's often been called the world's ugliest border. | ||
| Uh, but you know, you have to start from the premise that Israel's not going anywhere. | ||
| And I think it is one of the most striking things. | ||
| That in 2015, so many debates on college campuses and in the media and so on don't accept that fact. | ||
| And you know, if we had a conversation about Pakistan and we started by saying, you know, should Pakistan have been created or not? | ||
| As a mistake, we wonder if we could rectify this error. | ||
| You know, people would say, what are you talking about? | ||
| It's 2015. | ||
| Pakistan's got all sorts of problems we need to talk about. | ||
| But why are we talking about this? | ||
| This is a problem from seven decades ago. | ||
| You'd be a maniac. | ||
| But on Israel, that's thought quite normal. | ||
| Israel and Pakistan are the same age, and these crazy Israel obsessives keep going back to the basis. | ||
| And they're not gonna win. | ||
| That's over. | ||
| That's done. | ||
| So what do you make of these people? | ||
| So, because I see that. | ||
| I see very clearly. | ||
| I try to tweet as much stuff as I can about coexistence. | ||
| I want there to be two states for two people and understand that people can't live in occupation. | ||
| And I want everyone to be treated with dignity and have the right to self-determination and all that. | ||
| But I see nothing except on the left. | ||
| All I see is just this relentless demonization of Israel, no matter what they do. | ||
| Look, they left Gaza! | ||
| There's not one Jew in Gaza. | ||
| Hitler would love the place, right? | ||
| Yeah, yeah, I know, you'd feel right at home in certain ways there. | ||
| But the problem is that, by the way, when you said the two-state solution doesn't exist, it's dead, it's gone. | ||
| The best you can hope for now is a three-state solution, because it's in no one's gift to unite the Palestinians. | ||
| Right, so I wanted to ask you about that too, because it really is a three-state solution. | ||
| Yeah, I mean, people should stop using the two-state idea. | ||
| But you then have to ask some serious questions about the negotiating partners on both sides. | ||
| Now, people like to say here, and again, the clever thing to say is, well, you know, six of one, half a dozen of the other, and so on. | ||
| It is simply not the case that the Israeli Prime Minister uses rhetoric about the Palestinians like the Palestinian so-called moderate leader, Mahmoud Abbas, has used in recent weeks about the Jews. | ||
| Mahmoud Abbas was talking about, we don't want the filthy feet of the Jews on our holy sites. | ||
| This doesn't even get very much coverage outside of the region. | ||
| If Benjamin Netanyahu had made a speech where he said, we don't want any filthy Muslim or Arab feet in our land, I reckon that would have made the front page of the New York Times. | ||
| I think it would be being discussed. | ||
| I think people would know about it. | ||
| Mahmoud Abbas does the most extraordinary incitement. | ||
| And the most extraordinary denigration, and all that allegedly right-thinking people in the West can do is to say, this is the man with whom you must do peace, because he's not Hamas. | ||
| I think that the world should concentrate less on the Israeli-Palestinian dispute, you know. | ||
| I think it's over-egged, it's got too much attention on it. | ||
| None of the attention helps. | ||
| there are intractable problems around the world uh... the saharan question the lessons on question | ||
| uh... cypress all sorts of ones and and actually uh... at massive amounts of international | ||
| program and attention do nothing | ||
| to solve these conflicts uh... uh... you know that we have seen in recent years | ||
| the the the the motif of our time fall apart in the middle east and that was | ||
| and it was said by everybody from lighted little from right and left | ||
| throughout my upbringing at any rate if you could only unlock the problem of the | ||
| palestinian israeli dispute the rest of the middle east will be sold | ||
| i had this for years Solve the Israeli-Palestinian border dispute and the economy of Yemen will boom, and the Iranians will see the point of gay rights, and the Saudis will understand the potential utility of women in a society. | ||
| It was obviously nonsense then, but we've seen it's nonsense in recent years. | ||
| We've seen it because the Middle East has managed to fall apart with zero Israeli involvement. | ||
| Yeah, so is that the bigger issue here is that sort of, that we're really talking about a three-state thing because Gaza and the West Bank are totally separate, ruled by different people, and there's no reason to think that if Abbas signed an agreement That Hamas would abide by it. | ||
| I mean, in their, you know, their, what do they call it, their charter, it says kill all the Jews. | ||
| So they're not going to suddenly change. | ||
| So that's the strange part. | ||
| As I see people in the West saying, well, you know, just make a solution, make a magical solution and they'll stop wanting to kill you. | ||
| But it doesn't seem like there's a connection there. | ||
| For those people, it's not about the Middle East. | ||
| Most of the people in this guff have never been there. | ||
| They don't know anyone there. | ||
| It's about them. | ||
| It goes back to that point I made at the start. | ||
| It's about them. | ||
| If you say how concerned you are about this situation, you come across as virtuous and knowledgeable. | ||
| It's the idiot's way out. | ||
| Right. | ||
| And yet there's one place in the Middle East that stands for their progressive values, and that's the place that they despise. | ||
| And now they use the progressive values against it. | ||
| We're told that if you highlight the fact that, you know, that in Israel, gays have every right they want, and in every other country in the region you get hanged, people go, ah, it's a detail. | ||
| Why are you bothering? | ||
| Why are you pinkwashing? | ||
| Why are you doing this Hasbara for them? | ||
| You go, actually, you know, for me it's not a detail. | ||
| I mean, I mind whether I'm hanged or not. | ||
| I mind whether other gays are hanged or not. | ||
| I mind what their views are on a whole range of things. | ||
| I mind that there's a difference between a society in Israel that's actually talking about what you do about IVF rights for lesbian couples. | ||
| And a few miles away, lesbians don't get a look-in on the IVF treatment or anything else. | ||
| I mind about that. | ||
| These aren't details. | ||
| But all these things that used to be the things we used to say were what we used to call things that matter, Our now brushed aside is BR, don't you bore me with all that, all that, all that, all that, all those facts you keep coming up with. | ||
| Yeah, alright, well you gave me a great segue there because I wanted to discuss one personal thing with you. | ||
| How personal are you going to get? | ||
| Well, we'll see, we'll see how far I can push it. | ||
| You're openly gay. | ||
| This phrase seems silly to me. | ||
| You're gay. | ||
| And I wonder for you, I'm gay also, I don't know if you know that, and it shouldn't matter in any context of anything we're talking about here, but I wonder for you how much of the principles that you're talking about and wanting to help when you talk about the lesbian that might live in Gaza under Hamas or any of this stuff, you know, the people being thrown off the roofs, By ISIS or women's rights here or there. | ||
| How much of what you talk about and what you care about do you think has been colored by the fact that you in a lot of respects are the other at the same time? | ||
| Yeah, a bit. | ||
| I think it's easy to over-egg it. | ||
| Most of my political ideas are not based on who I am. | ||
| I like to think they're not me-centric. | ||
| I don't like people whose politics are me-centric because I'm something, therefore I have to... I like to think I try to use reason and go beyond identity politics. | ||
| I suppose there are some things which you notice and some things which you might notice first. | ||
| I do have a sort of view that when it comes to radical Islam, what we've seen in recent years is a set of early warning sirens going off basically around the world. | ||
| And some of those early warning sirens are gay. | ||
| Some of them, I mean, Bruce Bauer, for instance, a gay writer in Scandinavia, who went off as an early warning signal, you know, some of them are feminists, some of them are Some of them are from religious dissidents or minorities within a minority, and of course some are Jews. | ||
| And I think in a way that's interesting because, as I say, I don't think it's the basis for my interest or thoughts on these areas, but I think it's true that there's a lovely phrase that the composer Benjamin Britten once used in a letter to another composer where he said that composers have one less layer of skin than everyone else. | ||
| And I've often thought that might apply in some of these very large problematic | ||
| world events that we're sort of starting to go through at the moment | ||
| is that there are a set of people who feel it just a little bit before everyone else and I think that's true of | ||
| gay people. | ||
| A lot of gay people. | ||
| A lot of them have their eyes closed to that and don't care. | ||
| Or don't take notice. | ||
| I think it's true of a lot of Jews. | ||
| I think it's true of a lot of minorities within Islam who suffered. | ||
| And others. | ||
| So it's true that it might have a sort of early warning effect. | ||
| But apart from that, I like to think that my politics don't come from anywhere. | ||
| Yeah, no, I think the same thing about myself, because I hate identity politics, obviously, and yet I do, I feel this kinship when I hear about gay people being killed somewhere in the Middle East just for being who they are, and then at the same time, you know, they're also, when you repress all these people, it's fertile ground for all of the awful religious stuff to also take root, so it's so multi-layered, right? | ||
| But, you know, I do think the big problem of our time in the Western societies is this basically self-centered way of looking into the world. | ||
| I have an absolute bugbear, which is people who start questions by saying, speaking as a, and then say, you know, speaking as a gay man or whatever. | ||
| I mean, you do it if you know it's going to wind the hell out of someone, I suppose. | ||
| But I don't like that. | ||
| I don't like it when people stand up and say, you know, speaking as a woman of Puerto Rican descent or anything, you know, if your point is good, it'll be valid whoever's saying it. | ||
| But unfortunately, that's not, you know, as you know, I mean, the whole, the amazing thing we're seeing at the moment is a sort of breakdown, I think, of identity politics. | ||
| It's having a breakdown, I think, at the moment. | ||
| And that, partly, is coming because it was always going to collapse under the weight of its own absurdities. | ||
| And the only answer to that, when you sift through the rubble of that strange, spasmic-like movement in recent years, the only way out of it will be through reason and using rationalism and not trying to work out what we think about the world from what is most convenient for me because I'm me. | ||
| But trying to work things out on principles, and there's quite a lot of work to do. | ||
| Right, which is so crazy because when you think about it, now I've sat here with you for probably about 50 minutes or so, I got no indication that you were a racist or a xenophobe or any of the other things that people might say about you. | ||
| I only got an indication that you want to deal with the realities as they are, not sort of as you want them to be. | ||
| So my last question for you, and I barely looked at my notes because we could do this for hours and I hope next time you're in town we'll do it in person, but my last question is give me some hope. | ||
| What can we take at this interesting moment? | ||
| As you said, you see identity politics crumbling. | ||
| I see the same thing. | ||
| What can we as secular people, as atheists, as people that care about gay people, all of that stuff, What can we take from this sort of precarious moment we're at and sort of feel good for the future? | ||
| That's a big one. | ||
| Good luck. | ||
| I think optimism is overrated. | ||
| I don't like the idea one has to be optimistic or pessimistic or anything. | ||
| One has to sort of look at things as they are and sometimes you might wake up in the morning feeling optimistic and you might lose it by lunchtime. | ||
| Sometimes you might go out in the evening feeling pessimistic and come home optimistic. | ||
| Who knows? | ||
| These are things that come and go. | ||
| I think there's a lot that one can be optimistic about. | ||
| You know, I do have a view that, I'm trying to finish a book about this at the moment, I do have a view that one of the things that multimedia and social media and things has done and is doing at the moment is it's going to create a reform within Islam or a change within Islam because what people are having to face up to is now Coming to them at a speed which in, for instance, in Christianity took a couple of centuries to drift down from learning institutions in Germany, for instance, down to the person on the street. | ||
| That took a couple of centuries in the past and now it's happening with unbelievable speed. | ||
| I think it's going to be, this is the bad news, quite bloody and very bad for a period. | ||
| But after that, it means we'll be out of it within a fairly short space of time. | ||
| As for other things, I mean, you know, people's access to ideas and things, you know, obviously we hear a lot about all the craziness that goes on on the web and elsewhere, but people's access to ideas now, you know, it's never been better. | ||
| And people get to find out the good things as well, you know. | ||
| You can open your computer in the morning and read about a train crash somewhere that you've never heard of until that day, and you can feel sad for a bit, and people do, and people feel overwhelmed with the amount of information in the world, the amount of negative things. | ||
| But I think in the middle of that as well, you have to have a life and you have to try to think your way through the things that are going on. | ||
| And I think the most important thing is the appeal for something beyond a utopia, something other than utopia. | ||
| Religions and others Constantly tell people how to get utopia in the afterlife or in this life. | ||
| Most political movements promise people utopia. | ||
| Utopia is called utopia for a reason. | ||
| It's no place. | ||
| It doesn't exist. | ||
| It never did. | ||
| It never will. | ||
| In the meantime, it's a much better thing. | ||
| To think of how you can make the lives of the people around you better, and how you can broadly have a good influence in the world with the time you've got, but not to think that your role is to make everything else better for everyone else in the world, when you can't even help mum with the dishes. | ||
| You know, but as I say, the only thing I can think of that's positive is the fact that all this is happening so fast now, that just as things can screw up at an amazing speed, it's possible, it is possible that they can also be solved at an amazing speed. | ||
| But that won't bring us nirvana, it just is an appeal that we'll have to keep on paying attention, have to keep on concentrating and reading and thinking about these things. | ||
| All right, I actually think that was pretty lofty right there. | ||
| Well, Douglas, it was a pleasure chatting with you, and I fully get why so many people wanted this to happen. | ||
| By the way, I should mention that your e-book, Islamophilia, isn't available online anymore, but you're rolling it into a new book that you're working on right now, right? | ||
| I'm very proud. | ||
| Islamophilia was an e-book I wrote quite swiftly a couple of years ago, and I was very proud of the fact we immediately beat the Qur'an in the bestseller lists on Amazon around the globe. | ||
| And I thought, well, I'm on to something here. | ||
| It's true that Muhammad had a head start. | ||
| Anyhow, I'm finishing a book at the moment that incorporates Islamophilia, which is a word I wish I could encourage people to use more. | ||
| All right, well, we'll see if it picks up. | ||
| And for more info on the work that Douglas is doing, you guys can check out henryjacksonsociety.org. | ||
| And Douglas, it was an absolute pleasure, so thanks a lot for doing this. |
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