Aug. 22, 2020 - Rubin Report - Dave Rubin
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| I said to my colleagues one day in the editorial room, why do we seem to have a double standard? | ||
| And there was a terrible silence and I realised at that moment that I'd crossed a line. | ||
| I had no idea what the line was or why I'd crossed it, but I realised I'd stopped being one of them and I'd become one of you. | ||
| I'm Dave Rubin, and this is The Rubin Report. | ||
| As always, guys, click that subscribe button on YouTube, and don't forget to tap that notification bell so you're alerted of our new videos. | ||
| And joining me today is a journalist, author, and columnist for The Times of London, Melanie Phillips. | ||
| Welcome to The Rubin Report. | ||
| Thanks, Dave. | ||
| Very good to be with you. | ||
| I'm glad to have you, because I mentioned to you right before we started here that for about two years, I've been getting emails and tweets and Facebook messages and all sorts of things, people saying, you gotta talk to this Melanie Phillips. | ||
| Now you're in Jerusalem now, but you also split time in London. | ||
| For my American audience that may not know you, can you just do a little Melanie Phillips 101, a little bio before we get into the specifics of your work, your writing, your speaking, your books, that sort of thing? | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Sure. | ||
| Well, I am a British Jew, born and bred in London, of parents who were themselves born and bred in London. | ||
| Had a fairly conventional upbringing of the type that British Jews in the 1950s had. | ||
| Parents not very religious, not very observant, but nevertheless belonged to an orthodox synagogue. | ||
| I went to Oxford University and read English literature, which fits you for everything and nothing and fell into | ||
| journalism. I was trained, though in those days journalists were actually trained and we were taught things | ||
| like objectivity and the need to be truthful and the need to be factual and the need to | ||
| separate fact from opinion, would you believe such a thing? And I spent two years learning all | ||
| these trade crafts on a local newspaper. | ||
| In Britain, we have national newspapers. | ||
| We don't have syndicated columns like you do. | ||
| But I learned on a local newspaper in the suburbs of London and then went to a magazine and then went to The Guardian. | ||
| The Guardian is a bit like the New York Times, but more so. | ||
| It is the kind of journalistic crucible of left-wing thinking in Britain. | ||
| And at the time that I went there, I didn't ever really consider myself to be left-wing, because I wasn't very ideological. | ||
| I considered myself to be a liberal. | ||
| Now, I know that the word liberal means something different in America from Britain, but what I meant by that, what I mean by that, was that I thought of myself as an old-fashioned liberal. | ||
| That is to say, somebody who believes in making a better world by prioritising the good that | ||
| people do over the bad, standing up for the vulnerable, against abuses of power, standing | ||
| up for truth rather than lies. | ||
| And at that time, I thought that my colleagues at The Guardian and in the left, that we were | ||
| all on the same side. | ||
| And we can talk about this in detail, but nevertheless, over the next few years, I realised that this was a big mistake, and that while I still believe in all those things, they were on the other side. | ||
| They were the people who actually were the oppressors of the poor and vulnerable. | ||
| They were themselves racist and anti-semitic. | ||
| And during this period, which took 10-20 years, I changed also in the sense that I became more aware of my Jewish background, my Jewish identity became more important to me, and I became very, very aware of the enormity of the big lies being told about Israel. | ||
| Would you believe I'd never been to Israel and never wanted to go until about the year 2000. | ||
| The year 2000 was the first time I went and I didn't particularly like it for various reasons and then within two or three years I had bought a place in Jerusalem. | ||
| Because my life and my whole view of the world and my view of myself as a British Jew had completely changed. | ||
| So that's a very short thumbnail sketch of my descent from being the kind of wise child of the left to being the she-devil of the Western Hemisphere. | ||
| Yeah, well, I'm not sure how much you know about my story, but I think a lot of my audience is going, Dave, we've kind of heard this before, because that in many ways, although we're not the same age, we're not from the same country, the story that you just told of coming from the left, from a largely Jewish secular family, I mean, it's very much the same story. | ||
| And I think in many ways our politics and the way you laid out what true liberalism is really do line up. | ||
| So can you talk a little bit, because I get this question constantly, Now, can you talk about when and why you started to see the split within the left towards socialism, progressivism, whatever you want to call it, versus the liberalism that you just described? | ||
| Yes. | ||
| Well, there was one particular punctuation mark which really set me on this path and it was in 1982. | ||
| And it was when in a conversation with my colleagues at the Guardian, I was an editorial writer, and I thought of them as being just like me, liberal in the best sense, committed to truth and reason and decent people. | ||
| And we had a conversation in which I was very troubled by what at the time seemed to me to be the disproportionate | ||
| attention being paid to what Israel was doing in its war in Lebanon, which was a | ||
| controversial war, but it was being portrayed falsely as a war of aggression, whereas I knew, | ||
| and don't forget I'd never been to Israel and didn't really want to go and it wasn't | ||
| really my thing. | ||
| But I knew that it was trying to root out the Palestinian Liberation Organization and stop it from attacking Israelism. | ||
| The PLO at that time was in southern Lebanon. | ||
| But it was being represented falsely as a war of aggression and at the same time out of the woodwork came unbridled anti-Semitism that we British Jews are all considered to be basically all sticking together in a clannish kind of way and defending Israel. | ||
| And I was very troubled by this and I was very troubled by the fact that... | ||
| The Guardian was spending such a disproportionate amount of its time in hurling terrible obloquy at Israel over all this, whereas at the same time, President Assad, the father of the current President Assad, had caused a massacre of his political opponents. | ||
| Something in between 15,000 and 40,000 of his opponents were killed over the course of a couple of weeks. | ||
| That story didn't really have much traction at the Guardian. | ||
| I couldn't understand. | ||
| I was a different person then, didn't really understand what I was dealing with. | ||
| And I said to my colleagues one day in the editorial room, why do we seem to have a double standard? | ||
| And there was a terrible silence and I realised at that moment that I'd crossed a line. | ||
| I had no idea what the line was or why I'd crossed it, but I realised I'd stopped being one of them and I'd become one of you. | ||
| And they said, well of course there's a double standard. | ||
| After all, they said to me, like you, and I became you, and by you they meant Israel, and I've never been to Israel, like you, we in the West are brought up to believe in the sanctity of life, respect for human rights, human dignity, whereas people in the developing world are not brought up to believe any of those things. | ||
| And so if they kill people, we cannot judge them by our standards. | ||
| That would be racism. | ||
| And I thought... | ||
| What? | ||
| And I said to them, what are you saying? | ||
| That if one is unfortunate enough to be born and bred into the developing world, then one does not then have the same rights to life and liberty that we do? | ||
| To my mind, that's racism. | ||
| And they said, why are you so upset? | ||
| We do you, and I became you again, the great honour of assuming that you are like us. | ||
| You have the same moral standards as us. | ||
| And what's more, you tell us that you, as the Jewish people, are morally superior to us. | ||
| Now that is A, untrue, and B, it is sheer anti-Semitism. | ||
| And at that moment, I realised that the assumption I'd made, that we were all marching under the same banner of truth and freedom and decency and all those good things, that was untrue. | ||
| That I was marching under that banner, but they were on the other side. | ||
| They, the liberals, the left, The people who assumed that because they were the liberals and the left, they embodied virtue, and everybody who was not the liberals and the left was a bad and evil person. | ||
| They were the racists. | ||
| They were the anti-Semites. | ||
| And they believed in lies, and they were irrational. | ||
| And from that moment, I realized that there was a difference between us. | ||
| I couldn't anymore trust anything they said. | ||
| But because I was very attached to the left, And because I hadn't quite worked out in my mind what had happened here, it took me a while to realise that we were on different sides completely. | ||
| And how I realised it was that I was writing as a columnist in the mid to late 80s onwards about issues upon which I fill up with a left on every single one. | ||
| So the first was education. | ||
| The second was the breakdown of the family. | ||
| The first was the breakdown of education. | ||
| The second was the breakdown of the family. | ||
| The third was the development of multiculturalism and the erosion of the idea that the Western nation state was something that you should be proud of. | ||
| And then we went from there into Islamization and then into all sorts of other stuff. | ||
| And Issue by issue, that liberal world just fell in on me. | ||
| From the moment I started writing that, I was told I had overnight gone mad, i.e. | ||
| insane, and overnight I had changed my personality like a kind of chameleon into being right-wing, very right-wing, Ultra right-wing, extremely right-wing, fascist, neo-fascist, and then as I started writing about Israel, a Zionist, a warmongering Zionist, and then a warmongering Zionist, insane right-wing Jew. | ||
| And that's where I kind of ended up. | ||
| Oh man, there's so much here. | ||
| This is like, it's like hearing my story just, you know, 20 years in advance or something like that. | ||
| But so much of what you're saying I think is what now, in 2020, millions of people worldwide have woken up to. | ||
| So I have a couple follow-ups there. | ||
| First off, what do you think is wrong? | ||
| And I hate to say this as someone that still considers myself a liberal in that true sense. | ||
| Do you think there is an inherent flaw in liberalism that has allowed leftism and collectivism | ||
| to basically decimate it? | ||
| So that there are very few people at this point in the West, certainly in America, who describe themselves as liberals | ||
| the way we're talking about it. | ||
| Most of these, anyone listening to this right now would say, oh, they sound mostly like conservatives. | ||
| I probably come off a little more on the libertarian side of that. | ||
| But do you think there is an actual flaw in the good sense of liberalism that allowed this monster in? | ||
| Perhaps a protection that conservatism has that liberalism doesn't have. | ||
| Well, the fundamental flaw in liberalism, in the way that it's been developed, is that, let's put it this way, there are different types of liberalism. | ||
| There's the liberalism which comes out of, I would say, conservatism, or rather conservatism is a kind of defense of liberalism. | ||
| If you look at one of the greatest philosophers of what's called conservatism, Edmund Burke, in the 18th century. | ||
| Now, he's called a conservative, but what he reacted against was the French Revolutionary Terror. | ||
| He understood that the French Revolution, which was supposedly all about freeing the individual and introducing the rule of reason, divorce from religion, a whole lot of other stuff, but that's broadly what it was about. | ||
| It led directly to terror. | ||
| So he reacted against that. | ||
| And as a result, he was called a conservative and he's still called a conservative. | ||
| He's called one of the fathers of conservatism. | ||
| But from where I'm standing, he was actually defending liberalism. | ||
| What was he defending? | ||
| He was defending tolerance and freedom and progress and reason. | ||
| These are all things which I associate with liberalism. | ||
| Now, liberalism has a fundamental flaw. | ||
| It is that it has two fundamental flaws. | ||
| One is that it Because it prioritizes the individual, it has been interpreted over time in our current time to mean that you can't then | ||
| establish any kind of hierarchy of values. | ||
| You can't say that one set of values is better than anyone else's because that's kind of being nasty to somebody else. | ||
| And consequently, the logical flaw in that is that if you can't say that anyone's lifestyle or culture is better than anyone else's, then you can't say that liberalism is better than anyone else's. | ||
| And consequently, you can't defend the fundamental liberal values of freedom of speech and tolerance of other points of view and freedom of religion and all those all those things which make a liberal tolerant society you can't defend them you can't defend the equality of women so when faced with say the islamic world as a liberal today you cannot say that the west is better than the islamic world even though it is because | ||
| Surely the enslavement of women must be worse than freedom for women and equality for women. | ||
| So that is one of the essential, I think, contradictions in liberalism. | ||
| That means that it's sort of going down the plug. | ||
| Plus the fact that It's become a libertarian ideology. | ||
| That is to say, it's taken the notion of the dignity of the individual and respect for the individual, which in my view is at the heart of liberalism. | ||
| But in my view, that can only be enshrined by paradoxically a body of laws and moral values that are regarded as kind of binding on you. | ||
| But if you detach the individual from those laws, then you get a kind of free-for-all. | ||
| And once you have a free-for-all, then it's everyone out for himself or herself, and then you have the strong dominating the weak. | ||
| And then you get to a situation very fast, which is where we've got to, where you don't have a liberal society, you have a tremendously illiberal society. | ||
| And that's made even worse by the fact that this kind of liberalism, or I would call it libertarianism, is actually an ideology. | ||
| Now, what's an ideology? | ||
| An ideology is where the power of the idea must trounce everything else. | ||
| You can't ever say the idea is wrong. | ||
| So if you come along with a load of facts and you say, well, this idea is wrong because here are the facts. | ||
| Here is the evidence that shows it's wrong. | ||
| Well, the ideology says you must be wrong. | ||
| There can be no challenge to the ideology. | ||
| And so you have to be stopped, you have to be suppressed, because the ideology of liberalism is that it's bound up with the betterment of humanity, the perfection of the world. | ||
| So anyone who stands against that isn't just wrong, they're actually evil. | ||
| And if they're evil, they have to be stopped. | ||
| And so you have this phenomenon in which we have people who purport to be liberal, who are stamping out free expression on our campuses, preventing people from speaking, which is absolutely the absolute antithesis of true liberal values. | ||
| And that's the paradox of liberalism. | ||
| It's become an illiberal ideology. | ||
| Melanie, you would absolutely love my book. | ||
| So I'm going to get your address after and send it to you because I'm making many of the same arguments and that connection between truly being liberal and having something outside of yourself, which I think we're gonna get to in a little bit. | ||
| But I wanna back up for a second because you said that you grew up in a secular Jewish household that was similar to most of the others in the 50s. | ||
| Can you sort of describe what does that mean? | ||
| And one of the questions I get all the time now is what happened to the Jews? | ||
| How did the Jews all become lefties when the left has become so rabidly anti-Jewish, anti-Israel, anti-liberal, all of those things. | ||
| I mean, I think you can probably trace a pretty clean thread on that, but can you first describe what did it mean to grow up in a secular Jewish household? | ||
| Because I think that confuses some people and then sort of the road that that takes us on. | ||
| Well, to make people even more confused, it wasn't what I would call, strictly speaking, a secular household. | ||
| I mean, certainly highly Orthodox observant people might well call it that, but I didn't think of it like that. | ||
| My parents belonged to an Orthodox synagogue. | ||
| They went to synagogue three times a year, the two days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur. | ||
| We did not observe the Shabbat, in that my parents worked. | ||
| They were modest people and they had to work. | ||
| Well, they felt they had to work. | ||
| But we were kosher, really kosher at home and out. | ||
| And we had a Friday night meal with candles and kiddush and, you know, I didn't go out, but we had the television on. | ||
| It was that kind of upbringing. | ||
| And, you know, my parents were, they were modest people, they weren't educated people, but my mother was, she had a kind of religious instinct. | ||
| And she had very, very strong moral values, which I came to recognize in later years were actually Jewish values. | ||
| But you know, when I was a little girl, I remember every night she said the Shema with me, the fundamental prayer of the Jewish religion. | ||
| She said it with me every night. | ||
| So I wouldn't describe it as a secular Jewish household, but it certainly wasn't a very observant Jewish household. | ||
| Now, what happened to the Jews? | ||
| Well, you see, there's a difference between the Jewish community in Britain and the Jewish community in America. | ||
| Jewish community in America, as I don't need to tell you, is not only mainly Democrat, but the same proportion are non-traditional, non-Orthodox Jews. | ||
| And in America, it seems to me, the prevailing unwisdom of the Jewish community in America, | ||
| who are the majority of them are not Orthodox, is to assume that the secular ideology we've | ||
| been talking about, which actually is anti-Jewish, it's fundamentally anti the Hebrew Bible, | ||
| it sets out to undermine all the basic precepts of the Hebrew Bible. | ||
| The American Jews, the 70% who are progressively minded or secular, they've told themselves | ||
| those are Jewish values. | ||
| They've kind of squared the circle so they can be good Jews and believe in stuff which is basically anti-Jew. | ||
| Now, that's disastrous for American Jews, I don't need to tell you, but in Britain it's very different. | ||
| In Britain, something like between 60 and 70% of British Jews have for the last several general elections voted for the Conservative Party. | ||
| They are not the equivalent politically of your Democrats at all. | ||
| But they voted to the Conservative Party mainly through their sort of pocketbook, really. | ||
| But they have at the same time, like so many Conservatives in Britain and so many Republicans in America, they've kind of... | ||
| They're kind of absorbed, like a kind of osmosis, the prevailing liberal unwisdom about a whole range of cultural issues. | ||
| But they're not very political, they're not very ideological at all, so they're quite different from American Jews. | ||
| However, The rates of assimilation in Britain are pretty awful. | ||
| More and more people are just dropping out from Judaism altogether or belonging to progressive denominations where their children marry non-Jews and they themselves drop out. | ||
| But it's more a kind of process of demographic attrition. | ||
| Rather than the embrace of an ideology which is actually inimical to Judaism, which is, I think, what characterizes so many American Jews. | ||
| Okay, so there's many directions we could go from there, but if we were to sum up everything we're talking about, when you see what is happening across the world right now, and how liberalism has sort of failed, and what that then probably leads to is sort of some version of right-wing authoritarianism, or something like that, if you agree with that premise. | ||
| What can we do? | ||
| If you want to save liberalism right now, what can people do? | ||
| Well, it's this paradox, again, that to save liberalism you have to be conservative. | ||
| And I do believe that the problem, that the sort of death throes of liberalism have been caused not just by the what's happened to the left or the progressive circles in the West, but by the fact that the people who are supposedly to supposed to be defending the West against this onslaught have thrown in the towel a long time ago, largely through ignorance, | ||
| There are not precise parallels between British conservatives and American Republicans. | ||
| But nevertheless, there are certain, I think, constant characteristics that the conservative wing of politics, if I can put it that way, has forgotten what it is in business to conserve. | ||
| And especially, I think, since the fall of the Soviet Union, Which I think was taking place before the Berlin Wall actually fell. | ||
| The Soviet Union clearly was in its death throes for a long time before that. | ||
| And I think that what happened was that conservatively-minded individuals, certainly conservative politicians, the conservative political class, when the Soviet Union fell, it sort of thought, oh, our fox has been shot. | ||
| What do we do now? | ||
| We've won. | ||
| Here is the Soviet Union having disintegrated. | ||
| It's no longer a threat. | ||
| Everyone's bought into the market. | ||
| Now, the problem with conservatives is that they tend to think entirely in terms of economics. | ||
| They don't think in terms of culture. | ||
| They don't understand what Edmund Burke understood during the French Revolution. | ||
| It's all about culture. | ||
| It's all about values. | ||
| It's all about moral values. | ||
| They don't think like that. | ||
| And they haven't thought of that for years. | ||
| So they thought, well, what do we do now? | ||
| Everyone's bought into the market. | ||
| What are we going to hang our hat on now? | ||
| And they alighted upon freedom. | ||
| And I remember this happening at the time, and I thought, oh no. | ||
| They've had it. | ||
| This is ridiculous because the left hung its hat on freedom. | ||
| So what happened was that while the left venerated and worshipped the shrine of personal, individual freedom, freedom to do exactly what I like, behave as I like, have the values that I like, and no one can tell me that I'm wrong, Conservatives said that everything that's good in the world is going to be delivered by the free market. | ||
| And consequently, the Conservatives did not realise what was happening on the cultural front. | ||
| They didn't realise that education was being redefined from the transmission of a culture down through the generations to teaching your children that your culture was fundamentally illegitimate, racist and should be obliterated. | ||
| They didn't realize that was going on. | ||
| They didn't realize that the freedom to junk your husband, the freedom to have a baby without the baby even knowing who his father was, and perhaps you didn't know who the father was, that that freedom would come with a terrible cost to the child, and to the woman, and also to the man. | ||
| They didn't figure all that out, and all sorts of other stuff. | ||
| So they just lost the plot, and then Having vacated the cultural battleground, they then observed that society was changing in that direction and they said, Oh, we can't do anything to stop this. | ||
| It's like Canute holding back the tide. | ||
| We must go with the flow of cultural change. | ||
| And so they became part of the problem. | ||
| And that's why liberalism was allowed to become the kind of monster that it has become, which is illiberalism, or as somebody who was a very distinguished thinker once coined the term, and it's so true, cultural totalitarianism is what we're living through. | ||
| My friend, Michael Malice, who's a brilliant political figure, he's more of like a anarchist type, but he says that conservatism is just liberalism at the speed limit, which I think is partly what you're getting to there. | ||
| Do you sense that something has shifted though? | ||
| Because I do sense right now that It's partly because of Trump, maybe 90% because of Trump, although maybe Trump is just a symptom of it, but that conservatives have started to understand the cultural part. | ||
| I think there is a sense of, if you look online, the things that are fun and funny and the memes and comedy, the left has destroyed all of these things through its totalitarian view, and the things that are actually interesting right now are things that are coming out of more right-leaning circles. | ||
| Do you credit Trump for breaking through that thing in a way that the conservatives would have never done otherwise? | ||
| I think the election of Donald Trump was the outcome of a change that had already taken place. | ||
| That is to say, I think that there were two shoes that fell, if that's the right metaphor, in 2016. | ||
| One was the Brexit vote in Britain and the other was the election of Donald Trump. | ||
| And on both occasions, I think what happened, obviously they're very different phenomena, different countries, but they were fuelled by the same thing, which was that the vast bulk of ordinary people, the millions and millions and millions of, when I say ordinary people, I mean the kind of people who don't have typically a higher university education. | ||
| And who has who had spent decades being preached at and being scorned and being vilified and being produced by the intelligentsia, which dominates completely the universities and the media and the whole cultural apparatus. | ||
| And more than that, dominated politics, because even so-called conservatives, the Conservative Party in Britain, the Republicans in America, didn't really differ that much in these cultural issues from the left. | ||
| And they were all basically saying to the people, you don't know what you're talking about. | ||
| You're just rednecks. | ||
| You're just stupid. | ||
| You don't even have a university education. | ||
| You're bigoted. | ||
| You don't like immigrants. | ||
| You're racist. | ||
| The things that ordinary people value, which is community, which is the attachment to their country, patriotism, love of their country, and the kind of instinctive understanding that a country and a culture is made up of people who share your own values. | ||
| They don't have to look like you, they can be different colour faces from you, they can be of different ethnic backgrounds from you, but at some important juncture, They share the most important values of that society and that culture, which means that you're all basically sharing the same cultural experience. | ||
| You're all attached to the nation. | ||
| You all understand what it means to you. | ||
| Now, that understanding, that cultural attachment, was vilified as racist and xenophobic by virtually the entire political class. | ||
| And when Brexit happened, it was this monumental revolt by all those millions who said, we've been given a vote now, and we can now use this vote for this issue. | ||
| We want our country and our culture back. | ||
| And they voted to leave the European Union and restore Britain as an independent, democratic nation, governing itself for the first time for decades. | ||
| And when that happened, on that morning of that vote, when I woke up and realised that that vote had happened, I had two thoughts. | ||
| The first thought was, oh my goodness, there is a chance that Britain can survive after all. | ||
| And my second thought was, The intelligentsia will never allow it to happen. | ||
| And for the following three years, we have had this titanic fight in Britain to reverse the Brexit vote. | ||
| And then a few months later, the election of Donald Trump happened. | ||
| And in America, it seemed to me your intelligentsia, your political class, had a very similar reaction, but rather more, I would say, violently expressed, rather more extremely expressed. | ||
| But nevertheless, the same thing. | ||
| How could this have happened? | ||
| This can't be true. | ||
| This can't have happened. | ||
| The people are stupid. | ||
| The people got it wrong. | ||
| We have been robbed of our natural inheritance, which is a democratic presidency in eternity. | ||
| And they didn't understand and would not accept that the people had got it right. | ||
| The people wanted their country back. | ||
| They wanted again the rule of law. | ||
| They wanted immigration to be enforced so that they would again have borders. | ||
| That meant something. | ||
| Without borders, you cannot have a nation. | ||
| They didn't want their cultural values trashed the whole time. | ||
| They didn't want to be told that America was the rogue state of the world. | ||
| They wanted to be told that America was the exceptional nation again and that America stood for values of which they could be proud and which they would want to have other people emulate. | ||
| That's what they wanted when they voted for Donald Trump. | ||
| Now whatever you think about Donald Trump, Whatever you think about him, that is what people voted for. | ||
| And, you know, ever since you've had this tremendous fight, this tremendous fight to get that man out of office by hook or by crook. | ||
| And it's the same thing. | ||
| It's the class who feel that not only are they entitled, To rule according to their own rights and their own values, but that it's a kind of offense against nature that they shouldn't do so. | ||
| And they have to, they have a kind of moral duty, they feel they have a moral duty to reverse Brexit, to get Trump out of office. | ||
| And so that's where we are. | ||
| The fight is absolutely still on. | ||
| And who knows how it's going to end? | ||
| I do not know how it's going to end, obviously. | ||
| And also, I think that, you know, even if Brexit happens, I say even if because even now I'm not sure, Although it looks as if Britain is going to finally slough off the deadly embrace of the EU. | ||
| Even if President Trump were to get elected for a second term, I would not be confident that the West would survive. | ||
| But at least there would be a chance. | ||
| At least there will be a chance because if the left gets power again in America, Or if Britain were not to be able to become an independent, self-governing nation again, there'd be no chance. | ||
| No chance whatsoever that these countries and the culture they represent could ever reassert themselves. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| God, it's a dire warning, but, you know, I'm basically with you. | ||
| This is it. | ||
| It's sort of like the grand fight, all the decades of indoctrinating youth and destroying institutions and everything else. | ||
| It has sort of all led us here. | ||
| Can you talk a little bit, since you're in Jerusalem, Why does Israel always end up in the midst of this conversation that the left has, you sort of hit on this earlier, but the left has this sort of obsession with this country that's the size of New Jersey, that until the last couple of years had no natural resources and fights for all of the liberal values that they purport to believe in. | ||
| Why is there such an absolute obsession with that tiny place? | ||
| Well, I think they're all... | ||
| Yeah, I think there's a number of reasons. | ||
| First of all, in the last four or five decades, the educational systems of Britain and America, and the West in general, have been pumping out this message that the West is bad and the developing world is good. | ||
| The developing world can do no wrong, the West can do no right. | ||
| Any bad things the developing world does must be the fault of the West. | ||
| Allied to that is the fact that the West is supposedly colonialist. | ||
| And that, I think, laid the groundwork for what must be one of the most spectacularly successful propaganda exercises in the whole of history, which was when Yasser Arafat, who was then the leader of the Palestine Liberation Organization, travelled to the Soviet Union And there concocted with the Soviet Union the fiendish propaganda exercise in which what was the truth, which was the Arab world trying to exterminate the state of Israel because it did not want a Jewish state there at all, transformed that fact into the lie | ||
| that the Palestinian people were being oppressed and trying to shake off their oppression by Israeli colonialism. | ||
| And from that lie developed the historical lies of Middle East history, which effectively wrote the Jews out of their own history. | ||
| And because of the Intellectual and moral bankruptcy of the intelligentsia, which swallowed all this rubbish because it came from where it came from, and because it told a certain narrative story about the evils of the West and colonialism and all the rest of it, this has become enshrined as unchallengeable truth and unchallengeable dogma. | ||
| So that's one reason. | ||
| Can we just pause there for a sec? | ||
| I hate to have to ask you to do a little bit of a history professor kind of thing, but you know, when people look back and they see the British mandate of Palestine, although they usually drop the British mandate part, they think, oh, that means that there was a state of Palestine for a people known as Palestinians. | ||
| And what they mean generally is Arabs. | ||
| Now I know, you know, that's obviously all not true, but could you try to do like a two minute Recap, is that remotely possible? | ||
| Just to unpack some of that stuff, because what people don't realize is it was the Jews that were living in Palestine and the other Arab nations were boycotting Palestine and all of that stuff. | ||
| But can you give some version of that? | ||
| Because I think this is where people look at a map and they go, 1947, it was called Palestine. | ||
| And now there were people called Palestinians that say it was home. | ||
| Where did the Jews come from? | ||
| Something like that. | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
|
unidentified
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So this is probably the most annoying question I could possibly ask. | |
| Yeah. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| So history of the Middle East, the Jewish people standing on one leg or sitting on one leg, perhaps. | ||
| The fact is that Palestine was the name given to the Jewish kingdom of Judea by the Romans when they overran the Jewish kingdom. | ||
| of Judea and drove the Jews out. | ||
| They wanted to completely exterminate any memory that this had been a Jewish kingdom and so they called it by an insulting name, Palestina. | ||
| Now it wasn't then called Palestine over history when the British turned up after the First World War ended And with the great powers of the time, France particularly, carved up the Middle East into new countries. | ||
| It was the Ottoman Empire they were carving up. | ||
| And what we now think of as Palestine was actually part of the Ottoman Empire. | ||
| It wasn't called Palestine. | ||
| As such, but it was then called Palestine because that was the piece of, that was the area that was in contention. | ||
| And in carving up the Middle East, the great powers decided in, well, what happened was in 1917, the British government at the time, which was full of what are called Christian Zionists, that is to say Christians who very much believed in the redemption of the Jewish people in the land of Israel. | ||
| They understood that this was their ancient kingdom and they should come back to it. | ||
| And they passed something called the Balfour Declaration, which committed Britain to work for the restoration of the Jewish homeland in Palestine. | ||
| And after the end of the First World War, when the Middle East was being carved up by the great powers, they enshrined this in international law. | ||
| and gave Britain a mandate to run Palestine in order to facilitate the ingathering of the Jews to their ancient homeland and to establish in Palestine a homeland again for the Jews, to re-establish it. | ||
| And the reason they did that was enshrined in various statements and acts at the time that the Jews were entitled to this land, not as a matter of privilege, but as an absolute right. | ||
| Why? | ||
| Because it was only the Jews for whom the ancient land of Israel had ever been their national kingdom. | ||
| And so it was only the Jews who were entitled to return, and only the Jews who would be given political rights in that homeland. | ||
| Other ethnicities and peoples would be given, who were living there, i.e. | ||
| the Arabs, and many others, would be given civil and religious rights, but the political right, that is to say, it would be a Jewish homeland, would go to the Jews alone. | ||
| And what happened then was that Britain had this internationally binding duty to bring the Jews back and to establish the Jewish homeland, but the Arabs who were incited by what we would now call Islamist extremists, Who were kind of invented around that time, in the sort of political way that we understand them today, basically started to attack and to murder and to commit pogroms against both the Jews and the British, and to cut a very, very long story short. | ||
| The British kind of threw in the towel and decided that the only way they could solve this problem and stop their own people being killed and stop the killing was to divide the land. | ||
| So having been given this internationally binding duty to bring the Jews in and establish their homeland, in what was called Palestine, which consisted, by the way, of what is now Israel, the disputed territories called the West Bank and Gaza. | ||
| The Jews, under international law, were entitled to settle all that land. | ||
| So the British basically ripped that up and said, we'll give part of that land to the Arabs. | ||
| You can have an Arab state alongside the Jewish state. | ||
| And the Jews said, OK. | ||
| And the Arabs said, You must be joking. | ||
| We want the Jews gone. | ||
| And that has been the story of Israel and the Arabs from that day to this. | ||
| Time and again, the Arabs have been offered a state alongside Israel called a Palestine state. | ||
| A state of Palestine. | ||
| Time and again, on every one of these occasions, the Israelis, the Jews before them, before it was Israel, have accepted On every one of these occasions, the Arabs have not only rejected it, but have redoubled their attempts through terrorism, through war, to obliterate the Jewish state. | ||
| That is the story in a nutshell of the region, and it's why When you realize that story, and you know there's a lot more to that story than I've been able to give you in this little nutshell, you realize the magnitude of the big lie about Israel. | ||
| And then you realize something else, that if so many people have accepted this lie, Then it follows that they really cannot distinguish between truth and falsehood at all. | ||
| They are really gullible and credulous and stupid and irrational. | ||
| And that explains quite a lot about why the left is where it is today as well. | ||
| Yeah, I had historian Neil Ferguson on, who I'm guessing you're probably familiar with from Stanford, and he said something to that effect also, that it's just the biggest lie that they sort of use to then promulgate sort of the rest of their lies. | ||
| So I have one more for you with all of this in mind, which is, are you hopeful? | ||
| You know, when you mentioned that the morning of Brexit, that you had those two thoughts, you sort of lit up for a second because, I think it was the realization that we, the people, actually do have some capacity to control our lives, and maybe the elites and the intelligentsia and the rest of it don't automatically own us. | ||
| And I think a lot of people right now are just completely worried that our countries are slipping away and all of this stuff. | ||
| So are you hopeful? | ||
| Do you consider yourself an optimist? | ||
| Are you a pessimist? | ||
| Are you somewhere in between? | ||
| I have to tell you, in all honesty, I'm not normally considered to be a little ray of sunshine. | ||
| I'm normally considered to be, you know, Mrs. Apocalypse now. | ||
| I've seen some of the clips. | ||
| Until Brexit Trump happened in 2016, I was totally pessimistic. | ||
| I thought, you know, the West had had it. | ||
| It was, you know, there was no way that it could survive, given all the things that we've been talking about. | ||
| And then these two things happened. | ||
| And then we had this tremendous fight. | ||
| Over Brexit, over Trump, still going on. | ||
| Who knows how those fights really are going to end. | ||
| And subsequently we've had a whole lot of other stuff of, you know, different kinds of uproar, different kinds of unprecedentedly awful events that none of us could imagine living through. | ||
| And so we're in a state of, at the moment, where, you know, the world is kind of in uproar and it's up in the air. | ||
| But in this uproar, you know, we don't know how the pieces are actually going to fall. | ||
| But certain things are happening. | ||
| I think that, as I say, whenever you think of Mr. Trump, and I have reservations, I have to say significant reservations about him. | ||
| I think that the fact that he has shown that America is back in business, That it is not going to be a passive bystander to evil in the world, which can threaten America and threaten Israel. | ||
| But it's actually going to take a stand against bad people. | ||
| It's going to take a stand. | ||
| So he took a stand against Iran, for example. | ||
| He did not, you know, he very much renounced the whole craven business of appeasing Iran, which was basically leading the world to a completely nightmare scenario and still is, Iran is still there, it's still poses a terrible threat. | ||
| But the fact that he showed that he was not prepared to go along with that anymore, and the fact that he showed that he was not prepared to stand by and allow Israel to be endlessly blackmailed in the way that it has been blackmailed, and that America and the West have stood by while it's blackmailed all those decades, and that has changed the dynamic in the Arab world in a way in which we We would never, even a few years ago, we would never have thought possible. | ||
| The Arab world now needs Israel and America. | ||
| to help it defeat Iran. | ||
| It believes that it can't do it without them. | ||
| It believes that with President Trump in the Oval Office, America will remain true to that intention. | ||
| And so that immediately changes the whole dynamic vis-a-vis Israel. | ||
| So from that point of view alone, that is a source of considerable optimism. | ||
| That's not to say it's going to be plain sailing at all. | ||
| Or that there won't be terrible bumps along the way, or that Iran won't suddenly go completely berserk and do terrible things. | ||
| But it does mean that there's more optimism than there was, and on the cultural front similarly. | ||
| You know, the onslaught by the left, the onslaught on freedom and on decency and on morality and on truth is accelerating. | ||
| No question about that. | ||
| The madness of identity politics veers from one lunacy to another. | ||
| But they're losing. | ||
| And, you know, the more desperate they get, the more extreme they get. | ||
| And the more extreme they get, the more you know that they are getting more and more desperate. | ||
| And why are they desperate? | ||
| Because they have suddenly, not suddenly, but they have been forced to acknowledge at some part of themselves that the lie they've told themselves that, you know, everybody's with us and only a few Fringe fanatics, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, racists, xenophobes, and so on. | ||
| Only those people are against us. | ||
| It can't hold anymore because millions, millions have voted for Trump and millions voted for Brexit. | ||
| And millions in Europe are saying, we want our nations back. | ||
| Now, some of that is not going to result in stuff that I would approve of. | ||
| I think you alluded yourself to the fact that some of this is producing leaders who come from noxious backgrounds, whose views may well still be obnoxious. | ||
| You know, and some of it may turn out to be not very good at all. | ||
| But there is a prospect that, you know, decent people standing together can now win through in a way that was inconceivable just a few years ago. | ||
| So whether that makes me an optimist or pessimist, I'm not quite sure. | ||
| I always say I'm a world-weary optimist. | ||
| I think that we got a little bit of that right there from you. | ||
| Well, listen, from one far right extremist, whatever you want to call me, to another, I've thoroughly enjoyed this. | ||
| I'm glad we did it, and I hope we can do it in person sometime. | ||
| I hope so too. | ||
| I've enjoyed it enormously. | ||
| Thank you very much for having me on. | ||
| If you're looking for more honest and thoughtful conversations about the media instead of nonstop yelling, check out our media playlist. | ||
| And if you want to watch full interviews on a variety of topics, check out the full episode playlist. | ||
| They're both right over here. |
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