Speaker 1
Now, it's not quite true, having said that, because a lot of people still feel enough shame and embarrassment to couch it as anti-Zionism. But it makes no sense. We hate Zionists, as people have been screaming. It makes no sense in its own terms because clearly they're talking about Jews. They're not talking about Zionism as an abstract philosophy. They don't even know what it is. I mean, if you ask them, what is Zionism? Or what is a Zionist? I mean, like people screaming from the river to the sea. They don't know which river and they don't know which sea. But it's even more than that. People are screaming about Jews per se. And of course, Jews are being attacked physically and verbally all the time at an unprecedented rate here in Britain and elsewhere in the West. In America, it's happening also. In France, it's off the scale. And again, this is quite a complicated business to unpick because, you know, anti-Semitism is called the longest hatred. In fact, it is the eternal hatred. It's been around ever since Jews first emerged in antiquity. And it's taken different forms. And, you know, we've had, the pre-modern period Christian antisemitism. We've had racial antisemitism under the Nazis. And now we have the desire to eradicate from the world the collective Jew in Israel. And for those of us who live with this and who understand the dynamic, it's the same thing. But the question is why it is so omnipresent. Not omnipresent, why it is so, well, yes, why it's so omnipresent, but also why it's so brazen. And that's because there's really no pushback. Because people are very, very, very reluctant to think that the Jews are unique. So even if people are troubled by what they perceive to be, you know, remarkable obsession with Israel, with Jews, and so on, with very few exceptions, they're not prepared to stand up and say, this is a unique evil that has dogged the Jewish people forever, and we're seeing it now. It's unique, and we have to have a unique approach to it and we have to protect the Jews. And they don't say that. They say we're against all forms of prejudice. We're against antisemitism and Islamophobia. Antisemitism and Islamophobia? It's one word. Antisemitism and Islamophobia. Okay. Now, if you're against anti-Semitism and Islamophobia, you cannot ever say there is a major problem in the Muslim community of anti-Semitism. You can't say that because it's Islamophobic. So immediately you're paralyzed. And that's what we're living Antisemitism is coming at us from different constituencies. One constituency is the left, one constituency is the Muslim world, and one constituency is the people who are going along with this narrative because they think they are supporting the oppressed and the underprivileged of the world, either Palestinians, but actually when they're marching alongside the people screaming and globalize the Intifada, which means murder Jews throughout the world, and in fact not just murder Jews throughout the world, but rise up against the West everywhere, when they're going alongside people screaming from the river to the sea, they're marching alongside people screaming for genocide. So I would call those well-meaning, naive liberals who are not the left and they're not the Muslim branch, but they are the branch of the Muslim world that is doing this. But they are people who are nevertheless lending themselves to this. It's coming from three different constituencies.
Speaker 2
Why are they doing that, Melanie? Because I went along to some of these protests and I spoke to people and we have the video on our channel people millions of people around the world have seen it now and there are there was a guy the one in particular that really struck me he had a sign up saying uh something something socialist intifada and I said what do you mean by a socialist intifada and he went if
Speaker 1
I'm being honest with you I just got this at the stand over there. I don't actually know the definition of the word intifada.
Speaker 2
Okay. But I mean... Do any of you know the definition of the word intifada? I don't know what intifada means. I picked up the sign over there. Right. And I said to his friends, do you know what... none of them knew what intifada meant. Right. And so I'm not clear in my mind because very often, one of the things I've been, sorry, this is taking a long time, but I'm just trying to unpack this. One of the things I found very odd, if you remember, the first time you came on the show, we were asked, this is 2019 now, so before this recent flare-up, before October 7th, and I asked you to kind of talk about Israel and the history of Israel, and I wasn't particularly convinced by your argument, I have to say, on some things. And I came away from it thinking, you know, Melanie, you made some good points, but also I'm not sure about the creation. And then when this October 7th happened, it took me a few months just to kind of work out what the hell was going on and to start to think about it logically and rationally and try and understand it dispassionately. And now it's been a year. When I look at it objectively, the one thing that stands out for me is that Israel is not being treated like any other country at all. It just isn't, objectively. Israel is engaged in a military operation in Gaza in which the ratio of casualties among civilians to fighters is the lowest of any modern warfare in urban combat. Most of people don't even realize that the recent flare-up with Hezbollah is caused by the fact that since October the 7th, Hezbollah has been attacking Israel every day. When I see the Pager operation, it is clearly the most surgically targeted military operation in history. Yet we have politicians going on airwaves and saying the indiscriminate attacks. And I'm going, do you even know what the word indiscriminate means? Now, and what I've also found is my grandfather was Jewish. I was raised as a Christian. My parents are Christians. But suddenly the fact that I'm a quarter Jewish became very important to a lot of people all of a sudden. Really? Yes, all of a sudden. And I know that the answer to why this is happening in many people's minds is anti-Semitism. They will say, people just hate the Jews and this is why Israel gets special treatment. But when I saw those young people in those protests, they don't know
Speaker 1
what the hell they're talking about. They don't hate Jews. They don't know anything. So why is that happening? Well, they are going along with the fashionable consensus. It's a thing. It's not just a cause. You say Israel is treated in a completely different way to everybody else, any other country. It's absolutely correct. But the cause is different from any other cause. Because, okay, I remember the great fight against apartheid in South Africa. It was a very worthy cause. A lot of people were signed up to it. They thought about it a lot. They marched. But it didn't take over the society in the way this has done. I mean, here you have the Palestine flag, so-called, appearing on, I mean, it appears everywhere as a motif. And put aside why this is happening and the amount of money and organization that goes behind that, put that to one side. it's kind of omnipresent and it's unchallenged. The BBC regards it as a cause which is beyond challenge. It regards it as the cause of good versus evil. It's got it absolutely the wrong way around. But if you're immersed in that kind of atmosphere and you're a young person and you are in the education world, and the education world is absolutely saturated with people who believe this, that good is evil and evil is good, then you're going to do that. And the deeper question is why all those people who have influenced those impressionable young people have signed on to such a lunatic obsession. And ultimately, I can't really answer this because it is so fundamentally, outrageously absurd as to be really unanswerable. But there are certain obvious things that I would say. You talk about the pages, and you say quite correctly, this was the most surgical operation possible to take out thousands of the enemy combatants through this thing. And it's been turned into a war crime. And the way it's been turned into a war crime is people say, you know, it was willfully taking an ordinary piece of household equipment, a pager, an ordinary thing, and booby-trapping it. Well, in fact, that's not true. These weren't ordinary things. These weren't ordinary pagers. These were specific devices issued by a terrorist army, Hezbollah, to its own people, as weapons of war. These pages are designed to call people to war. If they're reservists, they're called to war. If they are already active combatants, they're told where to go, what to do. They're weapons of war. And therefore, the pages and the people holding them are absolutely legitimate targets. And one of the things that struck me about all that inversion in which people were saying this was a war crime was the same thing that they've been saying throughout, that Israel's defense against genocide is genocide. And what it means is that whatever Israel does to defend itself cannot be permitted.
Speaker 2
Yes, this is what I've noticed. This is the thing that's been bothering me because this is the bit I don't understand. Okay. Why is it that when Israel does, if this had happened in Britain on a per capita basis, 35,000 people killed or captured and taken as hostages or in America. We would have bombed the shit out of anyone who had stood next to the dog of the guy who did it. We would have turned countries into rubble. That's right. And yet when Israel targets pages that's indiscriminate. Why? Two various
Speaker 1
things are happening. First of all even among people who are sympathetic or think they're sympathetic to Israel, including the British government, there is this very deeply felt view that Israel is fundamentally the problem in the region. If Israel wasn't there, there wouldn't be a problem. That's what they all think. That's true. And consequently, Israel has to be basically, you know, if Israel is the problem, then Israel has to be stopped. And if Israel is defending itself, it becomes aggression. Because if Israel wasn't defending itself, there wouldn't be a war. Of course there wouldn't be a war. Every Israeli would be killed. Okay? But of course, those people who are saying this don't follow that logic through. But that's effectively what they're saying. So there's that. Israel is perceived as the problem because of an entirely false view of history in which Britain was complicit. Britain is actually the cause of Israel's beleaguement because it was Britain in the 1930s having been handed this internationally binding obligation to settle the Jews for their national homeland throughout what was then, what is now the State of Israel, West Bank and Gaza, reneged on it and faced with the Arabs who were trying to slaughter every Jew as a matter of Islamic holy war because no Jewish homeland could be permitted in that area, from their point of view, faced with that uprising, Britain didn't say, excuse me, Arab world, this is not on. Britain said, oh, Arab world, have part of what we're giving to the Jews instead. Have it. You can have it. And the Arab said, we want it all. We want the Jews gone. And the rest is history. Britain continues to maintain that position. So in fact, you could say Britain is actually at the heart of this problem. Anyway, there is this, as I say, fundamental belief in the British ruling class and the Western ruling class and the Western intelligence that Israel is the problem. But it's something deeper than that, which I think we're kind of hinting at. There is a view that the Jews are a problem. And this view is, I couldn't say buried, but I don't mean concealed. I mean it is a kind of fundamental part of Western culture that what I'm talking about is anti-Semitism. But the part of anti-Semitism which says the Jews are fundamentally a threat to everybody else because fundamentally they have a kind of demonic power. This is not true anti-Semitism. The Jews have a kind of demonic power because there are so few of them, but look how powerful they are. They're behind capitalism. They're all lawyers. They're all TV moguls and so on. And so the idea of Jewish power, if you look at antisemitism throughout the centuries, Christian antisemitism, racial antisemitism, there is this paranoia, paranoia about Jewish power. I say it's clinical paranoia because it's untrue. It's based on nonsense. The Jews are the most persecuted people in history. How can they have demonic power? But nevertheless, there is a belief. The Jews and power, that is the problem. You have Israel. Israel is powerful. Israel has made itself powerful on the basis that only if Israel has military power can it fulfill its sacred oath that never again will the Holocaust happen.
Speaker 1
do you- Sorry, just to keep my point. That cannot be permitted. You cannot have Jewish power. And so the idea of Israel defending itself with massive power because it's facing a massive threat to itself from forces who are literally billions of people in the Arab and Muslim world who wish it to be destroyed, that cannot be because it's Jewish power. I feel that very strongly and that's part of the wider problem of anti-Semitism that we're seeing.
Speaker 3
Melanie, do you know what I think as well the issue is, is that this conflict is incredibly complicated. You have to read about history. You have to understand the politics behind it. You have to understand the religious element. You need to tackle the thorny issue of Islamism within Islam, radical jihad, these groups. A lot of people simply don't have the time, the patience or the inclination, let's be fair, to want to do the reading and the work in order to understand. And then you come to the point that it's complicated. And there is no such thing, you know, these sweeping narratives that the people buy into. It's just easy. So it's easier for people just to take one particular point, hold up a placard saying, I want a globalist intifada. It makes me feel good. I'm on the right side of history. And here we are. Well,
Speaker 1
that's absolutely correct. And this is the road to hell. I have to say, and a lot of us in the Jewish community think this, now we understand why the Holocaust happened. By which I mean, now we understand how, I mean, this is the question everyone's asked all these years. Okay, there were the Nazis. They believed what they believed. That was terrible. But they were facilitated by millions of people in Germany and in Eastern Europe looking the other way. How could that have happened?