B (3:34)

I'm good. Thank you for having me. Glad to be here.

A (3:38)

It's really, it's really great to have you. We have really two themes for this moment, for this conversation, especially after, as I said, the killings of Jews from Colorado, from Manchester, from Bondi, from Washington, D.C. it's becoming a bit of a trend and it's something that, you know, the Jews kind of have to pick up the pieces each time on their own because many others aren't paying attention. One of the really important facts coming from me out of the Bondi massacre, which was already almost a month ago, is that Prime Minister Albanese of Australia didn't visit any of the victims. He did visit Ahmed Al Ahmed, the Syrian hero of the day, who personally tackled one of the gunmen and grabbed his gun and got shot. A wonderful thing to do. A wonderful guy. The prime minister visited him. He didn't visit any of the victims of the actual massacre because he didn't want to be shouted down on his way in or on his way out. And right now we speak. I think it's day seven of the massive protests in Iran. And those massive protests in Iran have drawn complete silence from all of these different elites. Progressives on Twitter are actually raging. They're forming rage mobs against people sharing protest videos. They are defending the ayatollahs. Amnesty International jumps at the, at the chomps at the bit to critique everything and anything that it thinks is against the progressive agenda. But it took it six days to put out any statement of any kind against the ayatollahs as they are oppressing their people and their people are rising in what may become an unprecedented uprising. So what's going on? It was in that mindset that I read your response to Bandai, which also dealt with this question of Islam and the failure of Western elites. What do you think of this moment? Am I crazy?

B (5:35)

No, I don't think, I don't think you're crazy. I think, I think exactly the things that you're seeing are actually are happening. I think my own personal moment of alarm was actually a while ago. But when you know, we know that the problems of anti Semitism and anti Zionism, the insanity that that's been prevalent sadly in the Middle despite what people refuse to acknowledge, but anybody who's aware in the issue. So Middle Easterners, Israelis, people who were informed, always knew that this was a problem in the Middle east. The explosion of this to become a global scale issue of just complete domination of anti Zionism and anti Semitism in discourses around issues that have nothing to do with Israel and Jews. So you're not crazy. And things definitely got increasingly insane. And this has to do exactly what you've said is the epic mismanagement of liberal institutions and the liberal elites that have been managing them for quite some time that ultimately led to the collapse of a lot of mitigating structures that were supposed to not let this happen, whether in the universities or whether at society at large. What we're seeing is a complete corruption of judgment that is a complete degradation of the moral and strategic faculties that are supposed to govern complex societies like Western societies that have been in place for a very long time, even in the Middle East. I grew up in Egypt, so even with the anti Westernism and all of this rhetoric, most people understood that Western societies have a much more complex faculties of judgment that makes them reliable on a lot of issues. And that's why whenever you had a major crisis in the Middle east country, the beginning of a civil war, a massacre by somebody like Saddam Hussein, you'll find a lot of people suddenly saying, well, we want the United States to help us, we want the west to help us. The reason that people did this is because they implicitly understood that these societies have better capacities of judgment. And that's exactly what we're seeing being corrupted. And if we can explore the mechanism of this complete corruption in which now you have basically liberal institutions that their judgment is completely skewed and off in the ways that you explain towards Israel, towards Islamism, towards the Muslim Brotherhood, towards anti Semitism, we can say that first of all you had an increasing moralization of all interpretation that started really to take over Western institutions I think from the 70s onwards, but really did come to peak in the last few decades. That is, people started to be trained to see politics primarily through either post colonial lens or a therapeutic lens. So you're always asking who's oppressed? Or if you're gonna do the therapeutic lens, well, who's wounded and trauma, who's authentic, who's harmed, so on and so forth. And this way of seeing things doesn't really describe reality. It really distributes moral permissions and moral values that it distributes guilt and innocence and so on and so forth. And this way of interpretation, for example, if we apply it to the Israel Palestine conflict, you end up in a situation in which the more violent, the more, the more insane, the more absolutely genocidal and maniacal actions like Hamas become, the more people think Israel is guilty, oh, you must be so guilty that you made them behave this way. Which is a completely perverse logic of judgment. But this is the moralization. Once you had this moralization of politics, this is how we end up with second, you had selective universalism. That is, liberal institutions insisted on enforcing, sometimes in a very illiberal way, their liberal norms. Pluralism, tolerance, anti racism. However, they insisted doing that in their own population, that is they were policing their own populations militantly. And you see it in places like the uk but completely suspend the these norms whenever it comes to other populations, whenever it comes to migrant populations, whenever it comes to Islamist rhetorics and Islamist groups, whenever it comes to important ideologies that now reign freely in a lot of these Western societies, whenever Israel is framed as cosmic villains and so on. And ultimately the result is that basically anti Semitic positions that were recognized as such not too long ago basically became understood as politics, identity positions. Well, they have this identity, so it's normal or acceptable that they view Jews and Israel in this way. Now the last thing maybe to mention is the complete outsourcing of moral seriousness. That is, liberal institutions tried to manage the complex foreign and domestic realities with slogans. Diversity, inclusion, community empowerment, so on and so forth. And not actual policies. That is the these were moral cosmetics and they can never be substitutes for hard decisions about integration, about your border control, about civic education, about confronting transnational ideological networks and so on and so forth. And ultimately what this, all of these structure of permissions and inhibitions and so on, aided Islamist movements in the west that now are present in the west and they do have, there is now such a thing as Western Islamists that was not a reality a while ago. Islamism was known to be something that's local, regional, in the Middle East, Middle Eastern ideologies, they do have supporters and networks that extend in the West. But these networks, job this was the case until the 90s, was to channel support back to the motherships, which is, let's say, the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, so on and so forth. Khabiv, this is not the case anymore. You actually have established Western Islamist movements that no longer look back to the Middle east, but got rooted in Western societies. And now they are competing for institutional power inside Western institutions themselves, governance. So they are entering local politics and they are using, of course, the now growing population of Muslim migrants, cultivating their resentments, their hatred, antisemitism and so on, and using this within these weakened conditions of liberal institutions to gain footholds. And they already did. So the last factor probably, of course, they are not also doing this alone. There's a foreign policy element to this in which you have countries like Qatar, Qatar, they saw exactly that this is happening and they learned basically how to leverage it, how to use it, how to work with these groups now in the west in order to empower their own positions in their geostrategic competition in the region. That's kind of the summary of how I see the moment that we're in.

A (12:56)

I'm trying not to despair. I've been on a lot of college campuses over the last two years and I met students who were not trained the way I was trained when I went to Hebrew University 20 years ago, let's just say it was 20. They taught me to read carefully, read twice, to try to be fair when I argue, to understand multiple traditions, multiple perspectives. If I can't make the Palestinian case in a coherent and serious and humanizing and convincing ways, I don't understand it well enough to debate it, to argue that something about the Palestinian narrative is wrong. And I meet students on campuses all over the United States and it's happened too many, dozens of times already for it to be a one off or a bad example. Who were taught at university, just as you said, to locate the power in society, to assign blame in society, to perform righteousness in society, to be the perfect activist, rhetorically, very skillful. They're constantly coming up with new terminology and new means and new ways of sort of packaging arguments and delegitimizing the interlocutor, the other side, they don't believe in any institution because everything smacks to them of power. And therefore they can't actually tolerate ambiguity, dissonance, disagreement. And these are the kids who are in the most elite institutions. They are being trained that way. I Don't know if I'm. I don't meet a lot of computer science majors. I'm talking about the humanities majors, the social science majors. I've had that experience with so much of American and British journalism where I don't know about the education. Although, you know, when you meet the students, you understand the education funnel that they all go through into the journalistic world. But journalism, the advertising model collapsed, and attention, the attention economy took over everything. And outrage and sells, outrage sells. Tribal confirmation sells. All of journalism, even very elite journalism, has fallen into that kind of curated outrage, that kind of selection bias where everybody just literally absorbs the one thing that actually mobilizes you, that triggers you, that everything has become tribal, everything has become moral signaling. And everybody is radicalizing. And it's happening in every democracy that you slightly lift the, you know, you lift the engine hood and you take a look underneath and it's happening to all of them. And that's the elite. When you meet the young people, you understand that the future is going to be worse. We now have deep economic dislocation. Globalization can move industrial bases very, very quickly. A lot of the capital in an economy is moving into virtual things, into things most people don't understand. The AI revolution, everybody tells us it's happening. Nobody quite tells us what it means or what we're supposed to do about it or how it's going to affect our jobs. And if you're an ordinary working class person, what's going to happen to you and what industries aren't going to exist in 10 years and you literally don't know. And so in that dislocation, we have elites that have been talking for generations now about this promise that was made, this kind of bargain underlying the Western order, which was that economic growth, you invest in your education, we have an open economy. Capital can move around, factories can move around, and that will create the kinds of efficiencies that will produce upward mobility. What if nobody's experiencing that upward mobility anymore? What if wage growth is stagnant for 30 years? What if people are on their way to becoming trillionaires while everybody else is losing ground and falling backward, and GDP per capita, they're stagnating everywhere, then what do we do? And so there's this sense that elites have failed everywhere. And if elites have failed, we might as well go to this radical socialist experiment, we might as well go to this radical populist right experiment to take a look. And maybe there's answers over there, because the staid and motionless thing where I don't even have the very fact that these elites are so highly educated. The education gap itself that produces a kind of ethos of technocracy means that a lot of policies aren't, they're all about the spreadsheets, they're all about the professionalism. They don't notice ordinary people. And that's how you can get the Democratic Party's open borders policy. You can only get that if you're looking only at spreadsheets. And when you do that, you make a lot of ordinary people in your society feel like the democracy can't hear them, can't see them, can't understand what their needs are. And so there's also this sort of technocratic elite that is formed out of all of these cultural changes. There is a profound disconnect in the west from elites and ordinary people. And sometimes a person can be an ordinary person and also have a job in an elite institution. And I don't know exactly what these terms mean, and please don't challenge me on them because I won't be able to give you an exact definition, but it's there. And these institutions very quickly become captured by the radicalizing ideology. The people most keen on taking down the elites are the elites themselves. And there's a lot of this anger at the base that doesn't see itself in the progressive project, because the progressive project is an elite project. And so that's building out the populist right project. And that's only driving further radicalization on the progressive elite project. And so societies are tearing each other apart, losing the capacity to do serious policy, losing the capacity to produce good outcomes. And somehow, somehow everybody's talking about Jews. I'm getting a little worried if, okay, my rant is over, okay, I, I.

B (19:06)

I want to complicate what you said a little bit more without losing people. I promise. I'll, I'll make it, I'll make it simple. What you really, what, what you have here is you have co centric spheres of competition. Well, you don't have only one competition, Elite against normal people, against society and so on. No, no, no, you have, you have actually various very now intensifying competitions happening at the same time. So you have a competition between the right and the left over of course, who's in power. And then you have a competition within the left about who's going to be on top and who's going to be on the bottom, within the elite itself and the elite and its relationship to its movement. And you have now an intensifying Competition on the right between what is the future of the right, what is the future of the post Trump MAGA coalition, who's going to be basically who's going to represent that new right wing movement. And seeing Tucker Carlson and the anti Semitic Zionism, I think is very important to see it in that context that this is a rivalry over elite positions within the right movements itself. And this has been happening in the left for quite some time. That's basically in different leftist institutions, for example in the universities, it's been happening since Edward Said. And post colonialism, Third world intellectuals trying to take over the, the positions of Jewish intellectuals and Jewish professors. So these are elite competitions that are happening.

A (20:29)

Wait, wait, I'm sorry, you said a lot here. Can you take us through that? First of all on the right and then we'll get to third worldism taking over the positions of Jewish intellectuals. The Tucker Carlson fight between Tucker Carlson and let's say the mainstay Republicans of the past, which Tucker used to be a part of, over control. So I have a lot of questions, but my fundamental question is why is it about Jews?

B (20:57)

Why do you become the which issue? I mean, that's a bigger question, but it's not only about Jews here. It's becoming about Jews in a lot of these spheres of competition. And that enforces each other. That is, it's the salience of the issue itself. That's already. That's a big selling point. The symbolic, the overwhelming symbolic and moral power that comes behind the antisemitic discourse and antisemitic imagination and the position of Jews themselves. I mean, that's also a part of the reality that we have to see. That is as a lot of intelligent people recognize that Jews as a success story of the United States ended up being really represented. That is visible in most elite circles in the different things, whether actually on the left, whether the progressive movement, you know, communist Sunday universities or the right, you know, also right spheres of influence. One of the most important conservative pundits in the last decade or so has been Ben Shapiro, who's an Orthodox keep a wearing Jew doesn't get more visible than that. That's actually a fascinating development in itself because it's new that Jews are very represented in conservative movements like this. But this also means that Jews have a position of influence within elite circles. Now this position of influence is the Achilles heel in which if you are competing, if you're trying to get in, this can be your Achilles heel in multiple things. You can use it to delegitimize These Jews themselves already, if you can remove them, that already creates a space for you. And you can see this in the competition against Ben Shapiro. I mean, some of it is clearly is professional competition, so to speak. That is, you have other influencers and pundits who basically want to diminish him in order to elevate themselves and for them to have bigger audiences and bigger influence on the conservative movement.

A (22:57)

Candace Owens has launched broadsides on Ben Shapiro and she's decided to do it through conspiracy Theories of 19th century Antisemitic conspiracists who invented insane things about the Talmud. And so she pulls out a book discredited within anti Semitic discourses of the Germany. I read your essay on this on the substack, where you know, the Talmudic Jew, it's called. And it's not just a forgery, it's a forgery that embarrassed the antisemites who took themselves seriously in Germany. And so they kicked this guy out of their circles. And she literally pulls out a printed copy on her podcast.

B (23:35)

What?

A (23:36)

There's so many ways to compete with Ben Shapiro.

B (23:39)

Well, this is the most vulgar. I mean, this is really bad. But this is how alarming this is that usually this kind of vulgar antisemitism will really lived in the dark margins of American society. You did have antisemitism that tried to hide itself. I mean, for example, Carlson, I mean, it's not very subtle, but at least he's still trying to commit himself. He succeeds, I think maybe 70% of the time to the idea that. No, I'm just talking about America and foreign policy and our policy in the Middle East. I'm not talking about Jews. Owens, of course, doesn't even try to do that. But the alarming thing that this works, that is it has constituency, it has huge following. I don't know how much. I suspect not all of these people are watching it because of the curiosity. I am afraid that that's not the case. There's a lot of people who actually, maybe actually thinking that this is true or taking her for her word, but this is the outcome or the, the consequences of severe elite competitions done in this way in which no scruples are respected or held. And then people engaging in this kind of anti Semitic discourse and this is happening on the right. For instance, if we're going to take a more sophisticated example than Candice Owen, the whole spat between Tucker Carlson and Ted Cruz, why Cruz? Because Cruz is an extremely important Republican senator. He almost became president and he is one of the most staunch Pro Israel senators in the U.S. senate. And this has been the case for a very, very long time. So it's what he represents. He represents primarily actually not Jews. He represents a kind of conservative and Republican politicians who've been there for a long time, who have a lot of power inside the establishment, who are pro Israel. Now this pro Israel position is used in order to delegitimize them and undermine them and thus giving a space for probably a new elite that offers itself for the Republican and conservative movement as the new replacement with the new correct commitment, so to speak. So this is the kind of competition, how I see it, that's happening on the right now. This has been happening on the left for decades. That's happening on the right is actually new. But in the left it's actually this competition in which Zionism specifically and anti Zionism became central. This has been the case probably since the late 70s and 80s. If we're going to talk about. In the academy, it was used by the new sort of intellectual that came to the United States and American institutions represented kind of the icon of this, as Edward Said, in which this anti Zionist commitment becomes a tool to relocate the moral prestige to themselves from the Jewish intellectual and professor that was really the symbol of the post war liberal success. So this was itself a form of competition in order to do that. But then that spread also in the academy and among progressive elites themselves, in which basically higher commitment to anti Zionist or pro Palestinian or really anti Zionist politics and opinions then gives one advantage in their elite competition. And this elite competition gets worse because you talked about economic displacement. This is, by the way, is not only happening on the base. So that means also there are fewer opportunities for elites. That is, elites are also now having status insecurity and having insecurity about their own futures as elites.

A (27:32)

And because journalistic jobs are drying up and everybody's opening podcasts and that means.

B (27:37)

That you have to ratchet up and this many times. And I've seen this dynamic even in Muslim societies. Basically it happens many times with Islamist rhetoric. That's how you ratchet it up. Basically when groups are competing, everybody's committing to Sharia more, everybody's more pure, everybody's more this. So it's a sad dynamic of ideological purity that happens within when the resources are actually limited for elites and then they are competing heavily. This is happening while you talked about the university, that's what I know a lot about. So I'm going to talk a little bit about that. So the administrations of the university, as this is happening. What do they choose to do? Because ultimately they are within the elite circles, they choose to do nothing. That is, they choose to make the issue about reputational management. That's what we did. The important thing is that we manage our reputation and we make sure that there is no risk. So basically risk management. And that's kind of what we see.

A (28:40)

What do you mean? How do they manage what? How do they manage. Which part of this are they managing? There's this competition and it's radicalizing people because radicalism is a great way to, as you said, relocate moral prestige. And that builds out the kind of Marxist sort of power dynamics, kind of interpretation of literally every single thing happening everywhere. Because then we can all step in with our great, you know, and the old class that's still used to analyzing other things and other frameworks, they. They can't do this. And the very fact that it is activist is, is what gives us that moral prestige. In other words, the transformation of academia, at least those sections of academia into activism, almost pure activism, is why we know this is moral. While those people who have time for other kinds of economic or other analyses, they're actually part of the problem because they're complicit in the power structures that be. That's, that's what, that's what they decided to walk us through this slowly. A lot of people don't know what you're talking about.

B (29:40)

And one last thing, another dynamic is that all of this trickles down to the students who actually believe in this. That is, you have these conditions of elite competition in which radicalism is performed in order to do their status and prestige gains and resources gains. But of course, the students, the young students actually believe, because they are the subject of all of this. And you end up with these very young people who know next to nothing about the world. They were practically still children and they have this unbelievable moral certainty that they are marching on the history on their side. And then you have all the conditions of the encampments and so on, which creates the conditions, tradition of antisemitism and anti Zionism that threatens Jewish students and faculty and just radicalizes the country and then attracts foreign funders who, by the way, did not invent Qatar. I think the issue of Qatar also is very misunderstood. They didn't invent our radicalism. They didn't come. No, they saw what's happening and they invested in it because it works for them. Now, the management of the universities, the administration, what they end up doing is pure risk management. That is, they don't interfere with any of this. But they want to ensure that they are still legally protected. So they basically, they spend money on lawyers, the donor money still come in and the enrollment are still steadies. And that's how the administration of universities think about the issue. They think about it entirely risk management. Not that this is bad thing happening, not that we need to protect students. And this is why you have the showdown between the Trump administration and the Ivies, whether Columbia or Harvard, because they are not taking it seriously. They are just trying to get away from. I remember the Harvard president was complaining about finding an off ramp with the competition, with the showdown with Trump, which is very funny because the off ramp would be just applying Title 6 protections to Jewish students. That's all you need to do.

A (31:29)

There's so many off ramps. What was he talking about? An off ramp to make it all go away so it doesn't disrupt their fundraising. They have become fundraising organizations that aren't institutionally capable of really paying close attention to, to their educational purposes.

B (31:43)

This is true. And that begs a bigger question. I mean, we can fight. Here's the thing. I'm not really interested in joining these elite institutions and maybe I am not an ambitious person, but I look at them and maybe five years ago, 10 years ago, I'd look at them. Oh, you wish. They are a little crazy, but they are amazing people and they are the gold standard in education and intellectual life and they really want to be a part of them. Maybe that was the case 10 years ago. Today when I look at these institutions say these people are absolutely insane. I want nothing to do with them and I want to go find a good place for me. And I think that's really what people need to think about, that this is a serious possibility that we don't know. A lot of these important institutions that supposed to do very important work, especially as we said, the humanities and social sciences, which I think the humanities are completely gone and are not going to come back in these places that they are possibly irreversibly corrupt, at least for some time. And it's important to actually build alternative institutions, which I think a lot of people are already starting doing.

A (32:47)

Hussein, you wrote a piece after Bandai that addressed both the anti Semitic, anti Zionist question and the subtleties and questions there, but mainly addressed Western elite. The Western elite question, and I'm going to quote two paragraphs and I just want to, I want to ask you because you're very fierce in your critique and also you're very pessimistic in your conclusions. You Write outside the United States, there is no Western political establishment with either the will or the capability to address this problem, let alone reverse its growth. The future of Western Europe, Canada, Australia and New Zealand is likely to be increasingly Jew free and increasingly dysfunctional. As strange as it may seem. To read the latest White House National Security Strategy distancing itself from Europe. That was in the White House National Security Strategy. We were all trying to skim it and figure out what it says and we didn't notice the little bits about Venezuela. We should have been paying attention. The assessment you write is correct about the distancing from Europe and the distancing is prudent. The decivilization of Europe, a program conceived by European elites over decades and for which mass migration and Islamic movements were recruited as instruments, is likely unstoppable. This does not mean that Western societies will be governed by Sharia law. That fantasy only contributes to the confusion. What it means is that Western societies will become their own versions of Third Worldist caste systems. Autocratic, corrupt, stratified. Think less caliphate, more Latin America. What I'm reading you saying here is that you take very seriously the possibility that the trends of the wealth gaps, the trends of capital being owned abroad, of factories moving willy nilly without actual attention paid to the needs of populations at home, that all of these trends of elite detachment and elite radicalization, they're not going anywhere. And you describe this with just a finish. National wealth will be sold by corrupt elites to Gulf investors and other foreign patrons while populations are abandoned to navigate the wreckage on their own. You paint a very dystopian future.

B (35:09)

Is that what's waiting for us at this moment? It's prudent to be pessimistic. And I think that's basically what the White House National Security Strategy did about.

A (35:18)

The Europe is lost.

B (35:20)

Most likely. I hope I'm wrong. I mean nobody's. And I'm not a defeatist. And I'm not.

A (35:25)

But it's no. So let me ask this. Europe is lost because it has gone too far down the path of the very trends that we've talked about it did.

B (35:33)

And whether in terms of elite corruption, I mean I look at the European elites, often the ones who, whether in the eu, various institutions, whether on the national level in countries like Germany, France, the uk, the countries that matter or not that the other European countries that matter, but basically the European major European powers and historical actors. And I don't see even any sincere opposition to the direction that these countries took or a promise of reversal, if anything they see actually doubling down more will to police people who complain about conditions and so on. So I think it's very prudent to be pessimistic. That's one, that's the one thing in the elite. The second thing, and I want to be completely honest here, but sometimes I want to be precise. I grew up in Egypt and I write very sympathetically about the problems of the Muslim world. So I write extensively about helping people understand Muslim problems. The antisemitism problem. It's not an eternal essence, it's a modern development. The influence of German ideas, so on. I don't deny the problems. The problems are real, as big and awful as we see them. I just try to help people understand them better. But that does not mean I want to live with these problems. I escaped these problems. I fled. Had I been living in Egypt, people who read my things can understand. I would have probably. I don't know if I would have survived till now had I been living in Egypt for the last 15 years or so. I don't want to live live with these problems that are extremely difficult to solve. One of the things also that I try to do is, and I'm trying to explain how deep these problems are and why they are extremely difficult to deal with. Importing these problems on that scale into Western societies is a nightmare for me. And obviously now for a lot of people now you have a lot of populations.

A (37:37)

Can you get specific?

B (37:38)

That is, you have allow.

A (37:42)

You've written critiques of Islam that have taken the Quran as a literary text and said as a literary text. It grounds Muslim ideas in the Muslim intellectual universe in actually in very shallow grounding because it rejected Judaism or it rejected the monotheistic world of Judaism and Christianity that came before it, that it emerged out of that kind of thing. Treats the Quran as a secular thinker would look at an anthropological artifact. Is that what you're talking about? That's something you can't do in Egypt.

B (38:09)

I mean that's. Yeah, of course that's part of it, but no, it's actually the other that actually lifts. I think actually in Egypt today you would be able to do that because you do have kind of this opening secular. No, it's critiquing the modern conception of Islam and Muslim identity and Muslim allegiance and loyalties, which basically revolves around commitment to anti Zionism. That is the core today for a big part of the Muslim world. And as I said, I wrote extensively about how this happened. This is not a mystery. It actually went through phases of how this by the works of Muslim elites starting from the interwar years. How sadly they brought this to reality in which the restructured mass Muslim identity for the modern world around a struggle specifically that ultimately collapsed into the struggle against Zionism and struggle against Israel. Now this became such a foundational commitment that you can be an atheist, but you cannot be a pro Israel in Muslim countries. That is, you can be a secular. And you see it in a lot of these secular activists. Think about somebody like Basim Yousef, who's entirely secular in his beliefs. Ala Abdel Fattah, the Egyptian British activist in which had the controversy. I have an essay on him also on my substack and going to the uk and then they discovered all of these absolutely nauseating anti Semitic record of his. A lot of these, by the way, I know many of these people personally. A lot of them are completely liberal modern atheists. They don't believe in God, they don't believe in religion, they don't believe in Islam, they don't believe in any of those. But they remain steadfast in their commitments to the narratives of victimhoods at the hands of the Zionists in the United States and how Palestine is the anchor that anchors everything. So there was.

A (40:01)

And the Jews control everything. Why? Why, why? Bassem Yousef? Why does Bassem Youssef obsess constantly about Jews? What does he care? Bassem Youssef, by the way, has a border with Gaza. Fine. Bassem Youssef also has a border with Sudan. Haven't heard a peep from him about Sudan. He has a literal border. By the way, Egypt hosts vast numbers of refugees from Sudan. What are his thoughts on Sudan? No one will ever know. Why Israel? I genuinely, I'm so used to it, it's almost silly to ask. But suddenly I want to ask. You're an Egyptian. You know these people, you talk to these people. You've read all these people in Arabic. I have never read why. Why Israel?

B (40:39)

Well, I think that's actually the interesting question that people don't, don't ask because it doesn't make sense. And a lot of the things that I write is actually because I started to ask that question. We don't really. We're so used to it that it doesn't strike us anymore is how bizarre this is. This is bizarre. It completely does not make sense. We can try to make it make sense. Oh, it's because of Islam. Oh, well, antisemitism. But ultimately it doesn't explain anything. It's kind of.

A (41:06)

I'll do more than that let's accept for the purposes of this conversation that Israel is evil, that Israel has got deeply malign intentions toward the Palestinians, that there's no good there, that there's no important context. You need to know that there's no history, that there's no diversity among Israelis. Let's go all in. All in. Okay, Israel is North Korea, but somehow smellier. That's what we're doing still. Why Israel? Yemen would still be worse. Why Israel?

B (41:36)

Well, the answer, again the answer that I have ultimately historical. It's about how these modern societies themselves developed and the ideological history. So to be modern you have to be ideological. That's what that is. You have to believe in one of the main worldviews of the modern world. You can't. That's the actually definition of being modern. That you see the world in a modern way. And these modern worldviews that you're, let's say that you're a society like Lebanon or Syria in the 1920s, 1930s and 40s and so on, and you're now modernizing your society. You have to modernize them through a mass education system, creating schools for all of these illiterate peasants in the countryside. This is basically the modernization model. All over Russia, Eastern Europe, you build an education system, you bring all of those illiterate peasant children and you try to turn them into working class and middle class, modern middle class through national identity, so on and so forth. To condense it very. To condense it in a simple. The model that a lot of Muslim elites and Arab elites, because a lot of them actually were not Muslim, but sadly chose for this process when they did this in the mid century was completely modern, completely modeled on German ideas, on fascist ideas and on communist ideas. And that produced a totalitarian modern worldview and social ethos that can just keep reproducing itself. That is when it was secular, it's totalitarian and anti Semitic. Whether Arab nationalism and so on and so forth. If they disillusioned with this ideology, you know what? Maybe I'm going to go back to my roots and read the Quran and become Muslim. You go read the Quran to become Muslim again. You reproduce the totalitarian anti Semitic vision of the world through these Islamic texts that you're reading. And that's basically what's been happening now this problem has been deep enough that you don't have even a memory that this actually did happen, that this is how this problem came. So you have people who even change their, like basimusive, they become secular, so on and so forth. And they are still really dependent in organizing their own identity and their moral worldview and these ideas of being a victim and struggling against the injustice of just Israel existing. This is the idealist understanding of it. Obviously there is also now a geostrategic and political and interests that are built on this. That is you have now, okay, because this happened already. So you have many Middle Eastern states or Arab states or Muslim states who organize their power or elites who organize their power around the relationship to this conflict. So now you don't just have a belief system, you have serious powers and serious interests that tied in. The biggest example is Qatar and the Qatar elite. Qatar has built an empire of influence globally. It started regionally. Al Jazeera was kind of the pioneer of Qatari influence. They built, and it's a tiny state and they built this empire of influence of influencing Muslim Arab opinion in every country in which people speak Arabic and they have access to satellite tv and the way they did it is actually through Palestine because they are the ones who are talking about Palestine all the time. A lot of Arab national TVs were not. You have countries like Egypt who had a peace agree or Jordan peace agreement with Israel. They are not going to. They are trying to walk the line. So they are not going to be pro Israel, but they are not going to try agitate their populations. But now Qatar became the spokesperson against this injustice and that leveraged an insane amount of influence, not to mention, of course, extending their patronage to the Islamist movement. Then they leveraged all of this leverage that they have regionally and then they gained leverage with Western politicians and Western institutions. And they became basically the main mediator between Western powers and Western elites and Islamist movements and Muslim populist movements and so on and so forth. So now their entire model of power is really built upon this. They have no interest in whether helping the problem being solved or taking down the rhetoric, or they have an interest in keeping things inflamed the way they are. So as I said, there are two aspects to this. There is the historical, actually understanding, ideological history and understanding of the ideas. And then there is of course the actual political and geostrategic aspects to this.

A (46:24)

Hussain, you are describing a situation in which the ideas borrowed. I think the last time we talked back in episode 30, I called it Inhaled because you really described it as truly like a void of ideas, this experience of European modernity and European strength and European competence and power. And so they just absorbed into an empty shell left behind by the decaying Ottoman Empire. A social and intellectual shell, they absorbed These mid century, 1930s, really 19th century, into Nazism German ideas, whether that's on the right or on the left. And when you write about Muslim immigration, you write about it almost as a warning. You're not talking about Muslims, you're talking about the ideas that Muslims have incubated from 19th and 20th century Europe that they're now bringing back into Europe, but coding it either in Islam, either in the validation, the authenticization that Islam can grant it, that Islamic vocabulary can grant it, or in this anti imperial left wingism, which is a European invention and Muslim diaspora intellectuals in the west have basically revived it, revived it as a Western moral project. And it comes from the Marxists in the 19th century right up to the Soviets.

B (47:54)

And.

A (47:54)

And that is what you mean by anti Zionism. Now, I want to suggest that. I'm just going to talk about you for a minute, if that's okay, that anti Zionism for you is code. You are a theorist of what the obsession with Jews has done to break the Muslim world or the Arab Muslim world that you're very familiar with. And so I want to just read one last piece of the, of the paragraph. Having introduced it that way, incidentally, I'm starting to begin to suspect, and I even talked to some colleagues at the Free Press about maybe trying to write something about Tucker Carlson as basically an importer into America of the Muslim Brotherhood. And this is something that I've been thinking about for months because the things that I was reading from 1920s Muslim Brotherhood to try to understand really what Hamas is, right? But the sort of the birth of the ideas that obsessed about Zionism in that way, that's exactly how Tucker Carlson is constructing his campaign to take over the right now, the populist right, which is to say it's a pietistic return to origin story, right? He has given speeches critiquing mainline American churches, liberal churches for being hollow shells inhabited by raccoons. I mean, he sees the degradation of the religion and the need to restore the original piety. And incidentally, totally separate story, it's all about Jews ultimately, who is decaying society, society destroying society, who do we need to face down? Who is secretly in control of things. It's carbon copy of Muslim Brotherhood and suddenly he's deep friends with the Qataris, which is super interesting, right? So it all comes together, these ideas, European ideas incubated in the Muslim world for a century and a half, coming back to Europe now on the wave of all these things. And then you write the following Paragraph. The anti Zionist derangement of the last two years was a final warning. In it we witness the full legitimization of genocidal anti Zionism within the commanding heights of Western institutional life and its enthusiastic adoption by large segments of the public. The protests themselves, as they began immediately on October 7, were celebrations of the Hamas massacres organized before the first IDF soldier had entered Gaza. They revealed what had been constructed over the encampments, the building occupations, the harassment campaigns against Jewish students, the open calls for intifada, the attacks on Jewish institutions. It is. Is the new baseline, our new norm. When Hossein Abu Bakr Mansoul says that he's talking about Egypt, your fear, this is a. There's a question mark at the end of all of this. Your fear is that through these intellectual channels, through populist revolts and elite internal elite revolts and competition driven by the crises, the real crises, the real economic dislocations and crises, crises of legitimacy that Western elites are undergoing because of the massive and very fast changes happening to all Westerners that are causing a real crisis of legitimacy through that in that space. These ideas are coming in from the places where they had incubated and retaking Western societies. Is that a fair assessment of your analysis?

B (51:16)

I think it's very fair. I think ultimately you touched really on something deep and something very personal. My nightmare is having to live in Egypt again. And Egypt is. There are a lot of normal people who live in Egypt. You can live your life in Egypt, by the way, being a Christian, atheist, Muslim. But as long as you're not engaged in anything seriously. And you'll be fine if you are a thinking person, that is, if you want to question anything whether how society behave, you want to question how society is organized. And I'm talking about the deep things like why do we think that we are the good one, the good guys in the Palestine Israel story. Maybe we're the bad guys. Like serious questions. The consequences are extremely severe. Socially, politically, so on and so for also.

A (52:08)

Also other issues. That's the issue that you and I talk about, mainly because you're talking to me. But women's. Women's status in Egyptian society is famously terrible. Yeah, there are reports on female genital mutilation out of the Swiss government and are the UN that are horrifying. Egypt has a real problem.

B (52:26)

So usually the regime in Egypt would be tolerant. Actually they would like to have some sort of an official feminist movement that is performing feminism. That's how a lot of these countries work. Right. Which is really funny because that's really similar to the condition that's happening to liberal institutions that we would like to have people who perform a certain social justice and radical ideas. But that's it. We're going to perform this. But you have your elite control and elite competition and so on and so forth. But what happens at the bottom doesn't really concern us. And this is why really, as you said in the essay said like don't think about you're going to living in a caliphate, you're going to living in a Western version of third world dysfunction. And that's the scary thing. Now there is of course the Muslim component of this that has to do with the issues then that we care about, the ideological commitments to anti Zionism and anti Semitism that I don't want to be an antiquarian historian who's just living in history. I'm trying to understand how things happened because of today, that is. I don't want to spend my life obsessing over German ideas and this German philosophers and how they think. I'm obviously learning and thinking about these things a lot. But ultimately I understand that this is the past. We're not there anymore. This version of mainstream Islam did indeed become like this. It was not Islam 150 years ago. It is today and it's done. And I'm not sure it's actually reversible. This is also my most pessimistic idea. I think it's too late. That is sadly, you could do that, you could indoctrinate all of these people at once because they had a majority of illiterate people who knew nothing and you can just put them into this indoctrination system and produce them. But that process is over and you're not going to get it again. That is, people already have ideologies. People already have no idea. So in order to, to change their understanding of the world, change of Islam. I'm not sure that this is possible. So having these ideologies becoming part of the Western institutional structure is terrifying, especially within the dysfunction of Western elites that we just talked about. And this is why I look at Western Europe and I'm pessimistic. I don't know if they can get back from this. They have now these large populations that now they have their own culture. They are not integrating into, into, into anything. It's becoming unsafe. Everybody knows it's becoming unsafe for Jews there. It's becoming unsafe for women in certain places at certain times. Same thing is happening, is happening in Canada and the Hope that this is not, not going to happen here.

A (55:15)

I can't help looking at this as a Jew, but I'm just a Jew, you know, there's a lot of as a Jews, I'm not as a Jew, I'm just a Jew, meaning I'm not the Jew, the cartoon character running around in the morality plays, running in everybody's heads all around the world trying to serve their own ideological needs. I'm literally just that one guy who is the real world thing that they have decided to code into their morality plays in ways I can barely comprehend. And what I just heard was Middle Eastern Islam is not repairable for me. The Emiratis are to me extraordinary, extraordinary people. I mean everywhere they go, everything they do. Every time I talk with Emiratis, what amazes me is that I don't get any of the victimhood garbage that I get in so many of the panels I sit in or discourses or Twitter exchanges with the Muslim world. I don't get any of the grievance and anger and bitterness and rage they are looking to invest in. AI if they're talking to an Israeli, they want to know what I have to sell them and what I have to buy from them. There's just a very practical, confident, clear eyed kind of conversation that you can have with this culture, but they're tiny. And the broader culture of the Arab Muslim world, with all the caveats that you can't in these kinds of conversations represent the real humanity of hundreds of millions of people. But the broader Islam of the Arab world that I have access to, not Indonesia, but you know, Iraq, roughly through Libya, cannot be saved from its anti Zionism. And I don't mean anti Zionism as the luxury belief in the way it's talked about in America of pro Israel, not pro Israel. I don't mean in these kinds of silly luxury beliefs. I mean the actual anti the existence of 8 million Jews who without Israel would be dead, simply would not exist. And the genocidal anti Zionism that you talk about, they're not getting over that. It's too fundamental to their religious world. It's too fundamental to their understanding of the world. They are Too much early 20th century Europeans for any of that to ever be washed away. No matter how much we have Abraham accords and trade deals and how much they want my I don't know what Nvidia chips.

B (57:38)

It's not going to help, I think. I mean I'm very pessimistic. I hope I'm again, I hope I'm Wrong. But first of all, societies are becoming much more autonomous than used to be because of social media, the Internet, that is. Now you do have societies or pocket society generating all kinds of discourse all the time. And we see it here and the Internet does all these weird things beyond the control of states and elites and so on and so forth. So you're not living in a condition anymore in which you have a centralized Arab state with a state owned TV network with state run three channels and a state run newspaper and a state run radio and you make peace with the guy on top and you try. Even that in Egypt was very difficult. We know of course President Sadat himself got assassinated, but at least it was a possibility then. Now, within the current conditions, I don't know how is that possible. Especially also if you have have actors like Qatar who have infinite liquidity and they really master the telecommunication games and they have access to your population through the Internet, through satellite and so on and so forth, that can just bypass you and talk to them all the time. So even, I mean technically speaking, if under people's understandings of themselves changes constantly. If this is a new understanding, technically speaking, which can be undone, you can have another understanding. The problem, why I'm pessimistic is basically the conditions of this change. Now you add to this, and this is what I'm talking about the Middle East. I mean ultimately I think the Middle east, this issue can be dealt with politically because you have states who are willing to do so, like the uae. I hope Saudi Arabia is not now trying to instrumentalize and change its regional policy. But generally you can try to deal with the states, you can incentivize better behavior in this area. Some states can see that it's disruptive to its own. That is you have of Middle Eastern rulers or Arab rulers who understands that this whole obsession is also disruptive to their own stability and power. By the way, that's the case in Egypt. That is, it's very important and central to Egypt and the state has to keep the flame low. But they know that the flame can't get high because that will disrupt their own legitimacy. So anyways, it can be dealt with politically.

A (59:56)

The other even that's very time limited. How long can Sisi. You know what, After Sisi there'll be some other general, but eventually it won't be a general. Eventually, when 98% of Egyptian society is Muslim Brotherhood, we're out of options. And then what happens?

B (60:12)

I don't know, but I hope that happens. But here's the thing. The Second part is now you have a lot of these populations who already sent big migrant groups who are now living on their own in Western societies. And they already moved out of this. That is now they have these ideas and they are developing them, by the way, in very different set of conditions. That is a lot of the Islamist commitments in Western societies among second generation, first and second generation Muslims, let's say in the United States, where I live. So I know this firsthand is becoming a Muslim. So Muslim Brotherhood thought, who used to be this fascist totalitarian movement, that's how it started. Today it transmutated in the United States and it became identity politics, activism for Muslims. Right? So you could be a very secular Muslim and you go to college and then you understand that Islamism is basically for you, let's say that's how you see it. It's like Black Lives Matter for black. So you'd be a secular woman without a hijab. But your allegiance to this, because you understand it in the identity terms of the conditions now, and this is only one of the sad developments that did happen and in which these, as you said, basically 19th century terrible European ideas now became established or became modernized to continue with us in the 21st century. And now you have their own versions now laundered in by Tucker Carlson and others into the larger American public. And this is an important reason why I started to try to tell the story to begin with of basically how the modern Arab ideology, how it came to being and try to offer this that I started working on years ago. When I started working on years ago, this is before October 7th, I was working on this book that I had no luck publishing because nobody was interested in this. But basically I wanted to say that the ending of the book, that this book actually, yes, it's about the Middle east, but it's a warning about what can happen here. That is your assumption that, oh, these Muslim societies, they have their own culture, they have their own identity, they are failing to assimilate Western ideas, foreign idea. These are foreign ideas to them. That's kind of the assumption that people had. And I'm telling them that, no, that's not true at all. They completely internalize all of these new ideas very quickly. And if this happened there, that could happen here. That is that your own society can also very quickly internalize four terrible ideas that you thought would never very foreign and alien to here. And sadly, I was thinking about this years ago and suddenly this became a reality, or we discovered it is already becoming the reality that you have large Segments of the population who are internalizing a set of ideas that only a decade ago would have been thought of as the epitome of anti Americanism. I have one of my friends who's in the United States military, he spent a lot of times in the Middle east, so he knows kind of Arab culture, Middle Easterners, and now he's becoming a pastor and the chaplain. I was talking to him the other day and he was telling me, hussin, you don't understand. It's crazy. I hear now things from some of the people I meet, like in the church, people from his own Christian white world that I used to hear from Arab taxi drivers 15 years ago while I was in Kuwait, while I was in, in Doha, or this. And this is exactly the outcome of all the failures that we've seen. And that's a reality that we're living in today.

A (63:57)

The west sense of self was actively dismantled by academia, by sense making elites and this stuff is making its way back. I think I have a fairly clear picture of what you see and I don't have a ready and obvious counter. It makes a lot of sense that that's exactly what's underway right now, what's actually happening and it becomes intelligible because I don't have to now assume there's this mysterious back room sort of backlog of vast Muslim ideas that I have no access to and that it's all some kind of secret coding that I can't understand because of the language and culture and religion gap. This is Europe. This is 20th century Europe. And so if this is 20th century Europe entering into a West whose elites have completely dismantled the Western sense of self. I know I just said a completely irresponsible, incoherent sentence. I'm going to run with it. That's to all the emails I'm going to get because there is something real there, even if it has to be explicated and carefully mapped out. Those ideas coming back, what do we do about it? What do Jews who find themselves in this incredibly untenable position on the progressive side, they can either join through all of these loyalty oaths that they have to take the progressive side, including anti Zionism, including literally being upset that half the living Jews of this earth survived the 20th century because without Israel they wouldn't have. And when people come at me and say, what do you mean they could have gone to America and then have to start explaining about immigration quotas in the 1920s and 30s, they literally all like, they're pretty much statistically Apologies to French Jews who are 90% Sephardic because they're basically after the Holocaust. All the Jews who fled North Africa, they're pretty much the last living Jews of the Eastern hemisphere. And American progressive Jews to remain in those progressive spaces have to perform a rejection of the last living Jews on the other side of the world. Something no one has ever asked any Muslim to do from Muslim societies. Nobody has ever asked somebody, oh, are you Syrian, are you Sudanese, are you Yemeni, are you Chinese? We have some problems with your very existence as a nation or with you here having to perform apologies for your nation over there. And so Jews in progressive spaces can be progressive on the condition that they do something profoundly anti Jewish or just simply ahistorical to the Jewish historical experience. And then on the right wing, what Ben Shapiro has to go through, Ben Shapiro feels himself, I believe. I haven't spoken to him, but I've heard him speak about these things. He feels that he's at war. Why should Ben Shapiro be at war? He's in a more serious war internally than with the progressive other side of the debate. What is that? And if he wasn't Jewish, he wouldn't be. If he wasn't Jewish, he could be doing the JD Vance, the Megyn Kelly, hedging all sides thing. So Jews suddenly have to be circumspect about navigating these political spaces. And these political spaces have overwhelmed the senses, they've overwhelmed the discourse. I don't know if most Americans are on the populist right and the progressive left, but all Americans have to respond to it. And Mamdani is the mayor of New York. So asking as a Jew, watching other Jews suddenly living the life that Herzl's Jews were living, that Herzl saw them living, that drove him to Zionism, from deep believer in integrationism to the point where he was willing to convert to Catholicism. Watching Jews live those lives again for the first time in a century or for the first time since the end of the Second World War probably. What do you do? How do you push back against a cultural shift so profound, so utterly bolstered and held up by all possible mechanisms of prestige? How do you push back against what academia has now as a monoculture adopted onto itself and the sense making elites of the left have adopted into themselves? And the biggest podcasters on the right, Joe Rogan, will platform Ian Carroll because it's kind of interesting to check if maybe the Jews are a giant world spanning conspiracy out to destroy the Christian white man. How do you build A response to that.

B (68:21)

All right. I'm always afraid of giving prescriptions. But I can tell you what I think really should happen. I think, number one, everything that's happening actually shows that Israel matters a lot. This is exactly why Israel is important. And I think this should push people to commit more to Israel and Israel future, Israeli security. And that also means that Israelis need to get their politics in order. Honestly, the messy politics is hurting the country, is hurting the world. Jews that actually now need Israel more than ever, especially Western or basically Western Jews. So Israelis need to get their politics in order because it just things are bad enough to set aside all of the pity and pathetic things and try to get things right. The Middle east is probably all of these fantasies and the utopias of the Abraham Accords of which were great. You know, the region is going to become one. That's it. It's going to become like another version of the eu. I don't think that this is happening. The Middle east is going to be dysfunctional for a while. If it's not Iran, it's going to be somebody else. You're going to have regional competitions. It's just history as it is. Powerful men competing, populism using movements, using ideologies. As long as you have collapsed states, extremely cheap labor in which basically you can hire a fighter for like $50 a month, you're always going to have. You're going to have a lot of dysfunction, at least for the observable future. So commitment to Israel is number one, number two in America itself. I think we should exactly. Or Jews should do exactly what Ben Shapiro is doing. I like what Ben Shapiro is doing a lot. I have to say it fills me with an immense sense of inspiration and pride when I see him standing an Orthodox Jew wearing a keeper within American conservative circles, not flinching, defending himself and attacking all of those insane, corrupt, pathetic people who go to Qatar. And we know it's just. It's unbelievable what's happening. It's on so many levels. Not just lying, not just conspiratorial, not just pathological, not just. They also corrupt there. We know they go to Arab capitals and they the worst of Arab capitals, Dohan they receive their patronage. So what Ben Shapiro doing is exactly right. Not flinching. Jews belong to the United States. They are part of the American experience. It's actually a key. I think it's a key component. I believe it's a key component of American identity. And there are a lot of good people that are standing with you that are going to be Your allies. I am one of them. I'm not Jewish, but I don't want to live in the whatever sick fantasy these other people want. I like America that produced American Jews as the most positive Diaspora experience in Jewish history. That's a great country. That's a great country for me. That's a great country for my children. And I'm sure I'm not the only one who actually believes that way. So standing and fighting for America, the last thing, and this is a critique from, or a criticism from an outsider in Israel. Israel is probably the place where you can just be, and you will be Jewish, that is, you can just live. Because Israel is a Jewish state. It's the national culture, so you cannot particularly care about these things, but you and your kids will be Jewish anyways. I'm not sure that you can do that in America. That is, you have to actively engage with your Judaism. You have to actually want to be Jewish. This Woody Allen, secular, liberal, coastal Judaism, it was extremely thin. I mean, is extremely thin. And I'm not sure it can withstand the pressure of the moment or that it will. Even without the pressure, I don't know if it has a future anyways. I mean, ultimately, what then? Why then just disappear in society? I think it's very important to actively, and I'm saying this again as somebody, I'm not Jewish. I'm not converting to Judaism, but I have an immense respect to Jews and Judaism. I think Judaism has been an immensely positive force in the world. And basically, I like Jews who are Jews. And that's actually what I discovered when I kind of looked at the people that I like and the people I like talking to and the people I don't like talking to. I discovered that basically I like Jews who disagree with me, even liberal Jews, progressive Jews, but who are really Jews. I like them a lot. And I think that also goes for a lot of people. But it's not just about liking. It's about actually being committed to being Jewish. Because otherwise, well, if you don't want to be Jewish, if you don't want to do the work of being Jewish, if you don't choose it actively, why the headache? Why are we doing all of this fighting to begin with?

A (73:13)

My takeaway is the problem is bigger than we can possibly imagine. And also, when you can see it, you can fight it. And so we stand up and we fight. I agree with you about Ben Shapiro. I think the same way about Bari Weiss. I think the same way about an entire host of Jews that I have seen and talked to and learned from, who have stood up and said, we are drawing a line in the sand and we are pushing back. Because these forces, as you describe it, you describe it, I think, with a deeper dive into the bookshelf than most of the rest of us possibly could. These are forces that are self destructive. A society that does too much thinking about Jews is probably seriously collapsing everywhere else. The Jews are, in that sense, not the canary in the coal mine. They're the signal. So we stand and we fight. We fight for the very societies in which we live, not for ourselves. Thank you so much for joining me. This was fascinating.

B (74:09)

Thank you. Habib.