B (3:03)

It's so great to have you on. Thank you so much for agreeing to do this. First of all, we'll start with just tell us a little bit about yourself. You bring a firsthand perspective. You were raised in Singapore. You're born and raised in Singapore, educated in the United States, and now you live in London. You're a citizen of the world, familiar with all these different worlds. So tell us a little bit about yourself and then we'll dig into the meat of the issues.

A (3:29)

Yeah, I think it's really weird to be born and raised in Singapore because it's just such a unique country that you almost can't relate to anyone else in the world in that sense. Maybe the insight on Israel, it colors that in a little bit because ties between Israel and Singapore go way back to Singapore's founding. And one thing that is probably would be interesting to your viewers is that my father was the head of deputy head of Military intelligence under the Ministry of Defense in Singapore, and he embedded and trained very closely with the IDF and the Mossad at the time because the Israeli Defense Forces were the ones that helped Singapore once it gained independence. Reluctantly to build up an army, Singapore knocked on the doors and asked for help from Egypt, from India, from Australia and the uk. They all said no. And only Israel came to Singapore's help. And so till today, the two countries are very close and the model that we have of, you know, officer training and even the conscription is all based on the idf. Except we don't get the girls involved. So it's just the girl's job is to have babies for the country not working as well as Israel's, but it's just men who are conscripted.

B (4:47)

Why? Why was Israel so open to it where others weren't? What was the reason for that religion? I mean, Singapore is a story of going from a third world backwater to the front, you know, leading, you know, the developed world and even the top of the developed world. It's this astonishing development story, not unlike Israel. So there's so many interesting parallels. But why was Israel happy to do that? Why was Israel part of that process?

A (5:13)

It's a very good Question. And this was only declassified, you know, years late after the fact. Because I think what Israel saw in Singapore was something of a mirror. It saw itself a small country, very vulnerable, no natural resources. It had to rely on just human capital. And, you know, there was a joke in the 50s, 60s, 70s about how Singapore was basically Israel of Southeast Asia because it's a small island state and it's surrounded by bigger Muslim neighbors. So you have Indonesia on the doorstep, you have Malaysia as a neighbor. And that region of Southeast Asia was quite difficult for Singapore to be in. And so I suspect that's what it is. I think the Israelis saw in Singapore, you know, just a fellow traveler facing very similar challenges. And till today, I think the Singaporeans, even, you know, youth are, are very grateful to the Israelis for, for that, for that help very early on.

B (6:18)

Okay, let's, let's get into it. I want to start with Iran and we're going to cover all the things I promised in the introduction.

A (6:24)

Okay?

B (6:26)

China's relationship with Iran. This is something that to me is mind blowing in the sense that I kind of knew pieces of it. But until I prepared for this episode and until I actually listened to you and read some of the things that have been written on these issues by others, I didn't understand the scale of it. Iran and China are not just partners. Iran is the. China is the sole guarantor of Iran's economic survival. The Iranian regime, to survive all these waves of protests that have happened since 2009, has basically been able to play the carrot and stick game with people. It has increased subsidies. It has tried to use the economic leverage that the IRGC has in Iran of control of Iran's economy to basically buy off the population and constantly stave off the next revolution, the next protest, the next uprising, and the one international force, the one element, the one actor that constantly refills Iran's coffers and allows Iran's regime to continue to play these games. It literally buys more than 80% of Iran's total oil exports and does all the work necessary to bypass American sanctions. To do that is China. China is the backup, is the strategic depth of Iran. Can you tell us about that? How deep does it go and why? What does China see in Iran? What benefit does China get from backing Iran to the hilt to that extent?

A (7:55)

Well, you're right. Even though the Iranian oil is being sold to China at very steep discounts for Iran, that big customer in China essentially feeds the war machine because it bypasses the sanctions. And in terms of the Gameplay that you're seeing here, it's been developed over time. But Iran is also very crucial to China in its global strategy. And so I think we should maybe get into what China's global strategy is. Ultimately, what China wants is to displace the US led world system with a Sinocentric one in which its interests dictate the norms of the world. And the goal of that is 2049. China wants to be a preeminent unchallenged military power. By 2049, it's the hundredth anniversary of the founding of the PRC. That's when Mao founded it in 1949. And so it's a nice round number. It's a romantic story that they can tell, you know, the world and they can tell their citizens. And so by 2029, their goal is to actually supplant the US led world order. And in order to do that, it has to make these moves on the chessboard. If you look at, you know, where China can co opt and essentially, you know, the strategy of say, building allies or even co opting other countries to become vassal states, what China has done is effectively, I think it was maybe in 2012 roughly, that they launched this thing called the Belt and Road Initiative. And the Belt and Road Initiative is a economic development program ostensibly about infrastructure investment. So they would go to various countries, invite them to join the Belt and Road Initiative on the pretext that, you know, it will fund road projects, it will build railway and. But essentially what that becomes or evolves into is a kind of debt trap. So sometimes written in these agreements would be okay, if you cannot, you know, meet this, pay back the debt for our initial investment, you would have to give up your port, you would have to give up, you would have to do something, you would have to give up this airport or something like that. And so what it is, is actually kind of a form of neocolonialism around the world, just not in a very overt way. It's a very underhanded way that is almost intangible and hard to see with your own eyes. Iran is part of the Belt and Road strategy for China. It's situated very strategically, you know, salient. It has access to the Red Sea, the Strait is right there. And also, China is not energy secure. So it has to get, it's still very reliant on fossil fuels. It is a, you know, rapidly industrialized, an industrial powerhouse. And so it has to feed its own economy with fossil fuels. Even though, yes, China has made a lot of inroads into green energy. And nuclear energy. But still, by and large, it still has to rely on a lot of oil. And so Iran is a perfect partner. That is the nuts and bolts of the geography. Right. But beyond that, what? Because China's goal ultimately is to supplant the US Led order. Iran is just the perfect foil. Because of the eschatological myth of Iran and what it represents in, in terms of third world kind of national liberation type rhetoric, Iran stands in opposition to the West. And so in that sense, the ideological goals of both nations are actually completely aligned. Ultimately, what they stand for is to take down Western hegemony, is to challenge it. And to that end, Iran has become very central partner in this axis of resistance that China is building, that includes North Korea, Russia, Iran, China. It has attempted to co, opt, you know, co opt this whole axis into a bigger movement called brics. But it was all the rage maybe like seven, eight years ago, but you know, it today, it has kind of frayed. BRICS has become completely incoherent because what global, what movement can have both Saudi Arabia and Iran in the same coalition? It just didn't make sense.

B (12:35)

You're talking about, you know, Iran facing the United States and challenging the United States as a way, in a way that's very useful to China. And I'm just thinking, as we're recording, right, the Abraham Lincoln has arrived in the Persian Gulf. It left the Chinese frontier where the United States was using it to push back against Chinese influence, and it's now in the Persian Gulf facing Iran. And whatever Trump's decisions on Iran, it's a distraction from China's perspective, from America being able to think about Taiwan. And so you nailed it. Having that nexus of American distraction that requires moving those resources. It plays out in real time if we're, if we're just starting to notice. Right. So Iran is very useful in that way, but it goes deeper. The Beidou navigation system, satellite navigation system, is something that Iran uses to avoid Western American led GPS system. Right. So there are all these like, alternative fundamental infrastructures that we don't think about. But Iran is basically on the Chinese infrastructures. And therefore it's also kind of a testing ground for them and for the, their reliability and whether they can survive an American strike or an Israeli operation, things like that. So Iran serves for China as a front against America in so many ways, in so many layers.

A (13:52)

Yeah. Bear in mind that what has happened since the latest round of protests had flared up is that starlinked was a alternative Internet system that was operated by SpaceX and that was very crucial in Ukraine, in the Ukraine, Russia war. And about what, day 12, day 13 into the war. And you saw the Internet just completely, just off a cliff, just blocked in Tehran. And this helped to not just prevent the world from getting images and videos on what's going on on the ground in Iran, but it also prevented I think Iranians from coordinating and actually, you know, deciding to go out and protest. So it helped to stifle the, the attempts for the population to show their discord and what the technology that was used to actually block this was Chinese. It was electronic warfare that they had gleaned from China, the military and intelligence sharing, technology sharing between China and Iran. The scope is very big. It is not just satellite blocking, it is also the repression apparatus that China has really perfected at home domestically. The Chinese Internet environment is a very tightly controlled, highly censored environment. And you know, there was that famous clip of Bill Clinton, I think it was 92, right after, sorry, 2002 maybe when China joined the WTO. Bill Clinton said, you know, you, you can't nail the, the Great Firewall is basically going to be useless. You can't nail Jello to a wall, right? Saying that, essentially implying that China will not be able, they'll try to censor the Internet but they won't really be successful. That turned out to be false. China has been very successful in building a very closed off Internet. All their apps are homegrown. For every software that exists in the U.S. for every app and platform that exists in the U.S. there is a Chinese version that exists within the artificial, the Great Firewall. And there are many topics that are simply just out of bounds. If you, insofar as typed, anything alluding to 6-4-1989, which is Tiananmen Square, you can't even post it. So these are preemptive bans on the Internet. And then anything that is sensitive, any comment that is sensitive on a story in just a matter of hours will be removed. China spends a lot of resources, and not just manpower resources, but now increasingly AI driven resources as well that, you know, just are, it's, it's able to enact this perfect level of control. And it's not just on speech. We're talking about facial recognition, gait analysis. All these are AI surveillance systems. They've managed to deploy it in Xinjiang, which is where the Uyghur Muslims have been under repression. The State department back in 2021 under Biden calls it a genocide, a cultural genocide of the Uyghurs. And that has become the perfect laboratory to experiment with these repression technologies and how to use state apparatus to essentially control movement, control speech. Iran has essentially co opted the Chinese technology of repression apparatus surveillance tech for its people.

B (17:35)

It is astonishing to me the extent to which seriously diving into this issue of China has really reframed for me. The Israel Iran standoff. F35s were facing basically Chinese radar systems. There was a lot of Russian stuff, the S3 hundreds and all that, which turned out not to be very effective. But a lot of the things that Iran is trying to install, trying to bring in from China is, is in operation there. The cyber is Chinese, the repression apparatuses and mechanisms are Chinese. Whether or not our future in this AI run Internet landscape is a future of wide open everybody yelling at each other like America right now, or total and absolute repression and control down to the granular individual, because the AI can do it, is what's at stake here in this great war between China and America. And the laboratories for a lot of these technologies are the Israel Iran war. Is, am I, am I exaggerating or is that how you understand what's going on here?

A (18:34)

Yeah, that's what I understand. I also do recall that during the Israel Iran war in June last year, there were Chinese planes that turned off their transponders and ended up landing in Tehran. And there was speculation as to whether or not China was actually directly, you know, replenishing stocks, weapon stocks, because Iran had, you know, sent a lot of its ballistic missiles. The question of what it was carrying is still, you know, up in the air. The, the depth of that relationship is, is it's, it's very deep and it's very pertinent for, for Israel because if China is feeding Iran's war machine and repression apparatus, it is also indirectly feeding funding Hamas. It is also indirectly funding essentially the instability of the region. The Iranian, the Iraqi militias, the Houthis. It presents itself as the stabilizer and the responsible actor on the world stage. But through his actions, if you understand what he's doing in Iran, it's completely the opposite.

B (19:43)

What should Israel do about it? How do you, how do you. Israel can't face off China, right? We're a tiny little hamlet in the middle of a big region. We're a little island nation, so to speak. What do we do about this Chinese Iran connection?

A (19:56)

So it's, it's interesting because Israel actually got closer to, to China 2010 and beyond. So this is really under Netanyahu's tenure that China deepen its relationship with Israel. I will Argue that was a calculated risk that ended up backfiring. But maybe we can go into that later. Ultimately, I don't think that Israel has any way to change what China's doing in Iran unless it has leverage over China. And so the question is, when you're dealing with an adversarial nation like, like China, what leverage do you have? Simply, the United States has a lot of leverage over China. It has this large trade relationship with China that it could use. It had tariffs and that's where you see President Trump using tariffs as a foreign policy tool. It has leverage on China because of chips, and that's very important. That's why we had the CHIPS act that enacted export controls. China needs the CHIPS for its, you know, its growth, for its economic growth and for all its new technologies. So the trick for Israel would be identifying the areas in which it does have leverage over China. Is there a particular technology? I know Israel got close to China on sharing agriculture technology or water technologies or things like that. Is that enough? Is China dependent on Israel enough? Does it want anything from Israel? Ultimately that can be used to coerce China. But unless, you know, for China, the calculus is simply is their alignment with Iran, does that get them closer to their goal of replacing the US led world order? As long as that outweighs what Israel can give them, it's not going to change.

B (22:03)

Israel has no leverage over China. It just has to fight Iran and fight Iran hard enough that even China's help for Iran doesn't help Iran. Right? That would be the answer.

A (22:12)

Agreed.

B (22:13)

So let me, let's get into the Palestinians. China is on the world stage at the un, consistently pro Palestinian to the point where, at least in diplomatic terms, it protects Hamas at every turn. During the last two years, for example, is that important? Significant, also a strategic thing, as with Iran, also a way of thumbing its nose at the Americans are building out the world order that it wants to see. Or is it just kind of diplomatic moral positioning showing that it has the moral high ground to, you know, to the third World. Are there any real fundamental strategic interests there?

A (22:49)

Well, Israel's relationship to China goes back a thousand years, but China's relationship with the PLO actually goes back to right after when Mao takes over and founds the prc, the People's Republic of China. His foreign policy back then was, you know, whatever it takes to support anti imperialist, you know, third world kind of liberation movements. And the PLO represented exactly that for them. They were one of the first non Arab states to establish relationships with the plo. They sent weapons, they funded them, they even had shared guerrilla tactics and made sure the PLO members were all reading the Little Red Book. So this was a, you know, complete ideological crossover as well. And so since Communist China was founded, the. The relationship between the Palestinians and the. The Chinese have been very consistent. Ultimately, China came to see Israel as the harbinger, you know, the representative of US imperialism, but in the Middle East. And so that has always been their calculation. However, during the Netanyahu years, you know, China was opening up to Israel a bit more. You had bilateral trade bloom from, I think it was 8 billion in 2012, and it grew to 20 billion in 2022. So more than doubled. There was more agreements and deepening economic ties. You invited the Chinese to invest in the Haifa port. That deepening all of a sudden, I think, was changed on October 7th. That for me was the mask slip moment. And I think many Israelis woke up to that as well, including Prime Minister Netanyahu back in 2017 when he went to Beijing on a diplomatic trip. He actually said to Xi Jinping that Israel and China, you know, is a marriage made in heaven. He was back then clamoring to join the ballroom initiative. So he was. You could see Israel was hedging at the time. But then the way that China responded after October 7th, immediate aftermath, okay, we're talking about, was horrendous. When the attacks happened, you had all the Western allies and countries expressing solidarity condemning Hamas. Instead, what China did was not only did they fail to actually condemn Hamas, they failed to label it as an act of terrorism. And instead, the first instinct right after October 7th was to express concerns about escalating tensions between Israel and Palestine and to urge calm and restraint among all parties. So that was that first instinct, which to me already shows the cards. It really shows what China's game was at the time. And if Israel is trying to contemplate of whether, you know, China is a friend or a foe, I think those actions, which does not pass the absolute lowest moral bar, the bar of human decency, tells you everything. And since then, as you said Houyf at the UN at every moment, China as a permanent, it's a member of this permanent member of the Security Council, it vetoes and blocks every pro Israel resolution, Every resolution that the US backs to condemn Hamas, it has blocked for the last two and a half years. And it basically shows Israel very clearly what the relationship between China and how it sees to exploit the Gaza conflict to advance its own geopolitical goals. If you look at there's a great group that I met up with in Jerusalem. It was called Palestinian Media Watch, and it's a group that monitors and translates all the Palestinian state media. And they noticed that the Palestinian media was actually talking about one China policy. And. And Palestinian leaders of Fatah were saying that China would be the savior of the world. And so you start to see Palestinian media now echoing Chinese CCP narratives. What does Palestine have anything to do with Taiwan? You know, in fact, it doesn't even follow that, you know, they would be anti Taiwan because isn't Taiwan the. The David versus the Goliath of China? So they have every reason actually identify with Taiwan. Right. Just if you superimpose the two struggles. But yet it is parroting CCP narratives because by projecting that kind of ideas into Palestinian media, it helps China kind of convince Arab. This is also viewed by the rest of the Arab world. And it's. It just cements their view of the world and legitimizes it outside of just Chinese propaganda. And it's very, very useful in terms of sowing discord not just between Israel and Arab states. It's also very good at sowing discord in the US within the US population, and it just helps to advance its goals.

B (28:36)

So I want to get into this and really maybe also focus in on the thing that my audience would be more interested in, which is the anti Semitism question. You specifically talked about how one of the drivers for this astonishing new rise in anti Semitism among tens of millions of Americans, especially the young, especially those on TikTok, on both left and right, couched in different ways, but it's always about the Jews. Somehow China is behind all this. Can you, can you tell us about that? How does this fit with the anti Semitism issue in the US So let's.

A (29:07)

Really zoom out here to understand why online platforms are being flooded with anti Semitism and anti Semitic content and why China is driving it. You have to read this book. It's called Unrestricted Warfare and it's written by two colonels in the pla. And Unrestricted Warfare is basically a book about how to wage asymmetric war using all kinds of techniques that are outside kinetic war. And so it kind of goes back to that, you know, ancient Chinese military book, Sun Tzu's Art of War, which says that the best war is the one that you didn't have to fight because you've weakened your enemy from within. And the tools that can be used in unrestricted warfare are tools of trade, are tools of media and diplomacy, things like that. And you have to understand that anti Semitic content is part or anti Israel narratives too. They're part of an informational war to wage unrestricted warfare. Not Israel is part of the game. But really it is about the west, right? The battlefield is not Gaza. The battlefield is the hearts and minds of young people in the West. That's how they see it. The levers of media are state media. You have Xinhua, CGN tv. They now have. I noticed this actually during COVID that Chinese state media, just like Russian state media, like rt started Arabic channels so you could watch. Now CGN Arabic, right? And this is basically Chinese state media in Arabic. It's like Al Jazeera in English, which is Qatar media in English for the American market. So you have state media, then you have bot farms and coordinated activists who are paid directly by the state or indirectly through NGOs.

B (31:11)

Right.

A (31:11)

And we're seeing that with the reporting now on Neville Roy Singham, which is an American billionaire based in China that's been funding a lot of the pro Palestinian protests, the globalized intifada protests going on in America, on the streets, on campuses. And then you have online platforms that is direct. You know, on Twitter, I'm sure you have been the subject of the target of a lot of anti Semitic hate. There was a moment, I think it was for quite a few months after the Iran Israel war last year, that every time I Posted I had $7,000, $7,000 in my responses. And if I had a dollar for every time someone said $7,000, I would actually have $7,000. It was, it's just, it just floods your replies. And they're relentless there. So those are the bots and operating on Twitter, Facebook and places like that. And then you also have TikTok. Now that this is the piece de resistance because TikTok has an algorithm and it's by the way owned by a Chinese company, recently divested and sold to an American, a conglomerate. But TikTok has been one of the main drivers. So right after October 7, in the months preceding, so this is even before Israel started to, to act, that was like a three week, you know, just lull. And there were, I don't know if you remember, you know, there were clips of, of youth, just young people praising Osama bin Laden, playing Osama bin Laden, clips that went viral. There was pro Hitler content, there was content denying the Holocaust, content inverting, doing the moral inversion, so equating the Israelis with Nazis. And even on chatty state media, for example, I saw a Clip that essentially was examining how 3% of Jews in America control 70% of wealth in America. Right. So it's, it's, it's again, you will notice that this is not unlike things that Candace Owens has said, that Ian Carroll has said. And there's a reason for that. This is complete alignment. And the statistics on TikTok is that the surveys show that anyone who spends more than 30 minutes a day or more on TikTok is at least 17% more likely to hold antisemitic views and people, NCRI has done these studies, they look at hashtags and they compare what, you know, how things trend compared to say other platforms like Instagram threads. And so they, you can see how things are throttled, right? How things are the gas. They put the, you know, pedal on the gas to kind of throttle that or they fail to remove anti Semitic content. Right. I mean again, China is such a, operates its online platforms in such a, in, in a way that has so much control and so much censorship. So essentially anything that is trending is allowed to trend. There's tacit approval from the government for that, for that topic to be spreading virally. They would never let that happen unless there wasn't, there was actually endorsement.

B (34:43)

Is China going to be pushing this anti Semitism, turning it on when it's its own interests, turning it maybe a little bit down in the West? Is China now the great purveyor of antisemitism in the west at will for all time? Is this now something Jews just have to learn to live with, that there are now these back end kinds of infrastructures pushing antisemitism into their existence, into their lives, into their surroundings for all time.

A (35:07)

So there is actually a white pill. You know, anyone who has gone to university in America or you know, worked in certain sectors like tech, one of the most common interracial couplings is Jews and Chinese. They always find each other. They get married, it's very common pairing. And there's a reason for that. I think Jewish culture and Chinese culture are very compatible. They are compatible on family orientation. They're very family oriented peoples. They are high achieving, they, they are focused on education. The relationship between Jews and China goes back a thousand years. And my white pill is that, you know, in contrast to Europe, for example, European cultures, where I think antisemitism has ebbed and flowed over the years, like a lot of what we're seeing on the online right podcast sphere is rehashed. David Irving. And then obviously in the Arab world there has been, you know, Expulsions of Jews every now and then, it's just, it's. It's baked into history. But for China, you've had a thousand years of, you know, interactions between Jews and China and ancient China, and there's never been. There's no historical record, but virtually none of anti Semitism. In fact, the first wave of Jews came 900 years ago during the Tang Dynasty. And then during the height of Western colonialism and trade, Baghdadi Jews, Sephardic Jews were. They fled their homelands and they went to China and they literally built Shanghai and Hong Kong. The Sassoon family, the Kadiri family, these are well known. And, you know, China also provided a safe haven for Ashkenazi Jews fleeing Russian programs. In 1917, they. They actually housed 20,000 Jewish refugees during World War II when Shanghai.

B (37:16)

The few places where a Jew could get a visa to actually flee and escape the Holocaust. Yeah, one of the few places on Earth.

A (37:23)

Exactly. And so I think China's view of anti Semitism is not ideological. The word for Zionism in Mandarin is. I'm going to translate that means to return to your homeland, to return to your home country, and is just doctrine or ideology. And so baked into the very definition of Zionism in Chinese is the core aim of Zionism, which is the return of the Jews to the homeland. So it recognizes that and which is rare in most languages, which would just be a phonetic translation of Zionism. So I think there is no deep animus between the Chinese and the Jews. This is merely political expediency. And the reason why of late, like in the last month or so, you started to see anti Semitism kind of dialed down a bit on online platforms. I think I 24 reported this, that China was kind of calling off its bots and the Wu mao Army, the 50 cent army that it pays to enact its propaganda goals. And the reason for that is now hedging because it realized that the axis that it has invested a lot in, which is Iran, Venezuela, that axis has dramatically weakened and it needs export markets. And that market is now looking like it's on the way out, especially with the regime looking very weak, might collapse in a few months. China's now starting to hedge and you see it kind of pivoting again. Now I would say to Israelis and Jews in general to kind of keep your eyes open, you know, like, because China is so pragmatic, I don't think that Jews feel comfortable again kind of trusting that they will always be a friend. The INSS surveys post October 7th shows that 50% of Israelis now view China as unfriendly or hostile. And that is way up from just a few years ago before October 7th. But historically, there's just nothing embedded in the culture, nothing embedded in, you know, any kind of, like, spiritual doctrines that preclude Chinese and Jews from really getting along. So I hope we'll see it, but I still expect it to be used as a tool.

B (39:54)

Why Jews? Who cares about Jews that much? 3% of Jews do not control 70% of America's wealth. Both of those numbers are totally fake and weird, and I have no idea what, where they even draw that from. Why make that claim and then ship it out into the world?

A (40:16)

It's a few reasons. One of them is to position itself as, you know, an ally of the Arab states. So it's to gain influence regionally, right? So China wants to increase its standing among the Arab nations, the Gulf nations. It sees itself as a player in the Middle East. It can elevate themselves that way. That's one reason. The second reason is to sow discord between Israel and the United States. You would notice that, you know, the rise of the woke, right, has really made this coalition very fragile. The MAGA coalition, it's torn it apart. It, you know, used to be that conservatives in America were almost always aligned with the Israel cause. And now that has been torn apart. And partly anti Semitic tropes have helped get us there. And then you can see how that became a wedge where this podcast host didn't condemn that podcast host. And now, you know, it used to be that you were all fighting Woke on the online, right? And now you're fighting each other. And so the MAGA coalition gets torn apart. And then the third one is that it's completely destabilizing to the west, you know, to have anti Semitic content kind of whipping, whipping up a frenzy, getting people to protest, getting them on the streets. It disenfranchises people. It's demoralizing. It demoralized the Jews. It turns the Jews against everybody else. And it's like the perfect wedge issue to, again, going back to unrestricted warfare. You can weaken society so much, right? I can't remember who it was who said that. Anti Semitism is always the sign that a society is about to collapse. And if that's true, then it is the perfect. It's the perfect piece of content. It's so cheap, you know, it's every. Every few years, every like few decades, it seems to get rebooted like a really bad Hollywood movie that's happened. And Europe has the cultural memory of this. And so it's so easy to kind of drum up, to weaken societies from within. And that's how it sees this project of flooding online platforms of anti Semitism.

B (42:49)

How much do you think the disruptions, the insane, you know, polarization that social media algorithms are driving? How much of this is Chinese propaganda? Is it 3%? They're trying to push it a little farther because it helps China's interests in various places? Or is it 70%? Is China the basic problem? Does the west basically have a China? You know, is China the virus, the Chinese regime, this virus infecting Western democracies? And it's not actually the Western democracies are throwing, you know, tearing each other apart, tearing themselves internally apart. But in fact this is being driven by a malign actor by the prc.

A (43:32)

You know, during the run up to the first Trump election, you saw Russian accounts, funding or supporting pages and content that inflamed both sides. So you would have, you know, the kind of rise of the sort of far right alt, right back then it was called, and movements to kind of push Trump into office, also funded by the Russians. At the same time the BLM stuff was funded by, by certain subversive elements. And I think it is the same now. Just the focus is all on anything surrounding Israel because it's just been so effective at dividing the coalition that is in power right now in the US but also not just in power, but literally pursuing a campaign to stop the, to deny the rise of China, to deny China kind of building the world and its, remaking the world in its own image. And so it is, you know, a very, it's been a very long game. It's not just Qatar's funding for, you know, universities. China's been doing the same as well and receives almost a lot less attention. Everything they accuse Israel of doing, of lobbying, of infiltrating, of co opting elites, China has done to a scale that is shocking if you really look into the details. We're talking also, you know, infiltration and espionage into, into US homeland in the form of students. Every day the FBI is releasing information about someone, you know, caught stealing ip, tech transfer, industrial espionage. These are military companies. And by the way, Israel has had some cases of this too. There were attempts by the Chinese and I think some of them successful, to steal military data from the company that was running iron dome on UAVs and things like that. And you know, that kind of espionage sure happens all the time. But China in particular is not Just playing the information war game. They are infiltrating institutions in America. It's not just scope, it's also depth. And I kind of liken it to, you know, when, when you kind of go down the rabbit hole of microplastics and you realize that microplastics is everywhere, including in the water supply, including in, I know, you know, people have found microplastics in the, in balls, like in testicles, like it's everywhere. That, that is the level of infiltration. China's like microplastics. It's in almost every institution. And at the end of the day, the we have to be very cognizant. It's like, you know, the only thing that prevents infiltration is, is vigilance. The only thing that prevents Beijing's dominant dominance in the world is full spectrum deterrence. And it's the same on both that macro global scale, right? Having a strong defense, you know, making sure you secure your supply chains, making sure you, you know, do not cede the freedom of navigation in the South China Sea. That's full spectrum denial. Because if you didn't do that, China will infiltrate, will take over. That's why they're militarizing islands now in the South China Sea. And it's the same at home as well. If you're not constantly vigilant about, you know, who is running your, your apps. You know, by the way, before TikTok, Grindr, which is the gay dating app, was actually owned by a Chinese company as well. And the United States government very early on recognized that that is compromise. You know, Lord knows how many secretly gay Republicans have had their, you know, dick pics on Chinese servers. And so they actually forced the sale of Grindr to an American owner. So constant vigilance about, about vulnerabilities and ways in which there are, you know, there would be reason for, for the Chinese to want to use that to subvert the state. So education, healthcare, it's, it's everything. It's constant vigilance is the only way.

B (47:45)

How does the west, can the west win this? Are you optimistic? I mean, is the United States capable? Is its intelligence apparatus? Is its own infiltration of China even remotely up to scratch? Can you defend against this kind of full court press that an entire, I mean, it's a government that rules over a seventh of humanity, give or take, with vast, almost limitless resources invested in this. How do you fight this? And are you optimistic that the American led Alliance, Coalition World Order can win this over the long term?

A (48:22)

You know, the Trump's strategy of securing the Western Hemisphere, as he outlined in the newly released National Security Strategy, is really about rebuilding civilizational confidence, is about securing the Western Hemisphere. And a lot of the actions from, you know, what just happened in Venezuela with the decapitation strike on Maduro, on preventing the outflow of Venezuelan oil to China and Iran, all of that can be seen as moves to deal with this rising threat of China overtaking the world. You know, ultimately you're asking about the systems, right? You know, China's sell to the world and to the developing world, which is very popular among Arab nations. Among African nations is the China. Chinese model is better. It leads to more prosperity, it leads to more stability. And you know, whenever there is chaos coming up from the US Whether you have school shootings or rampant drug problems and crime, all of this is being used by the Chinese to say to people around the third world, you don't want that, you don't want democracy, right? And every four years you have a change in government. And so the Chinese sell to the world is that our model is stable, our model is superior. And so join us. And the one, you know, the big advantage I do think that the US has simply, and this really goes back to the same kind of similar dynamics we saw during the Cold War is at the end of the day, authoritarian systems have bad information. They have bad information because they do not have a free environment. They censor so much speech. Dictators generally don't like to hear bad news. And so their own systems may seem very stable on the surface, but underneath it all, they're not. And if you look at what happened in the last few months, China has purged six out of seven of the generals that run its central military command. That is a nightmare scenario. You know, this is worse than like the death of Stalin vibes. It shows a society that is actually paranoid. I don't know how anyone is sleeping soundly at night. You know, compare that to say the Israeli generals, the American, you know, army personnel.

B (50:58)

Can you explain why what this was about? Was there some great military failure?

A (51:04)

So, you know, with China, you have to guess because a lot of that, whatever is communicated is just what they want the public to know. It's couched in an anti corruption drive. But because the generals that are purged are involved in the rocket force and because these are kind of red aristocracy types, you know, these are people. The general that was purged, Zhang Yuxia, he is a princeling. His father founded the pla. So to purge that high ranking of an official Some very big statement. And the guess is that the target for China to develop a military that is ready to invade Taiwan by 2027, that was the target that was given to them. And because it was not met, because they're not halfway there, that was the reason for the purge. So it's, it's a way to get rid of generals who would dissent in, in the event that an order was given for a Taiwan invasion.

B (52:10)

Wow. So that's, it's a signal of the future, actual practical, pragmatic policy that China will want to pursue in the next couple of years vis a vis Taiwan. It's a very bad signal for Taiwan, these purges.

A (52:23)

Long, long term. Long term. Although the short term, I don't know how you can evade Taiwan when you, you know, your command structure just got nuked like that and turmoil is, is, is just rampant underneath a very stable surface. And likewise the, you know, the Chinese economy is, the people say it's a paper tiger. Even the growth numbers, the demographics, there is a demographic time bomb that they're facing. And so the idea that China will actually get old before it really gets rich is a big problem because no nation can really, you know, surpass that kind of obstacle. So there are natural constraints. China has a closing window when it can actually surpass the United States. That is the white pill here. It can do a lot of damage in the meantime. But there are physical constraints to China's rise. And despite the seeming, you know, instability of the US system of liberal democracy, you know, you see now with Trump kind of rolling some things back, right, we're doing things that would make Francis Fukuyama cry, right, because he's now enacting industrial policies which they call picking winners and losers. The US system is resembling a bit, something that looks less laissez faire, more mercantilist. But all of this is to correct some of the economic circumstances that has precipitated the situation in the first place. But ultimately, I think, you know, it might sometimes seem very pessimistic. You know, every time there's just turmoil in use and then you look at China and it like, oh, wow, look, look at those people. Like they're just, you know, going along and everything's all fine. But underneath the surface, if you really like following the country and you're reading, you know, Chinese news sources, you realize like, firstly, life there is not. The social contract has changed the, the situation for just the average middle class person. Increasingly bad prospects. Youth unemployment very, very high now, especially under the age of 28. So China has a lot of structural problems, not to say the west doesn't, but I'm not that worried. Yeah.

B (54:46)

One reason that I have for optimism, and I, I don't know if it just comes from ignorance, is that, for example, the Belt and Road Initiative, you said this, right? These countries get into this terrible debt. I was reading just for this conversation about Pakistan and Sri Lanka. Many other countries have some of their most important infrastructures, things are deeply dependent on, for their military prowess and capabilities are now basically owned and or run by China. People will have to choose whether to have a world order that is somehow Western leaning, Western based, Western centric, or to be owned by the ccp. It seems like China's offering for all that it says, look, we're stable, look, they're democracies. It's actually offering a much worse deal, isn't it? I tend to think that, you know, if I was the Saudis and I really could choose either way, and I have 25 year Runway because of the oil, I would lean to the American side of that. I would hedge my bets to the last minute, obviously. But if I had to choose, what's the future, wouldn't the future be American? Wouldn't that be a better future? The Western future? That to me is, is an optimistic thought.

A (56:01)

Yeah. I think for small countries, middle powers, as Mark Carty recently called it. Davos, everybody has to hedge. The only major players in the world are Russia, China and the United States. There's just no other, there's no other power. And you know, there are industries and supply chains which are totally okay to be integrated. Right. So the, you know, global societies have become so complex that it's impossible to completely decouple. And I don't think that it matters for Israel if China was making crayons for Israel, but it would definitely matter if China was making any electrical components that would go into things like your smart grids or your drones, for example. Right. Because for China, ultimately all these trade links are also points of leverage. And we've seen them weaponize trade. Whenever there's a diplomatic outcome, they want to protest, they want to reverse. They've used trade in order to coerce the country from doing, you know, to do what it wants to do.

B (57:20)

You had a very specific story you told me about Israeli officers and their cars.

A (57:26)

Oh, yes, yeah.

B (57:27)

Well, that would be a great way to end with that warning to my fellow Israelis. Can you tell us that story?

A (57:34)

So in just 2025 last year, the MOD has, the ministry of Defense in Israel has finally passed a law banning Chinese EVs electric vehicles. This would be your BYDs, your NEOs, by the way. When I was in Israel I saw a lot of these cars. So even the taxis now are BYDs. They were being driven into by officers, into military bases. These are basically surveillance platforms on wheels, right? They hoover up terabytes of very granular data from videos from biometrics, audio in the car, lidar information, sensors, gps. They're just collecting all this information. And some of these cars have very sophisticated self driving functionalities, right. And so in order to do that it must be collecting a lot of information. And they're basically spy mobile on wheels. And I was surprised to see these cars being driven by IDF members, right. And they're parking. I, I was in Israel even as you know, first. The first time I raised the alarm was 2024, January 2024. I saw the IDF guy who was taking us around the kibbutz driving a Chinese ebit. It's like, do you know what information this car is constantly collecting? But not only collecting, it is also transmitting data to Chinese servers. And that's what the idf, what, that's what the MOD found, it's that they were actually transmitting as well. And so the thank heavens it was caught. Well, I don't know if any other salient information, you know, in terms of knowledge given to the Chinese about where Israeli bases are, you know, you can imagine they are allies with Iran. This is very, very prized information for the Iranians and obviously they would share that information. And so to be very careful about especially electronic smart components that are transmitting that are data collecting. You know, Israel of all countries should know what happens when you lose control, when you do not secure end to end your supply chain. Right. I mean you mastered the beeper operation, so that becomes a very salient issue I think for Israelis to wake up to. It's fine if China's making your clothing and the toys. It's not fine when these are electronics and things that allow China to essentially hoover up data because data for them is like oil. It's, it's a strategic resource and it can be weaponized because of the laws that China has, the cybersecurity laws, which essentially says that any company that has data, if compelled by the state, has to give it up. They have to give it up for national security purposes if asked by the state. So that is a very big danger.

B (60:43)

Melissa Chin, thank you so much for helping me to explain to our audience that Israel needs to understand that there's a much larger picture here that China is a big, significant, dramatic part of this picture. It's a huge part of the Iran threat. It's a huge part of a global architecture that I think threatens us all. Thank you so much for joining me.

A (61:07)

Thank you, Habib.