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- [00:19]
Ryan Reynolds
Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills. But it out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment
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- [00:55]
Zoe Booth
Welcome back to the Quillet Cetera Podcast.
- [00:57]
Zoe Booth (continued or co-host)
You're with me, Zoe Booth, and today my guest is Adam Louis Klein.
- [01:01]
Zoe Booth
Adam is a Ph.D. of anthropology at
- [01:05]
Zoe Booth (continued or co-host)
McGill University and the founder of the Movement Against Anti Zionism or maz.
- [01:11]
Zoe Booth
I came across MAZ through my friend
- [01:14]
Zoe Booth (continued or co-host)
Josh Dabblestein and at first I was
- [01:17]
Zoe Booth
a bit skeptical about what they were doing.
- [01:19]
Zoe Booth (continued or co-host)
So what they're doing is they're giving a framework and a language for people to combat the rampant violent anti Zionist rhetoric and ideology and movement that has taken over so many of our institutions, making it a taboo to be a Zionist Zionist. Stigmatizing Zionists, Jews and making life for Jews in the Diaspora and Israelis really, really hard and making them fair game for violence. What I've noticed over the past few years is that the anti Zionist crowd is a very, very well oiled machine. They know exactly what talking points to hit, they know exactly what to say and they know that repeating the same libels, libels such as ethnostate genocide, baby killers, racist Zionism is racism, et cetera. They know that if they repeat the same thing over and over again, it sticks and it becomes a taboo to criticize these claims. It's a really scary and pervasive form of mind control and brainwashing in that even when presented with evidence to the contrary, you still feel like you're obliged to acknowledge these stated facts about Israel. Adam was researching a niche tribe in the Amazon when October 7th happened and since then has dedicated his life, well, to finishing his dissertation, but also to combating this violent antisemitism. So many young Jews today have put a pin in their lives, in their social lives, in their careers, to focus on simply defending themselves and stopping the libel that results in the violence that we saw down at Bondi, that we saw in Washington, that we saw in Manchester.
- [03:10]
Zoe Booth
I just think it's such a shame
- [03:12]
Zoe Booth (continued or co-host)
that there's so Much effort and time that needs to be put into simply writing the record because these liars in the anti Zionist movement have done such good work, such good propaganda. It's fascinating to observe if you're interested in marketing and psychology, because they've done really, really incredible work in brainwashing so much of the population. So on that positive note, I hope you enjoy this conversation. Maybe it's not about enjoying it, it's about getting something from it. Towards the end, we do sort of rapid fire questions of how to handle libels when they come up in conversation. Maz, for me and its training has been extremely helpful. I thought I already had a good grasp on how to handle these conversations, these conversations, which are 99% of the time bad faith. And for your own mental health, you shouldn't even engage in them because they're just trying to make Jews and their allies suffer. But inevitably we will have to deal with this crap every day. So MAZ gives us the framework and the language to just deal with it quickly, effectively, and with the least amount of emotional work needed. So I hope you get a lot out of this conversation. If you do, please share it with friends who would also have something to gain from this conversation. Every time you share one of my podcast conversations, it helps the podcast grow and it helps get Quillet out there to new readers and listeners. And we all know there's so many people who need to hear the message. Without much further ado, let's get into this conversation with Adam Louis Klein, to
- [04:54]
Zoe Booth
start off with, could you talk a little bit about why you founded maz?
- [04:59]
Adam Louis Klein
Yeah. So, I mean, you know, I started in the Amazon. Basically, I was in the middle of the jungle with an indigenous people doing something that wasn't directly related to this on October 7th. And I'd been without Internet or phone for months. And then I returned to a local town on October 9th and I opened my computer and the images from the Nova Music Festival were the first thing I saw. Second thing that happened was I started to be basically purged from all of my academic world, essentially because I stood in solidarity with Israelis and I spoke up against what was happening, which was basically immediately a kind of anti Jewish environment that was emerging now at the time. I basically understood that as anti Semitism. So that was the language that I had. This was anti Semitic. These were people claiming they were engaged in political critique, but they were actually clearly extremely hateful. And the way they talked about Israel was something that I just never seen before. Right. Like the kind of visceral rage that they had at Israel, that they were saying this stuff right after a massacre was committed against Israeli civilians. That was really stunning. And I'd never witnessed anything this before. So over the next two years, I attempted to kind of make sense of my experience and use the tools that I'd learned in the academy, you know, the critical academic tools of anthropology, of philosophy, to actually understand what I was witnessing. And as I thought about this more and wrote about it more, I came to understand that it was really a kind of coherent ideology that was being expressed to me. Anti Zionism. Right. And I found it more and more. More important to basically bring more of a spotlight onto anti Zionism as its own ideology, as a violent ideology, and as an anti Jewish ideology. And then I got hooked up with a group of activists who are also moving in the same direction. And they also wanted to see kind of a transformation within the Jewish community and also within public culture at large of naming anti Zionism. Right. And speaking about anti Zionism and developing a language to fight back against it. And so that's how I founded the movement against anti Zionism.
- [07:03]
Zoe Booth
Fascinating. And the language you've developed around anti Zionism, would you say that a direct. Not copy, but directly influenced by the language that you've seen in academia, which is demonizing Zionism? Is it. Is it a mirror? Have you just done the opposite? Or essentially what they're doing, you're parroting it back to them in a way, or is it a whole new language?
- [07:27]
Adam Louis Klein
So I think there's an element of that because. So I studied how to critique structures of oppression, of power, of discrimination. You know, I'm in the humanities today in left academia, and that's basically just what the academy does. I work with indigenous people, so I've studied how European colonialism plays out. And I've actually seen European colonialism playing out in the present because, you know, in South America is actually one of the places in the world where European colonialism arguably still exists. And those processes are kind of ongoing against indigenous peoples, many other parts of the world. It's basically over. And we have non European colonialisms.
- [08:01]
Zoe Booth
Like Australia, maybe.
- [08:04]
Adam Louis Klein
Yeah, yeah, we don't have to get into that. Or maybe we can. It's actually important to understanding the genocide, libel and how that was kind of normalized because that grew out of basically Australian scholars who were trying to apply settler colonialism.
- [08:15]
Zoe Booth (continued or co-host)
Interesting.
- [08:15]
Adam Louis Klein
To Israel. But yeah, so I learned that language, I learned that way of thinking, and I saw that, you know, in many ways what anti Zionism is doing to Jews is a kind of mirror inversion of reality. So I mean, you have Jews, people who are indigenous to the land of Israel who were exiled, a diasporic people, an oppressed people for thousands of years, and still today, under anti Zionism, endless violence and wars, attempts to annihilate Jews and anti Zionism is constructing Jews as the inverse of this. First of all, Jews are not an indigenous people. They're in a settler colonial oppressor. And yeah, they're not victims in any way. So when we have genocidal aggression against Jews from Hamas or and all of the other Iranian proxies, the Houthis, Hezbollah, et cetera, it's then suddenly inverted into a narrative of Jews, of Israelis committing genocide. Right. So there are quite a lot of inversions that sort of need to be, let's say, de inverted. And you kind of do need to invert the inversion a little bit.
- [09:23]
Zoe Booth
And it's so intellectually challenging, I think, even for, you know, intelligent people who are fairly, you know, well read, at least have the basics done like a first year linguistics course at university, something like that. Have done a basic, you know, political science course like myself even I find it so difficult to understand or become aware of the linguistic manipulation that I'm faced with every day. It's very destabilizing because you, you can't work out, you can't dec. Decide what's true and what's false. You know what I mean? The linguistic manipulation runs so deep.
- [10:06]
Adam Louis Klein
Yeah, exactly. So they, they basically hijacked language in this way and that's part of their power as a majority, basically. So they spread these libels where they just, you know, extract these names, these labels, you know, colonizer, apartheid, genocide, racist, baby killer. And that's kind of the power of libel, right? You're not concerned with finding the truth. You're just concerned with stigmatizing a group and using language. A blunt weapon, basically. So I can just call you a genocider, I can just call you a racist, not because it's true, but because I'm the one in power here and I have a mass of people who are ready to form a lynch mob and start accusing you of those things as well, and then of course encouraging violence on that basis. So yeah, it's a complete hijacking of language. And that's what I found too in the academy. It became so difficult to talk back to it and just speak the truth because they've repeated these libels so much, many times that they start to feel as if they're kind of the Basic assumptions of the discourse. Like there's no even discursive space in which you can say anything else. And that's why I think it's so important to have our own language to speak back to anti Zionism. And we have to reappropriate that language from the academy that's. It's stolen that language from us and says you don't have a right to use critical academic language to talk about anti zionism because you are the oppressor and we are the ones judging you. So we have to steal that language back.
- [11:35]
Zoe Booth
And it's, it's interesting because I mean, working at Quillet and moving, you know, from where I was more on like the far left into a more. I don't see myself as being on the right, but many would cast me as, you know, center right publication space. I'm used to getting called a bigot, a Nazi. I'm used to all these words being used against me or, you know, groups I'm part of in a slanderous sort of way. And it sort of just used to, it never affected me that much before October 7th because it wasn't related to Jewish issues. But something about the discourse after October 7th and the way it's weaponized against Jews, it's different because it seems to have more salience. Like people believe it.
- [12:22]
Zoe Booth (continued or co-host)
The average person knew that the woke
- [12:25]
Zoe Booth
left was taking liberties when it came to using the word Nazi or whatever. And people were sort of like, oh yeah, everybody's a Nazi, whatever. We know what you're like, we know how you speak. But now people really believe it when it comes to,
- [12:38]
Zoe Booth (continued or co-host)
you know, this conflict,
- [12:40]
Zoe Booth
this Israel, Palestine conflict.
- [12:43]
Zoe Booth (continued or co-host)
I'm not sure why.
- [12:44]
Ryan Reynolds
Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here from Mint Mobile. Now I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made $15 bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment
- [13:06]
Mint Mobile Announcer
of $45 for three months, $90 for six months or $180 for a 12 month plan required $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees. Extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes. Me slow when network is busy. See terms right.
- [13:16]
Adam Louis Klein
I think you're right. Like they'd already started abusing language. Of course. Like we saw the term genocide being abused already. There was an attempt to say that trans people were suffering a genocide There was an attempt to say that indigenous people in Canada were sort of still suffering a genocide, which, while both communities are obviously suffering and are victims of forms of oppression, was of course stretching the term into a polemical direction. But at the same time, I totally agree. I think the way Israel is constructed, it's almost as kind of like a metaphysical cosmic evil. And there's of course also a special kind of sting in calling Jews Nazis.
- [13:56]
Zoe Booth
Right.
- [13:57]
Adam Louis Klein
And that's something the Soviets basically mastered, right. With their Soviet anti Zionist propaganda campaign after 1967. They depicted Israelis with swastikas. They put the swastika inside of the Star of David. And there's a real kind of obsession with seeing the Jew as the Nazi and the victim who's become the evil themselves. So their whole kind of ideology is based on these inversions. Like you were saying, why is that
- [14:23]
Zoe Booth
so tantalizing to see a victim portrayed as the perpetrator? I, I just don't fully.
- [14:32]
Adam Louis Klein
I mean, I think you just need to see, you know, it's, it's a construction of Jews as evil, right. And after the Holocaust, right, The Holocaust was seen as a kind of paradigmatic evil. It was impossible not to recognize how evil the act was. And of course there were other elements, right, like the US kind of took credit for defeating the Nazis. So it benefited the US and the emerging liberal order to describe the Holocaust and the Nazis as a fundamental evil. Which also meant, of course, that the Jews then would become these absolute victims. But that doesn't really work, especially in an ideology today like in the academy or in the left, where being a victim is the most morally valuable thing. How can you have a system where the Jew becomes the most morally valued kind of item? That doesn't work, you know, when you have anti Jewish hatred and bigotry, which is very baked into both Christian and Islamic civilizations. So reconstructing the Jew as evil in our age, in the anti Zionist age, meant reconstructing the Jew as a Nazi basically, and as a genocidal person.
- [15:34]
Zoe Booth
So how has the image of the Jew on the left changed over the last few decades? Because my understanding is that, you know, in the 60s, 70s, no, maybe a bit before that, in sort of the age of the Golden Meir and who. And the Ben Gurions who were well and truly on the left, the, at least in Australia and in the US these, you know, socialist Jewish leaders were seen, or Israeli leaders were, were held up, you know, were celebrated on the left. What, what has happened since then? How did that image become degraded well,
- [16:12]
Adam Louis Klein
essentially what happened was at first you had basically the Arabs were seen as a kind of Goliath. I mean, the Holocaust was still in people's minds. Jews were understood as victims. The Arab states basically converged on Israel in 1948. Now in the 60s, what happened is you had the emergence of Palestinian nationalism and there was kind of a reconfiguring of how the conflict was understood basically from the Arabs are a kind of unity with the Arab League and they understood themselves that way as well, especially with Nasserism and kind of pan Arab nationalism to one in which it was basically Israel versus Palestine. And this kind of new sort of equivalence between these two kind of parallel terms was then more and more how it came to be understood. And this equivalence gave anti Zionism a very powerful weapon, right? Because it could now say, well, actually the Palestinians are this minority victimized group, right? And it's Israel who's really the agent of this grand power structure of the US controlling the world. Right. Which is now basically just doing evil to the Palestinians. Now of course with the Oslo Accords, right, in the 90s, there was also hope that framing with the Palestinians versus the Israelis could lead actually to some real symmetry.
- [17:28]
Ryan Reynolds
Right.
- [17:28]
Adam Louis Klein
Well, maybe we could actually create like a two state solution. There would just be these two peoples that both recognize each other now that all fell apart. And then in the early 2000s we had the second intifada. We had at a similar time, we had nine, 11 and kind of the reemergence of Islamist violence on a large sc. We had the Durban conference, which was this conference that the UN gathered in South Africa where they basically sort of rehabilitated a lot of the Soviet propaganda lines from the 70s. Zionism is racism and the apartheid libel. And of course BDS started to emerge at this time. And it's interesting because all this started happening kind of concurrently. And the rise of BDS and the rise of Soviet propaganda now in Western academies and activists spaces again really coincided with the rise of Hamas. Right, right. So Hamas emerges basically in Gaza 2005. These wars then with Israel kind of intensify. And with each war we have these kinds of explosions in the west of anti Zionism and this more virulent anti Zionism. And I think with October 7th we saw a repetition of that pattern, but also it crossing a threshold, right. Where now anti Zionism has sort of fully broken through and has become normalized in the west in a way that we've never actually seen.
- [18:49]
Zoe Booth
So just going back a bit, it sounds like what you've said is initially the war, the conflict was seen as being between Jews and Arabs and then it changed in the 60s to between Israelis and Palestinians.
- [19:03]
Adam Louis Klein
Yes, yeah. Especially after 1967. So when Israel won the 1967 war, it was seen as a kind of miraculous victory. And of course the west bank and Gaza became occupied. And then that was also when the Soviet anti Zionist propaganda campaign really picked up. So they would, they constantly developed this theme that Israel was the aggressor, even though it was not true in the 1967 war. But it wasn't really until 1979 truly when the peace deal happened between Israel and Egypt, which was widely condemned and opposed by numerous people in the Arab and Islamic world, that Arab nationalism really started receding.
- [19:44]
Zoe Booth
So what did the so or did the Soviets have have to gain by degrading the image of Israel so much in the West? Is it just that they didn't want a Western ally in the Middle east to.
- [19:58]
Adam Louis Klein
Yeah, I mean they, so they were allied with the Arabs and they were basically playing the Arabs off of the west and, and, and obviously promoting this notion of socialism. Right. Like Arab socialism, which basically just meant that they would nationalize their industries and call that anti imperialism, even if they weren't actually developing sort of, you know, societies.
- [20:20]
Zoe Booth (continued or co-host)
Right.
- [20:20]
Adam Louis Klein
And so basically what happened was after the Soviet Union fell with, you know, 1989, the, the kind of hero that the left used to oppose the west shifted to Islamism. And that's how we've seen basically the rise of the Red Green alliance. And so that's now how anti Zionism is articulated today. Not so much the Soviet Union and the Arabs, but basically the Western left with Islamism.
- [20:47]
Zoe Booth
And what role does modern Russia play in this discourse or promoting certain discourses?
- [20:55]
Adam Louis Klein
Russia plays less of a role today in promoting anti Zionism, so they've, they've moved back to a more kind of classical anti Semitism is sort of more popular in Russia today, which is kind of an interesting development. It shows it's not always linear. Although overall in the west we, we have kind of gone from medieval anti Judaism, which sort of opposed to Jews as a kind of religion or Judaism as a religion based in the Talmud, to classical anti Semitism of the 19th and 20th century. There's a conspiracy of Jews to undermine our nations from within to anti Zionism where Israel is constructed as a fundamentally evil state that violates the international order. So those are kind of the three phases.
- [21:39]
Zoe Booth
Yeah, I'm, I'm speculating and I need to look further into it, but I have heard that, at least in Australia, the Russian government, well, Russian Orthodox Church, which is pretty much hand in hand with the Kremlin, is playing a role in disseminating certain. Yeah, lines of argument. Well, propaganda in Australia, especially in, you know, religious circles, in churches in Australia. And I need, you know, need to look further into it. But I do know that it was confirmed a few years ago in Paris that Russia was behind some anti Semitic attacks of like stenciling Stars of David on Jewish businesses and houses in a way to sort of just create chaos in the west and in, in Jewish communities there and create tension. A bit like what Iran has been doing in Sydney as well in like firebombing, paying people to fire bomb, you know, Jewish businesses.
- [22:37]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah.
- [22:37]
Adam Louis Klein
I mean, so, you know, anti Zionism in general, it constitutes itself as a kind of global war on Jews. Right. So it attacks Jews everywhere. So its focus is Israel, that Israel is the most evil state. But then it constructs Diaspora Jews as sort of Zionist traitors. Right. Unless they explicitly pass this litmus test where they perform Jewish shame and say, oh, I'm an anti Zionist or oh, I renounce Israel. So it is a kind of collective targeting of Jews. But in terms of this focus on Zionism and Israel is the center, how
- [23:10]
Zoe Booth
do you think governments, for example, the Australian government, which is soon to do a royal commission into anti Semitism and how we've handled it or not handled it, how should governments be handling anti Zionism and anti Zionist rhetoric?
- [23:24]
Adam Louis Klein
I think the big problem right now is in the public discourse and in the Jewish community, there's barely any discussion of anti Zionism. You know, there's barely any discussion of anti Zionist libels. The colonizer, apartheid and genocide libels. So in the US there was just a synagogue that was firebombs. Right. We don't hear anything about anti Zionism after it happens. We hear these condemnations. This was anti Semitic. Anti Semitism is rising. Anti Semitism is back bad. But it doesn't mean anything because how is that going to change the opinions of the people or the behavior really of the people who are spreading anti Zionist libels all the time? If you don't connect the libels that they are saying about Israel to this violence, Right? And you have to describe them as libels. You have to recognize that they're designed to stigmatize, that they're not legitimate opinions. Because if you don't, for example, if you say, well, maybe claims of genocide, for example, are inciting violence against Jews, but Israel might have committed a genocide, people have their free speech. It's just a political opinion that they think Israel committed a genocide. You're not really grasping the articulation of libels and violence, that they're defamatory claims that are supposed to stigmatize a community.
- [24:36]
Zoe Booth
It's so true. And that's why what you're doing at Maz is so important in making that connection. Because. Because it's so hard to do and it's been baked into. Separate the two.
- [24:50]
Adam Louis Klein
Yeah, it's always assumed that it's criticism of Israel. Just no matter what you say about Israel, it's criticism. Right. And I think that many people in the Jewish community sometimes or legacy organizations have kind of internalized that a little bit. They've internalized the notion that anti Zionism is legitimate and that we shouldn't speak out against anti Zionism directly. We should only talk about when anti Zionism crosses the line into anti Semitism. Right. Which also doesn't really make sense because anti Zionists aren't classical anti Semites. They don't always look like so called right wing anti Semites or they're not always talking about conspiracy theories of Jews bringing in immigrants into the country. But the language of anti Semitism today and the frameworks we use often assume that that's basically the only form of Jew hatred there is. And there's such a developed anti Zionism everywhere. Just people harassing Jews as Zionists, as genocidal, a colonist.
- [25:47]
Zoe Booth
So can you talk about some basic things that we can or tips that we can keep in mind every day? Some basic things to stop doing or to start doing when it comes to discussing these issues?
- [25:59]
Adam Louis Klein
I mean, like I was saying, I think cross the line discourse is really one of the most dangerous kinds of discourse. So this constant notion that anti Zionists cross the line into anti Semitism or even the anti Zionists are secret anti Semites, like you see that a lot as well. Anti Zionism is just a mask for anti Semitism. So the idea is that they're somehow kind of exactly like classical anti Semites. Right. And they also hate kind of all Jews or Jews as Jews. And they're just pretending to hate Israel or to even be bigots against Israelis. Right. They're just pretending to even care about Israel in order to attack Jews in general in some sense. It's actually a way of oddly privileging the Diaspora Jew. And it's a sense that, that let's say anti Zionism is anti Semitism or frequently becomes anti Semitism. It's because people have a dislike of diaspora Jews and they project that on Israel. It's actually a misunderstanding of what's. What's going on. What's going on is that there's actually a hate movement around Israel and there's a kind of deep hatred of Israelis. They really depict the IDF as fundamentally bloodthirsty, aggressive and evil. You know, they denigrate Israeli culture. They say it's a fake state, it's a fake country. Look, Netanyahu changed his name from like a European Jewish last name to a Hebrew last name. He was trying to fake being indigenous to the Middle East.
- [27:25]
Zoe Booth
Rates of skin cancer. Through the roof.
- [27:27]
Adam Louis Klein
Exactly. So. So they're always constantly libeling Israelis and libeling Israel and joining this global movement to try eliminate Israel, you know, pushed forward by Iran or Hamas. And then what they're really doing is they're marking Jews in the Diaspora as kind of complicit with Israel or associated with Israel as part of the. That collective of Jews that is represented by Israel. So it's not a projection of a dislike of Diaspora Jews onto Israel. It's actually more the opposite. It's a hatred of Israel that gets extended to all those who are marked as Zionists. And, and, and if we don't recognize this, it's of a piece with basically thinking that classical anti Semitism and anti Zionism are the same. We're only using the term anti Semitism as if there's only one form of Jew hate when there's actually multiple.
- [28:17]
Zoe Booth
And I think the point that comes out through Maz is that, you know, whether hating Israel is anti Semitic or not is sort of. It doesn't matter. What's. The fact that you hate a whole country and a whole nation of people is weird and is not normal. And we don't do it with any other nation of people. So can we just acknowledge that for a second and how. So I think Maz is onto something really good when it comes to that.
- [28:44]
Adam Louis Klein
Yeah. And it's not normal at all. And it's bizarre that it's normalized in society and it's so difficult to just be like, oh, wait, there's like a global movement of millions of people that wants to destroy a tiny nation of 9 million people and is convinced that this is like the most evil nation in the world. Right. Like there's nothing more.
- [29:04]
Zoe Booth (continued or co-host)
Yeah.
- [29:05]
Zoe Booth
And it's just terrifying how far it's reached in what seems like a very short amount of time. I mean, I'm from a small. Well, it's not a small town. But a smaller town than Sydney. I grew up in Newcastle.
- [29:19]
Zoe Booth (continued or co-host)
Not many Jews there at all.
- [29:21]
Zoe Booth
Never met a Jewish person until I was probably like in my 20s and moved to Sydney, let alone an Israeli. I never met an Israeli in my life. And now I'm seeing people who grew up in Newcastle, you know, who have never shared a political opinion at all on Facebook, sharing content that this is a genocide happening before our eyes. We cannot be complicit, not be silent, you know, not even looking at it as someone who cares about Israel or Jews or Israelis. Just looking at it through a marketing lens, like, what an incredible marketing campaign. The psychology of it is incredible that they've managed to spread this message so that even, you know, my friend's dad, who's a bus driver who's never really left Newcastle, is sharing this content and believes this stuff. It's incredible.
- [30:11]
Adam Louis Klein
Well, I mean, it's so easy to get people to latch onto it, right? Because in our age, you know, what is the horrible things that everyone agrees is bad is racism, colonialism and genocide. That's just the civilization we live in since Auschwitz, since the civil rights movement, since decolonization and apartheid South Africa. Everyone agrees with that. So if you can find a place that you can make a scapegoat and you can just start calling it these things, right? It's racist, it's colonial and genocide title, everyone's going to start getting angry, right? And you just need people to circulate enough sort of plausible, maybe decontextualized or selective information and maybe also just a bunch of fake information and AI generated images coming out of Gaza as well. And everyone will just get upset and angry and you'll kind of stimulate these mobs into being who will then circulate these libos because they, they feel a certain sort of, you know, they can release their anger and their frustration through spreading these libels and scapegoating the state. And so it's a, it's a powerful and scary mechanism. These, these lynch mobs.
- [31:17]
Zoe Booth
I guess people could have got out that hate through hating on Russia, for example, if there was a organized enough hate mob towards Russians. I guess what, what I sort of see you saying is just that, well, it could have happened against Russia, but it didn't because not enough people wanted to do it. And, and it's just simply that there's enough people online or in the world in general who hate Israel enough to really mobilize this.
- [31:40]
Zoe Booth (continued or co-host)
Is that it?
- [31:41]
Ryan Reynolds
Yeah.
- [31:41]
Adam Louis Klein
I mean, you need a minority, right? Like you need a people who is Small. And so you have the numbers basically and the influence and the power to spread these libels. So, so obviously Jew haters often kind of treat Jews as having this kind of immense power domination. They're evil. Right. But the whole kind of irony of it is it's really Jew haters who are spreading these libels and have the power to make that minority. So, so in, in saying that anti Zionism is different from classical anti Semitism or we can condemn it without sort of conceptually or rhetorically anchoring it in anti Semitism. It's also not to say that it's not part of the history of Jew hates. And of course it's not incidental that this is the, the Jewish state.
- [32:25]
Zoe Booth
Talk a little bit about the Australian context.
- [32:28]
Adam Louis Klein
Well, I mean it's actually stunning the role that Australian scholars have played in the creation of anti Zionism. You really can't overestimate it actually. So in that post 2000s period after the second intifada, this was when anti Zionism really became mainstream in the west for the first time. Because during Soviet anti Zionist age, it was really mostly just kind of small Soviet associated radical Marxist parties in the West. Right. That didn't really have much prestige or stature in the broader society. They were fringe who were kind of bringing Soviet propaganda into the left activist world. And it had an effect, but it wasn't something that was like taken very seriously in the, the academy. Right. You didn't have serious anti Zionists with major roles in the academy. Now of course Edward Said is his own part of the story. He was this kind of Palestinian Arab scholar and he, he did play a role in kind of transforming the whole discipline of what was called Oriental Studies and then became Middle Eastern studies. But I think anti Zionism did not really gain a, a strong foothold in the academy at large until post 2000. And so it was these Australian scholars who revived this theory of settler colonialism. So in the end of the, in the early 2000s there was this thing called the History wars which I'm sure you know about in Australia where there were all these debates about, you know, K3 settle versus.
- [33:54]
Zoe Booth
Yeah, yeah.
- [33:55]
Adam Louis Klein
So what degree was Australia responsible for what it did to the indigenous peoples? And was it a genocide? And there were these scholars like Patrick Wolf or Dirk Moses or Lorenzo Veracini who basically seized on this and they started basically transforming the concepts of genocide so that it no longer referred to kind of a punctual event or it didn't really have to look like the Holocaust, but there were kind of Protracted processes where these colonial societies were formed on genocide. And, you know, there's, there's insight there, there's descriptive value, of course, but what they did with that then in the post 2000s period, second intifada, et cetera, they decided to construct Israel for the first time as a kind settler colonial, protracted genocide. Now, there was this Arab nationalist in 1960 who actually came up with settler colonialism for Israel. But like I said, it wasn't mainstream until they kind of revived it in the 2000s. So they constructed Israel as inherently genocidal. And this was very new for most people in the West. Like when Veracini wrote this book in 2006, Israel and settler Society, he had to really make this point because most people thought of Israel and Palestine as like a territorial and religious conflict. Right. You know, at that point, there are two peoples, they're fighting over land, or there are also different religious groups who claim that this land was given to them by God. And this actually, of course, isn't something that's unique. There are ethnic conflicts all over the world that have been produced from when empires fall apart and different groups, national groups, fight over land. Right? And he had to, he basically had to make his argument, no, this shouldn't be seen as two groups, groups who are fighting each other. This is actually just one kind of unilateral process of an evil settler colonial state annihilating an indigenous population. And of course, it was kind of obscene, right, to start constructing Jews as white settlers. But this really is what made anti Zionism so potent, especially in these Anglophone countries like Australia and Canada and the United States, founded by, you know, white people arriving in a land that was full of indigenous people. Right. And often wiping them out. Right. So. So it was basically a way in which this white guilt in Australia could be transferred to Jews and Israelis who are now basically the repositories of this, of this guilt in one's own national history. So it's interesting to me, and sad, of course, that the. That in Australia that Jew hatred has been so particularly virulent. And I don't know of the exact connections, but it doesn't seem coincidental to me that Australia is actually kind of the cradle of Western anti Zionism today. And I did see it like that. I kind of do. Yeah, I do. And I saw that Jewish anti Zionist who was legitimizing the Bondi attacks, legitimizing the murder of a child in Australia by calling them white settlers. Right? So, so it's, it's anti Zionist Ideology that goes back to Patrick Wolf that is now legitimizing the murder of Jews.
- [37:12]
Zoe Booth
So I've, for the last few years I've had an issue with a lot of this language anyway, this sort of settler colonial, this sort of like academic speech. So it's not hard for me now to, you know. Well, I can, I continue to have the issue and it's applied to Israel, but I think for many Jews who
- [37:31]
Zoe Booth (continued or co-host)
were on the left, I'm not sure
- [37:33]
Zoe Booth
if you're one of them who they, they truly did believe in this, in these concepts and this language and were using it. Have you had to change your opinions on settler colonialism and, or what, what's, what's your arc?
- [37:48]
Adam Louis Klein
I guess my arc is I was a radical leftist as well coming out of college. I was in a group called Socialist Alternative when I was living in New York City.
- [37:57]
Zoe Booth (continued or co-host)
Yeah.
- [37:58]
Adam Louis Klein
And, and so they were actually accused by many Marxist groups of being lit. Too liberal, that, you know, we would t Democratic Party, but actually we were further to the left than the dsa. So it was a Trotskyist group. And over time I kind of drifted from it because I saw that the whole kind of left universe was just becoming so stale in the academy and, and these languages, these theories were just being applied so mechanically and with just no inspiration basically. And the academy wasn't creating anything more anymore. And it was kind of obsessed with, with the suffering subject. Right. Like it was just about trying to find the victim. So I do see problems with how these frameworks have been used. I think they've been overstretched. I think they've become just kind of desiccated at this point. But I wouldn't propose sort of wiping the entire slate clean. Right. And I also don't find it coherent. Like sometimes you hear from some people who want to fight antisemitism, what they're calling anti Semitism, and they say, well, you know, these victim oppressor, binary are what's driving anti Semitism because they basically construct Jews as powerful. And the fact that Jews are successful means, you know, they must be evil. Right. That's the kind of anti meritocratic kind of philosophy behind dei. But I think that that's going a bit too far and it's not fully coherent because I mean, if you're against bigotry and violence to Jews, you're recognizing that Jews are a victim and that Jews are suffering oppression. So I wouldn't say we should just get rid of all models of oppression, but they should be applied just more truthfully Right. And with more space for moral complexity. Because, I mean, Israel has developed a powerful military. So it's powerful, it's strong in that way. But also Israel is a victim because the reason Israel has developed that military is because it's been in response to kind of ever increasing violence. So I try hone in on anti Zionism as an oppression. I try be kind of forensic about it and not try and deconstruct the entire academy, which will never be possible. And you're always going to, going to get resistance from people who don't want to get rid of those frameworks in every case. They don't want to completely get rid of settler colonialism. In the case of Australia. Right, and you probably shouldn't. There are many aspects that work in the case of Australia much better than they do in Israel.
- [40:21]
Zoe Booth
Are you still studying people of the Amazon or other indigenous groups, or have you pretty much just focused on anti Zionism since October?
- [40:34]
Adam Louis Klein
So I'm still writing my dissertation and I'm. So I'm still writing about the group, the dishonored people, that I worked with in the Colombian Amazon. My dissertation's taken a bit more of a comparative turn that was present actually before October 7th, but I'm leaning into it even more basically thinking about Jewish peoplehood and dishonored peoplehood in comparison and, and, and the different sort of covenantal identities that both groups have. Because the people I work with, the Tisana, they also kind of constitute their own identity through a conception of chosenness, basically that they descend from a specific God who is God himself to them. And they can really only maintain their identity and their name and their peoplehood through their relationship with, with that specific God, that specific name. And so I'm also thinking a lot about Jewish indigeneity as I work with them and how indigeneity as a term has also been completely just stripped of its actual meaning.
- [41:30]
Zoe Booth
So how do you sort of define indigeneity?
- [41:33]
Adam Louis Klein
So indigeneity, if you actually base it on working with indigenous groups, it's really just a feature of a culture basically that the culture relates to a certain piece of land as sacred to it, and is kind of inherently connected to their identity. So in Australia, of course, you have the kind of whole notion of the dreaming, which was kind of this original kind of mix, mythic time that's sort of timeless at the same time, and it relates to these different origin places. They might be different wells or hills in the landscape where people emerge and then these places become kind of sacred. They become associated with certain rituals. And an identity of a clan or a people is inherently linked to the sacred places of that clan or people. And so with Jews it's really just the same thing. So the land of Israel is just kind of an inherent part of Jewish culture and civilization. That this land is sacred, that the, the story we tell about ourselves is all about our relationship to this land. So we're in this land. Then we were exiled to Egypt, then we came back, then we were exiled again, then we came back. And it's actually all just the story of our relationship to the land. So indigeneity is not the notion that one has always lived in the same land, which would apply to no one, because all humans have been migrating through time. It's not even the notion that you were the first person ever in the land, which as many people have pointed out, makes no sense because there's always someone who was there before you, right? And nor is it some kind of blood quantum notion like, oh, I took a DNA test and it showed that my ancestors came from Africa. Sometimes you hear this very just blandly stupid statement in anti Zionist circles. Well, oh, you don't come from Israel because like I took a DNA test and I come from like northern Germany and France, but I'm not indigenous to there. Or we all come from Africa. And it's really silly. There's really just a lack of understanding of indigeneity in these circles. The same circles that are trying to use settler colonial theory to basically erase Jews entire culture. Because if you say Jews have nothing to do with Israel, you just don't know anything about Judaism and you're just erasing a people and it's just blandly bigoted and it goes back to this thing, you know, like, how is this so normal? How is it so difficult to just point out directly that that's bigoted? And one of the problems is that we only talk about antisemitism, right? We only talked about classical antisemitism. And classical antisemitism had no problem with Jews as indigenous to Israel. The problem was Jews were in, in Europe, right? And it was because Jews were from Israel. It was because Jews were this oriental Middle Eastern group that they should wouldn't be in Europe. But anti xylem is completely different.
- [44:19]
Zoe Booth
And you made a very good point in a podcast I was listening. Well, it was difficult to listen to. It was a podcast you did with the Palestinian man who lives in Sweden, I believe. Omar. Wow. My, my blood pressure. I don't know how you did that got through that conversation, but it was very inspiring. And I think if people want to hear how to debate a very hostile person with poise and grace, listen to Adam's debate. You have a lot of patience. But you. You brought up a number of great points, but one of them, which I'd never thought about, was that, I mean, there's different types of genocide. Historically, there's genocide where a group of people, like, I think you reference Germans in Namibia somewhere, you know, genociding the indigenous there because they believe they're the superior race. And lots of us think about the Holocaust in that way as well. But as you said, in a way, the. The Holocaust, the Germans genocided Jews in a number of ways because of the sort of settler colonial ideology, which is that Jews are foreigners who have colonized Germany, they've come from Asia Minor, they're not indigenous, and they need to be exterminated for that reason that they're colonizing Germany.
- [45:41]
Adam Louis Klein
Yeah, exactly. So. So today there's the whole notion of colonial genocides because there's so much focus on the crimes. European civilization in the past, etc, has made it seem like genocide really is always against indigenous people or people who are seen as indigenous. Right. But constructing people as these alien foreigners who have no right to be there has motivated multiple genocides. So, yeah, it's true. It's not enough people really talk about the Holocaust as a genocide that was. Was based on constructing Jews as colonizers. And also the Rwandan genocide. The Rwandan genocide was strikingly similar actually, in its ideology to the way in which Israelis are now constructed in Israel and Palestine. So. So the Tutsis were basically treated as these kind of dominating oppressors. The Hutus had basically internalized this kind of race theory that the Tutsis were sort of more white and European. So they were. They were called Hamitic, basically. It was actually.
- [46:40]
Zoe Booth
Were they actually the same race or.
- [46:42]
Adam Louis Klein
There's debate about this. But in general, the Tutsis do physically look kind of different. They're sort of more tall and kind of thin, where the Hutus are kind of more. More stout. Some people have contested whether this really divides clearly between Tutsis and Hutus. And in the past, the Tutsis were kind of more of an aristocratic class. So there was a sense as well, that the Tutsis were oppressors. Right. So the Hutus understood themselves as kind of rising up and against the oppressors. So this whole language of colonial oppressors of sort of these quasi European colonists was exactly the Ideology of the Hutus that committed genocide against the Tutsis. And it's the same ideology of Hamas that. That committed genocide against Israeli Jews on October 7th. And they construct Israelis as settlers. They are all guilty, basically, and they are all legitimate target targets.
- [47:36]
Zoe Booth
On this topic, when that, what was his name? Allah Abdel Fattoh, the Egyptian activist Starmer allowed him to return to the UK after saying that he wanted to genocide white people.
- [47:53]
Zoe Booth (continued or co-host)
That guy.
- [47:54]
Zoe Booth
Yeah, there was an. I think that was trending. God, this news cycle has just been insane the last two weeks. I think it was trending like two weeks ago. Quillette published a piece about him, but I saw something on Twitter. He made all these, you know, horrible comments, comments about Jews. Surprise, surprise, Zionists and you know, The British Labor MPs who were sort of fighting to have him return to the UK or whatever. Once these horrible tweets of his surface. They, they said all their usual apologies. Oh, we had no idea. He had these abhorrent, you know, views about Jews, blah, blah, blah. We do not condone this. But he'd also made comments about just white people in general and how white people need, need to be killed. And someone made the point that, you know, while I appreciate that Jews are very sensitive at the moment, considering what just happened in Bondi and in general, I think it's weird that no one's talking about the fact that he also just said he wants to genocide white people in general. And my point on that was I don't think it's. It's right obviously to talk about genociding white people, but it sort of has less, it's less believable because we have so many instances of genocide of Jews throughout history. It's. We always know it's on the precipice of happening again. It can always happen at any time. But the genocide of like white people in general, as a white person, I'm less concerned about because I feel like it's never really happened and therefore I can't really believe it would happen. Like, what is white? Anyway, I got into a bit of a debate with obviously more right wing people who are probably leaning towards. They're very concerned about white genocide, et cetera. But what do you think? Is it possible, possible to have a white genocide? And what would it look like and what is white? I guess as an anthropologist, I mean,
- [49:42]
Adam Louis Klein
I mean, there's a lot of white people, right? I mean, I think whiteness has become so charged today basically all around these discourses of white supremacy and racism and of course, you know, something I might get in trouble for. Right. But, you know, in the US at least, right, like, white supremacy is really not as much of a problem as it once was. I mean, unfortunately, we have people now rising again, like Nick Fuentes, who are white supremacists. But of course, you know, civil rights was very successful in many ways. There's a huge cultural consciousness of racism against black people. And, you know, the vast majority of white people are very aware of this. So whiteness has become basically a kind of marker of like a heritage of. Of colonialism. Right. And it doesn't even really kind of refer to sort of people of European heritage or culture now. So I'm not really concerned a white genocide, and I do find that kind of weird to be concerned with, like the reproduction of white people and why one would even positively identify with whiteness at that level. But I am kind of concerned about European cultures and Western civilization. I think that's legitimate. Right. These countries in Europe seem to no longer produce much of cultural value, and they don't seem to be interested in maintaining. Maintaining their heritage and traditions. And I think that the influence of Islamism in Europe is. Is. Is quite frightening. And of course, like, often the numbers of Muslim immigration are kind of exaggerated, but the level of influence and the kind of deference to Islamism does not seem to be exaggerated. And also there's the fact that, you know, there are many Muslims in these countries who are absolutely committed to subverting Western civilization and ultimately taking over. And it's a kind of perverse inversion of the whole disc of Zionism. Right. Because they say that Jews immigrated to Palestine with a kind of plan that they were going to take over this whole region and make it a Jewish state and subjugate non Jews to a Jewish supremacist regime. Right. And it's a kind of projection almost of what groups like the Muslim Brotherhood actually want to do. They literally are immigrating to a place in order to eventually establish a Muslim Muslim state based on Sharia law that would subjugate non Muslims as dhimmis. So, of course, not all Muslims are engaged in that, but there are actual people who. That is their actual plan and intention that are trying to carry that out in Western states today.
- [52:19]
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- [52:50]
Zoe Booth
It's that inversion that I find so manipulative and I think, was it Goebbels who said a similar thing? He was sort of like accused them of what we're doing, Something like that.
- [53:02]
Adam Louis Klein
Yeah. Well, the Nazis actually studied the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, which is this classic anti Semitic conspiracy text.
- [53:11]
Zoe Booth
Who wrote that?
- [53:13]
Adam Louis Klein
It was, I believe, Russian pogramists at the end of the 18th century. And they plagiarized parts of Machiavelli's the Prince and then they attributed it to Jews as basically like a kind of manual of how to take power and control others. And so the Nazis studied it and Hitler himself, I believe, said this is actually, you know, we should learn from what the Jews are doing, right, of how to achieve world domination. So these people who want to achieve world domination are often accusing Jews of attempting world domination.
- [53:47]
Zoe Booth
Yeah, I did want to go back to that topic of white genocide because when I was debating these, these people who believe that a white genocide is definitely on the cards because I said I'm open to believing it, like sell it to me. Explain how a white genocide could happen here in Australia. And the best argument that sort of someone gave to me was that it would be a long sort of cultural genocide in that China eventually took over, whatever. But I was looking, I was just reading about, you know, whether there were instances of white genocides. And sort of the closest I could, I could come was, you know, revolutions in, in Haiti or where else, I can't remember. But it was more sort of an uprising of indigen people against the colonial oppressors. But are there any interesting instances of genocide that maybe a lot of people don't know about that you find very like that we can learn a lot from, I don't know, niche genocides.
- [54:46]
Adam Louis Klein
Well, I think what's kind of forgotten today is, I mean, obviously this was a huge thing during the Cold War, but basically the Soviet Union's numerous atrocities. What I think is interesting about these atrocities, right, is for example, Raphael Lemkin, who came up with the term Genesis genocide, he wrote about what he called the Ukrainian genocide, which was when in the. Stalin basically intentionally starved Holodomor. The Holodomor Yeah, a huge number of, of Ukrainians. And he also took out Ukrainian bishops and intellectuals to basically try and break down the culture and the kind of group coherence. But much of this was justified under the notion of liquidating kulaks as a class, which are these kind of small property holders, agricultural property holders. And so a lot of the atrocities that the Soviets did could be ethnically targeted, but they would be justified as political. So they were political enemies, they were class enemies. And I think this is really relevant today. And what we're hearing basically is that violence against Jews is political, right? It's against Zionists, which is a political ideology.
- [55:55]
Zoe Booth
Right.
- [55:56]
Adam Louis Klein
And so when there were these murders by an anti zionist in Washington D.C. yaron Leshinsky and Sarah Milgram, basically the media reported it as political violence and it was placed in a larger category of other instances of political violence, like the murder of Charlie Kirk as well. And Kirk was murdered because he was a conservative. And this is true. He was a conservative and he had right wing views and he had these views on immigration or transgender issues. And then it's kind of treated as the same thing, like, well, Yaron Leshinsky and Sarah Milgram were Israeli Embassy kind of employees, right? So they were Zionists. And actually the kind of the, the mainstream media was then reproducing this narrative, right, of the Zionist who's kind of a target in a way that shouldn't be understood as racism. But actually you have these examples of Soviet genocide, of the Cambodian genocide as well, right, where groups are targeted as political enemies. And it often kind of does have a rough correspondence to different ethnic groups. So anti Zion Zionism really is a kind of anti Jewish ideology that constructs itself as political in that sense.
- [57:09]
Zoe Booth
And do you know much about how well organized the other side is? Like the anti Zionist side? Like, are they. It seems to be a very well oiled machine, the talking points. It, you know, it all works very well. And I know, I guess that's what you're trying to do through MERS too, like have a more organized system and language for combating that which we desperately need. How, how well organized are they? How do they organize? How, how do they do it so well?
- [57:43]
Adam Louis Klein
They're extremely well organized and they're extremely obviously plugged into all the activist networks. So they did an extremely good job of, of treating anti Zionism as another social justice cause so that they could get in all the other justice movements, right, Like LGBTQ racism, social justice movements and all of these movements. Feminism could unify around so called Palestine as the, the ultimate cause is intersectionality, et cetera. So they perfectly just plugged themselves into that and then appropriated the mantle of being a social justice movement even though they're actually a racist hate movement. Right. And so we need to actually show that the real justice is actually to oppose anti Zionism because it's victimizing Jews and Israelis and it's victimizing Palestinians because this movement basically excludes moderate Palestinian voices, it punishes them, it backs extremist movements, it shows no concern with actually improving the lives of Palestinians in practical ways and encourages further wars. So we need to really show people that anti Zionism is the real injustice. And so in that sense we have a right to treat it as a social justice movement, even if we aren't yet treated by the other causes in that way.
- [58:58]
Zoe Booth
And why do we drop the hyphen in anti Zionism?
- [59:03]
Adam Louis Klein
Well, that's because. So we don't really feel that anti Zionism is dependent on Zionism and that it's a real kind of opposition to Zionism. We don't even really feel that Zionism is that much of a reality today, that Zionism is. It's anti Zionism that inflates Zionism into this grand cosmic evil or even this kind of issue that everyone should have a say on. Right. Zionism was a normal national self determination movement amongst tons of other hundreds maybe of movements. You know, in the late 19th, early 20th century, as empires were collapsing, particular minority amongst others wanted its own state achieved a State in 1948. The whole notion that Zionism needs to be this ongoing thing is just a way of rejecting the normalization of the state of Israel itself. So we think when you have the highest hyphen, you're suggesting that anti Zionism is dependent on really existing Zionism. And if we are against anti Zionism, we should justify and defend Zionism. We actually think it's the opposite. So anti Zionism is constructing this concept of Zionism, it's constructing Jews as Zionists. Right. The people it targets are not people with a set of views. They're not believers in Zionism. They're just any Jew who has the relevant associations to be treated as an evil zone Zionist, which means not passing a litmus test, which means showing solidarity with one's Israeli cousins and family. Right. And that's all it is at that.
- [60:34]
Zoe Booth
Maybe to finish up, could we do some rapid fire sort of role plays of how people could or should react to arguments we hear every day, Anti Zionist arguments?
- [60:46]
Adam Louis Klein
Yeah, definitely.
- [60:47]
Zoe Booth
Let's see how we go, I'm not the best actress. Okay, so we're in a conversation and I go, look, I don't hate Jews, not anti Semitic. I just don't like that there are babies in Gaza being killed every day.
- [61:00]
Adam Louis Klein
Okay, well that's just an anti Zionist libel that's used to basically construct Jews as evil and to completely override the responsibility of anti Zionist actors. You don't have to go much further than that. You just have to name it.
- [61:12]
Zoe Booth
Yeah, great, okay. What's another good one that you hear every day maybe about boycotting or. Look, you know, we're working with this Israeli supplier. I just think there are so many other, you know, better suppliers out there and we could be making a better choice than by working with this Israeli business.
- [61:31]
Adam Louis Klein
That's anti Zionist discrimination against Israelis. You're discriminating against Israelis.
- [61:37]
Zoe Booth
I've, I've had a lot of situations, you know, not a lot of just, you know, we were actually my, my fiance and I uninvited from a social gathering with two people who were like Colombian and Italian because they were bringing Lebanese friends, Lebanese, Australian friends whom they kn. Had very different opinions to us and therefore we were uninvited for sort of like social. That's, that's another classic thing. Like, look, I know you just have very strong opinions on this and I just, I think for the social cohesion of everyone. We're not going to invite you, the Zionists.
- [62:15]
Adam Louis Klein
Oh yeah, and it's, it's always framed as a political view. There are tensions between people with these different views. Some people are pro Israel, some people are pro Palestine. But what's actually happening in practice is everyone who's being marked as a Zionist is being pushed out of all of these different cultural spaces and is being excluded. And as a matter of fact, people who are marked as so called pro Palestinian are not. They're gaining cultural social prestige.
- [62:42]
Zoe Booth
That's another good, good thing that Maz educates people on is that we shouldn't be referring to these people as pro Palestinian. That's sort of giving them a win. And they're not even pro Palestinian half the time. They're just anti anti Zionist.
- [62:56]
Adam Louis Klein
Exactly. And as soon as long as we call it pro Palestinian, we're pretending there's this kind of sort of symmetric battle between the Israelis and the Palestinians, the pro Israel and the pro Palestinian. And as like you say, there's no evidence these people are helping Palestinians. And if they really want to support Palestinians, they should oppose anti Zionism because it's driving endless Violence, it's creating these wars in the first place. And we know, we just see them exploiting the war, exploiting Palestinian suffering and using it as a raw material to create libels to stigmatize Jews and Israelis.
- [63:29]
Zoe Booth
I think another thing you do really well is showing that you don't need to get into arguments with people who are trying to entrap you. For example, a common one is, you know, oh, well, Smotrich said that he wants to wipe out Gaza. How, how can you stand by, you know, defend him? They're essentially wanting you to explain, explain away what he said. And you know, just because, because you're a Zionist, you don't have to answer for Smotrich. You're not, you know.
- [63:58]
Adam Louis Klein
Yes, basically a form of racial stereotyping, basically. So that all Israelis will be tainted and also called Zionists will be tainted by a particular Israeli kind of exaggerated as a figure of evil. Right. And that's something that all racisms have always done, right? Like anti black racists spend a lot of time combing through videos of black crime and exaggerating, you know, instantaneous of black criminality to create a stereotype that stains and stigmatizes all black people as a collective. And that's all anti Zionists do. The way they behave on X, for example, they're a kind of mob where they sort of gather around sort of the next video, right, of an Israeli supposedly saying or doing something evil. Right. Regardless of the context, you know, sometimes maybe it's true and they're using it to stain all Israeli. Sometimes it's just fake because it doesn't even matter. The point is to find these images, these videos of the evil Israeli and circulate them and incite hatred amongst a mob.
- [64:59]
Zoe Booth
How do you explain that when you're criticizing Zionism, you're hurting all Jews?
- [65:09]
Adam Louis Klein
I wouldn't say criticizing Zionism. I would say that the construction of the evil Zionist and of Israel is inherently evil as a way of seeing Jewish peoplehood or the Jewish collective is evil and then trying to force people to do disavow their connection to Israel, to Israelis or to Jewish peoplehood as a whole.
- [65:28]
Zoe Booth
So this argument that I often resort to, which is like, well, 98% of, you know, Australian Jews are Zionists, don't even go into that.
- [65:37]
Adam Louis Klein
I don't think that's such a useful argument to be quite honest. Because if it was true, right, they spread libel and the role of a libel is basically to make the hatred seem justified. So that if the libel was true, many of your Hatred would be justified. Like if Israel was committing a holocaust of Palestinians. Right. Like if it was intentionally killing as many Palestinian children as possible. Well, maybe a global movement to stop it would be necessary. Maybe even taking drastic terrorist action would be necessary. And that's why it's a libel, because it makes it seem rational and justified. Right. So if it were true that 95% of Jews supported a holocaust of Palestine Palestinians, then it sort of wouldn't really matter that it was most Jews. Right. It would still be wrong. I would still be against all of that. 95% of Jews who believed that one should commit a holocaust of Palestinians. Right. And so when we think about libels in that way, I don't find it super useful to to just talk about how many Jews are Zionists. I would just say that it's really the anti Zionist that is constructing Jews as evil by sort of marking them as Zionists and spreading these libels about the evil Zionist.
- [66:53]
Zoe Booth
Good stuff. Okay, well we've got a lot of work to do. Okay, how can people learn more about your work and movement against anti Zionism?
- [67:02]
Adam Louis Klein
The best way is the website just movement against antizionism.com and then also we're on X and Instagram. Yeah, you can also go to my website, Adam Lewiskline. L O U I S K-L-E-I-N.com it also has links to my writings and the movement here against anti Zion.
- [67:19]
Zoe Booth
And what's the sort of big goal here with Maz?
- [67:23]
Adam Louis Klein
We want to create a complete social shift in which anti Zionism is recognized as a bigotry, as its own form of bigotry.
- [67:31]
Zoe Booth
Great. Okay, well thank you for joining me, Adam.
- [67:34]
Adam Louis Klein
Thank you. It's a pleasure.
- [67:47]
Ryan Reynolds
Hey, it's Ryan Reynolds here for Mint Mobile. Now I was looking for fun ways to tell you that Mint's offer of unlimited Premium Wireless for $15 a month is back. So I thought it would be fun if we made fifteen dollar bills, but it turns out that's very illegal. So there goes my big idea for the commercial. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch upfront payment
- [68:09]
Mint Mobile Announcer
of $45 for 3 months, $90 for 6 months or $180 for 12 month plan required. $15 per month equivalent taxes and fees. Extra initial plan term only greater than 50 gigabytes. Me slow when network is bus.