identity politics
Since the election of Trump, everyone is talking identity politics, whether as activists for various radical ideologies, or as critics of such ideologies and their many absurdities. Generally we can see a left/right split. On the left, we have feminism, the so-called wage gap, the pink tax, #MeToo, anti-racism, gender discrimination, trans activism, Black Lives Matter, Antifa, the free speech 'debate', cultural appropriation, etc. On the right, we have white nationalism, and that's pretty much it.

Whereas criticism of the statistically negligible far right comes from the entire political spectrum, it is pretty much just conservatives and centrists who are going to battle with leftist identity politics. The far left has turned their side of the political spectrum into a Borg-like collective of conformists shutting down any criticism as being evidence of Nazism.

But there is one form of identity politics that has slipped through the cracks unnoticed: Zionism. Ironically, the left by and large is anti-Zionist, but neglects to see how the worst features of Zionism are practically identical to the worst features of their own identity politics. And while the right is on point in their criticism of the left's identity politics, they tend to be pro-Israel and are seemingly blind to the fact that Zionism exemplifies the identity politics they otherwise abhor.

Tune in Saturday, May 19, 5-6:30pm UTC / 6-7:30pm CET / 12-1:30pm EST, as we discuss identity politics, and why Zionism provides a warning as to the horrors for which identity politics can be responsible.

Running Time: 01:26:24

Download: MP3


Here's the transcript of the show:

Harrison: Hello everyone and welcome to The Truth Perspective. It is Saturday, May 19 and we are back for a somewhat new format for the radio show. So today, I know in the past couple of years I've had a lot of fun making fun of SJWs and I know a lot of us have and that's because of a thing called identity politics. That's what we're going to be discussing today because in today's climate, at least in the western world, identity politics makes up a huge aspect of the entire western world view and we can see that in the emphasis in the media and on college campuses and all over the place on things like racism and sexism with the foundation in the feminist movement primarily for a lot of these issues.

But we've been talking recently and we have come to the conclusion that there's an odd man out in the identity politics game and so we're going to be talking about that today. With me today, my co-hosts are Elan Martin and Corey Schink.

Elan: Hi everyone.

Harrison: And Corey Schink.

Corey: Hello. Nice to be back.

Harrison: So let's get into that third man, Zionism. The reason I call it the odd man out is that if you make a tally of what seemed to be the left and right issues in the political discourse of the day, you find that on the right there is a very strong criticism of the foundations of identity politics. So that's where you see most of the criticism coming from, slightly right of center? Can we even say that? Maybe not actually because I think maybe I just fell into the trap of the radical leftists to think that everyone that who disagrees with them is somewhere on the right to far right when actually pretty much everyone is to the right of the far left, even if you're a centrist or even just a liberal liberal.

But even then, the odd man out is Zionism and what I'd call Jewish identity politics. If you look at all the left issues, feminism, anti-racism, anti-Zionism, they are all grouped together. Then on the right you've got a very pro-Israel attitude as well as an anti-identity politics in every other area. So it seems like on the left that a lot of the negative aspects of identity politics that you see in all if its iterations are identified correctly when it comes to Zionism but then they don't see how they are actually exemplifying those nasty bits of identity politics in their own feminism and focus on white supremacy and racism that doesn't actually exist to the extent that they say it exists.

Then on the right you have this vehement criticism of identity politics but then a total acceptance - it's like the blinders go in front of the eyes when it comes to Zionism or Israel.

Elan: It's exceptional.

Harrison: Yeah. It's the exceptional one. So for today's show I think what we're going to do is to get into identity politics in general and then in specific; so how its main features manifest in different movements. So hopefully we'll be getting examples to show how they're all kind of similar and then it'll just make that middle man Zionism seem all the more strange, how it's on the left when maybe it should be on the right. I don't know, we'll get into it.

Corey: It's its own beast with identity politics in general is really a different breed that when you look at it you've kind of got to poke at it for a while and see what all the similarities are between these different groups and where they differ and in terms of the left of the spectrum and the right, whether you're talking about Islamists or the Zionists or feminists, what you end up seeing when you listen to their rhetoric and you read all of their different reports and publications is that deep down there's a grievance. There's a fundamental grievance against an oppressor or against society at large that is usually boiled down to discrimination, a claim to being discriminated against.

For feminists it's basically that being a woman sucks because men are the oppressor and you have to stay at home and you want to go out and work and you want to do all the things that men do but you have to take care of the kids and so basically you're discriminated against by men and biology and by nature. For the Zionists, obviously there's a very legitimate grievance in terms of the holocaust. Anti-Semitism was rampant, especially in eastern Europe and the Russia of the Czars and Jews suffered horrendously throughout a large part of history.

For Zionists, they were able to capture this suffering and this claim to discrimination and use it in order to claim a level of victimhood. Feminists and Zionists and Islamists and all of these identity politics ideologues will take this claim, this grievance, discrimination, whether it's legitimate or in some cases just outright nuts, and they will then use it to convince society that they are the victims no matter what they do. They have a victimhood that transcends blame and reproach so that no matter what the group does, you can't criticize them because then you're just further victimizing them. Your criticism is just more evidence that you are discriminating against them and that you are the oppressor.

Elan: Yes. It's the hysterization of victimhood, of trying to protect your tribe, your group. Unfortunately the commonality between all of these groups is that more and more what they do is see life out of the prism or the lens of their own victimhood. So everything is against them and what they identify as who they are. It's a very dangerous phenomenon. What it does is it knocks everyone back on their heels. It puts everyone on the defensive when it isn't necessary to do so.

So if you don't agree with it, you have become, by default, the enemy of this tribe or group that is ascribing to this identity politics, whatever group they identify with.

Harrison: Let's start out with feminism. Feminism and gender politics and sex politics. So if a person is critical of feminist policies or the new sex politics as Stephen Baskerville called it, like the Title IX. Is that what the campus rape tribunals are called? I think that's Title IX. Any criticism of those policies as a set or individually will automatically lead to a labeling. You see this from guys like Antifa where the second you criticize anything that they do you are a fascist, you're a white supremacist, you're a misogynist. Did I say rape apologist?

Corey: No!

Harrison: Rape apologist. You'll see this at protests and in articles and blogs and just random YouTube videos where anyone that disagrees with them to the slightest extent has this label attached to them. "Well you don't agree with anonymous, unaccountable non-judicial juries that determine the guilt of a university or college student from an anonymous accusation against them? Well you don't agree with that? Well you're a rape apologist."

Well that's not how justice works. Like Jordan Peterson says, "We tried this in the 20th century. It didn't work. We shouldn't try it again." You can't just accuse someone of something and then have a trial with no evidence brought in, no ability to see the evidence brought against you, no ability to counter that evidence, to give your side of the story. It's just guilt is assumed. It's presumed and that's it. This is what we see in the MeToo movement where guilt is presumed.

You can have a lot of criticism of the MeToo movement and there has been, but to criticize just taking allegations at face value and presuming the guilt of the accused is not to excuse rape or actual sexual harassment or anything like that. That's ridiculous! It would be like saying because we put murders on trial that we're murder apologists. No! They actually deserve a fair trial. That's why we developed a justice system because people can be falsely accused and people are falsely accused. That's a simple point. You'd think it's a simple point.

Corey: Well I think that comes back to the whole blameless victim. The idea of victimhood has become sacred to the left and just to identity politics in general so that if you are a victim, if you even claim victimhood, that means that the person who victimized you is guilty. It doesn't matter if they actually did anything. Who needs an investigation at that point!?

Harrison: Right. The reason I brought that up because the obvious parallel is anti-Semitism. The second you criticize an Israeli policy or any action of the Israeli government or the IDF then you're called an anti-Semite. Even if you're a Jew - and there are a lot of Jews that speak out against Israeli policies. There are a lot of Jews that don't move to Israel because they don't have that nationalist fervor to go and be a part of the Jewish state. For those that do go, fine. For those that don't, fine. But there is this boundary. Every group has a boundary. Every group has borders to some extent but when you get to identity politics, even though it's largely a product of the left and leftists like to open boundaries, there is an unstated but very present boundary within that identity politics group.

You see this with the far left, with Antifa. If you're on their side to some degree, the second you step out of line you are the enemy.

Elan: Yes.

Harrison: It's the same thing with Israeli policy. Well maybe you can speak to this Elan.

Elan: Well I think, growing up Zionist or at least pro-Israel, this is a program that's pretty insidious in the sense that on the one hand - like we were saying earlier - the events of WWII, of the holocaust of documented anti-Semitism in Europe and in Russia, there is all this objective history behind what is a very real phenomenon. The twist to all of this is how awfully it's taken to a reactive - proactive is the wrong word - but it's taken to this hysterical level of reacting to anything that even smacks of questioning this dyed-in-the-wool, ingrained victimhood that allows for, apologizes for, permits for any reaction that is in defence of the tribe or the victims.

You don't even realize I think, that you're doing it necessarily. It's a program. You hear something that questions Israeli policy, as I have, and there's this knee-jerk emotional reaction that is by design intended to stifle the discussion, to shut it down and to make the person who dares question any of this information, feel like shit, feel like a bad person. Even if it doesn't do that, that's what it's intended to do.

So I see how that whole pathological way of thinking has been used in this new radical left phenomenon in the west that we've been witnessing in the past few years. It's the exact same thing. It's very dangerous.

Corey: With the left in the US and I think just in terms of the right and left in the US and the American empire and how it's stretched and how there has been so many different atrocities committed, whether it's in Vietnam or North Korea, over the course of an empire, if you're building an empire you're going to have to break some eggs to make an omelette. There's a large part of the population that is going to see that or people are going to see the crimes that are committed and they're going to be angered by it, they're going to be disgusted by it, they're going to react to it.

And the left side of the political spectrum, over the course of the 20th century, a lot of people had legitimate grievances and they were open to other ways of viewing politics. They thought capitalism was evil. They thought discrimination was evil. They had all these simplistic reasons for why the world was the way that it was, why crimes are committed, why inequality exists and through this simplistic reasoning combined with this amazing standard of living, people just started to adopt simplistic jargon and they really were opened up to these identity politics ideologues who were able to capitalize on their ignorance, capitalize on grievances and establish themselves in the university system and further extend their reach through activists and all that stuff up until the '70s when identity politics itself became an established matter of fact. That was when identity politics as a term first emerged.

I think that a large part of it is just this natural reaction as society goes through stages, through cycles, there's inequality, there's grievances and then there's also people within those societies who are going to use those grievances to their own advantage. They're able to mask everything that they do; feminists trying to redistribute wealth from men to women essentially today, through making it illegal to pay women differently than men, through pushing this wage gap myth and all of these things.

The reasons they're doing these things and initiating these conflicts is not necessarily because they have the best interests of all women in mind, especially for Zionists and racialist-type activists in the west. They don't have the best interests of their people in mind. They're just manipulating them. It's classic covert aggression that's difficult to react to when you're being called a Nazi or a fascist or a terrorist and that's used to justify bringing you down. It's pathological.

Harrison: I think maybe a better term as opposed to grievances or even identity politics is grudge politics.

Corey: Yeah! Definitely!

Harrison: Because they've got a grudge from a long time ago. In most cases it's something that didn't even apply in their lifetimes and that's where the grudge originates. In a different world you can make the same case for Palestinians. I mean it's been 70 years, right? Get over it? Except that it's not just something that happened 70 years ago, it's something that's been happening for the past 70 years. But that's beside the point.

The point I wanted to make is that there is a grudge that is held, sometimes over the case of generations, to the point where that grudge, that past grievance then justifies asking for more and more and even creating new grievances that don't actually exist. So of course there are past grievances, usually in everything. Usually if you have a group that's upset about something, they've got a justifiable reason for it at some point in time. You can find one kernel of truth at least in the grievance that they have.

At the very beginning of the show we made the point about the holocaust. Yes, giant grievance. The total lack of rights for entire segments of the population, yeah, that's a big grievance. Slavery. Huge grievance. Does it apply today? Probably not. You find people in all these identity groups that say "Yeah, these grievances don't apply today" but they are held onto with such fervor as this justification; it's all to get something. That leads to the creation of new grievances that don't exist.

Elan: Yes, and on that note, you'd think that the lesson of being victimized, you'd think that the very experience or knowledge of your group having been subject to injustices would make you want to think about everyone who experiences some form of injustice or victimization. What we're seeing here in many of these cases is groups of people who have not learned the lessons of history. Yeah, what occurred during the holocaust or slavery or when women didn't have voting rights, pretty darn awful. However, you're not going to correct it by trying to extract all of the extra power and advantage for yourself right now. The real lesson of it would be thinking about everyone that you can include in your calculus who right now isn't experiencing any kind of equity or justice.

Corey: And what is the meaning and purpose of life that it all has to be equal, that everything has to be nice - not that it has to be nice - but that it's supposed to be and that it's somebody's fault that it isn't. Is it the white people's fault if they're on top of the heap for 100 years and then is it the Muslims' fault when they're on top of the heap for 100 years? There's a mechanism at play that is completely ignored throughout history, that everybody has grievances. Life sucks. That's trite really to say it because people suffer relentlessly. The meaning of life isn't to blame everyone for it but it's to seek out the real reasons to make things better, ways to make things better, ways to live nobler and to sacrifice one's own desire just to get everything that we want in order to make that happen.

But like you said Harrison, that's the opposite of grudge politics. Grudge politics is 'somebody did this to me, it's somebody's fault'. I was reading Norman Finkelstein's The Holocaust Industry and he writes about how the whole holocaust as a "mystery religion" as in an Israeli national security type mystery religion, didn't really come into existence until after the Israeli state had reached a pinnacle of power that was enough to keep the Arab enemies at bay. It wasn't just a natural phenomenon for Jews to just say "Oh, the holocaust was the unique visiting of horror upon our people". People don't think like that! People don't want to hold grudges for their whole life. Most black people don't want to be reminded about slavery every day. We just want to live our normal lives but there are certain - and this is where the ideologue and their mentality comes into play - they are the ones who want something for nothing.

They're the ones who want the entire group to just be seen as a victim so that they can leverage the entire group's victimhood to get political or economic favours from everybody else. But the rest of the group, they don't want that! For the most part they don't. It takes a lot of work to convince them otherwise.

Harrison: You see the same thing in another overarching aspect of leftist ideology and that's just the notion of inequality; how if you look at ordinary people and you poll ordinary people, the vast majority of people have no problem with inequality whatsoever. If they see a person in a position that makes more money than them for example, they'll have no problem with that as long as that person's qualified and does a good job and they can see that that person deserves the amount of money that they're making. If they see a person that they perceive as getting a lot of money for no good reason and in fact this person has no talent and doesn't deserve that money, then they'll get resentment. But for the most part, people are totally fine with a degree of inequality.

Now of course when that gets so extreme for example a hypothetical society where a group of people have absolutely nothing and then there's the few that have everything and lord it over the people who have nothing, then you're going to get resentment and you breed this revolutionary mentality. But just for the most part, people don't care and people are fine. You'll notice that just in everyday life people will express some resentment against bankers or people on Wall Street. They've got their enemies that they pick out but they have no problem with their favourite rock star making a ton of money or the movie stars that they watch when they go to movies or people that actually earn their money, like in their community. If they know a person that's a successful businessman that happens to make three times as much as them, then they don't care.

Elan: No.

Harrison: And they can be proud for that person or they admire them even for putting the work in and getting something from it. So that leads me to think that there's something else going on here, that it's not just that an identity group thinks all the same way. It is a minority within that identity group, like you were saying Corey, that has the gall, the chutzpah to speak for the majority, to say "I represent everyone in my group and this is what we all think" when that's totally not the case.

I wanted to say something earlier when I was talking about the ad hominem slanderous, derogatory names that are called when someone either steps out of the in-group or criticizes the group, like rape apologist, misogynist, fascist, anti-Semite, there's an added dimension for people who are on the in-group that leave. Of course you're not just an anti-Semite if you criticize your own group, you're a self-hating Jew. You find this everywhere. The people who are perceived as traitors to their own group are treated more harshly than outsiders who are seen as enemies.

I think it was even in Jonathan Haidt's book Righteous Mind where he talked about this, I believe that's where it's from. You can easily imagine this. You've got a collective group, maybe you're at war with another group and someone in your group starts adopting the ideas and starts agreeing with your enemy, the people you're at war with. That person gets targeted. That person will actually get treated more harshly than some prisoner of war, some enemy from the outside. I mean prisoner of war even metaphorically because it doesn't have to be an actual wartime situation. What do you call the Uncle Toms? There's probably words for all of them but I don't know any of them.

Elan: Well just to give a recent example, about what you said there Harrison, there was the case of Natalie Portman who was invited to an awards ceremony in Israel. She was going to receive $2 million that she could give to a charity. I forget the name of it, but it's comparable to Israel's Nobel Peace Prize for instance. She came out with a letter and said, given Israel's and the IDF's behaviour against the Palestinians who've been protesting for the past five or six weeks, she didn't want to come even though she supports Israel. She was born in Israel, lived in Israel until she was a teen. She was speaking out against the government of Benjamin Netanyahu who is doing what is quite obviously terrible things to people who are not causing any kind of terrorism as Israel would say.

So by way of explanation she came out, she made the statement and you had members of Israel's government coming out and saying awful things about her.

Corey: That they should revoke her citizenship.

Elan: Revoke her citizenship. She used Israel to advance her career and now that she's made it she's an ungrateful wench or whatever it is they said when really this criticism that she came up with was right on target. It was the appropriate action. She didn't make a big deal about it but she spoke her conscience in a very measured, very powerful, I thought, way. So she's persona non grata now.

Harrison: And her criticism wasn't even that extensive. She basically said I don't support BDS (boycott, divest and sanctions). She limited her criticism to a vague statement that "There are some things I don't agree with and I don't want to be on stage with Benjamin Netanyahu." And that's all she said and they just came after her! One after the other. Some Israeli columnists were saying that she posed an existential threat to Israel! They literally went that far without being facetious. They really thought that her making this kind of public statement, this tiny bit of non-support for Israel, because she's an Israel supporter, was enough to be an existential threat to Israel.

Corey: Well she's probably part of Hamas. Hamas probably had her do it!

Harrison: I want to get to some examples here. We'll continue the stream of our discussion in a bit, but just to give an idea of what Jewish identity politics in Israel looks like, because I think a lot of people don't actually know. I know for me before I was actively looking for information about what was going on in Israel and Palestine, all I have was what I heard about in random conversations and the snippets that I might have seen on the news. I had no idea what things were actually like. All I saw were westerners talking about Israel on the news and maybe some Israeli spokesmen and that's it.

Whenever you look at anything it's an eye-opener and you're like "Wow! I had no idea that stuff was going on." So maybe we'll just take a look at some examples here. So I'm going to bring up some articles.

Recently there was the whole US embassy move to Jerusalem in Israel. Ivanka and Jared were there and they got blessed by a rabbi. This rabbi is the chief Sephardic rabbi Yitzhak Yosef.

Elan: Yitzhak (pronunciation)! {laughter}

Harrison: Oh just wait! Did I read that wrong? No, it's Yitz-chock unless the c is silent. I don't know. That was a bad article. Yitzhak, that's right, brought another one up. These are some of the things that he said: "Yosef allegedly used derogatory phrases when talking about African Americans during a lesson to followers last Saturday (this was in March). During the speech he appeared to specifically suggest that prayers should only be offered to black people whose parents happened to be white." Don't know how that works in a lot of cases but here's the quote:

So you go around in the streets of America, every five minutes you will see a negro. Do you bless him as an exceptional creature? We don't say a blessing for every negro. He needs to be a negro whose father and mother are white. If you know they had a monkey for a son they had a son like that.

Even the Anti-Defamation League which is a crazy organization that calls everyone an anti-Semite who isn't one, even they released a statement saying that this guy was crazy, words to that effect. So Yitzhak referred to black people as monkeys and used the derogatory Hebrew word Kushi to describe them. What's a Kushi?

Elan: A black person.

Harrison: A black person. And is it just black people or is it just anyone that's got colour in their skin?

Elan: It's mainly connected to blacks.

Harrison: Okay. This is the same guy. In 2016 he suggested that non-Jews who refused to follow Jewish law should be expelled to Saudi Arabia. Along with Ashkenazi chief rabbi David Lau who together preside over many aspects of Jewish personal and religious life in Israel, also called immodestly dressed women animals and railed against Smartphones which he sees as heretical. I might agree with him about that but not every one's totally bad. The ADL called his statements racially charged and utterly unacceptable but that's actually pretty light.

Okay, this is another one. It's not necessarily anything anyone said but it just shows where identity politics goes. The headline of this article is "Israeli gets 11 years for stabbing Jew he mistook as Arab". The story about this guy is he gets 11 years for the attempted murder of another Jewish man who he mistakenly thought was an Arab. An inner voice allegedly guided him to find and kill an Arab in revenge for terror attacks by Palestinians on Israelis. So he cut him with a kitchen knife, a box cutter and a hammer, walked into a local supermarket where he alleged he would be able to find his Arab victim.

This guy's kind of crazy because he's got an inner voice talking, but this it's kind of like a symbol of what's actually going on in identity politics where you can't even tell who you're fighting anymore. Again, going back to Antifa, 'everyone that I disagree with or that disagrees with me is a fascist. And what do you do with fascists? You punch fascists.' Is that person really a fascist? Who decides if that person is a fascist? What if that person isn't a fascist? No! They're a fascist! You punch them! It gets to the point of absurdity where the movement actually eats itself.

You see that where current liberals are thrown to the dogs because they say one thing wrong. That's what happens not only in movements like this but in all revolutionary movements when the revolution actually happens. All you guys that started the revolution and instituted whatever new order you want to institute, you're the first to the executioners in the first 10 years so have fun with that.

Corey: It's a good point. The new politics basically is revolutionary. It's roots are revolutionary.

Harrison: It wants to change the order.

Corey: They want the power. "Give us the power. You don't deserve it. You're mean."

Elan: And it has the unwanted unrealized effect of actually causing the resentment and the anger that it claims to be responding to, to begin with. So what ends up happening is people resent other people who consider themselves or want to be treated differently or exceptionally. So it's got this paradoxical wish fulfilment. That's kind of the wrong term. Self-fulfilling prophecy in a way where the society or the universe or however you want to explain it, gives them what they want. "Okay, if you're really going to insist and identify with being so oppressed and then demand for being treated exceptionally, you're going to be treated exceptionally, but in the worst way, in a way that you haven't imagined. I think that's at play a little bit here as well.

Harrison: Well going in that direction about turning on their own, there's another article here. It was published in 2014. Apparently a group of 300 holocaust survivors placed an ad in the New York Times condemning the massacre at the time in 2014, on Gaza. So this journalist's friend selected some of the responses in Hebrew and posted on Facebook in response to that ad. So there's all the responses in Hebrew. Here are some choice translations of what Israelis are responding to those 300 holocaust survivors that are saying they're committing a massacre, don't do it.

So this first guy David Cohen - "Those aren't holocaust survivors. Those are probably collaborators with Nazis." Schmulic Halfa - "He's invited to go back to Auschwitz." Itzhak Levy - "These are survivors who were capos, leftist traitors. That's why they live abroad and not in the Jewish state." Vitali Gutman - "Enough! They should die already. They survived the holocaust only to do another holocaust to Israel and global public opinion?" Mayer Dahan - "No wonder Hitler murdered six million Jews because of people like you you're not even Jews you're disgusting people, a disgrace to humanity and so are your offspring you are trash." (one sentence) Asher Solomon - "It's a shame Hitler didn't finish the job." Kadee Marav - "Holocaust survivors who think like this are invited to go die in the gas chambers." Yafa Ashraf - "Shitty Ashkenazis you are the Nazis."

Corey: Well with friends like those.

Elan: That right there is a sampling of some of the most despicable and pathological thinking that I think you're likely to get. Those are the folks that listen to the rabbi that you quoted from earlier Harrison. You see very similar responses against the IDF soldiers from Breaking the Silence. These are the guys who came out and said "What we were doing in Gaza during Operation Cast Lead and other operations is horrendous, gratuitously destroying homes and killing innocent people.

So these are the brave soldiers of the IDF who had the conscience and the courage against an 80%+ Israeli population that is for all of this carnage in Gaza; to come out and say "This isn't only wrong it's a criminal act that we perpetrated". These are very powerful statements coming from the literal boots on the ground. So how do you knock them down a notch or two? In some cases you hear statements like those you just read Harrison. In other cases these soldiers are confused, they're again, self-hating Jews; any kind of rationalization to try and explain away what are almost incontrovertible, undeniable human reactions to the behaviour of the IDF in Gaza.

Harrison: I'm going to get back to a few more articles. These are some more examples of things that rabbis say. I shouldn't say just rabbis because these are just particularly bad rabbis. There are some good rabbis out there like Rabbi Latz just yesterday said on Twitter "I am a rabbi. I love Israel. I condemn without reservation the bloodshed in Gaza. Not so hard. You can challenge the Israeli government's policies without being anti-Semitic." So good for him for saying that. It's got 136,000 likes, 42,000 re-tweets as of a while ago. There are probably more now.

So there are good rabbis out there and there are good orthodox Jewish groups for instance that totally anti-all these anti-Gaza operations. That's a really awkward way of saying it.

Elan: Even anti-Zionist.

Harrison: Yeah, even anti-Zionist, for sure. But then you get guys like this. These guys are just as dangerous as Karl Marx was because they preach an ideology and that ideology then forms the mental substrate of the way that their followers think. And that then leads to action. Thought leads to action and if you're not responsible about what you put into your head and what you believe, then bad things can happen.

So here's just an example. This is Rabbi Ophir Wallas headline "Influential Rabbi Is Teaching Would Be Israeli Soldiers Genocide is a Mitzvah" that is an ordained holy action. This is what he said in a teaching video for would-be soldiers. I'll read the translation. It was in Hebrew.

In conquering the Land [of Israel] according to Nachmanides and Rashi [two Jewish rabbi teachers of old], who say that the wars of today are also mitzvah wars for conquering the Land, I am beholden to nothing. This isn't the law of the persecutor, right? What law are we dealing with? The laws of a mitzvah war, a war of occupying the Land. Even if I don't conquer Gaza right now, [conquering it] is part of my ability to settle the Land of Israel, so it is also a part of the mitzvah of conquering the Land. And therefore it follows, there's no other way; like, we'd have to kill them all. Because this is the difference between the Law of the Persecutor and mitzvah wars. A mitzvah war of conquering the Land, which is not limited to saving the people of Israel from their enemies, according to some of the Rishonim I could, on the face of it and by the essential law, destroy, kill and cause to perish all of them. I will not do so, because if I were to do so, and reject international treaties, then the State of Israel shall perish, unless we shall witness a miracle of miracles - and one must not trust in a miracle. And that's the only reason I won't do it."

So the only reason he won't engage in genocide is because it would be bad PR for Israel. Okay let's go on. There's a reason that people are able to think like this aside from just mental illness and psychopathy in the worst cases. That goes back to ideologies.

This is another article in Mondoweiss, "Reclaiming Judaism From Mystical Zionist Nationalism". They quote this rabbi Eli Sadan and this is from a seven minute video message to his former students including those in uniform. This is his morale booster. Let me get to the good bit. He's talking about memory. This is the writer of the article commenting here.

Zionist supersessionism is here too. Judaism before Zionism was asleep if not dead:

This is a quote from the rabbi:

The nation has a soul awakening. The shekhina [God's spirit] is returning to Zion. The spirit of the Jewish people [knesset Yisrael] has appeared! From the deep wellsprings of life, the nation comes back to life.

In the collective subconscious of us all, beyond the political disagreements, there is a clear awareness that there is nothing more important than the rebirth of Israel in its land.

This gives birth in the people to a heroism, determination, and commitment to sacrifice that is beyond words.

Now note that. That's important. "There is a clear awareness that there is nothing more important than the rebirth of Israel in its land". Think about that. Nothing more important. If that is the most important thing in your life, in the life of all of your people...

Corey: Your nation.

Harrison: Your nation, then what limits are there? What is to get in the way of the rebirth of the nation? Nothing! Everything is permitted. That is the problem with these main ideologies, that they have this one focal point, this one goal towards they are striving and that is the most important thing. Nothing can get in the way. No morals. The morals of the enemy? No! The most important thing is the rebirth of Israel and therefore anything is permitted. Well anything within the Talmud, within the stricture of laws if you're talking about the rabbis, but even then as we'll see in a bit, it's pretty much everything is permitted.

That's why you can get a guy, what he said before about genocide in a mitzvah war, a holy ordained war, anything is permitted and the only reason that he doesn't do that is because of bad PR. It's because the most important thing in life is the rebirth of Israel. So when you stake the entire meaning of your life on something like a nation state, you don't have any target to move up towards. That's it.

That gets back to what you were saying Corey about what's life for? Is it to be resentful all the time or is it to find some meaning and to do something with your life; to do something meaningful but in a broad sense.

Corey: Personally meaningful.

Harrison: Personally meaningful, but it can be meaningful for other people too. When you have a personal goal let's say, or if you're doing something for yourself, you're actually doing it for other people too because you can't isolate yourself completely from other people. When you act completely off the cuff or on your momentary instincts and whims, that actually pushes you away from people and people don't like you. You actually become less successful at getting what you want. You have to give a little to get a little.

Even psychopaths know that. They know that to manipulate you in order to get what they want from you they have to at least put some effort into giving the impression that they're doing something for you. They have to hook you basically. But just for ordinary people it always comes down to doing what's best for you and what's best for the people around you. When you're going for a long-term or a short-term goal you're not going to be able to do that if you don't have support because you're constantly interacting with people.

Elan: I just want to flesh out a couple of things about what he said there. First of all, it's on the same spectrum "all is permitted in the name of creating the Zionist state". We've had statements coming out of rabbis to the effect that it's okay to rape an Arab woman or a Palestinian because it will boost the morale of the soldier. Rabbis have actually come out and said this sort of thing.

So you have that, but underlying your ultimate life's purpose is for the strength of Israel. It would be something if you were instilled with a certain nationalistic pride and you wanted to make your country strong which many people don't understand and that is that part of this vision of Israel or Zionism is for a greater Zionism for Israel, an Errata Israel and what this amounts to is a very ambitious project of growing Israel on the lands of Syria, Iraq, Iran and becoming this center of power exerting its influence in ways that are just egregious.

So underlying everything that he said there is this "We're going for broke here folks. It's not merely that we're trying to keep Israel strong and integrated and even moral." That doesn't even come into play in the sense that we think about it. "It's about imperial" - for lack of a better word - "power and influence in the Middle East. Period." So that is where a lot of these guys are coming from.

Corey: It's such a bizarre situation when you think about what led up to the creation of Israel, the holocaust, and you think about throughout history, inequalities genocides, everything. They're constantly ongoing and what we're seeing now is just the continuation of that process, of ethnic cleansing. One people move into a region. They start killing everybody off. They want to build. They want to take over. Obviously this ideology that is used to justify it that claims its roots in the Jewish identity, but at the same time it's like the Jewish people are very much aware of what it is and aware on some level that it's wrong from the point of view of the rest of the world; "We know what we're doing but we have to keep it secret and we have to cloak it and speak about it in public in a certain way. If you say anything about it, it could lead to another holocaust." It's just such a bizarre mentality that I cannot for the life of me wrap my head around. To be there, to know that the rest of the world sees it as wrong but then also to know that the rest of the world is anti-Semitic!

Elan: Yes.

Corey: "They will do this to us so we have to get on top. We have to do it to them first." Not necessarily "we have to do it to them first" but there is this level of paranoia, of fear, of hatred, of anger in the words of these rabbis and these ideologues that that is the heart of identity politics. Whatever you want to call it, you've got it right there. It's just brutal.

Elan: I think maybe that would be a good segue into a recent experience that Jordan Peterson had.

Harrison: yes.

Elan: Because Jordan Peterson was recently approached by a journalist - so called - from the Forward which is a Jewish publication that writes about a lot of these issues and even takes a pseudo-quasi progressive stance in some instances. But in this recent case through his publicist Peterson was approached by a writer who had a series of questions for him. Peterson agreed to do the interview. The writer offered to write a piece about Peterson for the Forward. Pretty much the questions were all framed around Peterson's relationship to or thoughts on anti-Semitism, the holocaust, the Jewish question, so-called.

So he had questions like "What accounts for your fascinating with Adolf Hitler? Have you ever said or would be willing to say that what Hitler did in terms of beginning, orchestrating and insisting on the organized extermination of European Jews was morally wrong?" Now right there with this one question that this journalist presents, almost says everything you need to know about this guy.

Corey: Yeah.

Elan: And what he thinks and what he's trying to do with this article that he's writing because anyone who has listened to Peterson for even a tiny bit, realizes that he's really thought through anti-Semitism. He has really thought through WWII, Nazism, Hitler, Stalinism, ideologies, what people are capable of and has put this out there. It's been his life's mission to explain how these things unfold and what informs the thinking of the people who perpetrate crime against Jews or anyone else.

So as it happens Peterson gets pretty wise to the game right away with a series of questions that kind of sound like that and are like that and sure enough this journalist comes out with a piece and the title - let me see if I can get the exact name here of the title because it's outrageous.

Harrison: Here, I'll bring it up.

Elan: "Is Jordan Peterson Enabling Jew Hatred?" It basically twists everything that Peterson has ever said and done on the subject, portrays him as a questionable figure. Peterson presents the timeline of events in the writing of this article and his reaction and his response to the editor of the Forward. I was thinking why would this guy come out and present Peterson as a maybe anti-Semite or as an anti-Semitic person and the reason is that Peterson poses an indirect threat to the identity politics of Israel and a lot of Jewish people.

So even if he's coming out and speaking out against anti-Semitism, it's not enough for the Zionists because the very type of thinking that Peterson has been explaining and railing against is the same kind of thinking that Zionists engage in and want other people to engage in. So that's why he has to get Peterson.

Harrison: Yeah.

Elan: Because sooner or later people are going to put two and two together and realize in greater numbers, that identity politics extends, as we're discussing today, to Israel and to Jewish Zionists. So it was a real lesson in how these people operate, really covert and underhanded and really a strong pre-emptive attack against Jordan Peterson and everything that he's trying to do right now.

Corey: I think it's interesting because that is the same approach that so many others like NBC News, 60 Minutes, so many different mainstream outlets absolutely refuse to even address what he's saying. It's like they can't even understand what he's saying. They are all such ideologues of whatever ideology that they preach that they can't even understand what he's saying. Whenever he says something all they hear is "I hate women" and when he says that you can't use a univariate analysis to explain a complex problem such as men and women and the amount of money they make across the planet, across the races, across all classes, they just say "You don't believe in the wage gap?! You must wish all women stayed at home!"

That ideologue mindset is so on display and he is, every time that they attack him like that, more and more people it seems hear what he's saying. "Wow, he's rational. I like his use of reason because I actually find that reason can help me accomplish things in my life and when I actually think things through without being an ideologue, without just believing in whatever my university professor taught me, I can actually accomplish things" and that is a huge threat to any ideologue. Ideologues do not want people thinking for themselves.

Harrison: Right, and especially psychologists. Maybe we'll get into that in a little bit. But I want to go over some of the questions, the back-and-forth that Peterson had with Ari Feldman. So here's the blog post that Peterson put on his website. One of the first questions that Feldman had asked him was "Do you believe it is possible to reasonably determine why the holocaust came about? If so, what's your answer?"

I think that question, like all of these, was designed to be a trap of some sort because I'm presuming that the only answer is anti-Semitism and that anti-Semitism has a particular meaning and that any other answer maybe explaining anti-Semitism would thereby be anti-Semitic for various reasons. We're going to get into that. But then they had a back-and-forth here.

"On May 8 Feldman sent me some more questions and I provided answers:" Let me get to this one. "Second, You told me it's difficult to know why the holocaust happened because we don't know a lot about the psychology of ordinary Germans who participated in the Nazi regime. How important do you think is anti-Semitism to explaining the origins and extent of the Holocaust?"

Peterson replied, "I don't see how you can distinguish cause and effect when discussing the relationship between anti-Semitism and the holocaust because they are different elements of the same thing. The question is what is driving both." Right there, that is wrong from Feldman's perspective. It's wrong from the ideologue's perspective because if we go to this article, this is some news from the US. This is South Carolina, "US State Passes Law Defining Any Criticism of Israel as Anti-Semitic" just as they killed... - well that's the Free Thought Project for you.

But here's the definition of anti-Semitism. We're going to read this out and maybe analyze some of these statements. "A certain perception of Jews which may be expressed as hatred towards Jews." So right there, 'may or may not be hatred of Jews'. So it's a certain perception of Jews. We're not quite sure what that certain perception is yet. "Rhetorical and physical manifestations of anti-Semitism are directed towards Jewish or non-Jewish individuals and/or their property, towards Jewish community institutions and religious facilities." Okay, again, 'Jewish or non-Jewish'. So you can be anti-Semitic towards a non-Jewish person. I really don't understand that.

Okay, "Calling for, aiding or justifying the killing or harming of Jews." Okay, reasonable. "Making mendacious, dehumanizing, demonizing or stereotypical allegation about Jews as such or the power of Jews as a collective. Accusing Jews as a people of being responsible for real or imagined wrongdoing committed by a single Jewish person or group, the state of Israel or even acts committed by non-Jews." Okay, there's some reasonable stuff in there, again mixed in with that 'or even by non-Jews'? Don't know why.

"Accusing the Jews as a people or Israel as a state, of inventing or exaggerating the holocaust." Okay. "Accusing Jewish citizens of being more loyal to Israel or to the alleged priorities of Jews worldwide than to interests of their own nations." Okay, I've got a problem with that one because that seems to me to be a reasonable criticism of anyone that every country makes. Every country that has a minority or a group of foreigners that comes into their country for instance - I'm not including Jews in this example - there are questions about dual loyalties. We see this going on in Europe right now with the refugee migrant crisis where you have a substantial percentage - not all of them - of migrants who come to European countries with no attention to assimilate into the culture. The locals naturally are irked about that. It's like 'okay, I don't know what to think about that because we do things a certain way here and if you don't do things a certain way here I'm going to get nervous'. That's just the normal human response.

So when you have a dual national in your country of course there's going to be the risk that they're going to spy on your country for instance. Maybe they're working for that other foreign government's intelligence agencies. You don't know. These are practical problems that governments deal with all the time and they deal with them with all different countries. So there are Chinese nationals that live in the states that are subject to scrutiny in the United States or any other country because they might be Chinese spies. So it applies to any group from another country, any dual national citizenship. "Okay, there's a potential you might be a spy for another country" and sometimes they are! Sometimes they get caught. We've have plenty of Russians that have gotten caught in the United States spying on the US and get deported back for a spy exchange or something.

But it's special when it's a dual Israeli/American citizen I guess, maybe because that's the one category of a dual national that's especially bad. You can't say anything bad about them because then you're anti-Semitic but you can do the same for Russians or Chinese or Iranians, no problem. Okay, moving on, rant over.

"Using the symbols and images associated with classic anti-Semitism to characterize Israel or Israelis". I'm guessing you can find images like this all over on the intranet. You've got the Israeli flag, but it's got a blue swastika in it or something like that. Now there are, again, holocaust survivors and other prominent Jews who make the comparison between what the Israeli state...

Elan: Yes.

Harrison: ...does and what the Nazis did.

Elan: Yup.

Corey: Mm-hm.

Harrison: Legitimate comparisons, but that's anti-Semitic. Okay. "Drawing comparisons of contemporary Israeli policy to that of the Nazis." Okay, they just flat out said it. You're not allowed to do that even if there are similarities, they cannot be pointed out. "Blaming Israel for all inter-religious or political tensions". Okay, well I guess the vast majority of people are free on that one, because barely anyone blames everything on Israel and the ones that do are crazy, so I can get behind that one.

"Applying double standards by requiring of Israel a behaviour not demanded or expected of any other democratic nation." Again, I don't think that can apply to anyone because I don't think anyone does that.

Corey: Well that makes it sound like it's criminal to say they can't defend themselves.

Harrison: Right.

Corey: It just basically sounds like the whole bill is you can't draw a generalization, you can't use the word Jew. Don't use it. You better not. You better not talk about anything in terms of their wealth, their power. And definitely don't criticize anything that Israel does. But what are the actual consequences if I should accidently use the word Jew and I'm criticizing Israel, what are the consequences? Do I get a fine?

Harrison: I haven't read that far yet.

Elan: I haven't read about the legal repercussions of actually being called...

Harrison: This specifically applies to colleges and to universities and maybe schools. Yeah, public schools and universities.

Elan: Is this the South Carolina one?

Harrison: Yeah.

Elan: Okay. So I think that it's main purpose is to act as a kind of thought police and to prevent you from sharing the information that is probably factual in its criticism of Israel.

Corey: Right. So if I'm on campus and I'm a college student and I share a Facebook article criticizing Israel from ABC News, is that...?

Harrison: Potentially.

Corey: Potentially, right?

Harrison: That's how far it could go.

Elan: And just to make a connection here, what brought Jordan Peterson into the spotlight to begin with, in a major way, was his speaking out against the Canadian legislation.

Corey: Exactly!

Elan: Which basically amounted to people having to use one of 50 preferred personal pronouns under threat of something. So what we're seeing here is this kind of legislation of ideology in the US, in Canada. Actually, getting back to this guy's article for the Forward, it becomes even more clear why he felt like he had to do this, even on a subconscious level because there's this kind of legislation in the US happening everywhere. It's not only in South Carolina. There are stories about it occurring in many other places, where criticism of Zionism and Israel, support for boycott/divest/sanctions is tantamount to anti-Semitism.

This is the tyrannical, authoritarian, ideological thought police in action, right now, here in the west. And he's putting his foot down and people are paying attention.

Harrison: And of course the irony is that he's not even remotely on the same level as real anti-Semites. He's got nothing but good things to say. I think he said in his email to Deborah Lipstadt who also was quoted in that article as clutching her pearls that Peterson might say something that might be interpreted in a bad way, and he said "Look! I'm on your side here. You're attacking an ally!" So these people are very strange. Ari Feldman, besides being a terrible journalist, he's just a very strange dude. In one of the responses to this Forward article that was written in defense of Jordan Peterson, someone just listed all of the Jewish intellectuals who are either close personal friends of Jordan Peterson or who he has a professional or a positive relationship with.

There's a ton of them. Feldman even linked, kind of this guilt by association thing, basically saying that Peterson was like Kevin MacDonald who's the evolutionary psychologist who has his theory of why Jewish individuals and groups have dominated in certain areas, for instance in social psychology, anthropology, things like that. He's got his idea and so Peterson has linked to critiques of Kevin MacDonald and has written his own on why he thinks Kevin MacDonald is wrong. He is not on Kevin MacDonald's side and yet Feldman presumably couldn't find this out on the internet when it's very obvious. Peterson doesn't have very many blog posts and that's one of them and yet he links Peterson to MacDonald as if they're kind of similar. The alt-right really likes MacDonald because he's got this answer to the Jewish question.

But back to the anti-Semitism thing, I'm going to go back to that a little bit just to pick up a couple of things you said, but first a couple more quotes to put this all in context. So this is from Maurice Samuel in his book "You Gentiles" written in 1924. He writes that "We Jews stand apart from you gentiles, that a primal duality breaks the humanity I know into two distinct parts, that this duality is a fundamental and that all differences among you gentiles are trivialities compared to that which divided all of you from us."

So there is some essential difference between Jews and all non-Jews, apparently. Okay. Leon Pinsker, a respected Russian forerunner of Zionism. He wrote that Judeophobia - anti-Semitism as we call it today is a hereditary and incurable disease transmitted for 2,000 years, a variety of demonopathy with the distinction that it is not peculiar to particular races but is common to the whole of mankind."

And then Joshua Yehuda. He's got an ethnocentric theory of history when he writes, "He who plumbs the depth of universal history to gain an overall vision finds that from ancient times until today two opposing currents are fighting over history, penetrating and shaping it constantly, the messianic current and the anti-Semitic current."

So we mentioned this thing about anti-Semitism. It's the answer for everything, from the Zionist ideology just like in communism the answer for everything is class oppression. So we've got the thing we're fighting against, anti-Semitism, class oppression and to get above that we're moving towards something. So of course it's the Jewish state in Israel or it's the Marxist utopia, the dictatorship of the proletariat, the communist utopia that everyone is pushing towards. And that's the most important thing.

And of course we've seen what happened in Stalinism, that holding that ideal justified anything. Just like that rabbi said that the most important thing is the rebirth of the Jewish state, is that the most important thing in the Soviet Union was the establishment of a communist utopia, allegedly, and that justified everything. That justified rounding up a whole bunch of people who were innocent and shooting them in the back of the head just because. Because they were class enemies. They didn't even have to be class enemies. There were completely innocent people that were caught up in that. And if they were class enemies, it's like what? You're going to arrest me and execute me for having a different economic theory than you?! Is that it?! You're going to kill me for that?!

Well people did get killed for that. People got tortured for that. But this is what it comes down to. It's that one single idea that ideologues have and they can't get out of that idea. That idea determines everything. It determines their whole moral framework, that one idea. They don't have something within which to place that ideal. So let's say we've got this national ideal. A group has a national ideal. You've got a tribal ideal. Well you have to place that ideal within a larger framework, a larger context. If you don't have a larger context you're no different than the person that places their own self worth in a bubble in exclusion to the well being and the interests of the people surrounding you.

We already talked about people who are like that. People who are like that not only for the most part end up to be total failures because they can't cooperate with anyone, no one likes them, no one helps them and they can't get any cooperation from them. And on the other hand if they can get some cooperation it's manipulated and those people are serial killers or similar types of psychopaths. It doesn't work and we know it doesn't work.

Elan: Well just to add something to that, Israel has successfully been behaving this way for the past 70 years in getting its nuclear power, in extracting large amounts of financial support from the US, in its propagation of false flag terror. So to its mind because they haven't gotten caught out yet they've become emboldened it seems to act out even further in this direction. It's almost as if no one has had the power to really punish Israel or to extract any kind of justice on Israel for so long. The UN says something might be war crimes or calls Israel out for some bit of behaviour and Israel's like "Very nice. Screw you. We'll do whatever we want to do" which is in evidence right now as we speak.

So it remains to be seen that its ideological purpose and modus operandi is going to be addressed and it will be addressed because it is crossing red lines left and right at the moment, in Syria, with the Iranian government, with Gaza. There is just so far in that direction that they can go.

Corey: It's such a unique case in terms of modern history of a state with ethnic colonies and a racial and religious criterion for the ideal - we're talking about the ideal vision, the ideal state in the future. In that ideal it's a Jewish state. Now let's say that they could come out and they could just say "This is what we want! We want a Jewish state, that's it." Just say it. Come clean. Don't be manipulative, don't be lying. Just let people come with some sort of a process, mediation, something! But the problem is that it's so underhanded and there's this extra layer of relishing the suffering that's caused and the crushing. I'm not saying everybody. I don't know everyone in Israel but I'm just saying from what you can see in different protests and calling for genocide and saying "They're the vermin! Destroy them! Destroy them!" They've been whipped into such a fervour by the crazy Netanyahu's and the that whole class. It's not even about that ideal state anymore. There's something else, something extra.

Elan: There is something extra. There's this vindictive thinking involved. "It's not enough that we win. You have to lose." A win-win doesn't play into the considerations that the Israeli government have at the moment. The other parties have to lose. There is no bilateral, multipolar thinking involved, just to put it into geopolitical terms. It's like Schwarzenegger in Conan the Barbarian, "Crush my enemies" (with Arnie accent). He says a couple of other things {laughter} It is barbaric.

But they have these guys coming on the news in their suits, speaking so well and projecting blame everywhere else, onto Hamas, onto the Palestinian authority. If you didn't know any better you would be likely to be taken in by these shysters.

Harrison: So do we have any more angles we want to go to with this or do we want to just end it for now?

Elan: One last bit that I thought was kind of interesting. This is about a year ago. Alan Dershowitz our favourite Zionist lawyer and mouthpiece in the US had come out to say that he thought that identity politics in the US among the left and the right was going too far. I just thought wow! How do you say that?! What bizarro planet is he in a position to make statements and judgments about other people's identity politics? If you know anything about Alan Dershowitz, the guy couldn't be more subjective or a greater proponent for what we've been taking apart here on today's show. So that's interesting.

Harrison: Okay, I think that wraps it up for today then. Thank you everyone for listening. Thanks to Elan and Corey for being here. We will see y'all next week so take care and tune in. Tomorrow we've got Behind the Headlines and Friday after that the Health and Wellness Show.

Corey: Bye.

Elan: Bye everyone.