I I Boris and this is straight talk.

Josh SEPs Well, back mate, straight mate.

Good to see, so good to be back.

I can't believe you're just complimenting me on how nice my skin looks.

It's the best way to start to today.

It's amazing.

Thank you.

But I don't even have a I don't have a regime, I don't have a skin range.

I can't believe it.

I come.

I actually have to tell everybody that I saw him loitering around the area just outside there.

He did have a suit, he had a suit bag.

He's going to put a suit on for the show.

But I said, mate, done with it.

You look great the way it is, correct the record.

I'm flying in Melbourne right after this and I'm hosting a panel event for which I need a suit.

That's not to say that this show isn't important.

On I felt important, but I'm just feel like your vibe is more informal.

I mean, what are we doing, Marke?

Informal?

That's what I've got to intimidate you.

If I was wearing a suit, well, I want to talk about that formal vibe and I want to talk about intimidation too.

Today that's the things.

There are the topies you want to talk to you.

I'm reaching out to Josh because he's my mate, but he also knows a lot of stuff and of course uncomfortable conversations.

That's your podcast.

And you're written an article recently which I'll park, but I want to talk about a little bit later.

You've written lots of articles, but.

One I want to talk about in particular is about your grandmother and just Eve's background.

Like we do in this show, there was a lot of military activity around the world and I got in Major General Mick Ryan to talk about what's going on around the world, particularly in relation to this was straight after the USA dropped the big bomb into Iran, and I thought it was a relevant discussion.

And Mick was sort of praising the.

Israelis, so if it's back into your wheelhouse, but praising the Israelis for their military work, I don't think he's praising Israel for it's general policies relativety perhaps, yeah.

And then I had a guy called Chris Joy, who I considered to be the best economists in the country from an Australian economics point of view.

And Chris is also talking about Trump and he was also praising Israel relative to Trump relative to world economics.

In other words, the effect of their what the regimes, both regimes are doing in terms of how it leads into his economic policy, his own policy relative to what he invests in.

He's not saying did you buy that?

Incidentally, the pro Trump tariff argument quick aside, not not really, I don't buy it.

But from his point of view, he manipulates.

He has a he's built AI and he's got a team of forty five PhDs who basically build probability events relative to global bonds based on Trump's demeanor, his facial demeanor, his words, and they predicted the ram bomb, It's gonna happen on the Saturday or the Sunday, whenever it happened, so that on the back of that they gone by and sell.

So they build up events global events relative and.

Then they short or along something depending on what yeah, is going to happen.

And they'd not always get it right, but generally speaking, this all about return to the I.

Mean, that's fine if you have a twelve hour time frame where you want to make money.

It's probably not fine if you're looking at a five to ten to fifty year timeframe, whether or not markets have confidence in the United States and in the integrity of its currency and so on, so correct, it's a trade uncertain Tariff wars is probably not wise if you want to remain the number one.

It's arbitrage.

It's basically garbitrage running a basis point, so they can buy many billions of dollars worth of the US bonds or training bonds, whatever's in.

The people made a ton of money after nine to eleven as well, the people who knew that it was going to happen.

They were all kinds of crazy inside you know, trades, the airline stock, you know, from people from mysterious people in Saudi Arabia who made a lot of money.

And whether they're in the know or whether or not they created the know, which is what he does.

And as a result of in those two podcasts, the amount of negativity I got was crazy people saying, oh, you're supporting Israel and I just thought, and that sort of brings you back to this level of intimidation, not that I'm feel intimidated, but the attempt to intimidate people via social media of in terms of responses and in terms of just interaction, engagement.

And I wanted to ask you this.

Your podcast is all about uncomfortable conversations.

It's about conversations which people don'tant talk about, and there were people listening to this.

How do you deal with the negativity if at all?

I mean, do you get negativity in?

But you do?

I get negativity?

Mark?

Do you know who you're talking to?

I know you do it, but some people say, you know, sometimes when I complain about it, people say, you literally named your show Uncomfortable Conversations, and now you're complaining that people are being left uncomfortable?

Do you complain?

I don't because I have basically left social media except as a promotional tool, so you know, we post clips and things there, but I don't really engage with it, and I don't.

I can usually dismiss the hate as being the just the deranged kind of yellings of somebody, And you know, I sort of think if you're not upsetting somebody, then you're not really saying anything interesting.

There's no old adage about journalism that journalism is something that's somebody somewhere doesn't want said.

Anything else is publicity or marketing, right, you know, the whole point is that you can to upset somebody with this most recent bout, though I have felt it it's been one of the two or three hardest professional moments of my life, with my being shoved out of the ABC as one of the other big recent ones, because I felt like there are really raw feelings on both sides, and people are hurting, and my team is hurting.

By my team, I just mean a lot of people who are close to me who feel like I should be carrying water for their side of things.

Given that I'm a member of the Jewish community, they expect that I'm going to have a certain defense of Israel.

And when you try to inject nuance and you try to like articulate a vision that is nonpartisan or that doesn't please either tribe, I have found it more emotionally trying this time as inexhausting.

As inexhausting, yeah, yeah, it doesn't.

But you don't feel traumatized.

You just feel tired, yeah, insulationally tired.

Yes, that's right.

Yeah, and a little bit traumatized because it is difficult being like I mean, my whole pointed with uncomfortable conversations.

Some people misunderstand that the title of the show and think that I'm trying to foster intentionally uncomfortable moments in the room or make the guests feel uncomfortable, which is not the point.

The point is to try to have amicable and to whatever extent possible, comfortable conversations about issues that it's really hard not to get uncomfortable about.

So, you know, we pick subjects, whether it's race or indigenous rights or welcomes to country, or you know, migration or refugees, or the Me Too movement, or male and female relations in the workplace or LGBTQIA plus issues or transathletes or whatever it might be.

That if someone were to express a strident opinion about them at a work function or even.

Or a family barber or a family barbie.

Everyone's everyone's bum Hooles would puck her up a little.

Bit, like everyone would be like, oh, are we going to go there?

You know, and I try to.

Like I just had on the show one of America's foremost anti gay parenting activists.

And anti gay parenting activist.

So she is against gay parenting.

That's right, So she's a family value, did you for?

People don't know, I'm married to a guy and we have kids through sarregacy.

And it was actually John Anderson, the former Deputy PM who's a maid of mine, who had her on his show, and he's.

A podcast.

You know, he's a Christian, he's a family values guy, lifelong conservative, and he's intrigued by me because I don't fit the mold of the crazy woke, you know, super kind of captured echo chamber.

He lefty that he thinks that I would be if I was a gay guy with a family who.

Used to work at the ABC.

And so he was like, you should talk to this this woman like she's in Australia, she's preaching her you know, I guess her gospel of family values and how like every child deserves to have its biological mother and biological father.

So we sat down for two and a half hours, Mark and had a really amicable, heated, thoughtful, combative conversation about where she's coming from, where I'm coming from.

That's my gold standard, right, that's what I want to do.

And when it goes down, And just.

Before we leave that, I haven't listened that episode, but can I can you just tell me how did it go?

Like?

What's her point?

Her point is it is it about child's rights.

Yes, yes, So then how could a child have well, well, Mark, how can a child have rights?

I mean no, I think under to say that you could.

It's not an incoherent argument to say that every child has a right to a biological mother and a biological father.

I think it's is that by virtue of some bill of rights for the United States tour it's.

By virtue of her well, I think it's by virtue of her religiosity.

But she would her ethics, her Christian ethics, But she would say it's by virtue of the nature of the way that you know, humankind is constructed, that you need a biology.

It's a construct.

Yeah, but she would say it's rooted in our biology.

No, no child has ever come into existence that didn't have a biological mother and a biological father.

It's never happened.

And we're now playing God in ways that are potentially damaging to the future of kids, and we're not even we're not really looking at the downsides for children.

What are the downsides?

Did she?

Well, there aren't.

Her problem is there aren't any?

Really?

I mean, what's her trick?

Her magic trick is that her chest move.

I should say is to say, there's a lot of historical literature about how bad it is for kids not to have a stable home with a nuclear family.

So she's talking about, Yeah, she's talking about kids from broken home.

She's talking about kids with step parents who beat them.

She's talking about kids who you know, lost a pair, and she's talking about and all of that literature trauma, trauma, trauma.

She then smuggles into the modern day status quo, where, from my perspective, three seconds ago, we developed the technological and legal ability for people like me to have kids and raise them in a home that is free from all of those downsides, no traume, that is not broken, where there's no trauma, where there are loving people surrounding the kids, where the kids have all of the advantages.

And there are loads of studies now that kids in same sex households fair just as well or better by any metric that you'd want to than kid And it makes sense because they're brought into existence by people who really want them.

You know that it's not a sixteen year old couple of sixteen year olds in the backseat of a car at a drive in movie theater or something who get knocked up and then you know, I'm talking about Alabama here, remember, you know, and then they.

Have to keep the kid.

You know, obviously kids are going to do well if their parents really really love them and spent a lot of money and effort bringing them into existence.

But she makes the move of saying, we can't, you know, we can't guarantee that the downsides that we normally associate with children from broken homes don't also apply to these children.

And I mean, it doesn't make a lot of sense, but I found it.

What I like about it.

Is that I think in the past ten fifteen years or so, progressives people on broadly my side of politics.

I think of myself as a pretty left wing guy, they have taken a very censorious and finger wagging and whollyer than theur Schoolmarmi attitude to everything.

And they've taken a posture of we don't need to explain to you why you should be using your putting your pronouns in your email signature.

We don't need to explain to you why trans women are women.

We don't need to explain to you why you need to sit through a smoking ceremony.

We don't need to explain to you why you need to be welcomed to your own country at an Anzac Daidorn service.

We don't need to explain to you why, as a straight white male, you're not allowed to speak up in a meeting where you feel like people are being a little bit sexist against men like you.

Should know that we're on the right side of history and you have to get in line right or we're going to either hound you on social media, we're going to report you to HR, We're going to know exclude you from all from polite society.

We're going to potentially get rid of you from the ABC, which is what it is.

Yeah, and I think that's just fundamentally misguided.

If you look at all the civil rights movements that have been successful, from civil rights for African Americans in the sixties to probably the most successful civil rights movement I think of all time, which is the gay civil rights movement.

Between like the eighties and the twenty tens.

The strategy was not you're a bigot if you don't agree with us.

The strategy was, listen, here's our perspective.

We're all on the same page.

We're here, we're queer, we want the same stuff you do.

We want to be able to open a bank account together and have joint access to it, to be able to visit our loved ones in the hospital when they're dying without being treated like a complete stranger.

We want to be able to take out mortgages together.

We want to not be discriminated against when we rent a house, and ultimately we'd even like to be able to get married and have that word to endorse our relationship the same way you do.

You don't have to do anything straight people of the world.

You don't have to change.

Anything.

We have to do is just live your life and extend to us the same universal values that you enjoy for yourselves, you know, equality, and that resonated with people.

People came on board incredibly quickly.

I mean when I was born, being gay was illegal in a number of states in Australia and the idea of gay marriage was completely ludicrous.

Right.

That was a very fast win, and it was a durable win because we actually won.

We didn't I didn't do anything, but my forefathers in the movement, you know one hearts and minds.

They went on talk shows, they went on panels, they wrote op eds.

Contrast that to the strategy of what you might call the woke left of the past five or ten years, where there's no ex a nation, there's no appeal to fundamental underlying values that we all share.

It's just like do.

As I say, do as I say, And understandably now in Trump and the far right in Europe and Elon Musk and like you know, a lot of discontent in Australia and elsewhere as well.

There's a backlash people say, I don't have to do what you say?

Or are they saying or are they saying, do as I say?

But what I say is the opposite?

What do you mean, well, Trump, Musk, the right that's called it the right is are they saying Are they saying I don't need.

To do what you told me to do it?

Is it a backlash from as a movement or is it this new movement or the opposite side.

Are they saying, no, no, no, we don't believe in gay rights.

We don't believe in two men be married or too men be married.

We don't believe in your rights relative for you having children on your own and you should do what I say.

Well, yes, they are, yes, riches, they are equally censorious and you know, but this is what you get Mark.

When you have overreach, right, you provoke a backlash, and when when the whole game is shut the hell up, because you're not just mistaken, but winnable over if I speak to you like a grown up and you know, provide a rational space for us to have a common discussion, but you'll be on the pale.

You're an enemy of civilization, You're on the wrong side of history.

I have to crush you, and I have to defeat you.

Then of course that provokes the other side.

So you see, it's understandable, Josh, I'm saying it's understandable that you would have a ratcheting up of intensity and a kind of a cultural war of attrition where both sides think that it's a I think that it's a winner take all scenario.

So you've got Donald Trump, who will basically do anything I think to crush his opponents.

But he doesn't come out of a vacuum.

He comes out of a cultural moment in the United States where a large base of middle Americans, of small c conservative middle Americans felt like they being talked down to and well the work and shout upon yeah by the Hillary Clinton's of the world for too long.

Right, So anyway, this is all a long way of saying that what I'm doing when I invite someone like this anti family you know, this pro family values, anti gay parenting activist on the show, is trying to say these topics aren't out of bounds.

Nothing's out of bounds for rational conversation.

If we're going to survive the twenty first century, then we're only going to do so by sitting down in forums like this and exchanging ideas with people we disagree with as well as those who we agree with, and too much of our conversations at the moment, coming back to what you were saying about feeling sort of besieged and like attacked right on social media.

Are we sit in our silos, in our echo chambers, you know, inside our kind of thought groups, which algorithms reinforce.

They show us things that are eger like, yeah, we're going to like even if we hate it, we still like it, we still engage with it.

Right.

It's things that in other words, either reinforce what we already believe or they demonize things that we don't believe.

But as long as we stay on that video of the Garsen baby dying and share it or comment on it.

Then that's a win for Silicon Valley.

And as a result, our worldviews get narrower and narrower, and it starts to feel like it would be beyond the pale to talk to somebody in good faith who disagrees with us because they're an enemy.

How could you defend the Garsen baby dying, Like how could you defend a child being ripped away from its mother or father in the case of gay marriage?

How could you defend you betraying our first nations, brothers and sisters by questioning an acknowledgment of country.

And so people get more and more like enclosed in these thought chambers.

I see my job as just expanding that by ten percent, if not punching a hole in the wall altogether, so that we are all on the same page at least when we know the sort of the terrain of conversation that we can have with one another to try to figure out what's right and wrong and survive as a civilization.

So basically, I'm superman, is what I'm saying.

Man, Well, I'm actually I know you're taking the pistative sort, but to be frank with you, people should listen to your podcast because unfortunately, or fortunately in your case, fortunately, the process of navigating your way through what you just explained so well requires a favoit of intellect and probably more importantly, an understanding of the topic at an intellectual level, as opposed to the way most of us look at these things as we're just looking at as you say, we're looking at Instagram.

We're just getting fedbare social media, getting fed what we normally it knows we like, and we're not.

Actually, we're too busy, run around business and we're not really intellectualizing these things.

That's your job.

I mean, maybe, look that is that's the reason why I'm saying that I am clever.

But I actually think there's a muscle that everybody can flex.

Everybody listening to this can flex, regardless of how busy they are and regardless of how uninformed they might be about a particular issue.

And that muscle is I guess, intellectual empathy a habit, forming a habit of giving people a benefit of the doubt and assuming the strongest version of their own case rather than immediately assuming the worst.

So if you see someone write an article like the one that I did, or you know, post a clip like the ones that I might post on social media about something that I'm saying.

We have been trained by the algorithm to take it in the worst possible faith and to get as to either agree as wholeheartedly as possible, which is just as bad as disagreeing as whole heartedly as possible.

Like, I've got some feedback in the past month from people who think that I'm on their side, which is just as upsetting to me as the feedback from people who hate me, because I'm like, I'm just because you're misunderstanding, I'm not on your bloody team.

Don't think I've suddenly jumped ship and I'm on your team.

U g hardiest humas supporting you know, you know, clueless fool.

I'm trying to not have a team.

I'm trying to encourage people to think about things with the maximum amount of generosity towards ideas don't come naturally.

Do we need to have a team?

No?

Is that the point?

That's the point.

So is tribalism emerging into our communit out of society.

In other words, pick a team?

Yes, I mean I think it's natural.

I think it's perfectly natural.

I think we've always had it right.

I mean, you know, go back to prehistory and we all were tribes, and so we have a cent and when, especially when things start feeling uncertain, you hunker into your tribe and you circle the wagons and you try to protect your kin.

And that's a perfectly natural response, not just for Homo sapiens, but for all mammals really, right, all clan animals.

I think we did a good job of inventing the Enlightenment and liberal again, we like I had.

A partner it.

People invented the Enlightenment and liberal democracy and institutions like for everything from the US Constitution to the Declaration for Human Rights and all kinds of things, so that for the second half of the twentieth century we understood that the main objective was to turn the volume down on tribes.

You listen to Martin Luther King speak, you listen to Gandhi speak, you listen to Nelson Mandela speak.

I mean Nelson Mandela after he.

Was axed, is imprisoned, and then he got elected.

Right, all of the white supremacist racists who had been in the previous government said, fine, don'torry, We're not going to you will let you do your thing.

He said, no, no, no, stay in cabinet.

I want you with me.

I want you guys who locked me up to be working with me, because the only way the country recovers is by us working together.

And famously upset his own crowd by wearing a spring Box jewsey.

He's a spring Box game where there was no not one person of color.

Yes, right, exactly, and gurageous.

People say it's greageous.

Actually, i'd see really.

Clever, absolutely so smart, smart and brave both.

And you know, you just listened to Obama's speeches from you know, when he was emerging onto the scene.

I believe it 'm not it's twenty years ago now.

You know.

He came onto the scene twenty one years ago when he first gave us speech at the Democratic National Convention, which brought his name to people's attention in political circles in the States, and it was all about how there is no red America and blue America.

There is no black America and white America.

There are only the United States of America.

I get to chill up my spine even just reciting that.

It's so beautiful and in the intervening twenty years.

I think the left has just gone a bit crazy, and that's caused the right to go a bit crazy in losing sight of universalism, of this idea that the tribe actually is a bit of a dead end.

Don't think about tribes.

Don't judge people on the basis of their skin, or their genitals, or their sexual persuasion.

Try as hard as you can to judge people on the content of their character.

Try to have everyone get along, try to reduce inequality, try to reduce prejudice.

But that almost on the left now comes across as a passe right wing excuse for inaction, like, oh, do you think that you know, all of a sudden, it's just fine for us not to pay any attention to like we need to have serious conversations about race and about sex and like my identity.

And we have to change the rainbow flag so it's not a rainbow flag, but it now represents like First Nations, you know, transgender, indigenous.

Like the whole point of a bloody rainbow is that it's a rainbow.

It's got everything in it, you know, you don't need to also add in a little black thing to include likes there's an obsession with tribalism and identity that I think is occluding our vision and is just is distracting exactly.

It's an ancient instinct, and I think social media and the instability of the globe is triggering, is flaring up that tribal instinct.

Yes, out of fear and out of I think a delusional interpretation of the way the world is.

Through social media, you know, people are presented with an extremified version of things because the algorithm knows that that's what they're going to spend more time on.

I mean, you know, most people who are certain one way or another about their position on big, complicated, controversial issues that we all deep down know there isn't an easy answer to.

I'm talking about all of these subjects, right Gaza, international relations, you know, whether to bomb Iran, race relations, same sex marriage, whatever it might be.

Religion.

Anyone who has a strident opinion about those things was either raised in a you know, a blinkered, blinded, constrained environment and has never been able to escape that prejudice, as is often the case with highly religious people, or they're consuming a view of the world from social media that is just sending them down a rabbit hole and is constantly reinforcing that worldview and has deranged them.

I mean, you look at the social media feed of someone who thinks that Israel is blameless, and you look at the social media fair feed of someone who thinks that Israel is committed to committing a genocide against the Palestinians, and you're looking at two different worlds.

Let's talk about that.

Tribes Israel.

You're Jewish, Yeah, you're part of I mean you would you consider yourself as part of the Jewish community?

Yeah, okay, you feel strongly.

About perhaps the Holocaust.

Yep, you've written an article recently about your grandmother.

Yeah.

What was the article titled?

Well, the part of the problem is that the journalist doesn't write the title.

The sub editor writes the title.

And people should know that too, and people should be aware of that, because I think that's a large part of the misunderstanding about what I was trying to say.

But it was called just in case you want to look it up.

Just go I actually don't remember, but it was just if you google Zepp's SVDPS Israel, I'll tell him.

It was something like my grandmother survived the Holocaust and now.

Yeah, I'm going to tell me exactly what it is.

My grandmother fled the Holocaust.

Now it's time for Jews to abandon Israel.

Now that's that's written by Josh, but he didn't put up the title.

And that title is usually the case is the Cidney Morning held and the age.

And the age.

So the Fairfax Group published it.

Usually it's the someone internally who writes there better writes that it.

Usually this paper writes the headline.

It's usually a drag and they want to make it they're dragging the audience.

Yeah, exact, and that's fine and it worked and it worked.

So just to give people some background, my dad was born in a refugee camp in nineteen forty three in Switzerland to Jewish parents who'd fled Poland just before Hitler invaded Poland.

There all the rest of his family and his parents family were wiped out in concentration camps, and he was raised by foster staunched Lutheran foster family in the Swiss Alps for the first two years of the war, and then when he was eight, after living in Paris with his mum and her new boyfriend, they came out to Australia on a boat as refugees.

So that's the like sort of backstory.

To my history.

I mean, I'm not a religious person, I don't, you know, I go to synagogue and I don't feel I'm not raising my kids Jewish.

But you know, you're part of a clan, You're part of a tribe.

I relate to my Jewishness a bit like I will relate to my Gainers.

I sort of think it's just the thing that's in the back that's a part of the backdrop tapestry of who I am.

And I'm sort of proud of it, and I'm also sort of annoyed by it, you know, in differing measure and.

But you're already be defined by it.

I don't want to be defined by it exactly.

And I'm certainly not going to carry water or Jewish that's right, that's right.

I'll be defined by the things I do, yep, right, well, as you said earlier on, by your character exactly, yes, by my choices.

I'm not you know, this is why I also have made enemies by like I wrote also a piece you know, not too long ago, against gay pride or just asking.

For people to the same newspaper too, the same newspaper.

Yeah, you know, like do we need to be proud at this stage?

Like what are we being proud of?

Exactly?

Like I understand we needed to be we needed to pretend to be proud when.

Everyone thought it should be more proud than anyone else.

Exactly, that's right, just but also what are we being proud of?

Like I'm not proud that I'm six foot, I'm not proud of being white.

If I was proud of being white, we would immediately understand that that's a problem.

Yeah, right, I mean, you shouldn't be proud of being but you're not embarrassed.

You weren't though at the same time, I'm not embarrassed and I'm white.

But I also think it's silly to be proud of being black or Asian or gay or like what like be proud of the things you do.

Who gives it what?

So that was my basic point.

And then but you're not part of the Israel trip, part of Jewish.

I am part of it, you know, I am, whether I want to be or not, a guy who will be labeled as gay and a guy who will be labeled as a jew.

Right, I'd be Jewish enough to be shoveled into a constant tration camp.

You know, I'd be Jewish enough for you know, for Hitler.

He's not going to be you know, he's not quibbling whether whether I believe I'm history.

Yeah, I'd be straight in, straight into the straight into the gas shads.

So you know, there's that, And then what's happened is that I've had this sort of conflicted relationship, like a lot of Jewish Nians do.

I think, with the state of Israel.

Here's a country that the politics of Israel as as opposed.

To exactly not This is a very important distinction, not with israelis and not with the existence of a country that is called Israel, but with the expectation that a lot of people in the Jewish community have that we have to only have conversations internally about our problems with Israel, and we shouldn't that It's sort of again that the kind of the wagons, you know, surrounding the caravan, and like the hunkering down and the tribalism, like we shouldn't air our dirty laundry about Israel to the rest of society, to non Jewish people, because that will only give ammunition to you know, anti Semitism or something.

And I've been newly on that since October seventh, since the barbaric attacks by the hardest death cult who can select?

What do you think about that, Josh so so, just talk about October seventh, Yeah, just as a preface right.

Now, Well, it was.

More more horrifying than the savagery of people storming across a border and like raping innocent young partygoers at a music festival who are high on ecstasy, a lot of them, which is what was happening on that date.

What's happening on that day?

It has But you're saying it had great ramifications, that there was greater intent behind it, Well.

There was a lot.

Yeah, No, I mean, I think it was just just to remind people.

Right, You've got over a thousand people, you know, innocent people and a pretty hippie, dippy part of the country who were left part it was a left wing part of the country.

Therefore they're you know, they're mostly peace nicks and they're mostly it's a love rave right in a field, and these people are being raped with rifle butts and you know, having their internal organs, you know, smeared everywhere, and you know, just the most and with glee, like these people are don't with glee, right, It's not like this is a regrettable casualty that we have together, we have to do in order to achieve something on our way to attack a military installation or something.

They're not going for any military installations.

Wanted to kill lots of Jews.

It was a pogrom.

But what was more disturbing to me than that was that immediately instantly protests all over the world in support of the Palestinians who had elected this jihadist death cult Hamas, which had then carried out this attack before Israel had done anything.

Right, we actually went down here with your prowse.

Yeah, literally days after it, Yeah, with people yelling where are the Jews?

And then there was some misinformation that they had said gas the Jews.

And then you know, I got into a few arguments online with friends of mine, like Antoinette Leatwof, who was saying like, no, no, no, it wasn't gas the Jews, it was where of the Jews?

And I was like, excuse me for not being.

Hugely reassured by that distinction.

Why are there a bunch of Arab Muslims, you know, rallying, screaming.

Where are the Jews?

Do they have good.

Intentions for me?

It's not a consolation that they're not.

Like.

This is what I'm sort of objecting to and why I wanted to write the piece.

I don't want the whole world, including Australia, to become tribalized into identity groups who feel like they have to carry water for either jihadists or the Netta Yahu government.

That's not my fight, that's not our fight, that's not the fight of That shouldn't be the fight of Arab Australians.

That shouldn't be the fight of Muslim Australians.

Certainly shouldn't be the fight of foggy headed, lefty, well meaning white Australians on Instagram who have no connection to the region but see images of devastation on their iPhones and think that it's now their calling to bang on constantly and become elatant, yeah about how terrible Zionists are and use the terms Ionists in ways that smell to most Jews like anti semitic, you know, like slander.

So the point of the article was basically saying we have to find a way to talk about our Jewishness, the Jewish community, where we're not always carrying water for Israel.

So when I said when I write, I probably if I write it again, Honestly, Mark, I wouldn't write that.

I wouldn't write it's time for Jews who abandon Israel.

But as you know, when you're writing, you've got these two competing needs.

When you're writing, one is to be highly delicate and nuanced and explanatory and hedging everything you say so you can't possibly be misunders stood, and right in a very academic way.

You annoyed with yourself.

You're doing that.

Yeah, and people it's boring.

Nobody wants to read a thesis.

The other need you have is to have people fall off their seat and go bloody hell.

That punched me in the gut.

I felt that, you know, I really felt that the audience, and so you know, I spend the whole art I spend eleven hundred and fifty words talking about what misguided hypocrites.

I think that the anti Zionist movement is how they don't understand the history of that region, theyn't understand why there's a settlement.

They don't understand why, I mean the settlements in the West Bank.

They understand why there's an occupation.

Most of them don't know about the Oslo Accords.

They don't know about Yitzak Rabin.

They don't know what happened in nineteen sixty seven.

They don't know who invaded the West Bank.

When Israel was created, it wasn't Israel, it was Jordan.

They don't know who invaded Gaza when Israel was created.

It wasn't Israel, it was Egypt.

They don't understand why Israel is sitting on this land at all, because it was invaded by all of its Arab neighbor who wanted to either kill all the Jews or drive them out of the region.

And then it won a military victory, which ordinarily means you get to keep the land.

You don't just give it back that you know, you don't get the deal.

That's the deal.

You don't get to keep invading.

They invaded in forty eight, the Arab States in sixty seven, in seventy three, and every time they want they want to go, you know, okay, we're going to wipe out all the Israelis and we're going to take back all the land for the Arabs, and then when we lose, oh, let's just go back to the starting place.

No, I'm sorry, that's not how wars work.

You don't get to just keep declaring war against the people and then just say can we have a do over?

So, you know, there was a huge history, and then you don't have to go to the nineteen nineties and the fact that the Nobel Peace Prize went to Yitzak Rabin and Shimon Perez and the Palestine leader for you know, really agreeing to a two state solution.

Then the Israeli PM gets.

Assassinated, but the Israelis continue.

To try to figure out a way to divest themselves of these territories which they're occupying, which was supposed to be the Palestine land.

And what happens then, you know, so they have Camp David in the year two thousand and Clinton gets together with Barak and the Palastinian leader of Bus and they make another offer, and the Palestinians walk away, and they launch what's acutely called the Second Intofada in the year two thousand, which really ramps up in the northern summer of two thousand and one.

You see posters.

Now that's say globalize the Intervada.

Have you seen that on stickers and posters and stuff, people say, globalize the Innovada, meaning the Palsenian cause is our cause, you know, the Palasian cause is the Indigenousustralian cause.

You know, it's about work, it's about fighting back against the white colonialist you know, structural patriarchy and global capitalist hegemony of like the military complex.

Yeah, the colonizers.

So the world is like bifurcated into these two very simple camps.

You're either a colonizer zionist, you know, militarist, pro us imperialist white or you're an innocent, blameless person of color, colonized victim.

It's victim or victimizer.

It's colonized or colonizer.

That's that's like this simplistic binary that you're supposed to accept about the world.

The fact that the.

Arab States have been pushing Islam at the end of a sword for centuries across the Middle East.

The fact that the Jews had the Kingdom of King David thousands of years ago.

The fact that when you dig up Israel, it's all Jewish archaeological stuff.

The fact that if anyone was doing a welcome to country in the Middle East, in Israel, it will be the Jews doing the welcome to country in Israel.

This is all sort of glossed over because of the atrocities that are being perpetrated by Israeli right now.

Right now, people see that, they see a snapshot, and just as if you'd seen a snapshot of Hiroshima or the fire bombing of Dresden on your phone every single day.

I mean, who would you think was the good guy in World War Two if every single day the Nazi, Yeah, the Nazis were feeding you all of the information about how horrible it was to live in Dresden.

I mean, how would you continue to support that sort of a campaign.

So there's this lack of historical Well, the second in fart just to stop on the point of Intafada, because you know a lot of people don't know this.

First of June two thousand and one, vast majority of Israelis are behind the peace process, which has now been dragging on for seven eight nine, about ten years of trying to figure out a way to give the West Bank and Gaza back to the Palestinians and create a state and the major stumbling block is the question of the right of return of Palestinians.

Right the UN when they set up you remember, end of the Second World War, countries are being created all over the Joint Refugees are all over the place.

My grandparents are kicked out of you know, Poland, kicked out of Europe.

They come set up here, huge flows of people.

The Jews are being kicked out of all the Arab countries in the Middle East, and they're going to Israel because they're hoping that the country's going to be created, and it gets created, and there's a bit for Israel, and then to the east of that there's the West Bank and Gaza for the Arab population.

They weren't called Palestinians yet they invented that nationality after you know, they were dispossessed from the land, and that was where the Arabs go.

And then about a fifth of the population of Israel proper remain Arabs.

They are Arab Israeli citizens, right.

They enjoy equal rights to the rest of They're probably the best treated Arabs in the world.

There's Arabs living in this the Arabs living in Israel.

You know, if I gave you, if I suddenly click my fingers and said, all right, you're now an Arab and you don't know whether you're going to be rich or part of a royal family.

You're just going to be an average citizen, right, You're just going to spin a You're going to roll the dice, and you could be anywhere in society at any level.

You could either be poor or rich or whatever based on status.

Whatever.

You get to choose to be anywhere in the Middle East as the place.

I mean, you're not going to choose You're not going to go to an Arab state.

Yeah, of course most and that by the ways of most people.

Most people don't realize that Israel treats the Arabes who live there.

Well, absolutely, I want to reframe it.

It's not like they're treading will just there's no treing well, no turing bad.

There's three citizens in a liberal democracy that's rich and in avery.

So what do you do about the Arabs that are surrounding the place, Well, the instant Israel gets created.

Instead of allowing the Arabs to form their own state, Jordan invades the West Bank and guyes We'll take that.

And by the sixties what is now the West Bank is like a third of Jordan's economy and population.

It's like a big thriving part of Jordan, and Egypt is sitting on the Gaza strip.

So the reason why initially why there was no Palestine was because the Arab states didn't want there to be, because they wanted to keep the land for themselves.

Then they got a bit greedy and tried to take over Israel completely in nineteen sixty seven, and unfortunately for them, Israel won back those territories and then was like, well, what do we do with them now?

And everyone in Israel basically thought we're going to have to help them create a Palastinian state at some point.

The problem was every time they.

Tried to broach the topic of creating a Palastinian state, every single Palestinian leader, including up until today, found it impossible to say that they don't have a right to go back to Tel Aviv and the original places where some of them came from.

Some of them were born and raised in the West Bank, some of them born and raised in Gaza, but many of them can trace their ancestry back to what is now Israel proper, and as far as Israel's concerned that's not a fair deal.

Nineteen forty eight was a weird time.

It was a long time ago.

So yeah, a lot of Palatinians are hanging around with like a key or on.

It's a thing in Palestine to have a key hanging on a necklace around your neck to the house that you're great great grandparents came from in what is now some Israeli town saying like someday, someday I'll be able to return, and my romantic it's very romantic, and it's really sad, and my heart goes out to the Palastinian people.

I mean, I am as devastated as anybody about how badly they've been screwed.

I just disagree with the mainstream Palastinian narrative that the main cause of their being screwed is Jews.

The main cause of their being screwed is the fact is the dysfunctional way that the Arab world has continued to inflame the Palestinian right of return, that someday we will go back to the sea, the Jews won't be here anymore.

This kind of a lot of Arab autocrats and the Arab street and the jihadists and the Iranian Theocrats have a vested interest in promoting in whipping up this kind of anti Semitic.

It's good.

Well, it bonds them together, it gives them a common enemy, and it absolves them of the responsibility to do anything for the Palatinians.

Right, they don't have to allow Katar just hosted the World Cup, right a couple of years ago.

Who build all the stadiums.

They shipped in people from Bangladesh to build the stadiums.

Why don't they let Palestinians come and build the stadiums and send some money back home?

Do you want to Why do you think that because they don't like I mean sad truth is, the Arab golf states don't like the Palestinians.

They think they're gey hardists.

They think they're trouble, they think they're lazy, they think they're dysfunctional, and they don't see a future in them.

They see a.

Future in oil money, tourism, opening up to the world, and ideally eventually being on the same side as Israel in the United States.

They want to back winners, they want to back the stronghorse.

The problem is the Hour of Street can't contemplate that.

So the Arab leaders who are playing a double game, right the Arab leaders in the Golf States and in Saudi Arabia.

Their attitude is keep talking a big game about how much we care about Palaestinians, but don't give them the ability.

Don't give them any work visas to come and work here and send money back to their families in Gaza or the West Bank.

Don't allow them to get citizenship or permanent residency in places like Lebanon, where tons of these refugees currently live, and they're stateless.

They can't even travel Mark.

You know.

I've I've met people in Lebanon who asked them what nationality they are, and they say Palestinian.

They have a Palestinian ID card, but they're not Lebanese.

They don't have a passport, and as far as they're concerned, they say they're Palestinian.

They've never been to the town that their great great grandparents came from.

Their parents have never been there, their grandparents have never been there, and sometimes their great grandparents have never been there.

But their home, deep in their heart, is still this town in what is now Israel proper.

And they've been sold a lie by Arab leaders and by international aid organizations and by well meaning lefties around the world for sixty years that someday they will be able to return.

And so the pickle that Israel has found itself in which it was trying to address is like we get this bit of land, you get that bit of land.

We don't get to come and live in the West Bank or like Gaza, if you don't get to come and live on in Israel, like it's supposed to be two countries.

And the inability to find a way to divest itself of the West Bank and Gaza has now led to Israel into what I think is this moral abyss, where it is running a military occupation in the West Bank, humiliating and degrading Palastinians.

It continues to build settlements meaning towns, you know, just constructs Jewish towns on what is supposed to be Palatinian land, which is hardly a show of good faith that you're actually serious about a two state solution.

And now it has taken the most brutal and militaristic approach to addressing the problem of having jihadists, you know, of having essentially terrorists running the Enclaven Gaza, where there seems to be no care for human life whatsoever or no proportionality.

Now it seems that or you think that is the case.

Well, look, I understand how tricky it is to talk about because as far as the Israelis are concerned, Look, israelis Rozrael Israel, as far as Israel is concerned.

But I would have to say that now they are almost indistinguishable.

I mean, I would say that ninety percent of the Israeli population is on board with the view I'm about to articulate, even if they don't agree with the Netanyahu government.

They would say there used to be Israeli towns in Gaza, there used to be settlements, and we withdrew in two thousand and five and there was no blockade there.

Israel was not stuff and around with Gaza at all.

There was a full unilateral withdrawal.

They ripped out.

The army went in and ripped out, screaming Jews from Gaza, in order to say, you know what we're done, have it, take it, do what you want with it, guys, We're over having a military occupation.

And that was a test case for the West Bank.

There are a lot of people in the Israeli government at the time in two thousand and four to two thousand and five, who thought, the way we're going to do this is to withdraw from Gaza, and as long as that works, we'll just unilaterally withdraw from the West Bank and we won't keep waiting for them to accept our right to exist.

They're never going to do it.

They're never going to come around.

Just build a big wall, leave side by side.

The problem was the Prime Minister of Israel had a stroke and wasn't able to completely fulfill that.

And the other problem was it was after nine to eleven George W.

Bush and Connolly's a Ris the Secretary of State, and the United States were big on empowering the Arab world to be more democratic.

They wanted to shake up of the Arab world.

They thought the problem was too many Arab dictators, and so they were like, let's empower the Ghazan people by giving them a vote for who they want to rule them.

And the Israelis were like, don't do that.

They're going to just vote in a bunch of usholes who want to kill everybody.

And they were persuaded otherwise by the international community and by the US.

You know, let's create a democratic Gaza.

Well, the Gazans have voted for terrorists.

They voted for Hummus Humas.

And once you've got this fully, I mean, I don't want to mince words here.

People should not understand Hummas as anything other than an incredibly ragingly jew hating, murderous, genocidal death cult.

I mean, this is not a you know, some people sort of think, well, it's you know, it's a it's sort of like Nelson Mandela or something like, it's a liberation struggle.

Yes, it's that.

It's not the plo I mean it is of course, of course, it is fueled by the frustrations of a people who yearn for freedom.

But their freedom has not been deprived by Israel over the past since two thousand and five, their freedom has been deprived by the terrorists who are holding them hostage and by the Arab states, especially Qatar, who empower that.

And I'll add by the cynicism of the Netanyahu government in facilitating that, because it sort of suited Israel's right wing government to have Hummus in power in Gaza, because it was a It meant it gave them an excuse to not pursue peace.

Right they were like, well, we're not going to go negotiate elections, yeah, because we're war.

No election.

Yeah yeah, well, I mean of course they're not going to have elect I mean, hummus would never allow elections.

Anym But also in Israel, so I see what sort of securities position.

Yeah, yeah, well exactly.

I mean he'll have the elections that he's required constitutionally to have, but he doesn't have to.

Yeah, he can call them at the time of his choosing, and it's when it suits him the best.

So this is a long rambling way of saying that once you've got the death cult in charge, then Israel imposes a blockade because you can't have people who are obviously committed to I mean, they start getting money, right, Gaza starts getting money from the international community, and what does its government do with it.

It doesn't build.

It could have built Singapore with the amount of money it's gotten, could have built high rises, could have made itself a technology hub, could have dinailing with it.

It builds the largest tunnel network in the world that it doesn't allow civilians into.

It only allows its military into, and then uses its civilians as human shields and pawns.

So again, this is a long round about way of saying they've rigged the game the Palestinian government in Gaza, such that anything that Israel does to get rid of them is going to make Israel essentially guilty of genocide in the eyes of the world.

Like if your own government is committed to killing as many innocent people as possible in order to stay in power, then you're basically booby trapped the system such that your adversary has to do horrendous things in order to get you out of power.

And the tragedy is that Israel is doing those things.

Like I don't know whether or not you can classify it as war crimes or genocide or whatever.

To me, there's a legalistic way that you can say that Israel is guilty of genocide by that yardstick.

Hiroshimu was genocide.

Lots of things that the West has done.

Vietnam was genocide that were you know, because like genocide technically under international law, I think is just the the whole or partial like prevention of a people from being able to exist as a people.

So if you think of the Gardens as a people, you'd have to say that that's the case, right, Their lives are being rendered intolerable to live as Garzens.

But if, as many Israelis see it, you see the gardens as a shat upon rump of the wider Arab world, and there are half a billion Arabs living in the Middle East and just a few million Jews, then it's obviously.

Not a genocide.

Like I spoke to one Israeli member of parliament, former member of parliament on my show, and she was like, you know when it'll be like a genocide when there are half a billion Jews and only a few million Arabs.

Like the population of Arabs and the population gardens, of the population of the West Bank of Palestinians in general is continuing to grow and grow and grow.

And I think when people, when the lay person hears the word genocide, what they think it means, and what I think it morally means is the intentional attempt to wipe out an ethnic group, to wipe it out.

And I don't think that's what Israel is doing.

But I also don't think that as a Jewish Australian I should be expected to keep making excuses for a state that I think has become deranged by its own predicament as in Israel.

Yeah, and well, can I just go back on the garden, the Garden Hamas differentiation?

How do you reconcile that this is part of the narrative?

But innocent gardens innocent let's call Palestinians who have nothing to do with Hamas but nothing to do with the ruling party are being killed whilst Israel is trying to get rid of Hamas as the reigning sort of group in the organ within Israel.

Man, how do we reckon sold that?

Now?

You know, like I get the fact that Israel wants to get rid of mus I get it because, as you said, it seems to be the terrorist organization and they're intent on one thing, one thing alone, that's wiping out Israel or wiping out Jews generally, and israel I guess too.

But at the same time, there's Palace.

There are Gars, people living Gaza who've got nothing to do with any of that.

At what point do we say that Israel's gone too far?

Yeah?

I mean that's the question, isn't it.

That is the question.

I don't know the answer to that.

But you know, you start wars, you know, play stupid games, win stupid prizes mark the start a war, then your people die.

But but you do see the unfairness because a lot of people in Palestine were a lot of Gazans at the time, willn't even know that October seventh is going to happen, that they weren't warned.

No, that's I mean, that's what I'm so sympathetic to many.

I mean, I'm conflicted in two ways.

Right on the one hand, I think they that gardens are basically hostages, hostages to a had used death cult, Hostages to the cynicism of Arab autocrats, hostages to the whole notion of jihadism as it's sort of perpetrated by the same kinds of forces that gave rise to ISIS And a lot of this is linked back to Iran and the theocracy there, and hostages of international The international community have always found Israel a bit unseemly in a way that they single it out for like the Unitedations has more resolutions against Israel than any other country in the world, I think than the next you know, ten or something combined, Like do we actually believe that it's actually more worthy of censure.

Than North Korea?

In Saudi Arabia.

I mean, come on, what's going on is yeah, and you know, nothing it's done is even remotely approaches the atrocities of the next you know, worst fifty countries you know who don't who aren't censored.

So israelis smell a rat.

On the question of like, how many dead babies?

Is too many dead babies?

I kind of think it's the wrong framing in the sense that I think that implicit in the question about this, at least for me in the early stages of the war, is a belief that the Palestinian people, through their views, their community, their elected representatives, their arguments on the global stage, were deeply, deeply wronged by Israel, only wanted peace with Israel and were predictably going to do something outrageous in order to break out of the sort of open air prison that Gaza had become.

And if you start from that starting point, then I would sort of say that almost no civilian casualty is worth the price.

At the time, I was arguing that Israel should have done something like moved the entire population of women and children into the southern part of Israel, or maybe into the Sinai where Egypt is and create a huge humanitarian zone where they could be well treated.

And then any military age male who remains in Gaza either let them either vet them and let them out.

Yeah, and forget about the hostage hostages.

They're done.

Sorry, you know you're not going to you know, this is the last time we bend over backwards and reward you for taking our hostages.

This is it.

It ends here, and just flood the tunnels or something, you know, just like go full there.

There are strategies you can imagine that would have avoided the amount of ongoing, constant carnage that I think has been reputationally terrible and morally abysmal.

But if you flip the script and you see Palatinians not as innocent, Like, here's an interesting thing.

Mark tim Mitchell said this to me actually on my show.

Notice who we give sympathy to, and notice who we give agency to, and it'll tell you a lot about our own prejudices and biases.

That's interesting.

Notice who we.

Give sympathy to, and notice who we give agency to, because we often overdo it.

If there's a brown, poor person standing amid rubble, we give them all the sympathy and none of the agency.

And if there's a white guy in a fancy suit, speaking perfect English, who is educated in an American university and who's in charge of a lot of expensive bombs, we give them all the agency and zero sympathy.

And that's a fudge.

Yes, the Palestinian child, it does not deserve to be in the situation they are in, so we can see.

But their uncles and their grandparents have been complicit, or at least been manipulated by people who are complicit in a refusal to accept that any Jews have a right to a country in the Middle East, a country that was established under international law at a time when it was perfectly legitimate for them to live in the boundaries that where they were.

And we've split ourselves into these two kind of narratives where imagine, like just to sort of try to amp up our sympathy for the people who most Australians regard as being the villains in this which is the Israelis, Imagine you bend over backwards in the nineties with a large majority of your population really wanting a Palacitian state, which they did, and the response you get is what's called the Second Intofada, which is.

I think it was fifteen hundred drive by shootings in the space of a single year.

So every other day you've got a bomb or a drive by shooting in your country at a time when you thought that you were on track for a peace process, you know, on the June the first in two thousand and one, the first bomb was at this nightclub on the beach, which was mostly high school students.

That's the other thing.

They were mostly targeting kids because they knew that would be the pressure point, the pain point.

So imagine you're a parent who you know with fifteen or sixteen year old kids and they're out in Fitzroy and Melbourne, or in Newtown in Sydney, or in Fremantle in Perth and the pub that they're in it has a bally bombing style bomb and that happens two days later, and that happens two days after that.

How many weeks or months of that do you need before you go, hang on, why are we doing the peace thing?

What do they want?

What is this all about?

I thought we were talking to each other about.

Oh, they don't want peace at all.

They're timing these bombings to coincide with the peace talks.

Because they want the whole Enchilada, And that's popular position in Palestine, It's a very popular position in the Arab world, and it's an increasingly popular proposition in Australia and the West that Israel is a shitty little country that shouldn't exist at all.

Basically, it's kind of a colonial project and it was the Palestinians land all along.

So if you're in Israeli, like, can we understand.

Why they would elect a shitty little government like Netta Yahoo's And you know, they even went back to the drawing board after the second into Farda, and they tried in two thousand and eight.

There was the biggest, most generous software that Omett put on the table, and the Palaestinians wouldn't take it because it didn't involve Palestinians moving en mass back into Israel and swamping the Jewish population because their great great great grandparents lived there.

Like do the Jews get the right of the right of return if they left Iraq in the forties?

Do the Jews get a right of return to Syria?

Do the Jews get a right of return to Poland?

The only people who get a right of return back to the places where their ancestors were displaced from.

In this Palastinian worldview, the Palacinians in the West Bank and Gaza who get to demolish Israel basically demographically by coming in in their millions and millions and millions.

What country in the world would tolerate that kind of refugee resettlement.

What the Israelis want, understandably is their country and a Palastinian country.

Now, I am super critical of Israel for being disingenuous about pursuing that, for having been conflicted about it, for maintaining a brutalizing military occupation in the West Bank, for continuing to build towns in the West Bank that make it seem like they're not really committed to a two state solution, for the brutality of the blockade on Gaza, which was understandable because a death cult was in charge, And for the way they prosecate prosecuting the war.

And the point of my article was to say, we as a Jewish community have to be free from bullshit and brave in saying this state is not our state, it's not my state, it's not the state that my grandmother envisioned, it's not a state that's living up to the aspirations of what it means to be Jewish.

To me, it's a state that has fallen into paranoia, bitterness and dehumanization.

But it is a state that has a right to exist, and it is a state that is in a part of the world that persistently refuses to accept that right.

And it is a state that is dealing with neighbors who it is occupying, who have persistently, with one voice, insisted that they have a right to come back to where their great great grandparents were born, a right that nobody else in the world gets.

And so it's a bit bloody rich I feel for us to be dividing up our own society, for Jewish Australian parents to be worried about their children waiting at the bus stop because they could be identified as going to a Jewish school, for my dad's nursing home, to have put up big new security fences and bollards, or really, in the past twelve months, because some deranged jihadist might drive a truck bomb into a bunch of old Holocaust survivors.

You say that's paranoia or you don't.

No, I think that's legitimate legitimate.

I think there is legitimate concern.

I like that this is how toxic it has become.

And I'm proud that I'm a member of a community where I can speak out and write a piece like I did saying this Israel doesn't speak for me.

Where are the pieces by the Arab Muslim Australians saying that the Palestinian cause doesn't that that doesn't speak for them, but Hummas doesn't speak for them, that the idea of eradicate Israel.

Why do you think?

Do you think equally because of the tribalism factor that we were talking about before, and.

I strongly tribal then say that, yes, yes.

I do.

I think so.

Yeah, I think I think Muslims as a rule, and I'll get a lot of shit for saying this.

I think that the Muslim community, as a rule, it tends towards more conservatism, and tends towards closing ranks, and has been too apologetic for dysfunctional systems of government and for jihadism and for Islamism.

Over the past twenty or thirty years, you know, there's been a kind of like, well, it's not our problem's got nothing to do with us.

Well, you know, major Muslim institutions from Saudi Arabia have been spreading their version of salaphust Islam right throughout the world, across the you know, this kind of Wahabi extremism, or even across places like Indonesia.

And I would like it if members of the community were more willing and more open to say like, no, no, no, no no.

The things that are getting preached in lakember Mosque about you know, white people and Jews being pigs and Americans being imperialists Nazis, that's not that's ridiculous.

And so I'm just trying to do my bit by saying, like, we have to find a way of talking about our ethnic communities in the diasprain places like Australia that does not hit us to the wagon of other countries or other agendas overseas.

Do not import that kind of toxicity here, you know, like this is our country.

Let's all get along with it and don't expect the Jewish community to endure, know, pain, discrimination and very real threats of violence, I mean very real threats of anti Semitic jew hating violence which people delusionally think is directed against Zionism, colonialism, imperialist aggression, but is really sort of an the latest incarnation of an ancient distaste.

For the jew Did you think that's because one side, let's call it the Jewish side, much more distant through generations away from Israel, and the other side is not not as distant.

In other words, they might have a parent here who's just come in from one of those countries that are anti Israel.

Do you think there's somebody just to do with the sequence of time?

Interesting?

Could be?

Could be also, I think, I mean the Israel thing is like the Jewish community, it's the oldest enduring ethnicity in the West five thousand years.

Not from a physical no, I understand what we're saying.

But the point that I'm making is Israel's existed for eighty years, less than eighty years, right, So no Israel existed in forty eight or in sixty seven.

They took over Palestine right when they were invaded.

So the Jews have had ninety eight point something percent of their history with no Israel.

I mean, there was the ancient kingdom and all list of stuff like in prehistory, but I mean Jews are very familiar with not carrying water for Israel.

Because it didn't exist for ninety eight percent of Jewish history.

But I don't think that Muslims and Arabs have learned the skill of distancing themselves from the ideas of Arab nationalism and Muslim liberation that emerged in the twentieth century, Like these are reasonably recent things like this kind of extremists.

You know, you go back a couple of centuries and Muslims weren't extremists.

There's nothing intrinsic to Islam that is extreme.

But I think partly as a result of oil and partly as a result of colonialism and whatever you want to attribute it to, there is a major dysfunction.

Anyone who denies that there is a major dysfunction in the way that the Arab Muslim world articulates its sense of self is kidding themselves.

I mean, this is the other thing about a Palestinian state.

What Arab Muslim state are we thinking this Palasinian state will look like?

That's going to be so great for Palatinians?

Most anti Zionists can't answer that question for me.

Point me to this great, well functioning state that says as rich and liberal and democratic as Israel, that's great for gays.

That's great for women.

Where is this place?

And so we're going to create one more failed Arab Muslim state which is probably going to become a proxy for Iran, would almost certainly just become a place where for Iranian meddling the way the south of Lebanon is, it would become Asbola and much stronghold.

So yeah, they deserve a state, absolutely, but let's not be dewy eyed about how magnificent everything would be if only Israel would get the hell you know.

But what's your solution is, Josh?

I mean, I'm not suggesting you have the solution, but I'm glad you asked because they have a point plan.

No I don't.

But where does it all end up?

I mean for Australians are talking about not not not there?

Right, yeah, because we are talking about here.

So where what do we do?

Is that politicians need to intervene?

What what I mean?

I know you have you intervened, but.

Well, yes, I've intervened.

Liked I would have liked to see stronger remarks about anti semitism earlier after October seventh, just to make it crystal clear from the Urban Easy government.

You'll notice something interesting when we like when we talk about the about other forms of bigotry or prejudice or violence, we don't feel the need to add on a whole bunch of other forms of hate.

But when people talk about anti Semitism, they never put a full stop after it.

When people say, like remember the nurses who were who got into trouble for being on that zoom or where they were.

You know, they were talking about how for Jew came in.

They were in Israel, in Sydney and they were talking to in Israeli.

Yeah, they're doing Israeli journeys social media guy.

Yeah, so you know if a Jew came in, we wouldn't treat him.

In fact, you know, Jews have come in and we've sent them to hell.

So right after that, a parade of politicians at a state and federal level came out and said there is absolutely and the Nurses Association also released a statement saying there is no place in Australian society for anti Semitism or any other form of anti Muslim bigotry or ant.

And I'm like, here on a second, if someone had said had been caught saying I want to kill all the Muslims, I wouldn't treat a Muslim.

Would you come out and say, and you know this supposed it's like a white it's a neo Nazi, right, you know, kill all the Muslims.

He's obsessed with Muslims.

That's his one focus.

It's all he cares about it.

He doesn't talk about any other ethnicity.

He's just going in on the Muslims.

Would they come out and say there is no place in our society for hatred against Muslims or Jews?

Of course they wouldn't know.

Of course they wouldn't.

There's a tacit understanding.

I think in polite society throughout the West that there's something a little bit fishy about the bloody Jews.

And there's certainly something a bit fishy about that bloody nuisance state of Israel, always you know, doing shit that we don't want it to and being mean to the power Sinians.

You go to the Middle East, you talk to Palestenians, talk to Arabs, talk.

To Jews, talk to Israelis.

They are all much more on the same page about the nature of the problem than we are in Australia.

Like I've spoken to Arab Israelis who were born in Palestine who are now Zionists because they're like, you don't get us, Like you don't understand us.

We are very complicated, like meaning the Arabs, you don't understand us Arab Palestinians, Like we are a very complicated bunch, and we won't take yes for an answer, and like, you know, you have to, we have to be sort of massaged in a way.

And I don't know if that's true or not, but I know that the conversations that they're having there are a lot more nuanced and sophisticated than this silly binary that we have over here where we try to superimpose all of our own white colonial historical guilt onto them.

I mean, what's basically happens since October seventh.

I think in countries like Australia and the United States, is white well meaning people have taken the burden of colonial that they feel guilty about.

Them we're now very virtuous about it all.

Yeah, in relation to our own indigenous people, in relation to our own conflicted relationship to the British Empire and its misdeeds, and we're just superimposing that template onto a part of the world that we had no bloody idea how it's working, because it's complicated and messy, and there have been Jews and Arabs floating around that neck of the woods, bumping into each other.

They know each other so well, so much better than anyone of us knows them.

Let them sort it out.

It's their problem, that's what That's the point I was trying to make in my peace.

Israel Is for Israelis.

It's not for the Jews of the world to make excuses for Palestinians and Arabs.

They can all sort it out, okay.

Don't allow the plight of one minority community of Arabs in the Middle East, the Palestinians who've been shot upon six ways from Sunday by everybody, by Arab states, who won't give them visas, who won't give them permanent residency, who continue to bolster Hammas and Jihadas like, let them sort that out.

You don't have a duty as an hour of Australian to be defending Jihadis over there.

You don't have a duty as an hour Australian to be standing up against your Jewish compatriots and fellow Australians because those Jews are somehow proxies for a state that they've never been to and don't have any control over abroad, Like, the last thing we want is to become a huge multicultural warring group of factions all representing our international obligations on the streets of Australia with some well chosen bomb synagogues or you know, or sucker punches to you know, people because of their own ethnicity and multiculturalism has worked really well in Australia.

It's not screw it up by getting too obsessed about what's going on overseas.

What do you think that?

What do you think we get obsessed by what's going obsease in that particular region.

We don't have a we don't have marches and protests and lots of media around what's going on, say places of Africa.

Well, I think because of the colonialism thing.

I think because of what I was just saying, which is that well, I think there are two big reasons.

One is what I was just saying, which is that it's a it's a very neat template.

I think sort of easier to understand it, much easier to understand, right, poor brown skinned person, you know, poor brown skinned people were living there doing their thing.

Everything was idyllic, and then parachuting in from Europe were all these white Jews who came in and pushed them out and then were mean to them.

This is completely ahistorical.

Most of the Jews in Israel are from the Middle East.

They were kicked out of other Arab states and they're you know, they're from that neck of the woods.

There was.

This was not a colonial project like the British in Africa turning up and take control of.

The joint exactly without coming in from Turkey and Israel from.

That area and when they were coming to a place for thousands and thousands of years.

So it was you know, it wasn't It wasn't traditional colonialism.

Coming from Georgia and Armenia and the families went in right right exactly.

So I mean, in other words, it was a colonial you know, people will often say, well, they even talked about it as a colonial project.

Yeah, Colonialism meant a slightly different thing in the thirties and forties, just sort of meant a benign you know, to the early Zionists, that meant a benign way of reclaiming the territory of their ancestors and creating something beautiful out of it, and they did create something incredible.

I mean, it's it's it's amazing.

It's to create this rich, democratic, technologically advanced country in a part of the world that is not renowned for that.

Now I've just lost track of whorld was going.

What did you just sar ask me?

I said, why don't we not?

Why don't we.

Yah soth Africa?

So there's that, there's there's that component.

It's quite easy for us to look at that and go, oh, well, that rhymes with all of the colonial crimes that we've been complicit.

And we can compartmentalize it.

We understand.

You know, rich white guy in suit with bombs bad, poor black person in rubble you know, a brown person in rubble good.

That's simple, and that when we get to Africa it's much more complicated.

Hang on, they're all black, they're all fighting each other, but they're sort of saving China going into into Africa.

Why don't we talking about that manipulation that process?

Yeah, good question.

I mean the other thing, the second thing that I was about to point to is the way that social media algorithms work and the way that people with vested interests in this are able to rig social media.

Like, let me just make one point here.

You remember during when ISIS was a big thing in the War on Terror, and you know, Syria was collapsing and they so there was the first thing I remember going viral was the beheading of the Wall Street journal journalist Daniel Pearl beheaded live online.

Then they and they started getting good, jee hardists at understanding social media, much better than clumsy governments like Israel's government and the United States, you know, where everything has to go through some marketing department or whatever.

And this came to the sort of apotheosis of this.

The ultimate incarnation that I can remember was those downed American pilots that they dressed up in orange jumpsuits.

This is really ingenious.

They would capture an American pilot.

And this was a time when Guantanamo Bay was very controversial and there were inmates, you know, who were alleged jihadists who were dressed in orange jumpsuits at GITMO.

They ordered online.

ISIS ordered orange jumpsuits, dressed up the American pilots in them, locked them in cages in the desert, sprayed them with petrol and ignited them and we watched American pilots burning in cages in the desert dressed up as Guantanamo Bay detainees.

That's ingenious and evil and like, that's villainous, but really shrewd right as far as manipulating public opinion.

It suddenly makes Americans go, holy hell, is there a comparison between what they're doing what we're doing in Guantanamo Bay?

Like how sav who are these people?

Like?

It's it's shocking.

And there are deep connections between ISIS and Hamas and Hezbollah and the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

They talk to each other sometimes these are the same people.

They go back and forth, like, so, why are we focused a lot on Gaza?

It's not entirely an accident.

Every image that comes out of Gaza is tacitly approved by a ji hardest terrorist group, that is the government of Gaza, which has deep ties to ISIS style, you know, and a lot of sort of DNA and experience from jihadiest groups.

You know.

Some people say, oh, well, they are not approving every article, every image that comes out of Gaza.

You can't dismiss all of the images that come out of Gaza.

I'm not saying all the images are manufactured, what of you know, the atrocity is there.

What I'm saying is if there was an image coming out of Gaza that showed the world that it's not quite as bad everywhere in Gaza and that maybe the Israelis are taking some care with some people, or that there are letter drops from aeroplanes which there have been, or draw knocks to make sure that the civilians are out of the building.

How long do you think that citizen journalist would last at the hands of Commas if they if that material was getting out.

So it's not that everything's fake, but it's that everything's one sided, right, and they're much better at playing that game of manipulating global opinion than the Israelis are.

There's a terrible at it.

I mean, there's a something people should understand is there's actually quite a long standing Jewish philosophy that you don't explain yourself to other people, They're never gonna understand.

It's this kind of paranoid Jewish thing of like, you know what, don't waste your breath, Like they're going to say they give a shit about you, and then when when it comes to crunch time, they're going to turn their backs on you.

And they're not going to allow the boats full of Jewish refugees after the Holocaust to come and land in America anyway, And you're going to have to go back and you'll all be gassed.

Spare yourself the hassle, Just go and bomb me round like pathetic marketing.

Yeah, terrible marketing, terrible at marketing.

They're obstinate people like and it's so easy Israel, you know, they're just like, they're clueless about it.

So why do we care.

So much about Garzara?

And we don't care about the Chinese in Africa?

A.

We don't see anything on on screens about the Chinese in Africa, So it's not marketed.

Yeah, it's not marketed.

B The Africans aren't any good.

I mean, there's nobody with a vested interest to make that a big issue, right, there's no equivalent of the Mullas in Tehran or you know, the leaders of Casbolo who want to make that an issue.

And three it's complicated and difficult for us to understand.

And it's difficult.

We wouldn't spend a lot of time hovering over a video of that if it came up on as an Instagram reel would be like, wait, who's who are they?

What are they doing?

Maybe they like it doesn't fit into that neat template.

So I think it's a it's a it's a sort of perfect storm.

It's like the perfect media story for people who aren't terribly well informed about the issue to feel passionate and virtuous about.

Well, I think there's been a for me.

I haven't said much today because so I'm apart from having unbelievable talent sitting here, if you're in a cycle of this whole region, and I think this is a perfect explanation of at an intellectual level of the arguments, arguments I'm saying in plural, not one if everyone and against just the arguments.

And I'd say to anybody listening to this today, thank you for listening.

But I'd say, well, equally, get onto Josh's podcast Uncomfortable Conversations, because just go through the episodes and find something in there that might suit you.

Because this is the sort of stuff that we here in Australia.

We've got to resist being pushed by the traditional media to take sides.

Yes, exactly, and there's a lot of partisanship in the mainstream press, not just.

By the way on what's going on there on over there, but in relation to all these things that we've been trying to be divided on everything.

Yeah, you know, and we didn't get tired to talk about Trump and or Maske, et cetera.

But that maybe we live that for another day.

Yeah, that'd be great.

And I should say, since you're directing people to uncomfortable conversations, if you if you're interested specifically in this subject and you want to hear me in real time with how I felt in the aftermath of October seventh.

Then in December of twenty thirteen, I did like an hour and a half long monologue which was like one of the most passionate and heartfelt and I think articulate ways that I've ever done of trying to flesh through a complicated issue.

Date again data It was.

In December of twenty thirteen, and it was called why Jews Are Literally Nazis.

Well, I had wanted to do a train headline, I think my own headline.

Then I wanted to name half the episodes why Jews are literally Nazis and the other one why Muslims are literally terrorists.

But you would get the same episode, but I couldn't figure out technologically how to release the same episode.

But just to show people how binary and stupid we were all being, and how you click on one because you want because that reinforces your belief.

But Jews aren't Nazis and Muslims aren't terrorists.

We're all people.

Wow, that's amazing.

I'm going to go back to listen to that myself.

Thanks good, Thank yoush.

Great to be here.