[SPEAKER_02]: Let's go back to sleep, Rahaf, for so tired.
[SPEAKER_02]: Free Palestine, Free Congo, Free Sudan, Free Yemen, Free Hawaii, Free Gwam.
[SPEAKER_02]: Be on a ceasefire, every new end to the occupation in this week, but in this week, everybody that's here right now, but it's watching to set up what these are voices.
[SPEAKER_02]: It should not be controversial to say that we should all be against murdering civilians.
[SPEAKER_02]: We all we got.
[SPEAKER_02]: So, I'm only dead there.
[SPEAKER_06]: Hello, hi, and how are you welcome back to the episode where French and my name is about call the nons and thank you for the opportunity.
[SPEAKER_06]: This is video episode five.
[SPEAKER_06]: Ancient hatred.
[SPEAKER_06]: I'll just put about this out of my voice.
[SPEAKER_06]: I have been a bit rundown late eight because
[SPEAKER_07]: Life has been a lot, as I'm sure you know.
[SPEAKER_07]: So updates from my day today, I just got off the phone with a relative who was sheltering in place because the sirens were going off from the missiles going overhead from Iran to Qatar.
[SPEAKER_07]: This of course is in response to the US and Israel's hostile actions of the region recently.
[SPEAKER_06]: So yeah, it is a dangerous time to be an Arab in the world.
[SPEAKER_06]: A lot has been happening and it is literally getting closer and closer to home for me.
[SPEAKER_07]: Less bleak.
[SPEAKER_07]: I recently have a chance to offline sit down and share a coffee with a fellow queer Arab immigrant making their way in the UK today and working in media.
[SPEAKER_07]: They're a fantastic tracking and event producer.
[SPEAKER_07]: You can find their work online at the Prince of Persia.
[SPEAKER_07]: Just replace the E in Persia with the number three.
[SPEAKER_07]: You'll hopefully get to hear their voice on the feed very very soon.
[SPEAKER_07]: We kind of spent our time commiserating about our experiences as queer, Arab people living in the West in this present moment and being people whose work is often somehow related to an aspect of their identity.
[SPEAKER_07]: I was an am really awestruck by how loudly they stood within their work as an Arab person and their relationship to visibility.
[SPEAKER_07]: I try very hard to push conversations with this podcast to what I think are areas in media discourse and critique that are overlooked and under-addressed.
[SPEAKER_07]: But that sit down really did make me think about how careful I can be when talking about specifically my area of identity.
[SPEAKER_07]: And I'm thinking that that might be because of how I feel like I have to work harder and the West to contextualize that aspect of myself.
[SPEAKER_07]: And the fact of the matter is that there are a lot of narrative layers that you have to peel away when discussing Arab people and cultures.
[SPEAKER_07]: But what is really frustrating is how often that fact is used as an excuse to avoid having the conversation.
[SPEAKER_07]: And instead just settle into some dehumanizing and violent positions.
[SPEAKER_07]: About a year ago now, I sat down with my good friend Dr. Jonathan Galton.
[SPEAKER_07]: I'd wanted to talk to him about a chapter of the book that he's been working on for a while now.
[SPEAKER_07]: And after hearing, then President Joe Biden give a speech about anti-azionism, Palestine, and the region's anti-Semitic quote-unquote ancient hatreds.
[SPEAKER_07]: It felt like the time to record.
[SPEAKER_07]: If you forgot in that speech, it was delivered by the former president of the United States in a keynote address at the U.S.
[SPEAKER_07]: Holocaust Memorial Museum's annual day of remembrance ceremony in twenty-twenty-four.
[SPEAKER_07]: And here's a clip.
[SPEAKER_00]: This ancient hatred of Jews didn't begin with the Holocaust, and didn't end with the Holocaust either, or after even after a victory World War II.
[SPEAKER_00]: This hatred continues to lie deep in the hearts.
[SPEAKER_00]: too many people in the world, and requires our continued vigilance and outspokenness.
[SPEAKER_00]: That hatred has brought to life in October seventh in twenty twenty-three.
[SPEAKER_00]: On a sacred Jewish holiday, the terrorist group Hamas, on least a deadliest day of the Jewish people, since the Holocaust.
[SPEAKER_00]: Driven by ancient desire to wipe out the Jewish people off the face of the earth, over one thousand two hundred innocent people, babies, parents, grandparents, slaughtered in the Kabuts, massacred in a music festival.
[SPEAKER_00]: really raped, mutilated, and sexually sold it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Thousands more carrying wounds, bullets in the shot from the memory of that terrible day they endured.
[SPEAKER_00]: Hundreds taken hostage, including survivors of the show of it.
[SPEAKER_00]: Now, here we are, not seventy-five years later, but just seven and a half months later, and people are already forgetting.
[SPEAKER_00]: They're already forgetting.
[SPEAKER_00]: That a boss unleashed this terror.
[SPEAKER_00]: That was a boss that brutalized his relics.
[SPEAKER_00]: It was a boss who took and continued to hold hostages.
[SPEAKER_00]: I have not forgotten or have you.
[SPEAKER_00]: And we will not forget.
[SPEAKER_06]: There's so much going on here, I don't know where to start.
[SPEAKER_07]: I think first hearing this speech, what hit me was the way that it allowed for an understanding for an ancient animus as being the direct result of this moment, rather than the decades long histories of documented conflict, occupation, and aggression.
[SPEAKER_07]: An animus, which by the way, I do feel they need to clarify to believe to be very, very real in this world.
[SPEAKER_07]: Jewish people and communities have been met with the worst of humanity throughout recorded history and probably definitely beyond.
[SPEAKER_07]: What I take issue with is the way that that is being rhetorically incorporated and located with an Arab and Muslim communities in the West.
[SPEAKER_07]: The way that it office gates the interests and identity of Jewish people throughout the world with that of the position and ambitions of the Israeli state or some imagined citizen.
[SPEAKER_07]: And then there's the way that it seeks to silence any commentary and nuance by associating complicating viewpoints with the barbarianism of the German Nazi and the collaborator so help them perpetuate the Holocaust.
[SPEAKER_07]: Actually, here's another clip.
[SPEAKER_07]: This one featuring New York mayoral candidates, Brad Lander, and Zaharan Maman D being interviewed by the Occasionally-Politically-Flave Retoxia host, Stephen Colbert.
[SPEAKER_07]: And, of course, Israel, antisemitism, and Palestine pop up in the conversation.
[SPEAKER_02]: And so I'll ask the same question, both of you, start with you, Mr. Lander.
[SPEAKER_02]: Does the state of Israel have the right to exist?
[SPEAKER_02]: I support the vision of Israel as a Jewish and democratic state.
[SPEAKER_02]: Mr. Lander, on the same question, does the state of Israel have the right to exist?
[SPEAKER_01]: Just like all nations, I believe it has the right to exist in a responsibility also to uphold international law.
[SPEAKER_02]: Okay, well, let's just talk about the elephant in the room, is that there are many people in New York, even people who would support your candidacy, otherwise, who don't want to support you because of the Jewish communities fear of the true and rising anti-Semitism, not only around the world, but in the country and shamefully in New York.
[SPEAKER_02]: which is the largest Jewish population, any city other than Tel Aviv in the whole world.
[SPEAKER_02]: And they are worried they're very upset by some of the things that you've said in the past, and they are afraid that your marriage would actually lead to increased antisemitism, that they believe that that would be more dangerous for them.
[SPEAKER_02]: What do you say to those New Yorkers who are afraid that you wouldn't be there, mayor, that you wouldn't protect them?
[SPEAKER_01]: No, I know where that fear is coming from.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's a fear
[SPEAKER_01]: that is based upon the horrific attacks we've seen in Washington, D.C., in Boulder, Colorado.
[SPEAKER_01]: It's all the way from Jews and Art Replaces to today.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it's a fear that I hear also from New Yorkers themselves.
[SPEAKER_01]: Just a few days after the horrific war crime of October seven, a friend of mine told me about how he went to his synagogue for some about services and he heard the door open behind him.
[SPEAKER_01]: And it kind of went up his spine as he turned around and I'm not knowing who was there and what they meant for him.
[SPEAKER_01]: I spoke to a Jewish man in Williamsburg just months ago, who told me that the door he left unlocked for decades is now one that he locks.
[SPEAKER_01]: And ultimately, this is because we're seeing a crisis of antisemitism.
[SPEAKER_01]: And that's why, at the heart of my proposal for part in the community safety,
[SPEAKER_01]: is a commitment to increase funding for anti-heat crime programming by eight hundred percent.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because for your point, anti-feminism is not simply something that we should talk about, something that we have to tackle.
[SPEAKER_01]: We have to make clear there's no room for it in the city and country in this world.
[SPEAKER_01]: And no justification for violence of any kind.
[SPEAKER_01]: No, there is no room for violence in this city and this country in this world.
[SPEAKER_01]: And what I have found also for many New Yorkers is an ability to navigate disagreements.
[SPEAKER_01]: You know, I remember the words of Mayor Koch, who said, if you agree with me on nine out of twelve issues, vote for me.
[SPEAKER_01]: Twelve out of twelve CSI-kind interests.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I had an older Jewish woman come up to me at the Nigerian, a synagogue many months ago after a democratic club forum.
[SPEAKER_01]: And she whispered in my ear, I disagree with you on one issue.
[SPEAKER_01]: I'm pretty sure you know which one it is.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I agree with you on the other, and I'm going to be ranking you on your mind about it.
[SPEAKER_01]: And I say this because I know there are many New Yorkers with whom I have a disagreement about these really government policies.
[SPEAKER_01]: And also, there are many who understand that that's a disagreement still rooted in shared humanity.
[SPEAKER_01]: Because the conclusions I've come to, they are the conclusions of these really historians, like English Goldberg.
[SPEAKER_01]: They are echoing the words of an Israeli Prime Minister, Able Mair, who said, just recently, what we are doing in Baza is a word of devastation.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is cruel.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is indiscriminate.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is limitless.
[SPEAKER_01]: It is criminal killing of civilians.
[SPEAKER_07]: So here's everything that I hear when listening to that clip.
[SPEAKER_07]: First of all, Mimdani gave a great answer.
[SPEAKER_07]: Second, Colbert's questioning style how both erases the experiences and realities of Palestinian people and is founded on the idea that as Muslim, Mimdani is anti-Semitic.
[SPEAKER_07]: He has to justify his belonging in this mayoral race, in the culture and hell in the country too.
[SPEAKER_07]: Radlander sitting next to him while Colbert is speaking for all New York Jewish people, only makes the subtext of this exchange even more striking to me.
[SPEAKER_07]: Remember what I said earlier about needing to constantly contextualize yourself and living in the West against dehumanizing narratives?
[SPEAKER_07]: And I'm not even personally brought in my queerness into it yet.
[SPEAKER_07]: This episode is hopefully the start of us having some of these tough conversations when it comes to the way that air people are being discussed in the West in media today.
[SPEAKER_06]: Dr. Jonathan Galton is a lecturer at UCL currently teaching sociology and social science at the IOE social research institute.
[SPEAKER_06]: His first book fake gods and false histories is out now for free and you can find a link to that in the show notes.
[SPEAKER_07]: He's currently working on his second with the working title of does Islamo leftism exists British left Muslim connections beyond the caricature.
[SPEAKER_07]: You'll hear referred to as does the left have a Muslim problem in the conversation.
[SPEAKER_06]: We talk about old anti-Zionism, new anti-Semitism, Palestine as a quote unquote left-wing cause.
[SPEAKER_06]: and the left's quote-unquote Muslim and error problem.
[SPEAKER_06]: This is part two of the Imperial Sessions series, talking fascism in media, part two of probably unfortunately many more.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's not any more serious one this time.
[SPEAKER_06]: You'll notice a lot less clips and edits in this one as well.
[SPEAKER_06]: It's a bit more free talk.
[SPEAKER_06]: Shout out to Layla over at Pitch again on the edit.
[SPEAKER_06]: Working on this episode has been really good for my mental health in this moment.
[SPEAKER_06]: So I hope that you also get something out of it.
[SPEAKER_06]: I hope that it helps you start some new conversations with people.
[SPEAKER_06]: Conversation that we should have been having a long time ago.
[SPEAKER_06]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_06]: Thank you so much for tuning in and I'll catch you back here in the end.
[SPEAKER_03]: I went down to family show me to go there.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, I'm just a third album I've done with him and his wife Ali is the violinist.
[SPEAKER_03]: He and I did one together.
[SPEAKER_03]: I've done a previous solo panel one.
[SPEAKER_03]: He's been quite a delay in getting any sort of files that he'd finally sent me something around the night.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the kind of exam was wonderful, but
[SPEAKER_03]: One of the microphones is very close into the piano so you can hear the hammer as well because the app to it was a thing away from it.
[SPEAKER_03]: It takes away from it.
[SPEAKER_03]: So borrowed light which is the penultimate piece of that piano said.
[SPEAKER_03]: As I'm sure you want the call from the call.
[SPEAKER_03]: Starts with the piano.
[SPEAKER_03]: I always do that shit.
[SPEAKER_03]: It just sounds like there's a drummer kind of saying alongside.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'll give that part of that.
[SPEAKER_07]: I'd like to maintain an era of music.
[SPEAKER_07]: I always said that the finale of the first season is going to be a musical episode.
[SPEAKER_07]: Not worked it out exactly how I won.
[SPEAKER_07]: Obviously sound playing all the episodes.
[SPEAKER_07]: Making songs and little break whatever.
[SPEAKER_07]: Wow.
[SPEAKER_05]: Wow.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, I think I'll be very upset if you don't even leave that now Is that or like trying to get people to sing try to actually do like a musical?
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean touching by the problems you've had setting up to microphones in this room.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't think it's a huge faith.
[SPEAKER_07]: Well, I have friends who are more proficient on your side.
[SPEAKER_04]: Where are they now?
[SPEAKER_07]: I'm fucking touring.
[SPEAKER_07]: That's the issue.
[SPEAKER_07]: My friend Joey's touring.
[SPEAKER_07]: You know, he's doing, he's the basis now.
[SPEAKER_05]: Oh, wow.
[SPEAKER_07]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_07]: For the new Yo Homo tour that they're doing.
[SPEAKER_07]: But they've been really excited as well because I have a stylist.
[SPEAKER_07]: I was like, I'm not a stylist.
[SPEAKER_07]: I'm not a stylist.
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm not a stylist.
[SPEAKER_07]: I'm not a stylist.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm not a stylist.
[SPEAKER_07]: I'm not a stylist.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm not a stylist.
[SPEAKER_07]: I'm not a stylist.
[SPEAKER_07]: I'm
[SPEAKER_07]: There I was like I'm gonna watch this to try and get podcasting out of my head I just want to rest and then the segment in one of the episodes where they went into I think in the eighties they have this wrestler themed a rocky
[SPEAKER_07]: And then they were like, yeah, we did that because you know the Kuwait war.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, I was like, why is that okay?
[SPEAKER_07]: I've just like put out there's like, you know, and if you look back at it, it's not okay now and it's really problematic moving on.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no,
[SPEAKER_03]: No, but I find when you try to escape something.
[SPEAKER_03]: You always come in exactly.
[SPEAKER_07]: What have you been trying to escape lately?
[SPEAKER_03]: Uh, your book?
[SPEAKER_03]: Good, really.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: And because my book's pretty much about everything.
[SPEAKER_07]: You're just seeing how the semesters of my book are.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the semesters of mislava phobia.
[SPEAKER_03]: Are you loving?
[SPEAKER_03]: We are staff.
[SPEAKER_03]: I love it.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, she's there.
[SPEAKER_03]: Have you?
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_07]: But like I'm gonna write a whole cycle of feed.
[SPEAKER_07]: So this the other thing is that about my podcast is that I don't really have an intro my friend Connor he was really disoriented like so what are we doing are we just talking and I was like yeah, we're just talking and we're just gonna like I'm gonna splice this in here and he's like I hate it
[SPEAKER_07]: I hate your podcast for this.
[SPEAKER_07]: Like this is the thing I hate about your podcast.
[SPEAKER_07]: I really should have like a proper intro to get you into the mood of it.
[SPEAKER_07]: I do like splicing us just and obviously I mentioned my friend Connor because he's Jewish.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: I've tried to establish that I have a big barred Jewish friendship.
[SPEAKER_07]: Great, great, great, great.
[SPEAKER_05]: Say no, please don't come for me for whatever the subject that ends up here.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's what I've missed in friends.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I've missed in friends.
[SPEAKER_03]: Just the one.
[SPEAKER_03]: I've missed in friends.
[SPEAKER_03]: Just the one.
[SPEAKER_03]: I've missed in friends.
[SPEAKER_03]: Just the one.
[SPEAKER_03]: I've missed in friends.
[SPEAKER_03]: Just the one.
[SPEAKER_03]: I've missed in friends.
[SPEAKER_03]: Just the one.
[SPEAKER_03]: I've missed in friends.
[SPEAKER_03]: Just the one.
[SPEAKER_03]: I've missed in friends.
[SPEAKER_03]: Just the one.
[SPEAKER_03]: I've missed in friends.
[SPEAKER_03]: Just the one.
[SPEAKER_03]: I've missed in friends.
[SPEAKER_03]: Just the one.
[SPEAKER_07]: I've missed in friends.
[SPEAKER_07]: Just the one.
[SPEAKER_07]: I've missed in friends.
[SPEAKER_07]: Just the one.
[SPEAKER_07]: I've missed in friends.
[SPEAKER_07]: Just the one.
[SPEAKER_07]: I've missed in friends.
[SPEAKER_07]: Just the one.
[SPEAKER_07]: I've missed in friends.
[SPEAKER_07]: Just the one.
[SPEAKER_07]: I've missed in friends.
[SPEAKER_07]: Just the one.
[SPEAKER_07]: I've missed in friends.
[SPEAKER_07]: Just the one.
[SPEAKER_05]: Do you have any black friends?
[SPEAKER_05]: I'm like, Khaled, I'm like a bug.
[SPEAKER_05]: Do you have any black friends?
[SPEAKER_03]: Do you have any black friends?
[SPEAKER_07]: Do you have any black friends?
[SPEAKER_03]: Do you have any black friends?
[SPEAKER_03]: Do
[SPEAKER_03]: So if I was the black friend whether or not they existed, I would find it really weird if some math course I'll take excuse me.
[SPEAKER_03]: Can you confirm that you are friends with this guy?
[SPEAKER_07]: I wonder how many people have been put in message.
[SPEAKER_07]: I haven't been thankfully so far.
[SPEAKER_07]: Maybe that just means I have, I make better choices in print.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think I think there are, I think there are ways to unpick my idea of what races I've got back friends.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't think that's it.
[SPEAKER_07]: Well, we don't talk about this earlier but speaking of black friends, you are technically my first white guest on a main episode.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm so honored.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_03]: First of all, the Vestity High.
[SPEAKER_07]: The only first one I recorded was, so I'm how do you feel?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I'm feel honored.
[SPEAKER_07]: How does it feel being the first?
[SPEAKER_07]: The first.
[SPEAKER_03]: I feel I've got to represent my people.
[SPEAKER_07]: Do you feel like you finally break in that ceiling?
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: I'll put a door for other.
[SPEAKER_07]: I want to hear you.
[SPEAKER_07]: What are you actually?
[SPEAKER_07]: Let's start there.
[SPEAKER_07]: What are you exactly?
[SPEAKER_07]: Please tell me how you identify, fully.
[SPEAKER_07]: Um, I want race, ethnicity, age.
[SPEAKER_03]: So we want to just marry, sexualize me into boxes.
[SPEAKER_03]: Um, I am, um, assistant of Mayo.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm very happy to say that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, he is.
[SPEAKER_03]: He is him, right now.
[SPEAKER_07]: I don't like how happy you are to say that.
[SPEAKER_03]: No, I'm very happy that I'm very happy just to sort of delineate that without sort of having to qualify things further.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know.
[SPEAKER_03]: I saw this before.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: I saw this before.
[SPEAKER_03]: Fine, okay.
[SPEAKER_03]: What else do you want to know?
[SPEAKER_07]: You're a Jewish academic as well.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that's much more with the reason I'm happy to say I'm just doing the mail.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't think there's much to unpick and problematize there.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think like myself a Jewish academic that becomes much more complicated.
[SPEAKER_03]: How so?
[SPEAKER_07]: Say more about that.
[SPEAKER_03]: They technically do days and passes down that for them your line.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: My mother comes from an entirely Jewish heritage level.
[SPEAKER_03]: I am qualified as one of the chosen people.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: I've been chosen.
[SPEAKER_03]: My dad's actually half Jewish.
[SPEAKER_03]: His dad came from a Jewish.
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_03]: So that doesn't sort of count, but I suppose in terms of my grandparents or my great grandparents, let's say six out of eight.
[SPEAKER_07]: How do you identify with your own information?
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, that's kind of where it gets complicated, because I was not raised remotely to it, which has raised very atheist actually.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think I was dimly aware of the Jewish heritage growing up.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I've got what would it excite it?
[SPEAKER_03]: I guess when I was maybe sort of twelve, thirteen kind of age, when I discovered that my mum, I always knew that my mum was from South Africa, that was kind of as far back as it went.
[SPEAKER_03]: Hold your D show.
[SPEAKER_03]: I cannot resist.
[SPEAKER_07]: I cannot resist.
[SPEAKER_03]: When I discovered though that we had Lithuanian heritage, this doesn't mean you're going up in Exeter.
[SPEAKER_03]: South West, we know, not exactly the most of us.
[SPEAKER_03]: So the idea of having the Lithuanian heritage may be so excited.
[SPEAKER_03]: I suppose belonging to something bigger than a little world I would sort of growing up in maybe.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I found that much more exciting we're taking notes.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm trying to, what happens when you're doing it face to face, I can see all your tricks.
[SPEAKER_07]: And the thing it also like my notebook has exposed.
[SPEAKER_03]: I know exactly.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I want you to go, I keep going.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm sort of looking at a national map of the Baltic region.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's only in my mid to late teens that I started getting sort of interested in the idea of having Jewish heritage.
[SPEAKER_03]: because for me Jewishness was also very connected to studying R.E.
[SPEAKER_03]: religious education at school which I hated which is I wanted to give in that now I'm in a sense and anthropologist of religion and nothing I didn't identify us so I suppose not interested it was a sort of shift that took place I suppose I have Dean's
[SPEAKER_03]: This is all a very long-winded way of saying that I wasn't raised Jewish.
[SPEAKER_03]: I certainly have never experienced any sort of anti-Semitism and I don't think that should be a sort of like benchmark for being Jewish.
[SPEAKER_03]: No.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'd be a little bit reluctant to just boldly claim to be a Jewish academic.
[SPEAKER_03]: I might talk about having Jewish roots to a heritage.
[SPEAKER_03]: I said to me to talk about how that's something that's very interesting to me and divide anywhere in the world.
[SPEAKER_03]: I go, I'll always kind of try and seek out any Jewish history in a place that was a
[SPEAKER_03]: I still need to go whatever else.
[SPEAKER_07]: Well that's interesting because like you were saying that there's a bit of an irony now that you're someone who writes a lot about Jewish identity.
[SPEAKER_03]: Mm-hmm.
[SPEAKER_07]: Long of that's why we heard today to talk about your new book.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: So you can tell us a bit about like your research.
[SPEAKER_03]: Just to be very clear, it's not a new book in the sense that it's out to finish product.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a book because it's slightly in painfully emerging from a three year research fellowship that's just about what was dropping.
[SPEAKER_03]: That will come sooner.
[SPEAKER_03]: Before the book.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_07]: Academic research.
[SPEAKER_07]: Let you get your degree in.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, actually, if you want to go right back, I was, I might, undergarge natural science.
[SPEAKER_03]: I said, you tell my crobes and then sort of moved on to whole animals.
[SPEAKER_03]: And things got bigger and bigger.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think I just sort of gradually realized that what I was really interested in was people.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: I worked for seven years as an environmental consultant, had a bit of a quarter life crisis.
[SPEAKER_03]: I like to think of it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_03]: And each thirty, I ran away to sell us to become an anthropologist.
[SPEAKER_03]: partly because, I don't know, inherent anthropological interest in the world, but a friend of mine had started an anthropological PhD at UCL and I'd go to parties at a house sometimes in her UCL anthropology lot were there and I spent the whole evening just sort of grilling people about their research and just thinking it's all sound so much more interesting than what I'm doing on a daily basis.
[SPEAKER_03]: and they're talking about, so the panel's very important conversation, by the way, and so full of guilt, a band in that shit.
[SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, so anyway, I decided to do a PhD, and because I'd spent quite a bit of time in India, a range of purposes, teaching English, trying to get into NGA work at various points.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I knew India quite well, and I'm fascinated by language.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I thought what I want to do is do a PhD, which will ultimately become a book, looking at language politics in Mumbai.
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, which for all sorts of reasons that we don't need to go into in great detail is a really fascinating topic that I felt hadn't really been explored that much.
[SPEAKER_03]: I was, you know, gloriously unconcerned with the fact that I'm from Devon.
[SPEAKER_03]: Got no roots in India.
[SPEAKER_03]: I got there.
[SPEAKER_03]: I spoke some Hindi.
[SPEAKER_03]: I didn't actually speak Morathi, which is the regional language there.
[SPEAKER_03]: No, with that great sort of sense of arrogance and entitlement I sailed into, so I asked, and then I'm really stopped me, which is quite interesting.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I ended up bending a year, researching in an neighborhood in Mumbai.
[SPEAKER_03]: The book that emerged was very, very different from what I've intended.
[SPEAKER_03]: It became actually a study of how to different people.
[SPEAKER_03]: There were different communities talk about history and very different visions of Indian history, depending on whether you're from a Hindu background or a Buddhist background.
[SPEAKER_03]: I eventually published that book in last November, January three.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's called Fake Gods and False History, Cologne, being Indian in a contested Mumbai neighborhood.
[SPEAKER_03]: Love a colony.
[SPEAKER_03]: You can get it for free on the UCL Press website.
[SPEAKER_03]: If any of you wants to review it, I came to fourth wall here.
[SPEAKER_03]: A lot of the streams.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_07]: So that was the first book.
[SPEAKER_07]: And after you used to complete that project, would you end up following into doing writing, working?
[SPEAKER_03]: Do you remember in twenty nineteen, I don't know how much you might have followed this in Birmingham, there were some protests outside a couple of primary schools.
[SPEAKER_03]: These were protests by the predominantly Muslim parent body of these schools, ninety percent Kashmiri Muslim.
[SPEAKER_03]: neighborhood, and the protests were about the fact that the schools were teaching LGBTQ and peace of control to primary school kids.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's quite a kind of complicated saga, but it very much got framed in a lot of the mainstream media as basically the gayest versus the Muslims.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was like, oh, okay, it's a liberal school teaching gay stuff.
[SPEAKER_03]: How lovely.
[SPEAKER_03]: And all these Muslims with their retrograde values are not known.
[SPEAKER_03]: They're not integrating it, they're just a society, they can't accept homosexuality.
[SPEAKER_03]: They're really, really simplistic sort of rhetoric about this.
[SPEAKER_03]: No kind of reference to the security agenda in the prevent counterterrorism.
[SPEAKER_03]: I knew what.
[SPEAKER_03]: Staff, that was in full force.
[SPEAKER_03]: I knew what, it's exactly.
[SPEAKER_03]: In the sort of right-wing populist press, let's say, to the Daily Mail and other sort of outlets like that.
[SPEAKER_03]: I kept coming across this idea of, oh, what are the left going to think about this?
[SPEAKER_03]: Because the left on the one hand loved the Muslims.
[SPEAKER_03]: Don't they?
[SPEAKER_03]: And they also, that's why it's be all supporting all the quietest two.
[SPEAKER_03]: People were like rubbing their hands, it's glier, it almost seemed that this was kind of really waiting for the response.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, this was completely flummix.
[SPEAKER_03]: What's Owen Jones going to say?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that really intrigued me.
[SPEAKER_07]: I was just going to ask, what did Owen Jones say?
[SPEAKER_03]: You remember what was that response?
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, so I think James did put out a little YouTube video.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think he tried to be quite even handed and speak to as many different people as possible.
[SPEAKER_03]: He was very clear that having grown up in statues written in those statues, when section twenty eight was in full force and couldn't really talk about homosexuality in schools.
[SPEAKER_03]: He was very clear that this is really important that schools do teach this material.
[SPEAKER_03]: but he also recognised the fact that these parents were mostly coming from very cozy, you can almost imagine lies, backgrounds, basically, migrant backgrounds.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm trying to remember how much he talked about some of the backstory, something else called the Trojan horse that was scanned.
[SPEAKER_03]: There is.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, a six or eight part.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then they'll be in the show now.
[SPEAKER_03]: Hmm.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't think he did affect too much on that.
[SPEAKER_03]: He tried to speak to some of the queer Muslim activists who were sort of trying to build bridges.
[SPEAKER_03]: So he talked to a guy called Kakan Koreshi who was a good to meet.
[SPEAKER_03]: He's very much kind of involved in that sort of queer Muslim queer salvation space and Birmingham.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think basically it's overall conclusion was yes we need to teach LGBTQ inclusive education in schools and it can be done in an algebraic way but this also we cannot kind of use this as a sort of beatings that the further demonize Muslims the conversations need to be had in a kind of respectful way.
[SPEAKER_03]: You have to work with the community.
[SPEAKER_07]: Okay, so maybe it's a little harsh.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: Maybe it's my perspective, but like, equivocating.
[SPEAKER_07]: In a way.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: Because that way you'd say, like when you said, even had to miss earlier, I know that like the response narrative from what I recall.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: Being, let's actually just like put the queer Muslims actually to the front.
[SPEAKER_07]: Mm.
[SPEAKER_07]: The counter narrative that was pushed forth was the existence of queer Muslims.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: Of another way of like progressive Islam as like being something that was being pushed by like quote unquote progressive laugh as like a counselor to those narratives, which is something that's problematic in different ways.
[SPEAKER_07]: You're right.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think there was this great effort to try and sort of highlight the voices of queer Muslims.
[SPEAKER_03]: More visual didn't have the same opinion.
[SPEAKER_07]: I like really not interrogate the actual relationship between sort of queerness and Islamic communities.
[SPEAKER_07]: But say in the UK, the difficult part of this is that the thing being used to beat us with is something that has a grain of truth.
[SPEAKER_07]: That's just sort of been exploited and blown up and transformed.
[SPEAKER_03]: So this will happen in the first half of the twenty-nineteen.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was really in September that year there was an intervention in the independent newspaper.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was an open letter from, I think it was got themselves as queer academics.
[SPEAKER_03]: A lot of them were queer.
[SPEAKER_03]: Most of them were queer.
[SPEAKER_03]: Most of them were queer people of colour.
[SPEAKER_03]: A few others, a few sort of objectives, the inclusive mosque initiative was involved.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it must have
[SPEAKER_03]: And they said, look, we need a new narrative around this.
[SPEAKER_03]: We need to actually inspect the extent to which this supposedly one of the full inclusive teaching programs called now outsiders has actually been quite explicitly hitched to the prevent agenda.
[SPEAKER_03]: The idea being that, oh well, if we teach kids to be respectful of squares, they won't turn out to be terrorists.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: and that I've been almost completely lost in the noise.
[SPEAKER_03]: And also we need to kind of have a wider conversation about the status of Muslims in the UK.
[SPEAKER_03]: And not then to lie in the eyes, he's particularly individuals as supposedly liberal or good Muslims.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's then formed the basis, I think, of a number of further studies and think pieces that I've been done, but I don't think that landed in any mainstream sense that narrative.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so I think if people all remember this, it's very much still in that very simplistic, the Muslims versus the
[SPEAKER_07]: to bring that about your work.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, exactly.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I got really interested in this idea of left as a kind of close relationship with Muslims and a bit of a mathematically close relationship with Muslims.
[SPEAKER_03]: And again, for me, that kind of felt like it had a grain of truth in as much as, you know, so that's for example, which is a very sort of left-leaning university.
[SPEAKER_03]: Very much felt that there's a lot of emphasis on combating Islamophobia, but also celebrating various Islamic studies in that kind of Boris sense.
[SPEAKER_03]: I thought I walked to sort of dig deeper into this.
[SPEAKER_03]: So the study became an examination of this idea of left Muslim relationship.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, the way I'm framing it in the book is I'm asking the question, does the left have a Muslim problem serve another uncomfortable questions?
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: Intentionally provocative, intentionally ambiguous because I can imagine someone might see that title and think
[SPEAKER_03]: Ah, okay, finally we've got to talk about Islamophobia in the left or in the Labour Party, which I do very much.
[SPEAKER_03]: Think about that.
[SPEAKER_03]: But the Muslim problem I'm sort of alluding to here takes one of two forms.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's either the left.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm very aware we're talking about the left in this face of a fuzzy amorphous way and not really defining it, which I think is kind of the point in their way because I think that these labels often have power but cause they're in precise.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is what I call a blindine narrative, which you often hear from a nicely right wing of the Christian's journalist, et cetera, saying, oh well, you know, the left will happily call out or diligently call out time of failure and misogyny and antisemitism.
[SPEAKER_03]: When it comes from the far right or from the evangelical Christians or Tories, but they won't say anything when it's when these are encountered in Muslim communities, which I don't think is true, by the way, but I can kind of see where that comes from.
[SPEAKER_03]: The other sort of side of that, neither often linked is what I call the unholy alliance narrative, because that expression is generally referred to as a sort of leftist Islamist unholy alliance that come in together and tearing down the fabric of Western civilization.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's like all a red green alliance.
[SPEAKER_03]: In France, this is called Islam or Gorshism, Islam or leftism.
[SPEAKER_03]: This has been
[SPEAKER_03]: So the thing around for decades, since at least the end of the Cold War, during the Iraq War protests, in the last month, three, this was seen as sort of coming together of leftist groups like the Stock of the War Coalition and the Islamic organisations, which is a true up to a point where those links being built there, and then has been deployed in various places, very much crept up in some of the rhetoric around the leadership of the Labour Party.
[SPEAKER_03]: And now we're seeing it in full throttle from people trying to discredit or demonize the propelistine marches.
[SPEAKER_03]: So we might have to go to example, I often use is Suela Bravman wrote a piece in the telegraph, I think in April this year, I might have been a bit earlier.
[SPEAKER_03]: And you literally said something like the Islamist cranks and the left wing extremists have taken over the streets and they've also well are hijacked the by-elections, but I think he's referring to it.
[SPEAKER_07]: We've got to appreciate someone who will always be their officer.
[SPEAKER_03]: Actually I didn't have the name of apologies, they're taking over the streets, Jesus Christ.
[SPEAKER_03]: This was just all part of her kind of bid to try and become the next to a really, they were just a striker for Roger.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was all in order.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, no nonsense appealing to the, yeah, this just I keep coming across this idea now.
[SPEAKER_03]: I hate being vindicated in the way, but this seems to have really picked up in the last year and I wasn't
[SPEAKER_07]: So I had a note here from what you were saying earlier about your first study.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, your current one.
[SPEAKER_07]: The first question obviously is someone who also does similar work that you do with like dealing with life history.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: And speaking to people about their cultures to have them describe their cultures and like trying to, I guess, ascertaining understandings and definitions from that or like the themes that emerge from that.
[SPEAKER_07]: I find myself really like curious about your position as a researcher.
[SPEAKER_07]: Especially at this moment, I asked you about your Jewish identity because obviously I've read your work and I know your work and these ideas that you're working with and developing.
[SPEAKER_07]: I just kept thinking about like this must be really exhausting to write as a Jewish person.
[SPEAKER_07]: at this time, who even though despite what you were saying earlier is like someone, you've not experienced any symptoms and like you have your own relationship with your Jewishness.
[SPEAKER_07]: How does it feel to be working about this now?
[SPEAKER_07]: But also what are your reflections on your position as someone doing this right?
[SPEAKER_07]: I guess it's a very different situation because you're writing your first big project because it's India, which is what you're saying, the community that you are in part of, you felt connected to in some ways.
[SPEAKER_07]: This is now a community, but if you're less connected to someone, do you see why I'm making that?
[SPEAKER_03]: I see, yeah, I mean, I think the first project, the India project.
[SPEAKER_03]: The simplest thing I can say, I was a complete outsider.
[SPEAKER_03]: I always spent time, I made friends, I'll never be an insider to that community.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't have year one year kind of embodied experience of what it's like to grow up in India.
[SPEAKER_03]: And just have all those experiences, but all those cultural references to hand.
[SPEAKER_07]: You can give like six pages to that person.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, I'm saying they're like what they're like.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I try to be very clear in that in the book.
[SPEAKER_03]: It goes the fourth history.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's where I'm coming from.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm not making any sort of claim here.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know now, by the way, whether I, if I could go back in time, whether I'd still do a project like that.
[SPEAKER_03]: I have more problems with the idea of that outside the research.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't want to do outside the research down.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it's really important to have multiple perspectives, but I'm not going to show up.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's something I want to be really part of.
[SPEAKER_03]: This project, I mean, leave us our suggestions for a second.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'll come back to that.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it's quite interesting.
[SPEAKER_03]: I do feel a lot of outside our and inside our.
[SPEAKER_03]: So my core research participants are queer Muslims and left ining Muslims.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I'm very, very important to me to be sort of centering those, not just experiences, but also expertise.
[SPEAKER_03]: I hope I'm writing about people and treating them as experts rather simply sort of, you know, raw material, but let's see, you can come and join that maybe.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm keeping our rules.
[SPEAKER_03]: Am I in it?
[SPEAKER_03]: No, yeah, you've made some of the work I mean, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: No, not at all that to quite you, I know.
[SPEAKER_03]: I might quite, I might quite from this, you know, once that's how the public domain is, it's free, I've got free, right?
[SPEAKER_07]: No, thank you.
[SPEAKER_03]: No, but, um, I, uh, colonizer to the, actually, actually, yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's a whole thing about going back to the Birmingham thing.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was, I think, I hesitate to mention this person, Katie Hopkins.
[SPEAKER_03]: Far right, jealous.
[SPEAKER_03]: She said something like, this is a problem that's incredibly awkward for the left, like, which way will they turn on the one hand?
[SPEAKER_03]: They want to be the home of all things LGBT, but they want to be incredibly tolerant of Muslims, such a patronizing thing to say, but whatever.
[SPEAKER_03]: I very much felt, well, okay, where am I in this?
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm left eating.
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, I'm queer.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm not Muslim, but I like to think I'm respectful of Muslims in Islam, and a place that is on my favorite beer.
[SPEAKER_03]: I felt very weirdly caught up in this nexus.
[SPEAKER_03]: To the extent that, as I say, the kind of I suppose, my core set of interviewees, or interlocutors, or whatever, want to go them, are queer Muslims.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's still that sense of outsiderness, and that risk of extractive, colonizing, kind of research.
[SPEAKER_07]: Are we just disrespecting?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, but in the Jewish pieces, only one part of the study, trying to kind of use this idea of unpicking of this Islamic leftist narrative to try and understand narratives of anti-Semitism in the UK, and very conscious of not wanting to hide behind my sort of technical Jewishness.
[SPEAKER_03]: As I say, I've not suffered at all.
[SPEAKER_03]: As I do, I really don't think I have.
[SPEAKER_03]: I've got the benefit, I've played the piano, I grew up in a musical family, I like to think that maybe there's a sort of film.
[SPEAKER_03]: something Jewish there, but so although I do talk a bit about Jewish heritage and various places in the book, because I think that is important.
[SPEAKER_03]: I, there are some particularly left-leaning Jews who are very critical of what they were considered to be inflated claims of antisemitism.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that I think is a really important conversation to have, but I think it's much more compelling if that comes from someone who actually has been growing up in a very Jewish environment and has perhaps experienced anti-Semitism, because I don't know what they're talking about.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think for me to come in and dispute claims of anti-Semitism as a matter of opinion, wouldn't be that much different from anyone who wasn't finished doing it, because I just don't have that.
[SPEAKER_03]: I've never experienced it.
[SPEAKER_03]: I really don't feel confident to be able to speak on behalf of Jewish communities.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a funny one.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm still, I think I'm still in the process of resolving this.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think it's quite tempting to sort of self exercise myself or into lies or fantasize myself.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know what it would call it.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it's a religiousness.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I don't want to fall into that trap, really.
[SPEAKER_07]: I think it's also just important when you're doing this kind of work to place yourself in the research and actually try and, like you're saying, process that, understand that and make a decision about what that means to you.
[SPEAKER_07]: I mean, in my own work, I have to think about that, even like with just this episode.
[SPEAKER_07]: I think I mentioned to you earlier that something I really did want to mention that this is the first episode where I I'm speaking of something related to my world my Arab identity I spoken about my queer identity I've spoken about my black identity but like my Arabness
[SPEAKER_07]: is something that is only coming up.
[SPEAKER_07]: It's such a serious topic in a serious moment.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: It's something that I often feel like I have to be very careful with how I present and inhabit in front of people.
[SPEAKER_07]: Right.
[SPEAKER_07]: That's why I asked you about like your position.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: As an researcher, because my mind always goes to that whenever I read something.
[SPEAKER_03]: Then you'll work.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, for example, PhD in the papers you've written.
[SPEAKER_03]: You also.
[SPEAKER_03]: I speak about my writing.
[SPEAKER_03]: Of course.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: I do, but like that's different when you write it down.
[SPEAKER_07]: It's different when I'm writing it.
[SPEAKER_07]: It's just, you know, this is a different kind of product.
[SPEAKER_07]: A lot of it is like me speaking about myself and my opinions, right?
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: But while the PhD, I mentioned that earlier with two people who really work with life history, is I spoke with a lot of men of sex with men who have to be Arab.
[SPEAKER_00]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: And that formed the spine of my work.
[SPEAKER_07]: My opinions came out of that through their voices.
[SPEAKER_07]: That was really important to me.
[SPEAKER_07]: Like, you were looting out that is like to center the voices of these people guiding whatever motif I see, whatever themes I see, whatever occlusions I draw from them.
[SPEAKER_07]: So a similar dual thing that I experience that you do working about something that in many ways is very personal.
[SPEAKER_07]: But also feeling almost dissociated from it because I had to like in many ways think of myself as just like a subject, you know?
[SPEAKER_07]: Yes, just like that's separate That my experience or like subject except I can reflect on yeah, but I can't you know what I mean?
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah But like we were sort of been like eating round the actual chapters.
[SPEAKER_07]: Can you tell me about this chapter that you sent me from this book and what it contains?
[SPEAKER_07]: Right, okay
[SPEAKER_03]: very brief of contextualization going back to the books.
[SPEAKER_03]: I like to think about unpicking this idea of an elect Muslim problem or an Islamic leftist problem and I'm trying to understand where this comes from, historically or chronologically, how it's used.
[SPEAKER_03]: So for example, careerist, Tory or reform, one of these kind of articles in the telegraph or trying to smear candidates and my elections, whatever.
[SPEAKER_03]: How it's experienced
[SPEAKER_03]: by those particularly caught up in the sort of crossfire.
[SPEAKER_03]: So that's why I was talking to a lot of left-eining and queer Muslims.
[SPEAKER_03]: And also, you know, what kind of grains of truth they're out in there because it's clearly a caricature, quite go test character in places, but caricatures don't come from nowhere, so I don't understand what is it that's actually going on that looks like this coherent idea over Islamo leftism.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then using that sort of framework to answer what I call these uncomfortable questions.
[SPEAKER_03]: So there are questions about gender and sexuality.
[SPEAKER_03]: There are questions about what a question about migration.
[SPEAKER_03]: All big chunky topics.
[SPEAKER_03]: This idea of the kind of left Muslim problem.
[SPEAKER_03]: Maybe it offers a slightly different way in that don't really talk about.
[SPEAKER_07]: Let's start at the very beginning.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, the top first title is the left anti-symathic.
[SPEAKER_07]: Would you like to answer that question?
[SPEAKER_03]: I try to be not too bit hedging at the very end.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I say, you know, I'm actually starting at the end.
[SPEAKER_03]: If we say we've made this question to, is there anti-Semitism on the left?
[SPEAKER_03]: The answer is yes absolutely.
[SPEAKER_03]: Of course there is because there is anti-Semitism everywhere.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: There are studies and surveys and show a higher performance of anti-Semitism generally on the right and the spectrum that doesn't absorb the left.
[SPEAKER_03]: going back to the beginning.
[SPEAKER_03]: I framed the chapter as a response to a book and a documentary by David Badiol, British Jewish comic, children's author, whatever else.
[SPEAKER_03]: Hello David, it's me to this.
[SPEAKER_03]: No, please don't.
[SPEAKER_03]: You are, shut it off.
[SPEAKER_03]: Go away.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't want your strength.
[SPEAKER_03]: He made a book called Juice Don't Count How Anti-Racism has failed one particular minority.
[SPEAKER_03]: He talks about progressives rather than the left necessarily.
[SPEAKER_03]: He doesn't define what he means by progressive, so it's quite interesting.
[SPEAKER_07]: What's useful is, isn't it?
[SPEAKER_03]: He's a course of progressives, he argues, are hugely anti-Racism of all kinds and they'll stick up for any sort of ethnic minority.
[SPEAKER_03]: apart from Jews.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: And he got, I think, quotes an actress saying, due to the one minority that get in Irish.
[SPEAKER_03]: Sarah Sullivan.
[SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: No one gets outraged about anti-symmidic football chance.
[SPEAKER_03]: Which don't think it's true, by the way.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think there is.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it's definitely outrageous about that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: He's his book is really sort of bringing together lots of what when I, as he sees it, examples.
[SPEAKER_03]: That sort of proved this thesis.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it was very well received.
[SPEAKER_03]: A lot of prominent British Jewish voices.
[SPEAKER_03]: He said, yes, this is what we've known all along, but no one's really said it.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I think it's important more as liberal rather than left it in one section.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I mean, Stephen Fry, I don't actually know how Stephen Fry defines politically.
[SPEAKER_03]: I said you're a diplomat.
[SPEAKER_03]: I do.
[SPEAKER_03]: They're broad interest, sensible.
[SPEAKER_03]: Definitely not right, but no, he's not a socialist.
[SPEAKER_07]: Friend of Jacob.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: Indeed indeed.
[SPEAKER_03]: Very much seen as a kind of this is common sense.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is like a kind of common sense that I do find these sounds telling it how it is.
[SPEAKER_03]: But then there was also a very critical and this was mostly a sort of left-wing socialist Jewish response.
[SPEAKER_03]: Really picking is a part questioning the way that he sort of tries to construct this idea of a hierarchy of racism in which Jews are faced on the bottom.
[SPEAKER_03]: really sort of downplays or dismisses and the blackness among other things.
[SPEAKER_03]: How he really doesn't engage much with questions about Israel.
[SPEAKER_03]: In the documentary, he says at one point in Israel, from Israel, I don't really care much about Israel.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: A lot of the critics make, because you can't have this conversation about anti-Semitism in the UK, without actually also talking about Israel and talking about Palestine.
[SPEAKER_03]: So in my chapter, it's somewhat chronological.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I start off with a twentieth century history of the Jews in Britain.
[SPEAKER_03]: And also history of the Labour Party's relationship to both Jews and the Israel.
[SPEAKER_07]: Can I give us a brief overview of that?
[SPEAKER_03]: I can, of course.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I actually opened by leading to a book by a man called Emmanuel Lippenoff, Jenny's through a strange land, which recounts his sort of nineteen-twenties East-Tend childhood.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's really striking that the kind of experiences of people not pronouncing his name correctly at school and him feeling shame when he walks past kosher bookchairs.
[SPEAKER_03]: His brother being forced to play the part of Shilok in their school production and the wretchedness.
[SPEAKER_03]: It also reminds me of reading, I don't know, sort of, a carless book about growing up black in the UK and sort of back when you know, obviously a lot of specific differences.
[SPEAKER_03]: But it very much feels like this is a poor marginalized, minoritized demonized community.
[SPEAKER_07]: Then you track that.
[SPEAKER_03]: I tracked that, I say it's a chronology, I don't go into great detail at what happened at every stage, but I think the Holocaust was clearly a big moment.
[SPEAKER_03]: That forced a reckoning with supposedly liberal Western democratic relationships with their Jewish communities.
[SPEAKER_03]: That was the point really at which, particularly in the US, this idea of a Jewish entry into whiteness.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm just very relevant to be your first white.
[SPEAKER_03]: Certainly in the early twentieth century Jews were not considered white.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: That alone, shifardic Jews were anyway else but Ashkenazi Jews were very much a racialized minority.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that sort of gradually changed, I think, over the first half of the twentieth century.
[SPEAKER_03]: First half of the twentieth century Jews in the UK, racialized minority, poor minority.
[SPEAKER_03]: accused both of being incahuts with global capital, the whole kind of a rust child, no, it's bankers sort of tropes.
[SPEAKER_03]: But also accused of being behind the Russian Revolution and the being communist.
[SPEAKER_03]: Does that deep sigh aren't narrative?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, the idea of Judeo Bolshevism, which is interesting.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it's in a way you could sort of see as a sort of early twentieth century version of Islam, I leftism, or is there no ghostism?
[SPEAKER_03]: Because it was, again, this idea that the Jews and the Bolsheviks were in this ungodly kebal.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, sort of like that was like maybe subverted but like the rise of the Abrahamic unity of religions like in the War of Terror?
[SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, as far back as the authorities and forties, they watched this notion of Judeo Christian tradition.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: The people promoting that narrative are probably very different to the people going on about Judeo Bolsheviks.
[SPEAKER_03]: But this idea was that this is what we need to protect against both fascism and communism in Judeo Christian heritage.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it was the first time that the Jews had been going to believe it did in that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Gradually in the UK at least Jewish communities as we kind of went from first to second generation of migrants that and beyond.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's a gradual shift towards sort of middle-classness.
[SPEAKER_03]: Definitely the Holocaust would have been a huge game change in terms of attitudes towards Jews.
[SPEAKER_03]: And attitudes towards anti-semitism, you know, anti-semitism became much more organised because how could you possibly endorse this idea that no ultimately ends up in six million Jews being gasped?
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm going to face up cruelty.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: Also, of course, what you have from the Second World War and words, and then particularly in the seventies, is much more migration from Britain's former colonies.
[SPEAKER_03]: So from South Asia, from the Caribbean, and so you get a much more racialized landscape in which Jews, I think, suddenly become what suddenly gradually become much less other and much less different and much more closely associated with whiteness.
[SPEAKER_03]: I read about all the skirmishes in the seventies, a very violent national front, meeting up migrants from South Asia and black people.
[SPEAKER_03]: and the organized Asian news movements and this kind of idea of political blackness where migrant groups, whether they were Sikhs in South Hall or people of Caribbean, Heritage and South London or whatever, Pakistanis in Bradford, forming these groups and really caramelizing against the national front.
[SPEAKER_03]: You did get Jewish involvement in those, but I think the role then would have probably been theatre closer to what would now go away and I, then this is a very weird victims of the national front.
[SPEAKER_03]: not to say that Jews were not beaten up by the National Fund but I didn't think they were the primary target.
[SPEAKER_07]: As you were saying that, I asked you and you were talking like the narrative of like sort of the position of the Jewish person in society.
[SPEAKER_07]: By the way viewing, that may be like the reshaping of antisemitism.
[SPEAKER_07]: Which is a big core of what you've written here is not talking about what is antisemitism today and how are we defining it.
[SPEAKER_07]: So should we get into that a bit more?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, I definitely want to go into that.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm just trying to think if there's anything else that needs to be covered before we get there.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm going to make myself look like this.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's my chance of it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Really, keep going.
[SPEAKER_03]: We will get there.
[SPEAKER_03]: We will corkscrew around towards this.
[SPEAKER_03]: Just one thing that needs to be said to make that make sense is the relationship to Israel.
[SPEAKER_07]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: So again, as part of this story, what we have of course in nineteen four to eight is the creation of Israel.
[SPEAKER_03]: This would I think widely perceived as a plucky little socialist refugee state.
[SPEAKER_03]: The first country to dayage or recognise it don't ask people what that means in practice was a Soviet Union.
[SPEAKER_03]: And very much the international left really had quite as there was a strong support for Israel in its early days.
[SPEAKER_03]: Labour Party and you know what the the left of the Labour Party in particular were really supporting Israel.
[SPEAKER_03]: And actually, it was people more aligned to the conservative party that were seen as being these very romantic arabists, who, you know, went up to the desert and whatever.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it was a teaks.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, the orientalist Lawrence of Arabia type figures they were seen in the show.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm sorry.
[SPEAKER_03]: Even I recognize that reference.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I'll see.
[SPEAKER_03]: This will be the thing I'll take out
[SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, so grandchilly, there is different points, different sections of the Colette to the European and American left with through that support.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think the Suez Crisis in fifties six was a turning point.
[SPEAKER_03]: Massively, the nineteen sixty seven, the six they wore, which is obviously when Israel then occupies the West Bank and Gaza.
[SPEAKER_03]: That was a big watershed moment that Israel lost a lot of this left-wing support.
[SPEAKER_03]: Interesting, some of those left-wing labor stalwarts, including Tony Bent, who later on became a great kind of pro-Palestinian advocate, still maintained this quite staunch support for Israel.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think there was, oddly I'd say, more in the US, sort of after sixty-seven, was the point at which being Prairie's rail started to be seen as quite a patriotic position, because I think they leaned into this idea of Israel being the bandguard, the frontier of civilization against the barbarian hordes, which
[SPEAKER_03]: wasn't necessarily so much a position beforehand.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm thinking of Norman Finkelstein's book, The Holocaust Industry, he talks about this weirdly because the US was really trying to maintain good relations with West Germany in the fifties.
[SPEAKER_03]: It wasn't actually seen as very good form to talk to you much about the Holocaust.
[SPEAKER_03]: There wasn't this great sort of discussion about the Holocaust.
[SPEAKER_03]: internationally yes that's probably right both from the western end of you like we'd also this rail was really much more able to advocate for that and there was a lot more organizing and funding that again we'll get to new anti-semiters in just a moment because of that but just to say the labour left people like Tony Ben only after the world's nineteen seventy seven and the liquid party was elected so it was the first really expensive you right wing government as well
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that was really the point at which people said, okay, hang on.
[SPEAKER_03]: What's going on here?
[SPEAKER_03]: We can't possibly.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I say it because it seems like lines were drawn.
[SPEAKER_03]: Dines were drawn.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so that's the point at which really we very much see Palestine is a left wing.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, you know, already that that happened.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it was really solidifying the idea of Palestine is being a broadly left wing cause Israel increasing the associated with the right.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right after nine eleven and the so-called war on terror when Israel becomes part of this coalition of the willing is George Bush called it again really emphasising Israel as this frontier of the due day of a bit of a due day of a Christian tradition and as you said earlier this idea of due day of Christian cultured unity then gets repurposed and mobilized against Islam and political Islam in particular that sort of you need the end of the Cold War for that to make sense and then this whole new geopolitical shift
[SPEAKER_03]: Alongside all of this, just to finish the brief romp through British Jewish history, not only to do the scenes white, progressive the as a community getting richer, and as soon as there's very good sort of civil evidence about a Jewish home ownership, so there is no that kind of stuff that's current is not just some sort of horrible
[SPEAKER_03]: And he's going to try to play another juice with all the money.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you look at religious groups or ethnic minority groups in the UK, Jews are astonishingly successful.
[SPEAKER_03]: Probably attached to that.
[SPEAKER_03]: But it might not be the only reason.
[SPEAKER_03]: There was a gradual weakening of the very tight Jewish voter Labour Party link.
[SPEAKER_03]: So there'd been this extremely strong sense that Jews voted for Labour.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: Just as often we think of Muslims and Labour, leave aside what's happened very recently.
[SPEAKER_03]: But those are that kind of thing.
[SPEAKER_03]: That was tradition in the twentieth century.
[SPEAKER_03]: Jews voted for Labour.
[SPEAKER_03]: That was just how it was.
[SPEAKER_03]: There was a more red rift than the nineties onwards of some Jewish communities starting to vote more towards the Conservatives.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you look at two thousand and ten onwards, it's the first point at which, here, majority, maybe quite a slim majority, but a kind of majority of Jews, virtually for the Conservatives party.
[SPEAKER_03]: over the Labour Party, particularly in the Jeremy Corbyn years which I'm sure will come to.
[SPEAKER_03]: We've gone from a point from the early twentieth century where Jews were seen as a racialized poor minority, very much tainted with associations with international socialism or communism, to now I think being seen as a white wealthy and perhaps quite right-leaning minority tainted by their associations with officially the state of Israel.
[SPEAKER_03]: So that's sort of, yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's what it is.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's what it was.
[SPEAKER_07]: So, for what you were saying, you were giving us like the narrative shaping of Jewish identity, right?
[SPEAKER_07]: But then there's also an opportunity for us to look at a counter narrative there, which is reshaping of antisemitism, of defining antisemitism, which is a big part of your trafers.
[SPEAKER_07]: I could talk to us a bit about that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_07]: This antisemitism understood us today.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then I was given to the fight.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, just actually go way back in time.
[SPEAKER_03]: One of the first big shifts, something he is specifically about kind of Christian anti-Semitism.
[SPEAKER_03]: We can talk about anti-Semitism in the Islamic world in due course, but focusing specifically on anti-Semitism within Christendom, which is where most of it was located throughout history.
[SPEAKER_03]: For most of the centuries ago, it was mostly about these people killed the son of God.
[SPEAKER_03]: This time they aside.
[SPEAKER_03]: Also, these people still babies and drink their blood.
[SPEAKER_03]: We'll have a blood like that.
[SPEAKER_03]: The blood like that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, exactly.
[SPEAKER_03]: After the enlightenment, there was a sort of very theoretical sense of human universality, which meant that we can't really regard these dozers, some human monsters anymore.
[SPEAKER_03]: Sure.
[SPEAKER_03]: So there was this period called the emancipation that occurred to the difference of times in different places in Europe.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think later in the UK then, for example, France, but Jews became more integrated into society and were able to do different jobs.
[SPEAKER_03]: And there was this expectation that sort of put aside their funny Jewish ways as it were.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that's the point at which this whole association with capitalism and money really came to the fore with it, which let us sort of anti-Jewish religious bias and more anti-discommunity because they're doing very well.
[SPEAKER_07]: So they say that is when that became stapled under the stereotype?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_07]: And that was the first alteration.
[SPEAKER_03]: That was the first, exactly the first shift.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so in no, throughout much of the first half of the twentieth century I suppose anti-semitism would have drawn from various of these wells.
[SPEAKER_03]: The anti would have just peace but also the kind of anti-capitalist and anti-communist bit.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's only really in the kind of last few decades of the twentieth century that we start to encounter the idea that opposition to Israel might be considered a form of anti-semitism.
[SPEAKER_03]: That didn't sort of happen miraculously.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that was the result of some quite deliberate effort on the part of mostly pro Israel interests.
[SPEAKER_05]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_03]: There were probably all sorts of bits of history that I'm going to miss.
[SPEAKER_03]: But from mine, the standing, some of the key moments were, for example, in the early seventies, I think I think seventy-three, the Israeli foreign minister, Abba Eben, wrote, I think to a conference in Washington, that we should consider anti-Zionism, obviously Israel to be a former anti-Semitism.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's a really flated desire then just to sort of plug this most of what I know about this history comes from a book by man called Anthony Laman, but just Jewish scholars used to hear that for you in such a Jewish policy research, I think he's written a book called whatever became of anti-semitry subject, I don't know how to be a subject.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know how to be a subject.
[SPEAKER_03]: Do you really charge this shift in all of the detail?
[SPEAKER_03]: Someone recently told me he thought the book was a bit conspiratorial, but too much conspiracy theory, but I don't know whatever, I think it's meticulous.
[SPEAKER_03]: Worthy, definitely.
[SPEAKER_03]: So in the later seventies, I think the president of Israel at that time was a man called Ephraim Cuts.
[SPEAKER_03]: He convened his so-called president seminars in Israel, but I think also possibly in the US, and there was certainly corrections there.
[SPEAKER_03]: that we're specifically about, well, how can we really promote this idea that critiquing Israel is actually anti-Semitic?
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: In nineteen eighty four, the year of my birth.
[SPEAKER_03]: Just, you know, censoring myself here.
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, wow.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, actually it's doubly interesting.
[SPEAKER_03]: The year my birth was something called the Jonathan Institute in Washington.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think named after Netanyahu's brother.
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, fine.
[SPEAKER_03]: I could never imagine a fact-check this, but yeah, there was a conference in Washington, and I believe not none of them, but Benjamin, maybe himself, was really there all over this conference, trying to rebrand Palestinian resistance, not as basically Arab territorial struggle, but as a terrorist, Islamic terrorist struggle.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so that's I think the point at which the sort of, you know, Palestinian movements start to get really subtainted with as image of, you know, mad malice and whatever.
[SPEAKER_07]: Terrorism, terrorism.
[SPEAKER_03]: Terrorism, all of that, exactly.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then I think once Israel becomes buddhist coalition of the willing in those local war and terror,
[SPEAKER_03]: That they get really sort of solidified because something like how my says below whoever else I've seen is kind of part of this other side and part of that other side and then anti-zynism becomes something that is associated with that so that it doesn't absolutely and it probably doesn't help that I think they still do this but basically there's a lot of institutional level of Holocaust denial in Iran
[SPEAKER_03]: There is, you know, some only comes to be scored here, and that's probably one of them.
[SPEAKER_03]: The idea that, oh well, of course, Israel is in this kind of judo, Christian, civilizational, bull work, because beyond that, all you can do is kind of raging terrorist anti-seemites.
[SPEAKER_07]: And then from there you kind of like, almost like take that, and then look at a case study.
[SPEAKER_07]: in the situation with like the Corbin?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_07]: So do you want to talk about that a bit more or more?
[SPEAKER_03]: I just want to say that this whole idea of anti-dionism, or opposition to Israel, being a form of anti-Semitism, that's referred to as new anti-Semitism.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: No.
[SPEAKER_03]: And not just by its critics, but by proponents of this idea.
[SPEAKER_03]: So there were a lot of books published, I think, in the early two thousands, including by some French Jewish scholars, specifically about new anti-Semitism.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it really got sort of boosted as this idea.
[SPEAKER_07]: I mean, that's really interesting because I'm just thinking about the thing that inspired us to sit down here in the first place.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: The Joe Biden speech about ancient hatred.
[SPEAKER_07]: So it's always like the stool narrative.
[SPEAKER_07]: A long established, I guess, half-field and McCoy's kind of beef.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, new antisemitism as a term.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not necessarily a sort of critical time.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's actually a term used by people who endorse society that actually addesignism is a form of antisemitism.
[SPEAKER_03]: Those a paper by, who's first in my current member of the set name, is Fischel back in July, which is reviewing some of the literature on this.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, and the he makes the claim that New Anti-Semitism is the preserve of a, like, an unlikely alliance, not only but unlikely alliance of basically left wing and Muslim sort of
[SPEAKER_03]: opponents of Israel.
[SPEAKER_03]: You can see these troops are only in place by then left Muslim troops.
[SPEAKER_03]: As opposed to like old traditional anti-Semitism which was really clearly about racism and sometimes nationalism, a lot of new anti-Semitism, visual and perhaps others argue, is actually couched in the language of anti-racism and anti-Nationalism and maybe anti-imperialism.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, it's a much more slippery sort of categories.
[SPEAKER_03]: It doesn't seem like more serious forms.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: I would like to come in more commonplace.
[SPEAKER_07]: That's interesting.
[SPEAKER_07]: Just let you double back on something you were saying, which is when you were talking about the forming definition of antisemitism and like the shifting sort of goalposts and all that stuff.
[SPEAKER_07]: I just been thinking about like where these narratives were coming from.
[SPEAKER_07]: So with the Roth child, so we're this elders of Zion narratives in the back, right?
[SPEAKER_07]: And these perception about greediness.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, that's tied with capitalism happening in, say, the seventies.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, but like I was started thinking about the ways that when I mentioned the seventies specifically because like we're the oil crisis Yes, about the ways in which those same tropes were also being developed in the Western region and weaponized against era nations and people as a response to the oil crisis
[SPEAKER_07]: It's interesting like how if we're talking about like the right and the left and we're talking about factions here how both factions were using almost the same building blocks but aiming them at different people So when you had the left beginning sort of formed these positions of the barbarism sort of Arab people Yeah, and we'd and the wealth of these nations and that becoming now like in more of a day something that we really associate and tie these Islamophobic content Yeah, very more right wing yeah
[SPEAKER_07]: but like how the left was using that as an narrative but then the right at the time was using similar narratives but weaponizing them against Jewish people.
[SPEAKER_07]: Just wondering like your reflections on that.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean actually one thing just to say it's interesting that we're talking about anti-capitalism.
[SPEAKER_03]: I see that a sense is already a bad thing but I'm actually pretty both of us are not.
[SPEAKER_03]: huge subscribers to global capitalism, but I suppose it's more the idea of certainly with the Jews.
[SPEAKER_03]: The octopus, the tentacles, I think that's called Goldman Sachs, was specifically compared to an octopus, which was very close everywhere.
[SPEAKER_03]: I hadn't thought of that parallel before, but I think it's a really interesting one.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's very specifically applies to sort of Arabs from the Gulf, doesn't it?
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not something that would be used to slurve the Egyptians from a global far, or Iraqis even, and far less so, global Muslims.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's like it's been reframed.
[SPEAKER_07]: But in the same way, it is something that became the idea of, like, it's a trait.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: So even if it's not associated with, like, say someone from Egypt or Morocco, for example, it's still something like that's associated with them in a different way.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: I like being an inherent trait, even if they don't come from country, like the golf that's known for wealth and oil and all that stuff.
[SPEAKER_03]: Hmm, and I suppose baby, but it's cases there's an association of vulgarity isn't there, I think, kind of that anti-capitalist.
[SPEAKER_03]: Anti-symmic tropes of the nineteenth century and then about was associated with an idea of do's being rich and vulgar and not really having culture, which is kind of ironic, but it isn't that really interesting.
[SPEAKER_07]: It's interesting.
[SPEAKER_07]: I don't even have a pushback on it.
[SPEAKER_07]: I feel like the trope when it comes to Jewish people.
[SPEAKER_07]: When it comes to what it's like the hoarding or taking.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: While with Arab people, it's more like having, you know, it's like exorbitant.
[SPEAKER_07]: And I think I've certainly think of this mega church narrative.
[SPEAKER_05]: Oh, yes.
[SPEAKER_07]: Where like the people would like a lot of wealth claiming sort of undeserving.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_07]: Maybe like my view of prosperity.
[SPEAKER_07]: So that's kind of how I say.
[SPEAKER_07]: It's almost like a different string, you know, like undeserving all that wealth and the like stealing wealth.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I don't know about property and land.
[SPEAKER_03]: There isn't anything else.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like there's an impetuous like, oh, strain gutter on top of London.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, they're like an impetuous strain with the way in which they're trying to colonize us.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, exactly.
[SPEAKER_03]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, but the Jews are like betraying us.
[SPEAKER_03]: Because everybody, yeah, I suppose.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, I think because of that thing with assimilation, that's how historically it would like Jewish people, that is, and symmetric trope comes up in terms of like, they're amongst us, you know, I like they're betraying us, and they don't actually belong here, but they've kind of like, they've assimilated.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I think that was very much right back in the nineteenth century and perhaps even before in this period of emancipation.
[SPEAKER_03]: Once Jews were not seen as internal, other in that really extreme sense, but more like, oh, will they kind of look just like us, how do you know who they are?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, Nazi Germany.
[SPEAKER_03]: There was this whole preoccupation of trying to identify some of the Jews.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's why you have the nose and the Cannabis measuring the nose.
[SPEAKER_03]: Because it wasn't necessarily immediately obvious who was Jewish.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, well it was like it could be immediately obvious who was Arab.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, sort of manifest in a different way because of how Jewish people say Arab people, respectively, because it's physical people.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: And I just feel like I'm just a couple of occasions.
[SPEAKER_03]: Be interested as you have it really is it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Ironically, given that we're talking about Jews and Muslims, we haven't actually talked much about religion at all.
[SPEAKER_03]: Do you think the specific call it the anti-golf attitude?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: How much is that also then linked to Islamophobia?
[SPEAKER_03]: It's quite different to the sense of all these Muslim parents protesting outside Bellingham schools, importing their alien home of area blah blah blah blah.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's very clear Islamophobic narrative there and also an anti migrant narrative.
[SPEAKER_03]: But when people are knowing about Sheikh or Qatar or Emir of Qatar does I mean, because Qatar haven't eaten, I don't know.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think so.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I'm thinking about this idea of the unity we were talking about earlier.
[SPEAKER_07]: the junior Christian the way in which I think when I first mentioned that I'm in mistake of saying Abrahamic unity and I was like actually now there's one very sharp division isn't yeah the thing is there's something within the culture that the force is that we do not want them to simply
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, they have not assimilated.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, you know what I mean?
[SPEAKER_07]: I think that's part of it, but because there's this perception of like the difference Yeah, I do think it's because of this law Anything that's like a big factor in it.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, and because despite how much you like to pretend like Christianity is so deeply woven into this country?
[SPEAKER_07]: Absolutely Yeah, that means certain prejudices are woven into the country and how it operates and there's a fears of self-reservation, you know, there's this other
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I think, you know, it took basically the Holocaust to allow Judaism to be woven into that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: Fabric.
[SPEAKER_03]: And not to be seen as an alien doctrine, an alien theology, an alien religion.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I think you're absolutely right about.
[SPEAKER_03]: Can it sort of continue in the presence of
[SPEAKER_03]: I should explain to this as I do have your cat Alaska Alaska and she took exception to my last point.
[SPEAKER_03]: So yeah, maybe we know how Alaska feels about your people and there are people she doesn't like anyone she's a pretty very white no ambiguity there
[SPEAKER_07]: you sitting there for the bike like what about my people yeah exactly we are kings and you know I do think that's like a very important factor I do think it's also a poor the Arabs look different yeah I think there is something about that idea of visibility non-passing that is a huge thing
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, with that's really interesting isn't it that until very recently, I think, in US censuses, where Arab's class is white?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah, which is courier, isn't it?
[SPEAKER_03]: So is it Biden time yet?
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, I think we should start talking about it.
[SPEAKER_07]: Well, the reason we have this idea to have this conversation is the Joe Biden ancient hatred, which is the type of thing.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, it is the title of this episode, so if you'd like an explainer about why?
[SPEAKER_07]: Joe Biden went up on stage and talked about the ancient hatred that the world has for Jewish people.
[SPEAKER_07]: That ended up spinning out into narrative online in the internet.
[SPEAKER_07]: We came across from somewhere into this idea like the ancient hatred between Arab people and Jewish people.
[SPEAKER_07]: Now I want to get your reflections on the context of what you're writing.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so I tried to avoid this question for as long as possible.
[SPEAKER_03]: In the chapter.
[SPEAKER_03]: No, I mean, not just now, but in my writing, I refer to it as the excruciating and comfortable question of antisemitism among Muslims.
[SPEAKER_03]: But because, as I said, new antisemitism, new antisemitism is often ascribed to both the left and the Muslims.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think you can't just avoid it.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, if we're looking first of all at the contemporary picture, I don't think the data out there's very good and there's lots of critiques for kind of various surveys that have been conducted on sort of global antisemitism and trying to compare antisemitism between different countries and different communities.
[SPEAKER_03]: Such data that exists though.
[SPEAKER_03]: does seem to point to being quite high levels of antisemitism in many Muslim authority countries.
[SPEAKER_03]: With huge exceptions, there's anti-deformationally global hundred survey or something it's called, which I think we should be very, very cautious about for all sorts of reasons that Norman Finkelstein goes into.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think for example, Greece comes out as far more antisemitic than Bangladesh.
[SPEAKER_03]: But you know, general, general, big picture.
[SPEAKER_03]: They does seem to be quite a big problem in the Western world.
[SPEAKER_03]: And according to this survey, that's not all about Israel because not all their measures of anti-Semitism specifically kind of weed out Israel related questions.
[SPEAKER_03]: And there's a whole conversation then to be had about does and designism, even if we separate it out from anti-Semitism, does that potentially lead into anti-Semitism?
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think there's evidence that it can do.
[SPEAKER_03]: Betty, all of that aside, think this idea that there is this ancient implacable, either Jewish Muslim or Jewish Arab animus just doesn't really have much bearing in reality from my understanding, and I'm not a historian, but really, Christendom, the Christian world, was by far the biggest location of sustained endemic anti-Semitism of everyone that we've been discussing, and there's a historian called Schlonordewgoytain.
[SPEAKER_03]: And as a brief aside, I just want to point out that my surname, Goulton, is actually an anglicized form of Goitain or Goitain.
[SPEAKER_03]: Goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain, goitain,
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, it existed historically in the Islamic world, but it was local and sporadic rather than the general and the indemic.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's the way he sort of deals with this feels like quite an appropriate way to deal with it, because I think there is a temptation when confronted with these kind of quite simplistic, all the Jews and the Arabs have been at it for centuries.
[SPEAKER_03]: To just push back at that and say, you know, that's completely wrong.
[SPEAKER_03]: And maybe draw a slightly romanticized picture of how hospitable there is Islamic.
[SPEAKER_03]: lands, countries, policies like the Ottoman Empire and parts of North Africa were to choose.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, it's, I think it's true that in general, Jewish communities were often able to flourish in the Ottoman Empire and in parts of North Africa and elsewhere, whether east as well, in recent days, Iraq and Iran, but there were also periods of violence.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you look at the history of Morocco in particular, I think there were some like grim periods in the twelfth century under the Al-Mahad dynasty, whereas both before and after that I think Jews had sort of mostly got on fine from what?
[SPEAKER_07]: I was born after Israel was established.
[SPEAKER_07]: So my experience as a person who grew up in an Arab country, in a Gulf Arab country, discussion and mention of Jewish people was always related back to the history of Israel.
[SPEAKER_07]: But at the same time, when I try to think of the idea of like the ancient hatred, I do sort of also reflect on some like the religious text and how do people are discussed and that.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: Then when all honesty, I don't know whether as someone I've read a lot of different like I read the Quran, I read the Bible, I read like a lot of different religious texts.
[SPEAKER_07]: I don't know what they want to say.
[SPEAKER_07]: It's like more extreme than one versus the other.
[SPEAKER_07]: So I feel like it's important, like you've been doing to, like, yes, there is antisemitism in these places.
[SPEAKER_07]: But like, it's more so the idea of working in a concerted specific way.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: That's like what I resist.
[SPEAKER_07]: The idea of this ancient hatred that narrative is actually used to go conversation.
[SPEAKER_07]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_07]: On the topic.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: And that is, it's purpose.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's transparent to use isn't it?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's a weapon.
[SPEAKER_07]: And like it's transparent to use, yes, but I feel like,
[SPEAKER_07]: I wonder why we've not managed to, like, surround that.
[SPEAKER_07]: Why have we not beat it?
[SPEAKER_07]: Because I think the reason is because, like, you are saying throughout this chapter, there is an element of truth in all these things.
[SPEAKER_07]: You're like an operator in a very different nuanced way.
[SPEAKER_07]: But instead, what we're seeing today, and now is the way that that is being weaponized, right?
[SPEAKER_07]: And I mentioned that specifically to talk about how you discuss Corbin in the theater.
[SPEAKER_07]: and what happened to Corbin's career in relation to these narratives, associations with, I guess, quote unquote, Islamic viewpoints is position in relation to anti-Semitism in the labor party specifically.
[SPEAKER_07]: And today, where Corbin is today, and what brought him there?
[SPEAKER_07]: I'm going to go into that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that's a lot.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's a lot.
[SPEAKER_03]: I also didn't want to, that's another thing to obviously come onto as well with the current situation in Palestine.
[SPEAKER_03]: But gosh, the Corbin, that whole saga was going to be complicated.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's our garden.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's so called Labour and it's almost like I just find it very simple.
[SPEAKER_07]: It is complicated, but also like in many ways it's also very simple.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I think lots of things are.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think lots of things you have to operate in different levels, but I think what I mean is there's quite a lot of specific bits to it.
[SPEAKER_07]: I mean to give like a summation.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, I mean when we Corbin was ousted because of accusations of like, and some simply
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that's too simple though.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't think that was actually the major factor at all.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it was a factor.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think there were much bigger issues.
[SPEAKER_03]: There was no one liked his position on Brexit.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think the fact that he was also just relentlessly smeared by the media as this sort of weird socialist fire brand and incompetent and everything else.
[SPEAKER_03]: There was a very, very powerful establishment interests forces like aligned against him.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't want to come down to conspiracy theory here.
[SPEAKER_03]: But they definitely, this anti-semitism was a part of it.
[SPEAKER_03]: And there, yeah, there was this fairly widespread perception by the time, but it was a twenty-nineteen election that the Labour Party was a wash with anti-semitism.
[SPEAKER_03]: And somehow, no one really talked about anti-semitism in the conservative party, let alone any other form of racism in the conservative party.
[SPEAKER_03]: But it was just sort of as you, that Labour had this anti-semitism problem.
[SPEAKER_03]: One of the big sort of components of this, which takes us straight back to new anti-semitism,
[SPEAKER_03]: In the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end, in the end.
[SPEAKER_03]: But this definition includes eleven examples alongside it, a couple of which may be referred to Israel and suggests, if you adopt this definition, plus examples in a doorstep, it really leaves open the possibility that any criticism of Israel might be vulnerable to being labeled as antisemitic.
[SPEAKER_03]: Don't lie, new antisemitism.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so labor initially adopted this, I think under Corbin.
[SPEAKER_03]: But then in twenty eighteen, for whatever reason it was decided that actually we want to kind of cut with our own modifications.
[SPEAKER_03]: And we've attained the original definition, I believe, but just decided to get rid of those examples that specifically kind of referred to criticism of Israel.
[SPEAKER_03]: This caused a massive sort of media think, and I think it was widely criticized.
[SPEAKER_03]: Partly, for example, the Jewish conical, but also, you know, generally sort of mainstream media.
[SPEAKER_03]: And there was only about a few months later that Corbin, or that they were planning to decide to actually just adopt the IHRA definition.
[SPEAKER_03]: with all the examples in full.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I think by that stage, damage had been done and really cemented this idea of labour being a very anti-semitic party.
[SPEAKER_03]: And there were various investigations, none of which came up with anything particularly conclusive.
[SPEAKER_03]: There was a twenty-sixteen inquiry, so I keep long before that I H R A sort of scandal that concluded that labour wasn't over and by anti-semitism.
[SPEAKER_03]: There was a later investigation by the qualities of human rights commission that suggested that the leadership by a Corbyn could have been more effective in dealing with this problem had it chosen to do so.
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's any subsequently that there'd been a number of more critical investigations into this idea of what was actually going on.
[SPEAKER_03]: There was the Ford report by Martin Ford QC that also came out in the end of the year, where he really sifted through files and files of internal complaints procedures and interviewed lots of members of the party.
[SPEAKER_03]: And here's conclusion was that, yes, there are absolutely some genuine cases of anti-semitism that have occurred in the Labour Party.
[SPEAKER_03]: Kind of as you would expect because there are going to be genuine cases of anti-semitism and racism and time of failure and everything else in any political organization that's just humanity, I suppose.
[SPEAKER_03]: why would Labour be any different necessarily, but, and it's a big part.
[SPEAKER_03]: There was also clear evidence that this was being used by the anti-corby infection, if you like, the kind of what's called Labour right, Labour headquarters actually against Corbyn and the leader of the opposition's office.
[SPEAKER_03]: There were clear examples of that being weaponized.
[SPEAKER_03]: Also for technologists that these issues were perhaps downplayed by Corbyn and those around him, because I think it was already seen that this was being used as a sort of factional.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's a culture.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, there's a culture, exactly.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then more recently in twenty twenty two, there was the documentary by Al Jazeera called The Labor Files, which investigated various different accusations against Corbyn.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it was a three part documentary.
[SPEAKER_03]: One of them is specifically about the anti-Semitism crisis.
[SPEAKER_03]: Again, they acknowledge the existence of real anti-Semitism in the party.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't think they perhaps maybe make as big an issue of that as they could.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's rather sort of, you know, dismissed in a few minutes.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: get it meticulously going through all the complaints procedures and concluding that actually a lot of what got categorized as anti-semitism was not anti-semitism at all it was maybe sharing a Facebook post about for Palestinian kids being fit for being bond or some sort of criticism of their news policy which I just don't think
[SPEAKER_03]: even in the kind of extreme interpretations of the IHRA definition, I don't think we would really be considered anti-Semitism.
[SPEAKER_03]: Interestingly, in that documentary and some subsequent work that's been done, I think it was calculated that the people by far the most likely did be the subject of an anti-Semitism complaint, as in the supposed perpetrators of anti-Semitism.
[SPEAKER_03]: To be Jewish people.
[SPEAKER_03]: If you're a Jewish member of Labour, you were six times more likely to be investigated for anti-Semitism.
[SPEAKER_03]: And nine point five times more likely to be expelled than non-Jewish members of Labour.
[SPEAKER_03]: Which sort of suggests that maybe there's a problem with definitions, right?
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, so like from what you're saying, I feel like I mean if we're going to take more of a meta-reading, of course you're writing.
[SPEAKER_07]: I guess what you're crafting is more of like a resisting definition of anti-zionism as anti-Semitism?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, so I mean, I'm even slightly uncomfortable with anti-zionism because I think it's such a broad umbrella that covers a range of different positions with respect to Israel.
[SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, I really look clarify it then.
[SPEAKER_07]: What would you prefer?
[SPEAKER_03]: I just call it criticism of Israel.
[SPEAKER_03]: Just because I feel that's more obviously heterogeneous.
[SPEAKER_07]: There is a counter you've got to give me pause.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: Recently that I don't remember who said it, but they were talking about their relationship with the idea of Zionism.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: And the way they framed it, if you just said that the ideals of Zionism appeal to them, the idea of a place, the occupation does not.
[SPEAKER_07]: That is the struggle that they have with us.
[SPEAKER_07]: calling themselves anti-zynists.
[SPEAKER_04]: Right.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: Because there is that thing where they feel like Jewish people have a persecuted, they need safety.
[SPEAKER_07]: So I wonder where the, that's something that you feel.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that's what's often called liberal-zynists, that's me.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's partly why, again, I agree.
[SPEAKER_03]: You're just starting.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's these labels because you could certainly be very critical of the occupation of the West Bank.
[SPEAKER_03]: But not considered Israel in and of itself to be a self-leculennial entity, right?
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, I get that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Or you could think just the existence of Israel is a clay and a prize and a story.
[SPEAKER_03]: There were so many different positions.
[SPEAKER_03]: You could have a different view about a one-state solution versus a two-state solution.
[SPEAKER_03]: They did to messy of colonized people who take up arms and resistance.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: How must it set?
[SPEAKER_07]: Like it goes with the nuances.
[SPEAKER_03]: Those are new answers.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: Calling all of that and design is, or not even being sure where to categorize that.
[SPEAKER_03]: I just struggle with that.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it's for me this isn't ongoing debate I'm having with myself.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm not there yet.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I've for now in this draft chapter, and that's just a bit clear that there's very much in drafts.
[SPEAKER_03]: I've tended to shy away from talking about anti-zangism and talked about instead criticism of Israel.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I think there are probably people who would consider even criticizing Israel's actions in the West Bank, call that anti-Semitism.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: When some people might say, well, no, I'd consider you calling Israel a satellite colony anti-Semitism, but let's call out the... It's that like, it's a time to boundary, you know?
[SPEAKER_07]: These conversations are like, which that I find myself resisting?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: So there's the tonohazi coats in your eyes.
[SPEAKER_07]: Oh yes, yes.
[SPEAKER_07]: Cover feature that just came out.
[SPEAKER_03]: I haven't read actually.
[SPEAKER_03]: I've heard about it.
[SPEAKER_07]: There was a section where he was talking about
[SPEAKER_07]: where he feels like he wants to identify himself morally, where identifies people morally.
[SPEAKER_07]: And then he, and I'm paraphrasing here, but he says something like the politician has less moral authority than the student protester who is out there who might be using, and this is the important bit, using slogans that I might not use, that would be chanting things I might not use, but the fact that they stake claim on their position, he finds a having more moral authority, a more ethical act, you know what I mean?
[SPEAKER_07]: And I don't disagree with that.
[SPEAKER_07]: I just find it interesting that we keep returning to the way we're speaking about things.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: The things that that person is saying as opposed to the things.
[SPEAKER_07]: No, the slogans that that person says.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: If they're saying come to the river for this season.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: And what that means and is that adds to magic or not.
[SPEAKER_07]: And we're fighting about that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: And by acting that rather than like the actual issue.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think as a distraction.
[SPEAKER_03]: It is a distraction.
[SPEAKER_07]: But I find that like tiny house and coast is doing it himself.
[SPEAKER_07]: Hmm, you know what I mean?
[SPEAKER_07]: Because he knows that if he skipped that part and just says, but I identify with a student protestor, then that narrative of what that student protestor's been called.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: Just stuck on to him.
[SPEAKER_07]: I like that something he has to be careful about.
[SPEAKER_07]: I find that to be.
[SPEAKER_04]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_04]: You see what I'm saying?
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: I feel like that gap.
[SPEAKER_07]: I mean, I resist it.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: But I do get what you're saying.
[SPEAKER_07]: We need to approach this conversation with nuance.
[SPEAKER_07]: Being very clear about where our positions are, about these different things.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: But that's a really long conversation.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, that'll take a lot of time for me to try and tell you.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: So while I get resisting these definitions are useful in some way, you know, this fight that we're having is a distraction to keep us from talking about like the actual events that are happening.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, yeah, and said we have defaulted to place where the things we say about those events, the common identity marker for us rather than like we're actually talking with us.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: And that prevents action.
[SPEAKER_07]: And that stalls the conversation.
[SPEAKER_07]: You know, then let's care Starmer step up and finally say a ceasefire must happen.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: But not acknowledge the fact that they're funding.
[SPEAKER_07]: You know what I mean?
[SPEAKER_07]: Like that thing is something that I resist.
[SPEAKER_07]: So I guess that's why I'm pushing back on it a little bit.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, I'm now excited.
[SPEAKER_03]: Everything is like washing.
[SPEAKER_03]: Everything's in a complete sense.
[SPEAKER_03]: And yeah, I think a lot of the time these conversations are just actions of a man.
[SPEAKER_07]: I'm not trying to play special.
[SPEAKER_07]: I'm just saying that like I'm glad that that's something you're engaging with.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, and you try to think about like where do I lie in?
[SPEAKER_07]: work where I am in the position, but I also, I guess I'm cautioning people to not spend too much time on that.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think I would probably, yeah, I'm always gonna head to my bed, but I think I would probably be, well, I have on many occasions described myself as anti-zionist.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think where I'm being cautious is more in an academic descriptive sense trying to talk about other people's positions.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I was like, you know, my frustrations.
[SPEAKER_03]: That could be me.
[SPEAKER_03]: Of course.
[SPEAKER_03]: We're here with you.
[SPEAKER_03]: But I think it's going back to your time.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think going back to your question, though.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, absolutely.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's possible to be both anti Zionist and anti-Semitic.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that probably really sort of blurs the boundaries of what's what there doesn't do.
[SPEAKER_07]: I can say that as well because there's another side of it that I think is worth looking at, which is as these definitions are rising, there's another one rising, which is the idea that like these, I guess, I don't know if I would say progressive values that we have about like the Situopian vision of a world of peace.
[SPEAKER_07]: It doesn't have a place for these Muslim voices because this idea in the West of Islam is not belonging, right?
[SPEAKER_07]: And that's what we're talking about, the Muslim problem.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, right.
[SPEAKER_07]: The Muslim person does the Arab person have a place in UK labor or like, not even UK labor, like this idea of like, progress the future, sorry, I'm like,
[SPEAKER_07]: I'm just losing it.
[SPEAKER_07]: I'm trying to get something but I'm struggling.
[SPEAKER_07]: I'm trying to work out with it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Can you help us?
[SPEAKER_03]: That's anyway, there's always going to be a drop-back in what you want to say.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: Maybe I'll make sense of it later on.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: Corbyn.
[SPEAKER_03]: One thing that I think didn't often get discussed about the Corbyn anti-Semitism crisis, it went to a better term.
[SPEAKER_03]: was a sort of accusation that was made by a range of different people, actually.
[SPEAKER_03]: Definitely some sort of maybe right wing kind of news articles, but subsequently I've read other, there's an author called Ruckip S. San, who seems to make a version of this and it was reported in Harats, which is a sort of liberal, liberal, liberal left is really newspaper.
[SPEAKER_03]: An idea that actually one of the reasons why Corbin didn't stamp down on this terrible endemic anti-Semitism in the Labour Party was that he wanted to keep his Muslim vote back on side.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, obviously that's all kinds of problematic because that then assumes that Muslim voters are going to be inherently anti-Semitic or are not going to care about anti-Semitism.
[SPEAKER_03]: But it caps right back into this idea of new anti-Semitism doesn't it?
[SPEAKER_03]: Because it's the left eye Corbin and his circle ignoring anti-Semitism to maintain this link with Muslim voters.
[SPEAKER_07]: I think what I wanted to say earlier actually, I finally got it.
[SPEAKER_07]: I kind of want to draw attention to the fact that there's a definition sort of implicitly being created about like what the Muslim person is at the same time as that's happening.
[SPEAKER_07]: I mean, it's like they're being brought into the conversation.
[SPEAKER_07]: We're talking this idea about like the Muslim community is antisemitic and courting them, right?
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, obviously not, but yeah, that's it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: But like what I'm saying is that as that's being done, that is sort of forming this definition of like this is what the most one person believes.
[SPEAKER_03]: Right.
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's what I mean.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's anti-semitic.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it's these crises that then sort of, I think, really solidify these labels.
[SPEAKER_07]: And like, we're in a moment where like these definitions are being created, but also they're being in touch at the same time.
[SPEAKER_07]: You know?
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: Anyway.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I mean, that's absolutely what we're seeing now with the Palestine marches, right?
[SPEAKER_08]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: Because they're constantly being framed as somehow antisemitic.
[SPEAKER_03]: And again, who's on the marches?
[SPEAKER_03]: Left, Muslims.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think this narrative has almost reached its sort of apex.
[SPEAKER_03]: Apex.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I mean, good to say they might go further, but... Is it a school device?
[SPEAKER_07]: Is it something like that with the cultural beliefs?
[SPEAKER_03]: I feel it's, I don't know about culture beliefs.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it's very much an idea that's in circulation and a lot of people would recognize it.
[SPEAKER_03]: So this is all happened in the course of me doing this research and writing this book.
[SPEAKER_03]: I feel it's almost much easier to explain it to people now because there is such a kind of glaring and obvious example.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think a lot of people probably, no, even friends of mine and people I know, who, you know, I'm sure they'd call themselves sort of sympathetic to the malestimian course and they're clearly not sort of
[SPEAKER_03]: supportive of Netanyahu and Israel, but I think they probably do have this lurking sense of all, but these Palestine marches are a bit anti-Semitic, and I'm sure it's not right that Jews don't feel safe going into Central London on Saturday.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I could only speak from my own experience and what I've read, but I've certainly not personally been a quite a few of these marches.
[SPEAKER_03]: I've not witnessed anything that I would consider to be anti-Semitic.
[SPEAKER_03]: generally speaking the arrest rates have been very low on the march just in some people say oh well that's just because of these the two scared to interfere in political work.
[SPEAKER_03]: I haven't seen I guess a compelling argument that the Palestine marches are a wash with anti-Semitism of any kind.
[SPEAKER_03]: I've seen quite a lot online on Twitter on some discussions you know it doesn't take that long on some Twitter.
[SPEAKER_03]: For someone to talk about a hook nose Jewish bank or something but I think that's the online
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, I think the second march I went to in Brighton the next day the Daily Mail had like pictures of it.
[SPEAKER_07]: I was talking about like the anti-Semitic movement in Brighton.
[SPEAKER_07]: I was like Jesus Christ.
[SPEAKER_05]: Wow, we're just walking.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, I mean this is another thing like from my life I remember when this first start happening I got a phone call from my mother.
[SPEAKER_07]: Mm-hmm.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's a totally different.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, I remember.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, my mother was like warning me not to go on.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, and like to not publicly identify as feeling one way or another about this.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, because my career but also because I'm in the process now of like sending my application for settlement to the home office and so she was concerned about like what that would do for it whether that might affect it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, which is very valid, it can sad.
[SPEAKER_03]: It is very valid.
[SPEAKER_07]: And that is something that I guess from my perspective as someone who's Eric, who's here, that did play into how I participated with the moment and like the needs of the moment and like how I could show up to a place.
[SPEAKER_07]: It was something the back of my mind.
[SPEAKER_07]: I think I also mentioned all the stuff about belonging and all that stuff because that is a question that I have myself, the idea of like, I've not perceived as belonging with because of my therapist.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, with which society would like, queerness.
[SPEAKER_03]: With queerness, like, for example.
[SPEAKER_07]: or with British society like you were saying that that's like an outlying aspect of me.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: That's interesting.
[SPEAKER_07]: We might blackness obscures, you know, that allows me to sort of pass in a way.
[SPEAKER_07]: Oh, right.
[SPEAKER_07]: And so I often feel like to show you guys the backness obscures the Arab alphabet.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, yes, no.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, and that is something I have in the back of my head though.
[SPEAKER_07]: like how my Arabness might change the mood of the moment in the past before in the context of me existing in British society today and that's something that's come to the forefront in my mind over the past couple years a lot more as like stuff happened that has forced Arab people and Arab identity to the national conversation and as always that happens through a conversation about Islam
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: Because something we haven't said already is the office case or like a multicolored machine up of Arab and Muslim identities as if they're one.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_07]: And that is something we've not really touched on.
[SPEAKER_07]: In fact, like you're talking about Jewish identity and Jewish experience being very diverse amongst many many different people who exist in many different ways.
[SPEAKER_07]: That same could be said about Arab people.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, because we've been raising Arab Christians and Jews and to everywhere else.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, and also like on that topic of ancient hatred, we've also erased the links between Jewish and Arab people historically.
[SPEAKER_07]: And we always talk about the violence, but also like the community existed.
[SPEAKER_05]: Absolutely.
[SPEAKER_07]: I also the community that existed in the diaspora.
[SPEAKER_07]: you know a lot of people in my life are Jewish yeah my close friends are specifically because of the similarities of like our upbringing yeah I find and like our behaviors so I feel like there are associations there and that's something we often have to scale in the fact that like a lot of you know yeah yeah yeah like in the practical and real day-to-day life these things operate differently than they do in the political stage or in the economic stage as well
[SPEAKER_03]: No, and I think there are so many examples of permanent Muslim scholars in the organization, saying, well, they weave it.
[SPEAKER_03]: As most of them, we've got to be at the forefront of fighting anti-Semitism.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think vice versa as well.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think one thing I found really heartening is seeing the depth of Jewish support for Palestine.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, obviously, I think it's a very representative of statistical, which is true.
[SPEAKER_07]: It's not a feeling, but there's been a really powerful, I think, because I think, and I'll step back from the other side of this.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: But because, like, I feel I've had to be outwardly presentational.
[SPEAKER_07]: of my feelings about Jewish people.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: And have to affirm publicly about being at the cinematic.
[SPEAKER_07]: So seeing Jewish people really like show up for a person really didn't mean a lot to me.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: Because I felt like, oh, okay, uh, they felt that same word.
[SPEAKER_03]: Just imagine how easy.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: There is a kinship in that.
[SPEAKER_03]: And there's definitely, I think, a politics there too, because I think it's almost overwhelmingly left wing Jews who are doing that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Actually, I don't want to assume that, but that's how they've been my experience.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's going to be exceptions in place, but there's definitely a strong kind of left wing Jewish
[SPEAKER_03]: Like, for example, the Jewish voice for Labour, which was a Jewish faction that grew up around the Corbin movement.
[SPEAKER_03]: Not in opposition, but in distinction to, let's say, the much older Jewish Labour movement, which we're not in the recent decades, I think consistent there's been fairly supportive of Israel, even though it was a kind of left-winged unionist organisation in its early stages.
[SPEAKER_03]: just on the subject of the Jewish experience in the Arab world.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think more of a plug than anything else, a book I read recently by Ani Rakiborn, which is Israeli historian called Abby Schleim, called Three Worlds.
[SPEAKER_03]: Essentially he uses his family and he calls himself an Islamic Arab Jews as sort of
[SPEAKER_03]: evidence that you can't just simply divide that part of the world and then choose an Arabs or Jews and Muslims and he documents his flourishing during deciding Baghdad.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think Baghdad was maybe not fifty percent, but a large number of thirty forty percent Jewish and much of the early part of the twentieth century.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then he goes into real, quite meticulous detail about the changes in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the, in the,
[SPEAKER_03]: ancient Arab anti-Semitism.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a much more complicated story involving accurate British peasants there.
[SPEAKER_03]: Lots of different factors going on.
[SPEAKER_03]: All I think Mossad got involved at one point too.
[SPEAKER_03]: So it's a really interesting feat that I would recommend to anyone who'd like to know about that.
[SPEAKER_07]: You brought up the ancient hatreds again?
[SPEAKER_03]: I did.
[SPEAKER_03]: I thought I'd just sort of drop that in there.
[SPEAKER_03]: Because I think Einstein's book really is a great and attractive to them.
[SPEAKER_03]: That is very true.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: I guess it'll bring us back at the macro.
[SPEAKER_07]: really in your whole writing.
[SPEAKER_07]: What it is is like it's an advocation for us to look at these simplistic narratives, right?
[SPEAKER_07]: And to think about the ways in which they deligid to mise.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: Deligid to mise.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: This is a tough one.
[SPEAKER_07]: That's a tough one.
[SPEAKER_05]: That's a tough one.
[SPEAKER_07]: That's a tough one.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's a tough one.
[SPEAKER_07]: That's a tough one.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's a tough one.
[SPEAKER_03]: That
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm very happy to resist that with you actually.
[SPEAKER_07]: I associate with liberal.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is another one I resist.
[SPEAKER_03]: Or I often think of progressive is actually used to specifically not mean liberal.
[SPEAKER_03]: I know, but like, but like, both of them.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: At the same time, I know both have associations that I do.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_07]: And we have to get, I don't want to go for like independent because then I'll
[SPEAKER_07]: I watched that documentary about anarchy and I did not like it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Let's keep, let's keep woke out of this as well.
[SPEAKER_07]: I just want to set fires and take care of cats.
[SPEAKER_07]: That's not a lot.
[SPEAKER_03]: Very good.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, I tend to say to discredit left-wing politics.
[SPEAKER_03]: This is not my leftist narrative.
[SPEAKER_03]: In my experience, for example, I've seen it.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's been used yesterday to discredit left-wing politics.
[SPEAKER_03]: Corbin being one example and also to demonize Muslim communities.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think one thing to be really clear about because I've sort of been talking about this as if the left and Muslims are two tech book communities.
[SPEAKER_03]: Of course, that's not true because I think the majority of Muslim politicians in this country, the overwhelming majority are left wing around members of the Labour Party.
[SPEAKER_03]: Not the very card of Labour Party and it's current forms anything close to left by the way.
[SPEAKER_03]: But yeah, Muslim politicians have generally aligned themselves to the left.
[SPEAKER_03]: So much of a bit of the United States.
[SPEAKER_03]: Sorry.
[SPEAKER_03]: So, exactly, yeah, and obviously there are exceptions, but there are obviously many, many sort of left wing, western activists and academics.
[SPEAKER_03]: And the Muslim vote, if you can sort of generalize, has also traditionally lean left in this country.
[SPEAKER_03]: So there's a huge overlap there between those categories.
[SPEAKER_03]: I just want to make that point because I'm aware sometimes there's a dangerous tendency to sort of talk about things as a sort of very secret, but they're really not.
[SPEAKER_07]: I guess from my end, the thing I'd want to say is, I have to be very careful about how I stay this, given the conversation, is with all these kinds of things.
[SPEAKER_07]: I would encourage people to reflect on who do these narratives privilege, ultimately, and in my opinion, the ultimately privilege, well, they enable state power to commit atrocities in the name of a citizens.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, manufacturing consent basically.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yes, that's what we're doing.
[SPEAKER_07]: And they are based on lies.
[SPEAKER_07]: They're based on stereotypes, they're based on fabrications, they're based on stories.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: And the active truth is a lot more brutal.
[SPEAKER_03]: Hmm.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, they're based on sort of gross exaggerations and distortions as well.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm always keen to sort of stress, you know, or to kind of locate what is the kind of truth behind or whatever these narratives are.
[SPEAKER_03]: Just because I think it's really important to knowledge that
[SPEAKER_03]: Because if you don't, then you're automatically yielding power to someone who wants to critic your magic.
[SPEAKER_03]: They can just say, well, hang on, but actually, yes, look at that survey that shows.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's not much.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, hang on, actually.
[SPEAKER_03]: Go on, that's fine.
[SPEAKER_03]: Very good.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thank you.
[SPEAKER_03]: Absolutely hilarious.
[SPEAKER_03]: What makes me afraid, it's all such a witty joyous question.
[SPEAKER_07]: You shut your mouth, put your hormone.
[SPEAKER_07]: No, is there anything else that you'd like to touch on, Jonathan, that we've not covered?
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, um, we've covered so much.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think you want to like mention.
[SPEAKER_03]: I mean, I think just the one bit of the chapter that we haven't really talked about, and I don't want to go into in so much details, because quite depressing is the way that Garza sort of became an electoral issue in both the recent download election, but also there was the Rochdale by election in February.
[SPEAKER_03]: There's huge amounts that could be said.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think I might save that for him.
[SPEAKER_03]: When his book eventually comes out, please read my chapter.
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, okay.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I think just acknowledge in the post-calling era, Guestama has huge these sort of drag labour back from it supposedly far left socialist fringe into some to the middle of it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Back to the centre, or even further right, but who knows?
[SPEAKER_03]: I could argue about that length, but certainly back to a sort of rather middle of the road.
[SPEAKER_03]: Not what I'd say is traditional labour, but kind of maybe trying to emulate the more kind of blare right labour.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think a huge part of Starmers' political personality at least in the beginning was not being Jeremy Corbyn.
[SPEAKER_03]: And so when element of that was, he was very keen to distance himself from this taint of antisemitism.
[SPEAKER_03]: Which is why I think one of the reasons why that was so crack down upon in all of this was the subsequent investigations.
[SPEAKER_03]: Internally investigations, I mean not the kind of forward report or anything like that, but the internal sort of disappeared new procedures.
[SPEAKER_03]: We, I think, privileged anti-Semitism, that's something that needed to be dealt with.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, this was, no, I'm not very Corbin.
[SPEAKER_03]: I care about this.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I think Starmer, and obviously a lot of other reasons he was perceived as fighting a war on the left and on unions and all sorts of things.
[SPEAKER_03]: So he was very much kind of already not very popular with some of the more kind of left-leaning members of the party or voters who could myself in that category and I believe Muslim voters as well and obviously as all of you just got lots of label at there.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think the nailing that coffin that say was LBC radio show wasn't at the end of you where he was asked whether he believed that Israel had the right to hold.
[SPEAKER_03]: No, the defenders have it also to kind of cut off water and the immediate said yes, I do think Israel has that right.
[SPEAKER_03]: He then sort of couched this in terms of being in line with international law.
[SPEAKER_08]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: That really felt like a turning point followed by, I can't remember the exact name of what happened when, but the various ceasefire boats.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it felt like they were going to hemorrhage both left wing and Muslim and that intersection, folks from those constituents.
[SPEAKER_03]: The Rochdale by election in twenty twenty four.
[SPEAKER_03]: There was a bizarre story.
[SPEAKER_03]: This needs to be sort of written about property.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think I haven't got that capacity because there was so many different shots and sub dots.
[SPEAKER_03]: But the key story was that the Labour candidate, as are Ali, he was very unpopular among the person, certainly the Muslim both bang in Rochdale.
[SPEAKER_03]: Because he was seen as very closely aligned to Starmer.
[SPEAKER_03]: But ironically he was ultimately ditched by Labour because well firstly he kind of was to unrecord making a claim that he felt that Israel had let the Yorktober in a seven massacre happen and then that even that was kind of he wasn't actually exposed because of that but some other video came to light of him talking about Jewish quarters in the media being responsible for this suspension of another pro Palestine MP and that was a bridge too far for Thomas say he was taken off but he wasn't taking it it was a complicated thing wasn't that Labour stopped endorsing him but it was too late to actually take him off the ballot
[SPEAKER_08]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: But anyway, then enter George Galaway.
[SPEAKER_03]: Tuesday had long history of being involved in British socialist politics and anti-war politics and very much kind of no has forced very strong alliances with British Muslim organizations like the Muslim Association of Britain back in the anti-wrote war demonstration.
[SPEAKER_03]: his newly branded work as party of Britain.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think I've got that name right.
[SPEAKER_03]: They really capitalised on this and sort of made the election about garrisons.
[SPEAKER_03]: So when you eventually won, Galaway, the first thing you said was Kirsta, this is for garrison.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think that was why then later on, so I'll a brother from and talked about the leftist extremist and his most cranks, whatever way around it is hijacking by elections.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think that's what she was referring to.
[SPEAKER_03]: And then this slightly became a big part of the general election as well.
[SPEAKER_03]: And there's an organization called The Muslim Vote, a quite broad church, a sort of quite the right thing, broad tent collaboration of multiple British Muslim groups.
[SPEAKER_03]: And they were specifically looking at trying to, first of all, identify candidates who had to have spoken out to the support of Palestine who had voted for a ceasefire.
[SPEAKER_03]: And also then funding independent candidates to actually take on certain constituents where the labour candidate or generally other candidates, well, it was perceived as either leading towards Israel or simply not engaging with that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_07]: Why do you think Gaza has emerged as an electoral issue?
[SPEAKER_07]: Might be an obvious answer, but that's right.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think because the British government is very clearly seen as aiding and the betting is right.
[SPEAKER_03]: Both diplomatically but also through no sending money and weapons.
[SPEAKER_03]: Not obviously to the extent of the US, just because we're as poor country, but it's not seen as some sort of far off conflict that's got nothing to do with us.
[SPEAKER_03]: First of all, very much there is British political culpability there and you know, British politicians voting for things of consequence like, no, are we going to call for a ceasefire or not?
[SPEAKER_03]: So there's that.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it's also, and this kind of connects to all the things we've discussed and perhaps many things we haven't discussed as well.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think Palestine has become such a central cause both for a lot of left-wing activism and for a lot of Muslim community organising activism and identity and no to keep stressing this left Muslims have no overlap there as well.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think Palestine is a key part of that political identity in a way and has been now for several decades.
[SPEAKER_03]: in the UK, and I mean, on the US as well, and you're up, but it's, I don't know if what you think about this, but I'd feel for it.
[SPEAKER_07]: I'm just thinking more so in terms of like, not quite materiality, but why are we talking about this now when this is happening?
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, obviously not because it's, you know, I don't know, I'm like, yes, exactly, but because we're seeing it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, we're seeing it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Oh, I see you mean, you know what I mean?
[SPEAKER_07]: That's where my mind goes.
[SPEAKER_07]: I was like, oh, I wonder, like, the end of the bus being, it's being more visible than ever.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes, yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: That's, I think that's absolutely true.
[SPEAKER_03]: It was a more intense.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's been only the year we've got twenty four-hour coverage.
[SPEAKER_03]: People talk about it in the first live stream genocide then they all sort of social media ramifications as well.
[SPEAKER_03]: I suppose, yeah, it's there, it's very present.
[SPEAKER_03]: And it sort of feels like if you're even slightly political, you can't get away with not having a conversation in a opinion about it.
[SPEAKER_07]: And I would say it, I would just add to that and I think that's directly because as a reaction to the fact that for a long time you had to have a very specific opinion about it.
[SPEAKER_07]: Hmm, and you couldn't share if you had a different opinion about it, right?
[SPEAKER_07]: Or is that just me saying that?
[SPEAKER_07]: Go on, same mind.
[SPEAKER_07]: Well, I feel like there was like we've been talking about it.
[SPEAKER_07]: For a while, it was really hard to publicly have an opinion about this matter.
[SPEAKER_07]: So my mom, I was in my pop culture nerd.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, and the past films call it, if I will.
[SPEAKER_07]: And I keep thinking of examples in media where I discuss shit about his real palestine with uses a joke.
[SPEAKER_07]: I realized, yeah, I did what TV show was watching, what was it?
[SPEAKER_07]: Might have been the Simpsons, and it had the thing where they were asking one of the characters, like, what's your opinion about his real own Palestine as a faggot show moment, and then it cuts away.
[SPEAKER_07]: But of course, I think that's why it cuts away, and it returns to like, make our just the final sentence, saying like, and that's why I think it's a very complicated issue, but that's what I would do to fix it, and that was like a lot of time, you know, and like, it was an equivocating.
[SPEAKER_07]: You know, it's about like, I can't publicly talk about it.
[SPEAKER_07]: It's complicated.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's complicated.
[SPEAKER_07]: And like, it's complicated.
[SPEAKER_07]: Exactly.
[SPEAKER_07]: It's complicated becoming the end of the conversation.
[SPEAKER_07]: Right.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: Hey, think that it's partly the moment is a reaction to that.
[SPEAKER_07]: The fact that we had it, it's complicated.
[SPEAKER_07]: We had this complicated narratives.
[SPEAKER_07]: We had like no, but now we can talk about it.
[SPEAKER_07]: People feel more free to talk about it, which I find.
[SPEAKER_07]: Really cool.
[SPEAKER_07]: I find it really really good that Chapel Rowan is saying.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, I did hear about that.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah, I did.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, I did.
[SPEAKER_07]: Something we should probably mention.
[SPEAKER_07]: There's the fact that like she's getting a very ferocious reaction from, because of the liberal laugh in America, because she said I'm not endorsing.
[SPEAKER_07]: Come on.
[SPEAKER_07]: Kamala.
[SPEAKER_05]: Kamala.
[SPEAKER_07]: Kamala.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_05]: Kamala.
[SPEAKER_05]: That's that.
[SPEAKER_05]: It's a whole science.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah, I used places.
[SPEAKER_07]: Because I have, uh, stupid, I have a marble character in my head who's, like, said the different way.
[SPEAKER_07]: Oh, yeah, I can use them.
[SPEAKER_07]: Me.
[SPEAKER_07]: But yeah, and so her saying that she didn't want to endorse Kamala, specifically because of power stuff.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I remember that.
[SPEAKER_07]: The liberal reaction.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: To that.
[SPEAKER_07]: has been, like I said, really gorgeous, really negative.
[SPEAKER_07]: That statement, which I find to be like, you know, really interesting.
[SPEAKER_07]: But I find it really inspiring, the fact that like, you're standing on it, tentals down.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, Kamala, who was it just this morning, or yesterday, white, visciferously re-affirmed Israel's.
[SPEAKER_03]: Sorry, the US is horrible as well, is it?
[SPEAKER_03]: It's important.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, the US is, um, I can't believe it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, it's canceling.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, support for Israel, there's some specific formulation there.
[SPEAKER_03]: And very much, you know, Nasserla was a terrorist.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: And a story.
[SPEAKER_03]: Because there had been some sort of sense that she might be moved.
[SPEAKER_03]: She'll carry on sending bonds, but she'll say slightly.
[SPEAKER_03]: She'll say it out loud.
[SPEAKER_03]: She weighs so loudly.
[SPEAKER_03]: Whereas it sounds pretty loud.
[SPEAKER_03]: Like every other thing.
[SPEAKER_03]: It sounds pretty loud.
[SPEAKER_07]: And now here we are.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, here we are.
[SPEAKER_07]: In the mouth.
[SPEAKER_07]: Well, I think we solved it.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think we solved it.
[SPEAKER_07]: I think the crisis.
[SPEAKER_07]: What took so many years?
[SPEAKER_07]: I started an ancient hatred.
[SPEAKER_07]: A couple hundred years.
[SPEAKER_03]: Thousands of years, exactly.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think we should thank Alaska for her part.
[SPEAKER_03]: I was about to plug the next national march and so I'd already found a sign next Saturday, but of course it won't be that no time comes out.
[SPEAKER_07]: So it will be another march at some points.
[SPEAKER_03]: There we are.
[SPEAKER_03]: Go get out of the streets.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah, I'll post the details on that one.
[SPEAKER_07]: So what are our final thoughts?
[SPEAKER_07]: Do you have any final thoughts?
[SPEAKER_07]: Was that the end?
[SPEAKER_03]: Do you want to say to the people?
[SPEAKER_03]: I think what I want to say, just actually more generally into just moving away from the sort of specifics of what we've been talking about.
[SPEAKER_03]: Also it frustrates me that it's complicated as used as a conversation.
[SPEAKER_03]: And yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: And especially this is my entire sort of approach to the writing this book and maybe the previous book as well.
[SPEAKER_03]: I want to, you know, be in a space where you can embrace all this complexity and nuance and ambiguity without losing sight of your clear ethical and political commitments.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, as I think I put it in, I don't know if it actually was a book drawn event for the Ghost of Forces Street book, I think no.
[SPEAKER_03]: There are times when it's really important to be having these very sort of tortured and vigorous conversations and kind of endless footnotes and notes and there are times when you just have to get out and march on the fucking streets.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think both, I think it's possible to operate at different levels.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I have very clear views.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, I think Israel's committing genocide, happy to say that.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't think it's much time to go to you there.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think it's certainly not your buying force in the West Bank, guys.
[SPEAKER_03]: I have, well, obviously, guys is historical sort of complexity there.
[SPEAKER_03]: I have slightly less kick cut views on the question of, well, then you know, I do believe it's a set of clicker in your entity.
[SPEAKER_03]: What we then do with that fact, I think is where I started, you know, see the variety of viewpoints.
[SPEAKER_03]: So I'm saying all that, but then obviously, you know, in the chapter, which I hope one day will be published in a way or the read it.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah, there's obviously endless little backwits and forwards and, yeah, there are areas.
[SPEAKER_03]: Well, if we could sit there and look at them.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: And we can really think about them.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_07]: But also when there's a genocide happening, we march on the streets.
[SPEAKER_07]: Try and stop it.
[SPEAKER_03]: That is my sort of message really.
[SPEAKER_03]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: And the files, files, then try to recognize cruelty.
[SPEAKER_07]: Try to think of kindness.
[SPEAKER_07]: You know, kindness must always be the option.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yes.
[SPEAKER_05]: And.
[SPEAKER_05]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: Well, Jonathan, thank you so much.
[SPEAKER_07]: I believe this completes episode.
[SPEAKER_07]: I don't know what number this will be.
[SPEAKER_04]: I have anything.
[SPEAKER_07]: Hopefully I'll get you back here again at some point.
[SPEAKER_04]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_04]: Oh, am I saying it like that?
[SPEAKER_07]: Actually, before that, this is something new I'm doing.
[SPEAKER_07]: I am now, I want to end every episode where I have my guests give the audience a recommendation of something.
[SPEAKER_07]: Whatever it is, it doesn't have to be of anything related to this episode.
[SPEAKER_07]: It could be like music that you like listen to that will make their day just a little better.
[SPEAKER_07]: So I'm from to check out.
[SPEAKER_03]: Okay, I'm going to recommend something that I acquired yesterday.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a magazine.
[SPEAKER_03]: I don't know how widely available to this yet, but I great hope that it's a magazine.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's called Balkanism is prepared by a friend of mine called Arbe, Arbe Gashi, and it's a sort of celebration of the Balkan region in all its naughty complexity, diversity, ambiguity, all of that.
[SPEAKER_03]: He's from Bridges Bond, but from background from Kosovo, there are contributors from everywhere.
[SPEAKER_03]: Everywhere Serbia, Bosnia, Macedonia, you name it.
[SPEAKER_03]: I love that.
[SPEAKER_03]: Food, poetry, politics, a lot of queer history as well.
[SPEAKER_03]: I'm sorry.
[SPEAKER_03]: And yeah, I hope it's something that becomes widely available and goes from strength to strength.
[SPEAKER_03]: So that's my recommendation, Balkanism.
[SPEAKER_03]: And I think weirdly, there are so many resonances with what we've been talking about.
[SPEAKER_03]: I think you're going to find many of the sort of lenses I suppose that we've been applying to these questions of Israel, Palestine, Judaism, Islam and all of that to that region too.
[SPEAKER_07]: Lovely.
[SPEAKER_07]: And actually, I'm going to recommend something that we've mentioned earlier in this conversation.
[SPEAKER_07]: The Trojan Horse Affair podcast.
[SPEAKER_07]: You can go listen.
[SPEAKER_07]: I think it will reflect into a lot of conversations that we're having and the topic that they have.
[SPEAKER_07]: And offers a bit of a good foundation to the conversation that we just had, I guess.
[SPEAKER_07]: And it's not even a bit of background to what we've been talking about.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's gripping.
[SPEAKER_03]: And that unfolds like a sort of detective.
[SPEAKER_03]: It's a crime investigation.
[SPEAKER_03]: You don't believe me.
[SPEAKER_07]: It's one of those podcasts that very much inspired me to get into the video.
[SPEAKER_07]: So yeah, I recommend.
[SPEAKER_07]: Yeah.
[SPEAKER_07]: Thank you, Jonathan.
[SPEAKER_07]: We're coming on my podcast.
[SPEAKER_04]: Thank you for inviting me!
[SPEAKER_04]: Bye!
[SPEAKER_06]: And that was the episode, thank you so much for listening.
[SPEAKER_06]: I gave you a long intro, so I'll keep it rather short.
[SPEAKER_06]: On the outro, you can find Dr. Jonathan Golden at Jonathan Golden on Twitter.
[SPEAKER_06]: It didn't come up with this conversation, but Jonathan is also a composer.
[SPEAKER_06]: His latest album is going to be linked in the show notes, so please check it out.
[SPEAKER_06]: You can also find the podcast everywhere you listen to your podcasts.
[SPEAKER_06]: And you can find us on social media everywhere at also perp.
[SPEAKER_06]: That is a L-S-O-P-U-R-P.
[SPEAKER_06]: That is going to be on TikTok, Twitter, blue sky, threads, whatever I am forgetting about as well.
[SPEAKER_07]: We are also on YouTube, which is search for referential podcasts.
[SPEAKER_07]: The video version of this episode will be updated in a few weeks.
[SPEAKER_07]: We've got a video update coming your way in about a week or so, so keep an eye out for that.
[SPEAKER_07]: And if you'd like to get in contact, you can reach out to me at referentialpodcast at gmail.com or at khalyde and n-n-n-n-gmail.com that is call it end with three ends at gmail.com.
[SPEAKER_06]: If you like this podcast, please leave a rating and review and share with your friends.
[SPEAKER_06]: It really helps.
[SPEAKER_06]: get the word out there on referential and also kind words are nice and probably needed right now.
[SPEAKER_06]: So I'd really appreciate that.
[SPEAKER_06]: And yeah, I think that is pretty much it for me.
[SPEAKER_06]: I will be back in your ears very soon.
[SPEAKER_06]: So keep an eye out on your feeds.
[SPEAKER_06]: Thank you so much for listening and goodbye.
[SPEAKER_02]: We all we got, so I'm gonna get that there.