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You're listening to the Ben Domenech Podcast, brought to you by Fox News. Anti-Semitism in the West is thankfully not the dominant position of belief. But that's not to say it's insignificant.
A clear portion of people in the West who enjoy all the benefits of Western civilization, of freedom of speech, religion and assembly, are nonetheless dedicated to an authoritarian idea focused on the destruction of a people and a nation who throughout history had to confront repeated attempts to eradicate them. We saw this in the past week in protests that played out across the Western world.
Some of the most obscene forms of this protest took place in some of the most diverse major cities of the West, including London, near Whitehall, where this scene played out of a group of free Palestine protesters chasing a lone man who dared to raise the Israeli flag. In America, these protests played out across college campuses, but also in Times Square in Manhattan, home of the second most populous Jewish community in the world after Israel.
What was perhaps the most disturbing was that our elite institutions were so quick to embrace this form of anti-Semitism, and indeed, promote it. Harvard, Columbia, and other Ivy League institutions all issued statements or allowed statements to be issued that were heinous and reprehensible, without any kind of moral perspective on the rape and murder perpetuated by Hamas. To all graduates of these programs who are Jewish, and to many who are not, these messages were particularly personally offensive.
In some instances, students themselves begged that these protests be shut down because they recognized the level of danger it creates for Jewish students in these communities. The consequences were rare indeed. Statements from people like Lawrence Summers about the disappointment they had regarding Harvard, statements from people like former Ambassador John Huntsman as regards his family's funding of Penn University, these were the exceptions, not the rule.
The truth is that elite academia, now wholly captured by the left, has a deep problem with anti-Semitism. They are full of figures funded by taxpayers who put an intellectual spin on the most barbarous lies and do so in service of ideas that are fundamentally antithetical to the Western Enlightenment that made their institutions possible.
The important thing to understand is that this is not unnatural. It is not out of step with the principles of the left to embrace anti-Semitism or an anti-Israel posture. Despite the fact that Israel is a liberal society by any measure, the current leftist dynamic that we have seen play out over the past several decades loathes their existence and foments racist hate against Israel as an occupying power. At first, such views were on the fringes, the most extreme of the extremes.
but support has increasingly mainstreamed itself within a progressive left increasingly open to their heinous ideas. Now we confront a group of leftists who are tied together by the bonds of vicious lies about our past and our future, who are also dedicated to the destruction of the Jewish people and their state. Whether the mewling students in the square understand that or not, they are part of the same deadly agenda.
Understand, as author Chris Ruffo has noted, the Democratic Socialists of America, the Black Lives Matter movement, the DEI agenda, the CRT agenda, the 1692 project, and every other aspect of the ridiculousness of the modern left are branches of the same tree of a message of decolonization, one of blame and victimhood. One branch of this is based on the destruction of Israel.
The DSA and its attendant members in Congress are incredibly powerful individuals. Regardless of their positions within the hierarchy of the Democratic Party, they have enormous microphones. They speak to an audience of millions, and they are emphatic that Israel is an apartheid state. They have said it so often that those who listen to them believe it to be true. This is a problem for the left.
It is, in its essence, a generational divide between the establishment of the Bill Clinton generation, which was in no way guided toward embracing anti-Semitism or the destruction of the Israeli state, with a younger generation that dares to embrace such extreme ideas and then finds in the reaction to those ideas an affirmation as opposed to a condemnation. More of the Ben Domenech podcast right after this.
I do not know what will happen to the left when this establishment generation goes away. I don't know if the Hakeem Jeffries of the world will be able to hold back the tide of Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib and the rest of the growing squad once Nancy Pelosi and Chuck Schumer are gone.
That is a problem for the future. But they are a problem now. And we ought to confront them with the truth, with condemnation, and with utter rejection of their collectivist ideology. However, just because the vast majority of the problem of antisemitism exists today in the Western Left does not mean that those problems are confined there.
there is a fringe portion of the right that does dabble in these ideas, sometimes funded by top donors who are either unaware or do not care or even secretly perhaps support this ideology. The specter of racial hierarchy and eugenicist blather festers in corners of the online world and sometimes figures on the right fall into that evil pit. But they are dwarfed by the voices on the left, on the streets, in academia, and in the halls of Congress. Now I want to be clear about definitions.
It's not anti-Semitic to be opposed to the politics of the conservative parties in Israel. It's not anti-Semitism to hold different views on foreign policy than the leaders of Israel. It's not anti-Semitism to take issue with Benjamin Netanyahu, to oppose his election or his judicial reforms, or oppose any other Jewish leader or politician anywhere. Nothing like that is in any way an automatic indication of anti-Semitism. It's absurd to think so.
Just because you disagree with Chuck Schumer doesn't make you anti-Semitic any more than disagreeing with Nancy Pelosi makes you anti-Italian. Just because I hate Justin Trudeau doesn't mean I hate Canadians. But I do fundamentally believe that if you reject the right of Israel to defend itself, the right of the Jewish state to exist, if you embrace the rhetoric of the quote-unquote "Free Palestine" movement, make excuses for the murder of innocents by the terrorist organization Hamas, then I think it's on you to prove you're not anti-Semitic.
Because there is no moral excuse, there is no moral defense for what we have seen. That brings me to a significant problem that I've seen growing over the years as an aspect of the right. One of the aspects, unfortunately, of being on the right in America is the feeling that you are isolated. That culturally, you have to depend on everyone you can and welcome any celebrity, no matter how fringe, who sounds the least bit conservative with open arms.
It's one of the reasons that we saw some on the right embrace people like Kanye West, whose anti-Semitic lies blew up his life and his business, or people like the Tate brothers, the alt-right's favorite pimps. Let me ask you, you got into a Twitter spat with Andrew Tate yesterday. He's a converted Muslim. He'd been doing a lot of supportive tweets for the Palestinians.
And he tweeted at your one stage, What was that spat about? Why did you engage with him? What do you feel about that?
uh well what i feel about that is that he was tweeting that immediately like as terrorists were still running around in southern israel that was on october 10th and he was still tweeting while the bodies were fresh and warm in the streets pieces you cannot make peace with people who murder your children and burn their bodies you can't do that i mean this this rush to israel i i
The murder happens and you immediately say, okay, well, guys, now truce. Now truce. Now ceasefire. That is not – no state worth its salt. No government on earth would allow this kind of insanity. No government on earth. And no government on earth would listen to nonsense about how you immediately have to seek peace with a group that seeks your direct extermination.
Again, I can't emphasize enough. Israel turned over the Gaza Strip to Gazans in 2005. Hamas has governed the area since 2006. The year is currently 2023. Israel has endured round after round of rocket fire on its major cities for literally almost 20 years. And now the idea is the minute that Gazan terrorists rush through the border and murder people in their beds, that's the time for a peace conversation?
That's the time for peace conversations? By the way, I'm not going to be lectured on morality and toughness by Andrew Tate, whose great idea of toughness and morality is pimping women and then bragging about it on air and trying to quasi-walk it back while simultaneously maintaining many of the same positions and flexing his biceps.
One of the most prominent youth-focused entities on the right is Turning Point USA. Founded in 2012, it began with the admirable mission of trying to win over young voters to the right. They organized campus events and conferences. They pushed content on social media, promoted and engaged with influencers who would lead people toward the right. When they started out, they were the defenders of capitalism and fairly standard conservative policies.
But they've evolved over the years, become increasingly associated directly with Donald Trump as his rise became an essential part of the identity of being young and on the right in America. That's fine. But there's a problem. At the same time that they've been doing this, they've repeatedly engaged with people branded as TPUSA ambassadors, contributors and the like who have that branding in their bios, even as they say villainous and disturbing things online.
In the wake of the Hamas attacks, TPUSA figures pushed the fiction that images of burnt babies were fake, equated Zionism with communism, praised Holocaust deniers, and accused Israel of trying to "ethnically cleanse" Palestinians. It's a pretty far cry from the "less government, more freedom" bumper stickers back in the day. They are about to commit a genocide, and it is a repugnant and evil government that is led by the Jewish state
that is about to commit perhaps the worst atrocities in this century. And if you're a Christian, if you're a Catholic, we have to have some moral clarity here and say that two wrongs don't make a right. What Hamas did in Israel on Saturday was terrible, but those people should be held accountable. What Israel is doing now and what they've done for 16 years is they've held all the Palestinians collectively responsible.
and they are inflicting a collective punishment on innocent people, on children, on civilians. They're blowing up schools and hospitals. And so although from a strategic and geopolitical point of view, I am ambivalent because this is happening very far away.
At the same time, any Catholic can recognize that this is wrong. This is wrong what they're doing. Now, these are people who are part of TPUSA's influencer program. They aren't actually that important. Though as my friend, the writer David Marcus, pointed out this week, if TPUSA influencers embrace trans hormones or an open border, they'd probably be dropped like a hot rock. But embracing the anti-Israel rhetoric of the left, apparently, that's just fine.
As activism goes, this is just bad politics. It hands the left a cudgel to use against the right. Every time the right cites something crazy being said by the squad, the left can deceptively point to these crazy internet people on the right and say, "See, you have the same problem."
Of course, that itself is a lie. None of these people are members of Congress. When AOC was crying on the House floor about the Iron Dome being funded, she had a vote in the matter, even though she lost 420 to 9. These people do not have a vote in Congress. So keep that in perspective. But we had an illuminating moment this week in terms of why something like this continues to happen and continues to be a problem for the right.
Ladies and gentlemen, listen to the head of the Turning Point USA organization talk on a podcast about his personal theory about what happened on that terrible day in October. I've been to Israel many times. The whole country is a fortress. When I first heard this story, I still had the same gut instinct that I did initially. I find this very hard to believe. I've been to that Gaza border. You cannot go 10 feet without running into a 19-year-old with an AR-15 or an automatic machine gun that is an IDF soldier.
The whole country is surveilled. And so let me just kind of go through this. We don't talk about Israeli politics very often, and most Americans don't know this. The last nine months, Israel was on the brink of civil war. It's not an exaggeration. This judicial stuff, there were hundreds of thousands of Israelis taking to the streets because Bibi Netanyahu was basically redefining the Israeli constitution. That's not an exaggeration, right? He said the judicial branch has too much power.
There were protests planned this week against Netanyahu where they anticipated tens of thousands of people to take to the streets. That's all gone, Patrick. Netanyahu now has an emergency government and a mandate to lead. I'm not willing to say, to go so far that saying that Netanyahu knew or there was intelligence here. But I think some questions need to be asked. Was there a stand down order? Was there a stand down order?
Six hours? I don't believe it. Israel's the size of New Jersey. When I took a helicopter ride from Jerusalem to the Gaza border, it's 45 minutes. Six hours. They're live streaming the killing of Jews. Did somebody in the government say, stand down? That is a legitimate non-conspiracy question. The whole country is the IDF. The whole country is. And you're trying to tell me that they're going to concerts and kibbutzes and schools and
What you've just heard was offensive, hideous, and idiotic. Back in the days of 9/11, we were all familiar with the line from some of the most fringe people on the left who said, "Bush lied." George W. Bush lied, they said. He knew that there were going to be attacks on 9/11 and let them happen anyway as an excuse to go to war in the Middle East.
There was a variant of this targeted at the Jewish people, a variant that said Jewish members and officers who worked within the World Trade Center had been warned away from the buildings on 9/11 so they could survive while others died. Both were essentially invocations of the Reichstag fire, used as a pretext to establish Nazi rule. This is an echo of the same kind of conspiratorial attack that we're hearing today.
In this moment, before the bodies are even all identified, the claim is being advanced without any evidence that Benjamin Netanyahu, a soldier, a statesman, a man dedicated to the defense of the Jewish state and the Jewish people, purposefully told his military to stand down in order to allow the worst day since the Holocaust in terms of the murder of Jews out of an interest in his own political benefit? Think about that for just a moment. Think about the smear involved here.
Think about the villainy one would have to consider in order to believe that this is true. And by the way, the whole thing is idiotic because the simple fact is most people are blaming Netanyahu for failing in this context. It's something that doesn't benefit him politically at all. There won't be any consequences for this. Charlie Kirk continues to make millions of dollars off of his donors.
According to an Associated Press report put out this week, he's gained so much money from his time leading the organization, he now owns five different properties, all of them valued at more than a million dollars, including a $4.75 million mansion in Arizona, where he was a champion of the failed Carrie Lake campaign and the Stop the Steal effort.
For the coming cycle, Turning Point has promoted to donors a more than $100 million Get Out the Votes campaign that they can apply to different elections in three different states, Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. But the fact is, they probably won't be very good at it.
During their tenure as the lead youth organization on the right, the right has seen its numbers among 18 to 29 year olds diminish dramatically from an 11 point margin of loss for Republicans in the first election cycle it was active to a 28 point margin in 2022. This is what the donors are funding. As long as they continue to fund it, they'll continue to get the kind of results that we see. Results that just aren't good enough for conservatives to win. My overall point is this.
The American right, much more than the American left, has traditionally been supportive of Israel. This is a very good thing. It should continue. It will continue. It will continue long after many of the voices who argue against it are gone from the scene. This is because our relationship with Israel is so strong.
It is because the people who engage in this type of conspiracizing may have big follow counts, but they are on the fringes. They do not speak for the majority of American Christians, the majority of the American people, the majority of the American right, or even the majority of the Democratic Party.
But this small, loud faction is still too large. It feeds into the anti-Semitic narrative that turns the streets into places of rejoicing, praising terrorists as freedom fighters or militants, excuses them as gunmen, as the New York Times has done, as opposed to calling them out as the terrorist butchers and barbarous villains that they are.
I think it is much better in this moment to listen to people like my friend Douglas Murray, my colleague at The Spectator, who had this to say at one of London's main synagogues. I beg you not to accept it. I came back to London the other night and I hear the residue of the people outside the Israeli embassy. These people were not protesting against Israeli countermeasures. They hadn't even had any countermeasures. They were protesting because Jews by the hundreds had been slaughtered in Israel.
and they wanted to wound us more. Well, they might try, but we should not accept that with equanimity. I've written in the Spectator tomorrow a demand on the Prime Minister and the Home Secretary that supporters of Hamas in the UK must be treated in exactly the same way as supporters of ISIS were. This... Some people thought that the claim that Hamas was ISIS was a rhetorical claim. We know since Saturday, if we didn't know before, it is not rhetoric, it is real.
If you stand in Britain with a Hamas flag, you should not be allowed to be free in Britain. You should be arrested, have your citizenship withdrawn, your passport withdrawn. You should be deported. You should be sent to the Gaza and try your luck there. But you should not be given the right to insult and to taunt Jews after the death of Jews. It's intolerable, and we should not tolerate it. -The Jewish people will survive.
They will survive well after these enemies are gone. For those of us in the West, it behooves us to do three things. First, to call out the voices that echo villainous lies of those who work on a daily basis via media and policy to end Israel and its people. Second, to teach the next generation the truth about the people of Israel and the Holocaust. And third, is to support Israel and its people however we can.
Not all of us can send planes like Ron DeSantis did, but we can support them financially with resources, military, intelligence, and humanitarian. And we can support political steps against those who funded this death and destruction that broke the peace and started a war. We can confront American academia that foments hate. And every one of us can offer prayer for the Jewish people, for their families, and for the fighters. May their justice be swift.
and their arrows fly true. I'm Ben Dominick. Listen ad-free with a Fox News podcast plus subscription on Apple Podcasts. And Amazon Prime members can listen to this show ad-free on the Amazon Music app. Listen to the all-new Bret Baier podcast featuring Common Ground. In-depth talks with lawmakers from opposite sides of the aisle, along with all your Bret Baier favorites like his all-star panel and much more. Available now at foxnewspodcasts.com or wherever you get your podcasts.