Victor Davis Hanson: The West Has Fallen for Hamas’ Genocide Propaganda

But what I was shocked by, after the October 7th massacres, and in that interregnum period of 21 days, where the Israeli government said, we will not invade if you turn over all 251 hostages and all the people responsible for this mass murder. I can't quite figure why America woke up one day after October 7th and you heard things, you called them blood libel against Israel, but also just overt anti-Semitism. Hello, everybody. This is the Victor Davis Hanson, in his own words, podcast. I'm solo today interviewing, as we often do, the distinguished historian Richard Landis. And I think you might have known him from his works in medieval history for years at Boston University. And he's a great historian. He's now, and Richard, you'll have to correct me if I'm wrong about the pronunciation, Bar-Ilan University in Tel Aviv. That's right. But I'm not connected with him. I'm an independent scholar. Oh, you are? Okay. Yeah, I mean, I was a senior fellow at a center for media studies. How are you speaking to us today from Tel Aviv? No, I'm actually speaking from Brooklyn, New York. Oh, you are? Yes. Where is your primary residence? You go back and forth to Israel and United States? Jerusalem. Yeah. Most of the time I'm there. Well, you've been very eloquent about, you were the first person, I think, to really discuss the Palestinian genre of sort of stage films that emphasize or exaggerate atrocities. Do you have any general views about what the status of this, what's the world's status? Do you feel that people are starting to take a second look at this false charge of genocide, or is it still gaining momentum in your view? Look, again, it depends on who you read and what feed, what algorithm is supplying your feed. You know, if you read people like Andrew Fox, you know, it's all falling apart. Yeah. So for people who pay attention, it's falling apart. For people who don't, like, I don't know his name, but some guy who plays a rabbi in a Netflix series called "Nobody Wants This" has decided that Israel's committing genocide in Gaza, you know, you mentioned that I was one of the first people, in fact, I named the term "Palestine" in Hollywood, that was back in 2003, 2004, when it was already an industry, I mean, when Pierre Rehov first got into it, and he's one of the people who helped me understand, you know, he was going over to the West Bank and pretending to be a sympathetic reporter, and what he found was that most of the stuff that was coming out of there was stated material. It wasn't actual combat footage, it was staged. At this point, so at that point, you know, I said, when I realized that the Western journalists, rather than telling their Palestinian cameramen, "Don't do this, this is not journalism," they would just rummage through the footage they got, looking for the most believable site bites and sticking them together and producing, you know, various things, including the Muhammad al-Dawra, I call it the first postmodern blood libel. But what's happened now is that it's metastasized, in other words, then you had to be a cameraman with a Reuters camera or an AP camera or a France 2 camera, but now with the cell phones and stuff, everybody can do it. A, it floods social media, and B, and this is, I think, much more serious, it has more or less completely taken over the legacy media, the mainstream media, so that, for example, I was interviewing this woman who is Kurdish, Suzanne Kintas, and her interview is up at our site, and I said, "Look, you know, she worked for Al Jazeera and various Arab news media," and I said, "Well, you know, is there any sense that there's something wrong, or do they worry that they're going to get caught for staging, handing over stage stuff?" And she said, "No, initially they did, but now they just know that the Western media will take whatever they give them," and what's happened is worse than just taking over a sort of B-roll about. Palestinian injured in the streets. What it is now is it's systematic blood libels, like mass starvation, and you have people like Jeremy Diamond who, you know, I'm not going to, I don't think he hates Jews, but he just takes over this ludicrous material that's sent to him and edits it into a story that accuses Israel of mass starvation. "Many Americans are going to have a big wake-up call." "We have never seen net migration as high as it has been in the last few years." "This year there have been more people coming to the UK in small boats than ever before." "You did an extreme thing to the country." "Britain is facing a migrant crime epidemic." "We don't actually know where they're coming from, who they are, how old they are." "Why would you let in millions of people who are undead if not to change the country from within?" "There's no other word for it: demographic replacement." "England's a blueprint for America. It's coming. Yeah? It's just a blueprint." "Thousands of daily migrant crossings." "A political earthquake threatens to reshape America." "We are showing there is a new path for politics in our country." "Not all cultures are the same." "You cannot ban Sharia." "America is a nation of immigrants." "We are a nation of immigrants." "We are a nation of immigrants." "We are a nation of immigrants." The Immigration Crisis. Watch now on The Heritage Network. The Heritage Foundation's YouTube channel. "In explaining what attributes this phenomenon in what was until I think four or five years ago the most sober of the Western countries as far as Israel, and that was the United States, but what I was shocked by after the October 7th massacres and in that interregnum period of 21 days where the. the Israeli government said we will not invade if you turn over all 251 hostages and all the people responsible for this mass murder, there was a 21-day, but what I was shocked at was I walked across the Stanford campus. They were yelling from the river to the sea on October 8th, and so they were starting the blood libel before Israel even went in, and this was at a time when they would start rocketing. So, you know, one of the things to think about is, you know, what is going on with the U.S. military? You know, what is going on with the U.S. military? What is going on with the United States? Right. So this gets to the Red-Green Alliance, which on one level is totally absurd. The jihadis want everything that progressives don't want, and the progressives want everything except for the one thing. And this recalls Eric Hoffer's famous phrase, a mass movement does not need a God, but it does need a devil. And they share the devil of Israel and the United States, which is somewhat insane for the progressives, because it's in the United States that progressivism ever got anywhere. You know, most countries never got rid of slavery because it never occurred to them that slavery. Slavery was bad. And here the West gets, America gets rid of slavery, and it's still being accused at Durban in 2001. So on the one hand, you have this, and Wilf has a great term for it, what the post-colonial paradigm does is West-splain. It explains jihadi imperialism as an anti-imperialist movement fighting the indigenous people, fighting. So on the one hand, you have the progressives in the West who are engaged in a systematic falsification of the record in order to sustain this energizing alliance with the jihadis. And then on the other hand, you have the jihadis who are literally exploiting the West's unconscious. Hostility and resentment of Jews and of Israel in order to invade. So, you know, the sort of hostility to Jews is the soft underbelly whereby the jihadis are invading the West. And the West is, I don't know, you know, my instinct, but that's because I'm a pathetic intellectual, is to call it colossal stupidity. Mm-hmm. But. You know. Yeah. How can you be that stupid? I don't know. I noticed that where I am at the Stanford campus, I would say most people fit the definition of what you're talking about. And they have a little out now, I've noticed, that all of the sins of Israel have coalesced to the Netanyahu government. Right. So then they say, if we just get rid of him, then peace will return. But it has nothing to do with it. It transcends him, in my view, in fact. And I think that has to be clearer because I think it came in during the Biden administration that they felt that he was atypical of Israel. And when you look at the other candidates, they're not talking about it. None of them are talking about a two-state solution, or none of them are saying that they have to go back prior to October 7th mentalities. Because now. Right. In fact, yeah. Yeah. So I. What do you. But. Let me ask you another question. You were a very distinguished historian of the Middle Ages, medievalism, millennialism. Your father. I remember when I wrote Carnage and Culture, I found his Wealth and Poverty of Nations just a brilliant book. But both of you were mavericks. But what sort of made you pivot somewhat into this area from medieval studies as a more of an. I don't want to say active academic, but somebody who was. Right. Really devoting your scholarship to expose certain contemporary problems more than usual. Right. Well, one of the things. And I published a book in 2022, Can the Whole World Be Wrong? Yes. Lethal Journalism, Anti-Semitism, and Global Jihad. But the original title was They're So Smart Because We're So Stupid, A Medievalist Guide to the 21st Century. And the reason was that having studied the dynamics of shame. and shame on our cultures, which the Middle Ages was, and which the Arab world is, I was, to some extent, immune to what I call the liberal cognitive egocentrism of Westerners who are projecting their mentality onto the Muslims and the Arabs. So, for example, they were sure that Arafat would accept the positive sum negotiations of the Oslo peace process, whereas if you understand the dynamics of shame-honor, there's no way he could have accepted it, and he didn't. So that, on the one hand, and on the other hand, I. apocalypticism, messianism, and so on. And it was in the late 90s that I met David Cook, who teaches at Rice University now, and he explained to me how fundamental a kind of apocalyptic vision of the global caliphate, millennial vision, conquest of the entire world, the entire world becomes Dar al-Islam, was fueling a great deal of the hostility to Israel, the mobilization against Israel, particularly Hamas, which was a deeply apocalyptic cult, and the whole notion of suicide in Islam, the whole notion of suicide terrorism, and the whole notion of terror attacks, was apocalyptic in its conceptualization and inspiration. So, having both of these understandings from my work in medieval history, I had a view of what was happening in the 21st century that most people didn't. Most people couldn't believe. I remember talking with Dan Pipes at this one point, and he had just published a book called, published, I mean, he'd been publishing a series of articles about Islam comes to America, and he was saying to me that, you know, you just cannot convince Westerners that. It's almost as if you can't convince them they have enemies. They don't want to believe they have enemies. Yes. And so they ignore real enemies, and then adopt those real enemies' demonization, and adopt false enemies like Israel. I don't want to be biographical, but do you think the fact that your father was a very empirical Harvard historian, followed the evidence, wrote these wonderful books, Prometheus, Wealth and Poverty of Nations, that pretty much sealed the debate, I think, about the dynamism innately in Western culture, and yet he had a lot of criticism, which I think he refuted pretty successfully, but did that model of his career encourage you to. I mean, you weren't the son of a get-along academic and just. Right, right, right. No, I grew up believing that the whole point of academic excellence is to operate in a culture of dispute, where you get contradicted, and you deal with the contradictions, and you treat somebody who contradicted you as having shamed you, and therefore you have to take vengeance for his disagreement. So I grew up really enjoying disputes. I went to Princeton, there was the Davis Seminar, which was a notoriously disputatious place. And then after 2000, it's like this culture of consensus descended on academia. And you say, for you, David Landis defended his thesis. But in fact, I remember my daughter at one point at Connecticut College, or Trinity, they were doing a study of Jared Diamond, you know, his explanation. Guns, steel, germs and steel, right. I debated him two times, I mean, I debated him on NPR, in fact. Right. So my daughter went to the. Went to the professor and said, you know, my grandfather wrote Wealth and Poverty of Nations, he'd be happy to come and speak to us. And, you know, that was just unthinkable. So I think that although intellectually he won the argument, in terms of the pattern of thought in academia and the culture of consensus that descended, he was on the list of forbidden books. It's kind of funny because, you know, I've been at the Hoover Institution for 23 years, and it is part of Stanford, and we do have liberal elements within it. But when I talk to my colleagues, Neil Ferguson or Tom Sowell, I mean, it's not even. I mean, they just consider your father the foremost economic historian of the West. And it's an open and shut case, and there's no dispute. And they're not partisan when they make that statement. Right, right. Well, but in a sense, I mean, what's interesting about the difference between. Actually, I wrote a piece on this, the difference between Jared Diamond. Jared Diamond's argument, I call it therapeutic history. Yes. of saying look the west it was an accident the west happened to have the right uh environmental conditions in order to flourish and if the somebody the the the the inhabitants of papua papua new guinea had been living in europe they would have done it yes which is just an absurd or it is i can remember the debate very well when i had i said to him can you explain why there's no lights at night in north korea and south korea and he said well it's because of geography i said okay let's try another one how about the tijuana border with mexico and it's because of geography and then in his book he actually i thought it was quite racist he said that pacific islanders from his experience have a genetically superior sense of direction and they don't rely on compasses and maps and he almost it was really racist i had two really acrimonious i mean they were civil but that that book was i remember when bill clinton held it up and said this is the book to read and that kind of launched his career and he wrote another apocalyptic book about societies are going to collapse yeah and but he picked he all the examples were cherry picks so they were very hostile environments with very small you know montana you know i think something like that in the 19th century but it was uh it it was very different is what i'm trying to say from your father's work are you right and i was going to ask you too richard are you when you see uh israel and i i have gone there every other year for about 15 years but the the difference today is is striking when i look at a city like haifa and compare it to san francisco it's clean it's orderly it's safe the whole country seems to be booming i i remember i counted the on the horizon three years ago yeah yeah national bird yeah and then the desalinization plans the tin noble a lot of it i i i think as long as israel was attacked and small and struggled they felt kind of paternalistic well they're jews and they're you know that they're but when it gets proud and dynamic and strong and it's really the military and technological powerhouse of the whole middle east and that i think that caused a lot of envy and jealousy and it became more and more western in the eyes of anti-westerners well in this essay that i wrote about jared diamond in my father's book one of the things that i pointed out is that the most interesting case in the favor of my father's argument which is that development is a cultural issue and it depends on culture and it depends on culture and it depends on culture and it depends on cultural traits uh and non-environment and against jared diamond's case would be israel israel was bottom of the third world in 1900 and in a century it went to the top of the first world so you couldn't have a better example of a place that you know has barely any natural resources it's not brazil and yet was an extraordinary success and yet neither did jared diamond who understands it's a counter example to his thesis but my father didn't mention it either even though it was the perfect example and i think partly it was just because he didn't want to sound like some kind of jewish chauvinist saying look at israel how great it is but israel is really an extraordinary case and the fact that it's become the world villain really says terrible things about the world yeah i i had a big debate actually it was on piers morgan the other day with a professor from the uae and he kept telling me that christians had their christians and had no freedom in israel and i said they have complete freedom but they don't have freedom and where you're speaking from they're in enclaves and then piers morgan said and i said every other place has no freedom of speech and so piers interrupted and said well i'm a i'm a well-known uh broadcaster interviewer i go all over the middle east i'm treated just as if i was in the west i said that's because you have self-imposed limits your guest if you want to go to saudi arabia or you want to go to egypt or you want to go to any of the major arab countries try going to iran and have two types of guests on one a muslim apostate who says in your interview that he is going to declare himself a christian on the air and that would be fine if you had a jewish interviewer in israel that says i'm renouncing judaism i want to be a christian there would be no no consequences whatsoever right if you have that guest or another person let's say in the gulf states who say i am a strong critic of the royal family's corruption either one of those two guests one of two things would happen when you left the studio a mob would attack you or the government would put you in jail and you would be put in jail and you would be put in jail and you would be put in jail but that would not the same the same situation reversed in israel would never happen and don't you see that and he couldn't he couldn't answer it and yeah no i remember i remember after 2014 when when the intimidation of the press became absolutely clear i was in the office of the the chair of um uh media studies communications whatever it was at bu and there was a journalist who was in the office of the chair of media studies communications whatever it was at bu and there was a german photographer there and he said german photographer there and he said german photographer there and he said we're not intimidated in palestine they we're not intimidated in palestine they we're not intimidated in palestine they love us love us love us and i said yeah because you say what they and i said yeah because you say what they and i said yeah because you say what they want try saying stuff that hamas want try saying stuff that hamas want try saying stuff that hamas doesn't like and see how much they love doesn't like and see how much they love doesn't like and see how much they love you and again it gets back to this you and again it gets back to this you and again it gets back to this culture of dispute in which if you culture of dispute in which if you culture of dispute in which if you criticize hamas you're viewed as an criticize hamas you're viewed as an criticize hamas you're viewed as an enemy to be taken out and if you enemy to be taken out and if you enemy to be taken out and if you criticize israel criticize israel criticize israel you know what are they going to do they you know what are they going to do they you know what are they going to do they believe in freedom of the press believe in freedom of the press believe in freedom of the press the israelis are critical of israel so the israelis are critical of israel so the israelis are critical of israel so it really is too different and and the it really is too different and and the it really is too different and and the inability of people to see that is inability of people to see that is inability of people to see that is really quite remarkable it's very really quite remarkable it's very really quite remarkable it's very strange to hear strange to hear strange to hear not that we have sins of our fathers not that we have sins of our fathers not that we have sins of our fathers but to see the irish president but to see the irish president but to see the irish president a prime minister or the spanish prime a prime minister or the spanish prime a prime minister or the spanish prime minister and you and you think well minister and you and you think well minister and you and you think well wait a minute wait a minute wait a minute your country sent condolences to the your country sent condolences to the your country sent condolences to the german embassy in ireland when hitler german embassy in ireland when hitler german embassy in ireland when hitler died died died you were you were discussing allowing you were you were discussing allowing you were you were discussing allowing german u-boats to dock german u-boats to dock german u-boats to dock in irish ports until churchill warned in irish ports until churchill warned in irish ports until churchill warned you the consequences you the consequences you the consequences and the spaniards the only reason you and the spaniards the only reason you and the spaniards the only reason you didn't join hitler is because you didn't join hitler is because you didn't join hitler is because you wanted too much you wanted gibraltar and wanted too much you wanted gibraltar and wanted too much you wanted gibraltar and all of vichy north africa which he all of vichy north africa which he all of vichy north africa which he couldn't deliver otherwise you would couldn't deliver otherwise you would couldn't deliver otherwise you would have been happy to join the nazis have been happy to join the nazis have been happy to join the nazis and in this country and in this country and in this country i was thinking the other day mondami is i was thinking the other day mondami is i was thinking the other day mondami is always using this term always using this term always using this term settler colonialism but he came from the settler colonialism but he came from the settler colonialism but he came from the zero one percent zero one percent zero one percent of the indian community in uganda he's a of the indian community in uganda he's a of the indian community in uganda he's a dual citizen of uganda dual citizen of uganda dual citizen of uganda that controls 60 of the gdp and it was that controls 60 of the gdp and it was that controls 60 of the gdp and it was a british imperial project to a british imperial project to a british imperial project to facilitate that immigration to really facilitate that immigration to really facilitate that immigration to really control economically control economically control economically or politically the indigenous or politically the indigenous or politically the indigenous population of uganda so population of uganda so population of uganda so all of these when he makes these all of these when he makes these all of these when he makes these fantastic charges of settler fantastic charges of settler fantastic charges of settler colonialism if one wanted to be cruel colonialism if one wanted to be cruel colonialism if one wanted to be cruel and rude he said well you know and rude he said well you know and rude he said well you know you're a dual citizen of a dictatorship you're a dual citizen of a dictatorship you're a dual citizen of a dictatorship essentially essentially essentially you have a property in uganda you were you have a property in uganda you were you have a property in uganda you were married there married there married there do you ever see yourself in the way that do you ever see yourself in the way that do you ever see yourself in the way that you criticize israel as a settler you criticize israel as a settler you criticize israel as a settler colonial right colonial right colonial right and the same thing with ilian omar her and the same thing with ilian omar her and the same thing with ilian omar her father was a general in saeed barry's father was a general in saeed barry's father was a general in saeed barry's genocidal excuse me a colonel genocidal excuse me a colonel genocidal excuse me a colonel and his army that wiped out a whole and his army that wiped out a whole and his army that wiped out a whole tribe in tribe in tribe in somaliland 200 000 people somaliland 200 000 people somaliland 200 000 people and so i don't get this it's so strange and so i don't get this it's so strange and so i don't get this it's so strange that no one's self-reflective in europe that no one's self-reflective in europe that no one's self-reflective in europe or here or here or here but it's almost as if all of the sins but it's almost as if all of the sins but it's almost as if all of the sins they project they project they project that they're worried about or hassan that they're worried about or hassan that they're worried about or hassan piker it was piker it was piker it was kind of an anchor baby went right yeah kind of an anchor baby went right yeah kind of an anchor baby went right yeah he's a dual citizen of turkey he's a dual citizen of turkey he's a dual citizen of turkey and all he can do is call israel and all he can do is call is israel and all he can do is call is israel apartheid genocide settler colonial and apartheid genocide settler colonial and apartheid genocide settler colonial and i think i think i think the turkish government which your the turkish government which your the turkish government which your parents have prospered under in which parents have prospered under in which parents have prospered under in which you were grew up with you were grew up with you were grew up with has still occupying 40 of northern has still occupying 40 of northern has still occupying 40 of northern cyprus we have the armenian genocide of cyprus we have the armenian genocide of cyprus we have the armenian genocide of a million people right you destroy the a million people right you destroy the a million people right you destroy the city of smyrna on an incinerated fifth city of smyrna on an incinerated fifth city of smyrna on an incinerated fifth smyrna's 50,000 but smyrna's 50,000 but smyrna's 50,000 but the one-sidedness is so strange that the one-sidedness is so strange that there's never any self-reflection there's never any self-reflection there's never any self-reflection historically well yeah i mean historically well yeah i mean historically well yeah i mean i call it the great lethal projection i call it the great lethal projection i call it the great lethal projection which is hamas openly says it wants to which is hamas openly says it wants to which is hamas openly says it wants to commit genocide commit genocide commit genocide it openly did commit it openly did commit it openly did commit the way it behaved when in the 24 hours the way it behaved when in the 24 hours the way it behaved when in the 24 hours that it had a free hand that it had a free hand that it had a free hand was classic genocidal slaughter every was classic genocidal slaughter every was classic genocidal slaughter every civilian civilian you can get your hands on and yet you can get your hands on and yet you can get your hands on and yet the the west believes them when they the the west believes them when they the the west believes them when they accuse israel of committing genocide accuse israel of committing genocide accuse israel of committing genocide which is a really absurd charge so which is a really absurd charge so which is a really absurd charge so i think this the it's a it's a technique i think this the it's a it's a technique i think this the it's a it's a technique in fact i think ken marcus wrote a piece in fact i think ken marcus wrote a piece in fact i think ken marcus wrote a piece called mirror accusations called mirror accusations called mirror accusations which was true of the hutus in um which was true of the hutus in um Rwanda. Yes, they did the same thing. Right. So this is a this is a classic technique. And the fact that we're falling for it, the fact that people admire Mamdani and admire Hassan Piker and and and imbibe this these accusations and feel compelled to sort of virtue signal is really quite astonishing. We're going to take we're going to take a quick break. We're with the historian Richard Landis, and we're talking about the media's portrayal of the Mideast conflict and the propaganda that comes out of the West Bank and Gaza and fertilizes the United States and Europe. And we'll be right back. We're right back. Richard, Richard, maybe we have about 10 minutes left. What do you think? I think we're losing this battle because not only is the left. Yeah. But now we have outpost of Thomas Massey or Marjorie Taylor Greene or Tucker Carlson on the right. Right. What are you optimistic, pessimistic? How is it addressed other than just writing about talking about it, trying to I think that the administration, with some major exceptions, has been pretty good about it. Some people, Marco Rubio, it seems to be really strong about. Right. Marco Rubio has a moral compass. Yes. And Trump himself has been very pro-Israel compared to past presidents, I think. Right. But especially Rubio. Right. Rubio in particular. So one of the things that we've tried to do, I've gotten together with a number of people and we have inaugurated a thing called Infidel Awareness Month. And the idea is to open up a space one month every year to discuss. To discuss the jihad against the West and how it operates. And part of it is conceived on a large chronological chunk. In other words, by my reading, and this goes back to my work on millennialism, starting in 1400 of the Muslim calendar, which was 79, 1980, which is when Khomeini took over. Yes. When a Mahdi army took over the mosque, the Grand Mosque in Mecca, Boko Haram's origins in an earlier group, Maithat Sineh, also kicks off that year. So that was a year, and that's the year that the Muslim Brotherhood got together in Switzerland and put together a plan for taking over the West. So they've been fighting this war for 50 years. And it's 100 years war. By 1500, in their calendar, they expect to have the whole world subject to Islam, the global caliphate. And so what we're trying to say is, look, it's halftime. It's not over. It could be over if we continue. They won't even have to wait until the year 1500 to take over. But if we do fight it, it will last another 50 years. So we anticipate this. Over 50 years to 2076, which will also be the 300th anniversary of democracy. So the idea is, if we open this space to talk about stuff that literally we've been forbidden to talk about since 9-11, with accusations of Islamophobia, if we connect this violence to Islam, so nobody wants to talk about it. In fact, people that. I've been surprised. Some people that I expected would welcome joining us in this effort have been reluctant because they don't want to be accused of Islamophobia, which is. It's a paralytic. You can see it at work in England, in the rape jihad that's going on there and so on. You touched the explosive issue of immigration. I just noticed today there was an executive order coming out of the State Department that they are not going to be. They're going to be double-checking. They're reducing the refugee entrance quota from particular countries, but they were all places where there's radical Islam and they're. Sure, sure. And we do deal with that. We deal with all of the different techniques that are being used by what I call caliphators, people who are working for the global caliphate in our age, in our day. We deal with all of those. The month is defined between September 11th and October 7th, which are the two most massive jihadi attacks on democracies in the modern world. And in those days between September 11th and October 7th, we take up all the different topics that have to do with this, including. And we're going to hopefully have a map up, a global map of the. Victims of jihad since 9-11. It's just astounding. So there are two things that are astounding since 9-11. One is the number of jihadi attacks that have gone on, particularly. I mean, they've gone on all over the world. Nigeria is a terrible place for this. But also within Islam, they're killing each other. The vast majority of victims of jihadi terror in the 21st century are Muslim, by far. So we deal. Deal with all of that. And one of the things that we're trying to do is to say, look, we've lost the first half of this war because we didn't even show up on the field. I mean, you can score against Arsenal if they're not on the field. And we can fight. So I do think. I'm optimistic. I think that we can start talking back. Just to finish, are you surprised. Pleasantly so by anybody in, let's say, celebrities, sports figures, politicians, tech people, any of them that have been explicitly pro-Israel or have been at a cost, at possible cost to their business or career? Is there anybody that comes to mind? Right. Right. So I don't really follow that. Yeah. And I couldn't name you people, but there are some extraordinary ones. My favorite is John Cleese, who I had a ticket to go see and didn't come because of the war with Iran, but hopefully he will come later. John Voight has been very good. The American actor, John Voight. Yeah, well, Voight goes way back. Yeah. But it's just stunning how foolish the sort of public figures have been around this issue. And the French have a great word for it, c'est désolant. It's desolating, you know? In fact, I was talking yesterday with Benedict Beckheld, who's quite an interesting guy. And he said, right, he said something that I think should be the title of a book, which is the heartbreak of it all, you know? That the West is throwing away this unbelievable achievement to the worst people in the world. That people of compassion in the West are allowing the cruelest people on the planet to manipulate them with fake images of Palestinian suffering, and they ignore everything that's going on everywhere else. Yeah, I think Benedict coined the word occult. Like oikophobia, a hatred of your own. He didn't, actually. Roger Scruton. Oh, Roger Scruton. Roger Scruton coined it. But he wrote the definitive volume on this subject. Roger Scruton was another great luminary. But I know, I guess, part of it is I've always, the Judeo-Christian tradition, which I greatly admire and adhere to, has elements of self-criticism in it. Yeah, very strong. The classical, you know. When you see the Sicilian expedition, and you see the debates as recorded by Thucydides, or Aristophanic comedy, just, you know, libeling everybody in it. But, so we've always had that, and that's been our strength. But at the same time, that self-criticism at periods in our history does descend into nihilism. And that, I think it has something to do with affluence and leisure. Because when you combine consensual, consensual government with market capitalism, we do create such wealth and freedom that it's taken advantage of. And it seems that we didn't have this at the same level at certain periods in our own history. But I think when you're, we have such a standard of living, and life is so sweet in the West, that we lose sight of the elemental struggle to stay alive one more day. And so then we start to speculate and virtue signal. at the website, which is infidelawareness.com. We have a map of the month and a calendar, and you can click on the day. And September 12th, the day after September 11th, we dedicated to the reaction of the progressives to 9-11. I have an interview with Benedict for that day, and we go into the oikophobia, the literal loathing of your own culture that dominated. I mean, in Europe, I think it was also combined with envy of the United States and Israel. But in America, the academics were just really overwhelmingly oikophobic and cheered on 9-11. And, you know, at the time, most people didn't really understand it or notice it because the dominant voice was outrage and horror and shock and so on. But over the last 25 years, that oikophobic response that says, the way I put it is, when jihadis attack a democracy, blame the democracy. That oikophobic response has empowered a terrible enemy whom we refuse, to acknowledge or name. And that's what, and the purpose of Infidel Awareness Month is to say to people, look, you need to understand how they see you. You are an infidel. You are not innocent. You are deserving of death. Whether they kill you or not is another matter, but you deserve death. There is no innocent infidel. And until you know how your enemy sees you, you can't defeat him. I remember the secretary of the army, George Casey, after the Fort Hood massacre, with, I think his name was, Nadal Hassan. He was a major psychiatrist. Right. Psychiatrist. Yes. Everybody was unarmed. He walked in and murdered 13 people, and I think he wounded 19. Yeah. And everybody deplored it. But George Casey, the next day, said, well, we deplore this, but one of the things we really have to watch out for is we might lose our DEI outreach program. That was the first thing he said officially. The New Republic, before it went kind of hard left, it was at 9-11. It was interesting left. Yes. It had something called Idiot Watch. And I remember they had, you might want to go back to the issues, because in that column, every issue, they had Norman Mailer, Philip Roth. Either one of them said, I woke up and I walked across, I can't remember if it was Roth or Mailer, but he said, I walked across New York and I didn't see those two- Right. ugly buck teeth sticking up into the sky anymore. And I remember that quote. And there was a lot of them in there at that time. I have in the book, Can the Whole World Be Wrong? At the end of each chapter, I have what I call astoundingly stupid statements. And there are lots of them. And the joke was, I remember after the Fort Hood thing, the study, that the State, the Department of Defense did, the only time it mentioned radical Islam was in a footnote when it cited an article, but it would not use the word radical Islam. I remember that. Right. And people like my classmate at Harvard, Frank Rich wrote a piece about how it was pre-post-traumatic syndrome. He was about to be deployed and therefore he got upset. Anything, but say, look, this is the ideology that's targeting you. And if you don't understand the ideology, you can't possibly fight against it. Especially in the West, when someone comes from, who's an Islamist, comes to the West and they see the affluence and the freedom and the security, they say, why don't I have it back where I am? And then they, that's their first impulse. Their second is they get ashamed of, their own appetites that grow. And you remember the 9/11, some of them were indulging themselves the night before in Las Vegas with porn and alcohol. And then that, the third stage is they get a self-hatred and anger at, and they try to explain it. Well, you're wealthy and powerful, and you've addicted me to these sick appetites because you did this to us, or we would be wealthy, and powerful, but you did this. And it's always, colonialism or Israel or something. And it gets very boring. Well, we're out of time, Richard, but it's been a pleasure to talk to you. All right. I was going to compare them to the Germanic tribes invading the Roman empire, which is, the Germanic tribes didn't intend to destroy the Roman empire. They just saw it as booty. Yeah. They were going to take over and enjoy. They had no idea how it was run. They had no idea what it meant to sustain a society, a civil society, and they just plundered it. And I think a lot of these people come, some of them are actually driven, many are driven by the ideology, but others just come in and say, "Hey, this place is open to us and we're going to plunder it." And they think- I think that's a really poor, I think they in- They interpret, I know that Ilhan Omar or Hasan Piker or El Saeed or Mandami, they interpret Western magnanimity not to be reciprocated and kind, but as proof of weakness and indecision and lack of confidence in your culture. And therefore, they don't respect you. Right. They have sheer contempt for us. And to be honest, to be honest, they're right. They're right about it. We are behaving contemptuously. Especially in Europe. Well, Richard, this has been fascinating. I hope you come on soon and I'll try to keep up. All right. I look forward. Yeah. One last plug. Where can people find out about you again? Right. So again, infidelawareness.com. Okay. Infidelawareness, it's got Delaware in it. Infidelawareness.com. And come, there are months, the month- There are months. The month of October 8th. We're approaching the end. We're going to stop on October 7th, but we'll have one more day, October 8th. Peter Beinart, not Peter Beinart, I'm sorry. Bret Stephens coined the term October 8th Jews. And we're talking about October 8th humanity. Well, that's good. That's great. And behind all the screaming and yelling that you saw on campus, there were a lot of people who didn't know how to articulate that. They didn't know how to articulate what they were feeling, but who looked at what happened and thought, "This is madness." And we want to welcome them to our site. Well, that's great. Well, it's been a pleasure talking to you and take care. All right. Thank you. Thank you for this chance. Thank you for tuning in to The Daily Signal. Please like, share, and subscribe to be notified for more content like this. You can also check out my own website, at victorhansen.com, and subscribe for exclusive features in addition.