Arutz Sheva Conference: Experts warn antisemitism has become socially acceptable

[00:00:00]Thank you so much everyone for being here. My name is Catherine Perez Shagdam. I'm the chief policy advisor of Stop the Hate UK with the lovely Itay who's right there behind you guys who's going to be coming and is going to is going to talk to us later.

[00:00:16]I'm surrounded by two giants here, very happy. David Collier, I don't think he needs introducing.

[00:00:23]He's an investing investigative journalist, has done amazing work, continues to do so.

[00:00:29]>> [snorts] >> And we have the fantastic Aurel Tevelem who is a historian who's also a great advocate of Israel and works in advocacy as well as political analyst first class I would say who works with the foreign for foreign relation. Aurel, thank you for being here. I'm going to start with you.

[00:00:50]So, first question has anti-Semitism become the world's most socially acceptable conspiracy theory?

[00:01:00]>> Yes.

[00:01:01]>> Is that the short version?

[00:01:02]>> I I think yes. I mean, when you when you look at what qualifies anti-Semitism, just this completely radical reinterpretation of what a Jew is and then you project that onto actual Jewish communities and Jewish individuals, what you're doing is you're reducing the Jew to this sort of non-human vessel where it's it's the only thing that exists about the Jew is his capacity for conspiratorial thinking and action. A lot of this we find even earlier than Nazi racial science, but much of it is based on that. There was a an interesting book by Hans Günther who was a eugenicist in Germany.

[00:01:43]And in 1930, he wrote a book called Rassenkunde des jüdischen Volkes which is an ethnology of the Jewish people.

[00:01:50]And one thing that he found or that he concluded was that the Jews were part of an oriental race that that its sole remnants really were chiefly the Jews living in Europe and that they above all possessed a a um quality of of ambush and deception that could make them very very fierce adversaries and we then find these traces in Hitler's speeches decrying Jews as escaped Orientals for example but most people don't know about those but a a lot of the the anti-Semitism that we find happens to be conspiratorial and it is socially acceptable and right now the way in which it has been rendered socially acceptable is through the forum of Israel.

[00:02:40]>> I see. So in your mind because I want I'd like to ask questions about so fun solutions to the problems that we face.

[00:02:48]What would you do if you could do anything? How would you maybe not solve the problem entirely but bring the beginning of a solution because I think we a bit late to the party unfortunately. Things have gone worse and it's getting worse and worse every day.

[00:03:06]What do we do to turn the tide if we can?

[00:03:10]>> Well you kind of understand when looking at anti-Semitic thinking that the anti-Semite needs the Jew. Uh the the anti-Semite dreams about the Jew. The anti-Semite dreams about what the Jew is and is not about what the Jew is doing and not doing and how the Jew is infecting society and um uh what you end up with is a is a whole host of people who have nothing better than to do than to think about Jews. So I think if we're going to really start with somewhere it's give the anti-Semite something to do that doesn't allow them to think so much and project so much onto Jews.

[00:03:43]Keeping people busy is probably the probably the best way to stop them from being hateful.

[00:03:50]>> Fair enough.

[00:03:51]David I do I mean look, first of all, I'm so pleased to be here with you today. I think you're one of the most incredible people. Not generally.

[00:04:00]If you're not following him, please do because his work is unparalleled.

[00:04:06]I want to ask you a question that quite often doesn't It's just not been asked. Do you think cuz we talk about anti-semitism all day, every day, anti-Zionism as well cuz it's the new thing?

[00:04:18]Do you think that rather than talk about anti-semitism and giving it air because to some extent we do, should we concentrate a bit more on promoting Jewish pride and Jewish identity and telling the world who we are beyond the conspiracy cuz I know they love those?

[00:04:36]>> Well, I'm I'm a bit of a pessimist.

[00:04:40]Mainly because I'm up front, up close, and I see what it is that we're facing.

[00:04:44]I Look, I get I get the idea of looking at the positive message in and I get the idea that we need to separate the two things. On the one hand, we need to have our own existence, our own life.

[00:04:56]We need to take pride in our life and to be take pride in who I who we are. So, I'm absolutely on board. Yes.

[00:05:03]But on the other side, I think we also need to identify properly the enemy that we're facing.

[00:05:08]>> Yes.

[00:05:09]>> Right? We need to turn it We we have to stop playing nice because for the last few decades, both our government and our own community leadership have been playing a game that that has just left us in a situation where we're continually sinking.

[00:05:25]Where the people that we we know what is going on. We can see what is going on.

[00:05:31]The people that have been stabbing and murdering the Jews and setting fire to the Jews are not Tom and Bill and Harry.

[00:05:38]We know what we are up against.

[00:05:41]So, I think we do need to to act in in parallel. On the one hand, yes, absolutely. We need to stand there and and enjoy our own lives and our own existence and not let them define who we are.

[00:05:53]>> Mhm.

[00:05:54]>> But on the other, we also need to face up to the realities of the enemy that we are facing. And we need to to basically tell the truth to ourselves about what it is we're up against.

[00:06:04]>> I agree with that one. Speaking of the enemy, do you think that we understand who the enemy is? Because it looks to me that we have many, but um a lot of them are, I would say, engineered by one entity. And I mean, I would say two that joined at the hips, Muslim Brotherhoods, ISIS. Let's call it what they are.

[00:06:26]Do you think that we have a good read on, first of all, the agenda, and second of all, the ability they have to co-opt institutions into doing their bidding against us?

[00:06:37]>> No, I don't think we've got a grip on it at all. I I think our our government is still naive. I think it it it it will get into bed with money wherever and whenever it can. I think whilst, for example, if we're talking about Iran, there is widespread recognition that Iran is the evil state. And you know, I'm not saying that they they act against it properly. They didn't even prescribe, you know, who they should have prescribed by now.

[00:07:01]>> on that one.

[00:07:02]>> Well, exactly. And but then again, this is this is a good example. We talk about prescription, all right? We talk about Oh, just prescribe them, prescribe them.

[00:07:10]They prescribed Hamas. They prescribed Hezbollah. And they did nothing. We still have the leaders of Hamas sitting inside London playing around. So, what point is it it it's like prescription is the box they want to tick. When in reality, it should be the starting point for the action that we need to take against these groups.

[00:07:29]So, yes, and I forgot your question.

[00:07:33]>> I'm sorry?

[00:07:33]>> I forgot your question.

[00:07:35]>> No, I was asking you if you think we have a good read on who the enemy is.

[00:07:38]>> And again, you know, if our universe Just a quick point, I cuz I spend a lot of my time playing around in the enemy camp, playing around as one of them, putting on a kaffiyeh, turning up at their little events, and so on.

[00:07:52]There is, for example, um I don't know how many of you something called the Qatar Foundation.

[00:07:58]Right? For those that don't know, that is a sign of how bad and how deep the trouble is.

[00:08:03]Because what they do is they fund everything.

[00:08:07]We have um Arabic school programs. If you are a teacher in a school anywhere, you can apply for the Qatar Foundation for funding so that they will introduce Arabic into your school. And the Qatar Foundation will pay for an Arabic teacher inside your school.

[00:08:26]And it's going on around our country, and nobody ever talks about it because at the end of the day, this is money coming into the country. So, we have schools becoming dependent on Qatari funding. They've got teachers who are employed by the Qatar Foundation, and our government are not doing anything about it because and this is going on at school, it's going on in universities, it's going on everywhere.

[00:08:49]So, are we aware of No, we're not.

[00:08:51]>> Well, that's a problem. I want to speak more to you, Hal, about the universities because you've had firsthand experience.

[00:08:57]And this gentleman is a fighter because he's um You've done a few things at King's.

[00:09:03]>> Oh, indeed.

[00:09:04]>> [laughter] >> Can you I mean, one of those things I remember him calling me, telling me that he was being chased by ISIS agents, and I was like, "It's another Monday for you."

[00:09:14]And I'm not too far off from the truth.

[00:09:16]So, can you tell me about number one, your personal experience there cuz I think it matters in discussing anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism.

[00:09:25]And what I mean, again, we're going to talk about solutions cuz we have to.

[00:09:31]Where do we start because I feel that we're going backwards. I mean, 2 years ago we were having those conversation and nights today are we any closer to solution? I don't think we are and I'm a bit of a pessimist. I have to say I'm on this one I'm with you. However, we are joyful people so I want to I want to [clears throat] look for the silver linings. So can you can you tell me what you think?

[00:09:53]>> Okay. Well, for those of you don't know I attended King's College London between 2022 and 2025 and I was the president of the Israel Society just before October 7th happened and then I stayed on as president of that society until mid-2024.

[00:10:13]But a lot of the issues that I had to deal with were were just horrendous examples of anti-Semitism even at a faculty level. There was one incident I believe in November of 2023 where someone came up to me and said actually that in their war studies department one academic whom I I won't name but who was a known as the Hamas expert for King's College London had never been to Israel, Judea, Samaria, or Gaza by the way. Said in a lecture that Hamas do not kill Jews but only Zionists.

[00:10:47]Um then in my own seminars I had academics who were handing out material that was extremely pro-Hamas in my own seminars I had students threatening me. I had students telling me that it is a Jewish belief that the Al-Aqsa mosque will one day explode and and just surreptitiously be replaced by the third temple. I had just faculty coming up to me telling me that that my beliefs in in the right of Israelis not to be killed but simply stupendous and ludicrous and I also had one meeting I recall with a uh senior member of my department, in fact the most senior, um after having been threatened by yet another student, um and he told me I remember this cuz I was I was uh so shocked. He told me, "You know, I wouldn't mind having Muslim Brotherhood events on campus the same way you have Israel events."

[00:11:51]To which I I said, "You do understand that the Muslim Brotherhood has a track record of killing Jews, Muslims, and Christians alike, and it does not discriminate."

[00:12:00]Uh and to which he said, "That's your opinion." Um you know, the there is a an incredible tolerance for intolerance in our institutions, and unfortunately, the more an institution gets captured by hostile foreign interests, especially financial ones like those of the glorious state of Qatar, um the more they are going to tolerate more of this behavior because they are financially incentivized to do so. Uh a lot of people might not know this. The Middle East Forum came out with a report um a few months ago on the fact that Northwestern University in the US, which maintains a satellite campus in Doha, effectively had in its contractual obligations towards the state of Qatar a uh clause stating that all members of the Northwestern University uh staff, student body, and faculty, regardless of whether they were based in Qatar or elsewhere, were essentially prohibited from criticizing Qatar in any of their academic writings or their public statements. Now, there is another university in London that maintains a satellite campus in Doha, King's College London, and I don't imagine that the contractual obligations are any different materially speaking uh than uh than those of Northwestern. So, we are dealing unfortunately with institutions that are absolutely captured. Um Charles Asher Small at ISGAP has done some incredible work exposing uh the network of financing uh that goes on in US universities. I think they found um uh some tens of billions unaccounted for in Ivy Leagues. And there was a uh a uh congressional body that was investigating this during the first Trump administration.

[00:13:34]It was paused during the Biden administration. I think they're reopening it now.

[00:13:38]But we have seen nothing comparable in in the UK scene. I think it's time that we ordered these universities to find out exactly what's going on.

[00:13:47]>> I need to call in Elon Musk for that one.

[00:13:49]>> Yeah.

[00:13:50]>> David I I want to talk about anti-Zionism because we talk about it as some kind of a I mean political theory. I don't like to to call it that because it's not. It's just it's slightly ridiculous. But they are treating it as such. And I feel that now it has moved onto the culture where people create an identity around anti-Zionism. And anything that would upset their understanding of the issue or what they perceive it to be it feels like an insult to their own identity. And I feel that we stuck in it's like a non-conversation in the sense that how do we move forward with people who have tied you know, this belief system of anti-Zionism with their own identity.

[00:14:35]How do we break the ego and tell them to just shush?

[00:14:39]>> Okay. I mean firstly, in some way we've allowed the language itself to be captured which has half created the problem. The word anti-Zionism in itself is an issue.

[00:14:50]Zionism, you know, the the the belief in that the the Jews have the right to set the Jews have the right to self-determination in their historical homeland. Israel was created in 1948.

[00:15:02]Israel therefore exists. Now, as far as the Zionist is concerned, it's not complete. We still have Jews who want to go. We still have But anti-Zionism basically became almost a redundant term in 1948.

[00:15:17]There was a huge difference between arguing about planting a seed and uprooting a tree. There's a difference between discussions over pregnancy and abortion and talking about the life of a child.

[00:15:30]And we have allowed these people to name or title themselves based on an historical argument that effectively was an internal Jewish discussion that ended in 1948.

[00:15:43]There is no anti-Zionism anymore in the sense of the way that it used to exist.

[00:15:48]And we have allowed these people who who are not anti-Zionists. That's not what they're opposing. They're not opposing Zionism.

[00:15:56]They're trying to uproot the state of Israel, to wipe it out, and to get rid of the Jews that live there. That's nothing to do. It's It's It's something completely different. So, in some ways we have allowed them to occupy this semi-moral space by by misnaming the terms of what they are. And I think we should fight back on those kind of grounds because I think there is areas that we can we can move. There's no way at the end of the day that these left-wing progressives, which is what they think they are, if you take anti-Zionism away from them, what they are doing is they are marching through streets carrying a national flag that pushes a violent Islamic replacement ideology on the only Jewish state in the world.

[00:16:47]And that is It's hardly a left-wing progressive thing to do.

[00:16:50]>> I know, I agree with you. Well, actually, this is It's going to be my last question to you two, gentlemen.

[00:16:55]>> [snorts] >> Because we're talking about leftist values. And I mean, some of them are fantastic. I don't associate with the left anymore. Haven't done since I was 18 years old.

[00:17:05]Um and I think that someone smart said that when once you start owning something that you cannot um But what do we do? How do we move forward to make the left understand, and actually everyone for that matter in the UK, that associating and aligning yourself with the like of the Islamic Republic Islamists in general is a bad idea.

[00:17:26]Whether you do or not, is is it be it's beyond me that today still we're having an argument about is it a good idea to befriend the likes of Al-Qaeda or the Taliban. The answer should be no every day.

[00:17:38]I mean, as Jews we know it, but they should know it too because, I mean, war on terror don't think it has ended. Um so, your take on this, gentlemen. We'll start with you, Alan.

[00:17:49]>> Well, it depends on who you're trying to protect.

[00:17:52]You know, if if you're trying to protect Jewish students, fine. If you're trying to protect Jews in general, fine. If you're trying to protect Western civilization, we're talking about a whole different thing here. Um part of it um has to do with the fact that over the course of some 50-odd years um we've allowed our institutions to be captured by uh an ideology known as third-worldism.

[00:18:15]The belief that people who lay outside the West and particularly in uh areas known now as the global south, back then as the third world, are completely morally incapable of making their own decisions. And so, if they choose to be violent and uh use violent means to achieve a supposedly non-violent ends, then we should support them no matter who they are, no matter what they do, no matter what they believe in. It's precisely what animates the sort of gays for Palestine movement, uh which is one of the most suicidally empathetic movements possibly in the history of the 21st century. And um these lies are not new, but there's a lot of myth-making and myth-building that's going on that has been going on for a very long time. There are lies that constantly crop up about about Israel uh that actually have been laying dormant in our institutions for a very long time. For example, the lie that Gaza is a concentration camp, right? If you look at uh a book written by Michael R. Fishback, who was absolutely no friend of the Jews. Uh it's called Black Power in Palestine.

[00:19:17]Uh he tells on quite early in the book of the Black Power movement in 1968 going around handing pamphlets to individuals in the US, especially on campuses, comparing images of Gaza, Palestine to Dachau, the Nazi concentration camp. So, these lies have been extremely suffused into the academic framework, and I think it's it's only really with with auditing, with dissolution of bodies that simply don't work, with a complete reorganization of the teachers unions especially at a primary and secondary level that we're going to create any long-term impact. The number one way in which I would invest into into any kind of change is through education because right now this particular generation is not doing so well.

[00:20:08]>> David.

[00:20:09]>> Okay. For for this question, I actually think that we should look at wider society as a whole.

[00:20:16]I think, and I say this every time I speak, that we are probably about a generation away from understanding how much damage social media has done to our society. It is tearing us apart from within. I spend a lot of my time in the other I don't think people understand how quickly it radicalizes people. Social media for for provides people with a self-radicalization tool, and you can see them. You follow them, and you can see this descent of from normalcy. People that would not entertain conspiracy theories slowly cutting themselves off from normal society, blocking anything they disagree with. Their Overton window getting narrower and narrower and narrower until the point where anything outside of this tiny little echo chamber they're in is seen as extremism. It's how people like and I'm saying today Heidi who is an activist, she was called a far right extremist by the Canary. I mean this is a girl of the left and you know I have major disagreements with her because we sit on opposite sides of the political spectrum and she's being called a far right extremist. This is what social media is doing and that's not a Jewish problem. It's a societal problem and I think that we have to understand that some of the battles that we face are wider societal battles and we have allies and with that there are things that can be done at a national level that should be done that would help not just us but everybody in our community.

[00:21:47]>> David, thank you. Aurelie, thank you.