 Welcome back to Think Tech. I'm Jay Fiedel. This is Bigotry in America and much more. And we're going to try to understand anti-Semitism in U.S. schools with an old friend of ours, Max Asimov from LA, who is with Stand With Us. You should remember that name, Stand With Us, a very important organization. Welcome to the show, Max. Thanks so much for having me. So just reviewing the history of the last month or so, we're at what day, 39 in the war. And on October 7th, there was a massacre of the worst sort. And we could discuss some of the horrific things that Hamas did, Hamas and also Islamic Jihad did to the Israelis and anyone with them or near them. But what happened after that was we were, I think, all in shock in some ways, because there was not a lot of protesting going on either against the massacre or involving the hostages. And people were just too much in shock. So you didn't see a lot of people out there in the street in an organized protest. But soon thereafter, we started seeing protests, not only in the Middle East, in Arab countries and the like, but in the U.S. And all of a sudden it became clear that there was a very substantial, I mean by hundreds of thousands of people in schools and in cities who sided with the Palestinian movement and Hamas and Hezbollah for that matter. And they were on the streets and they were ripping the posters of the hostages off the telephone poles and it was extraordinary. It was a revelation to find that so many people didn't really care much that the massacre had taken place, didn't care much about the hostages. In fact, they are deniers a lot of them of the fact that hostages were taken. I suppose there was some that denied the massacre took place and instead they're out there in streets supporting the Palestinians and Hamas and Hezbollah. And they're in the schools and we saw this in every major's college campus. We saw letters and we saw criticism of the administration. We saw job offerors with drawing job offers to students who had identified themselves as protesting against the Israelis. So we're in a kind of chaos, Max. You must be following this every day and I wonder if I could take your temperature about what is happening here and what I found when we talked a few days ago is that you're not only covering college campuses and university campuses, you're covering high schools and even grade schools to see what the story is about anti-Semitism and protests on these issues. Can you tell me the state of affairs? Sure. You know, it's a very, very difficult time. For people in the Jewish community and people who care about the Jewish community, you know, the last over a month. I think you mentioned that you didn't see a lot of protests initially. I think people were gathering but people were gathering to mourn. People were gathering to mourn the single deadliest day for Jewish people since the Holocaust happened. I think, you know, gathering to mourn at this point, I can't call it something completely shocking or surprising because if you've been following these issues, I mean, Hamas is a terrorist organization dedicated to the destruction of Israel and they express genocidal intentions about murdering Jews in Israel and around the world. This is far from the first time they've massacred innocent people. It's by far the largest single massacre they've ever been able to pull off. And so it's not entirely surprising for all of us to see something like this happen but certainly the scale of it is horrific. And so I think a lot of people gathered to mourn rather than to protest. We did just see, in fact, yesterday nearly 300,000 people, Jews and allies, gather in the Capitol in Washington, D.C. to protest against the massacre and the taking of so many hostages who are men, women, children, the elderly Holocaust survivors, babies, pregnant women who apparently have given birth in captivity in Gaza. So people are protesting to free them. People are protesting really against this massive wave of hate that has taken place as a result of the massacre and all the misinformation and propaganda that we've seen spreading on social media. It's unfortunately in traditional mainstream media and pushed by a lot of extremist organizations and forces that have been getting organized for a moment like this for a very, very long time, for decades, in fact, in some cases. You know, it's disheartening to see but at least for someone like me who has been watching this issue for a long time and working on it, it's not shocking. It's just very disappointing. The other side of the coin here, I think, is that, you know, we've seen a lot of amazing people, amazing people in the Jewish community, outside the Jewish community, step up and take a leadership role and speak out for what's right. And both in terms of making sure that terrorists from like Hamas and Islamic jihad can never commit such atrocities ever again, by the way, not just to innocent Israeli civilians but also all the innocent Palestinian civilians who have suffered under Hamas' rule in Gaza for such a long time and are also suffering immensely from this war that Hamas started that was entirely unnecessary, entirely unnecessary as have, frankly, every single war between Israel and Hamas since 2008, 2009 could have been averted had Hamas just decided to change from a terrorist organization into a legitimate government that would negotiate peace on any reasonable basis which they refuse to do. Yeah, you know, I think a lot of people have actually stepped up and been on the right side of this issue but there is a very, very loud and extremist minority in higher education. Unfortunately, sometimes also as you mentioned in K through 12 schools and in some parts of the media that is, you know, I think they've been louder and more influential than their actual numbers would justify is the reality. I look at the media because I think the media like social media has an effect on people in many ways, maybe it has a greater effect because more people are gonna listen to the conventional media and cable news and the like. And I have noticed that there's this kind of twisted liberal approach where they, including channels that you would watch, commentators and broadcasters that you would ordinarily watch. And, you know, they've been covering the Ukraine war they've been covering politics in Washington and, you know, there was a certain amount of credibility but they, a number of them have lost credibility with me because they always start with Israel's, you know, genocidal intentions against the Palestinians, which is a lie. And that's where the raw meat news is and that's where, you know, I've been very disappointed with some of these cable, I mean, large cable networks. It's interesting too that, and this is really remarkable that Fox News, which I, you know, in the past I have refused to watch even for a moment, Fox News is giving better coverage than MSNBC and CNN and to some extent BBC because of that phenomenon of going for the raw news and, you know, doing the knee jerk attack on Israel. And this, I think exacerbates the problem. And the problem, of course, is what are these kids on these campuses thinking? What are they doing? Why are they out there? Are they informed? What is motivating them to get together by the tens of thousands, write letters and make protests and in fact reject any argument by Israeli or Jewish organizations like Tony before the show about a specific incident of which I am familiar, with which I am familiar where BDS, and I wanna ask you about how BDS is doing these days, BDS refused to let Hillel participate in a college campus conversation about this sort of thing. So it's not like a fair educational experience. It's not like academic freedom at all. It's something else. My question to you is, you know, what's the strange process that leads our students in so many national schools to behave like this? Is this something that came from BDS? Is this a morphing of BDS into something else? Is BDS part of it? Is it a leader in this? How are these kids getting so motivated? Yeah, so first, you know, BDS, the Boycott Divestment Instinctions Movement against Israel. A lot of people, I mean, BDS itself will kind of market itself as a human rights movement and an effort to pressure Israel regarding its policies in the West Bank and Gaza. The reality of the situation is, and you know, you can read statements from the leaders of the BDS movement in other contexts, or you know, even their stated goals. It's not about changing Israeli policy. It's not about Palestinian human rights in general. It's about eliminating Israel, making Israel no longer exist. And in fact, in the immediate aftermath of the Hamas massacre in southern Israel, the BDS movement released an official statement explicitly supporting Hamas, explicitly supporting their quote unquote armed resistance. So I think it's very important to understand what BDS actually stands for because they're often not very honest about it when they're speaking to university audiences or other audiences across the United States. So yes, BDS is part of this picture. I think it's one part of it. The bigger picture here is that, particularly in humanities departments, we're talking about anthropology, sociology, ethnic studies, history, any one of these kind of humanities departments, there's at this point been a fairly longstanding bias against Israel and sometimes also in some ways against the Jewish community. It's not the same in every single university department. I just saw recently a graphic showing basically how many professors from different types of departments had signed letters, either condemning Hamas or one-sided condemnations of Israel. And if you looked at the humanities departments, it was overwhelmingly biased against Israel if you looked at the rest of the departments you see, business, STEM, what have you, then you have a much more, I think, level-headed view of the situation than these one-sided statements. So why is it in these humanities departments that we have this bias? So the big picture reason is a matter of ideology and narrative, right? So there's sort of a broad, I think, intellectual stream of thought that focuses on anti-colonialism that frames basically most, if not all of the world's problems as a result of specifically European colonialism and looks at basically relationships between different groups of people as if you are the stronger party, then you are pretty much automatically the oppressor. And if you're the weaker party, you're automatically the oppressed. And it's basically a black and white picture of who's right in the scenario and who's wrong. Now, the reality is, I mean, colonialism was horrific for many, many people. I'm sure that living in Hawaii, you've seen people watching this have seen some of the negative impacts of colonialism in one way or another. So that's a legitimate academic conversation that we should have. The problem is applying these types of concepts to a conflict in the Middle East between Israelis and Palestinians where they actually make no sense. I mean, yes, there's British colonialism in the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Other forms of colonialism, like, for example, the Ottoman Empire or even before that, various Arab and Islamic empires that conquered that land. But Jews, I mean, for Jews, Israel is a homeland of the Jewish people. It's been the homeland of the Jewish people for over 3,000 years. Jews who came back to their homeland in the 1800s and 1900s from Europe and later from across the Middle East and other parts of the world, they weren't coming as representatives of some foreign colonial power. They were coming as people who had been oppressed as a minority for hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years in those societies. And we're saying, basically, enough is enough. We're not going to be an oppressed minority anymore. We're gonna go back to our homeland and be free once again and have the right to self-determination once again. So basically, these broad concepts, these broad streams of intellectual thought get applied in completely inaccurate ways to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And so people decide that the Israelis are quote-unquote colonizers and the Palestinians are their indigenous victims. And so any violence that happens against Palestinian, sorry, against Israeli civilians by terrorist groups like Hamas is justified in the name of decolonization. And this is how basically you get very, very highly educated people to go out onto the streets or onto social media and justify just the brutal slaughter, sexual assault, torture, maiming of innocent people who happen to be of the wrong ethnicity and religion. That's a sliver of it, but that's, I think, a big part of the problem. Do you think that the people who protest in favor of Hamas on these campuses know what happened in the massacre? Do you think they know what's going on with BDS and the way BDS is organized and its mission? And for that matter, the way these terror organizations are organized, then do they know or are they simply ignorant? And it seems all these humanities departments and these schools would be sensitive on a historical basis to all this, but are they teaching this or are they rather teaching hate? It's impossible to generalize. Maybe there are some people who know exactly what happened and still think it's justified. I mean, we saw a clip of a professor from Cornell saying that it was quote, exhilarating to watch the massacre unfold on October 7th. So, and to what extent people like that have saw the actual atrocities and were still willing to celebrate or justify them. I'm sure there are some people in that category. I think there's other people who basically have internalized so much bias against Israelis, in some cases against Jews, that they will just refuse to believe anything that frames basically anything that frames innocent Israeli civilians as being subject to any kind of unjustified attack or in this case, a brutal massacre. I think the other piece of the puzzle here is that, it seems like some folks in these humanities departments and elsewhere, those that they influence the media and on social media find it very difficult to walk and shoot gun at the same time. So, we can all, if we wanna acknowledge reality, we have to recognize, yes, Palestinians and Palestinian political factions and terrorist groups and what have you, they're much weaker in various ways than the people of Israel and the state of Israel is correct, that there is a power differential between the two. And also at the same time, you could have the governments in Gaza and in the West Bank, the Palestinian Authority make terrible decisions that are very harmful for both Palestinians, their own people and Israelis and that they should be held accountable for those decisions and for how they use what power they do have. So, it's disappointing and disheartening, but I think those of us who are kind of, in the middle and trying to help in some way need to be able to, like I said, walk and shoot gun at the same time. Everyone in a leadership position and a position of power involved in this conflict should be held accountable for the decisions that they make, whether they're Israeli, whether they're Palestinian, whether they're from the international community and having some kind of influence. And I think this black and white view of the world is a big part of the problem. So, what should a good university do when it sees this happen? What should a good university president do? David Lassner is the president and he's Jewish of University of Hawaii and he's organized some kind of event where he finally is gonna speak about this. What should he say? What should he do? What standards should he adopt or not in order to make this more rational and sound more like academic freedom that takes into account all arguments and all sides. Well, I think number one, just starting from a baseline of recognizing the humanity of Israelis, recognizing the humanity of Palestinians, recognizing the immense suffering that is happening right now without moral equivocations or moral equivalencies that paper over the fact that this was a completely unnecessary war launched with a brutal terrorist massacre by Hamas and other terrorist groups in Gaza against Israeli civilians. You know, I think that's a starting point. I think also clear condemnations, I'm not aware of specific anti-Semitic incidents that have may have happened at University of Hawaii. I'm aware of many, many incidents that have happened at many other universities and communities across the country. I think, you know, unfortunately also, so Jews are targeted with more religious-based hate crimes than any other group. They have been well before this war happened, but it's even worse right now. There have also been anti-Muslim hate crimes, which are horrific and should be part of the conversation as well. So I think that's kind of the second part of it is clear condemnations of any incidents of hate, whether it's against the Jewish community, against Israeli Americans, against Palestinian, Muslim, and Arab Americans. I think those are all baseline messages that need to be sent. And from there, I think it's really about moral leadership and intellectual leadership and calling on the entire university community to have a more honest, fact-based, and constructive conversation about this issue instead of one that only fuels more divisions and hatred and conflict, which is clearly what we're seeing far too often on university campuses. What about sanctions, Max? I mean, if I find that one of my faculty members, say, in the humanities department, is fomenting hatred, is teaching students how to hate and how to protest in favor of those who would hate. What do I do about that? Do I let him or her continue that effort? What do I throw him out of school? And what happens with seniors who have tenure? What do I do with them? Now it was up to me, I might add, my own digression here is I would throw him out of school because our community should not be trusting the development of young minds to people who would teach hate. That's a bad way to develop an electorate and citizens in our democracy. But I think for me, I'd like to see some sanctions. There haven't really been a lot of sanctions, have there? Well, we have seen that on certain universities, there have been extremist student groups who actually violated campus policies or may have violated the law in some way. We've seen some of those groups actually get suspended, which I think universities have been hesitant to do in the past, but just the level of hateful rhetoric and justifications of violence on top of the violations of various policies or laws, I think has gotten universities to that point where they're willing to take more significant action. In terms of that- Does it work? Does it work suspending them? Does it actually have the desired effect? We'll see. We'll see it just happened. In many of these cases, it literally just happened in the last week or very short time span. So we'll see what effect it has. But in terms of sanctions, so we strongly, my organization and I personally strongly believe in academic freedom and I think the best answer to bad ideas is more good ideas, which in for the public to see that debate play out and make up their own minds, I think the problem is on many university campuses is certainly in some departments more than others, you don't actually have a very meaningful debate or exchange of ideas where the bad ideas can be effectively marginalized and called out for the bad ideas that they are. So I think rather than necessarily jumping to sanctions, which in some cases would be appropriate, but it really, it's very case by case, if someone has actually clearly violated a university policy or law or what have you. In general, I think the more important thing for universities is to start investing resources in actually having a meaningful debate and meaningful pushback against some of the extremism, frankly, that they've let Fester under their watch for decades now. A lot of universities, frankly, are suffering intense reputational damage because not because they just allow all voices to be heard on their campuses, that's fine, that's what they should do, but rather for allowing an echo chamber of extremism and hate to Fester in too many of these departments without meaningful challenges from people with other perspectives. So that's what I think really needs to change. You know, you refer to the nexus between, and maybe it's a very close embedded nexus between these protests. I mean, the anti-Israeli protests and anti-Semitism. And we know that in this country, we have had anti-Semitism historically for a long, long time. And we know that if you look at the history of the last months, we know there have been an awful lot of protests against the Israelis. So how close is that? How close is that nexus? What is the connection between anti-Semitism and it's called anti-Zionism, if you will? Because it seems to me that even if you were able to establish a meaningful dialogue and have academic freedom on open discussion of the rational point, son, all sides of the table, as long as you have anti-Semitism in there, which is not rational, but deeply embedded in our society, you never can solve the problem. Yeah, of course. I think, so to answer your first question, what's the connection? So if you're criticizing the Israeli government regarding an issue of policy, anyone can do that and it's not anti-Semitic. We just were watching before, shortly before this massacre happened, a huge Israeli protest movement in Israel against the current government. And certainly that wasn't based in anti-Semitism. You can criticize the Israeli government without being anti-Semitic. There are specific types of rhetoric and actions related to Israel that do cross that line. So that would be like, if you are denying Israel's right to exist or calling for Israel's destruction, that's a form of anti-Semitism. Similar to that, if you're denying that Jews, saying that Jews, unlike all other people, don't have a right to self-determination in their ancestral homeland, that's a form of anti-Semitism or discrimination against Jews. If you're demonizing, Israelis are dehumanizing them with any number of anti-Semitic tropes that go back hundreds of years or sometimes in the modern age, Israelis are being dehumanized, like I said before, by being labeled as colonizers, erasing 3,000 years of Jewish history there and basically justifying their slaughter by terrorists. So unfortunately, part of the complexity with anti-Semitism is it doesn't stay the same throughout time. It evolves, it changes with whatever the sort of common streams of thought or streams of language are in any given society. And so we constantly have to adapt to how this hatred against Jews evolves from the far left, from the far right, from other types of extremists. And I agree with you, it's impossible to have irrational discussion from someone who has adopted just irrational anti-Semitic hateful ideas. I think the core, there's a few ways to go about dealing with it. Education has to be at the center of it. Our educational institutions have a huge, huge responsibility to, not just in response to anti-Semitic incidents, but rather proactively educate about who are the Jewish people, who are Jewish Americans, what is anti-Semitism, both historically but also today in all of its forms and including the more uncomfortable conversation about what is anti-Semitism related to Israel and how do we together fight against anti-Semitism in all forms of hatred in our society? I think that every educational institution has a role to play in that and if they fulfill those responsibilities we'll be in a much better place. Including the high schools and grade schools, right? Yeah, that's where it has to start. Yeah, well, you know, because you develop these biases, these bigotry very early on. In fact, that's what happens in a lot of Arab countries where they teach very, very young children to hate to choose and they carry that their whole lives. You know what's ironic is that because of the Abraham Accords, which are the peace deals between Israel and the United Arab Emirates and Bahrain and Morocco and the increasing level of sort of diplomatic relations and other connections between Israelis and people across the Arab world, we've actually seen a curriculum in a number of Arab countries start pretty significantly improving, removing various types of anti-Semitic content, including more positive representations of Jews. I mean, nothing's gonna change overnight but there's actually some positive developments happening in the Arab world. Certainly there were before this massacre took place. At the same time as it seems there are negative developments taking place in the education systems in the United States. So just let that sink in for a minute. We here in some cases are going in the wrong direction and Israel's new, you know, the states that Israel now has diplomatic relations with are headed in the right direction. I think it's, I hope it's, you know, in all of our, for all of our interests and values that we should wanna turn ourselves around as well on this issue. And so many issues actually when you start talking American politics and public policy and public opinion, which leads me to ask you, you know, how has the media been doing in terms of educating people here in this country? And a further question, which is just equally important is, how has the Israeli government been doing in educating people in this country and the world on what has been happening? What did happen? What's been happening? Yeah, so I mean, I think if you've been following the media coverage of this issue to any significant extent you probably remember that there was a really, really terrible moment of many very widely trusted media outlets. The New York Times, others reporting that basically supposedly an Israeli strike had hit a hospital in Gaza and that 500 people were killed in that strike. And then very, very shortly after you had the facts come out that, well, actually it didn't hit the hospital. It hit a parking lot outside the hospital. And in fact, it wasn't an Israeli strike. It was actually a rocket from a terrorist organization in Gaza that fell short. And in fact, it wasn't 500 people killed. The estimates quickly were reduced to maybe 50 or 100. All of it horrific, all of it tragic, but at the same time, the immense, immense, immense damage done around the world by this screaming headline and the photos associated with it, the story. I mean, the New York Times eventually had to backtrack and apologize for that, but the damage was very much done by the time they did that backtracking, right? And I mean, I think it's gotten more people to realize that, well, maybe we shouldn't just take at face value the reports coming out of the Gaza Ministry of Health, which is in fact controlled by Hamas, which is the government of Gaza. Maybe you shouldn't just trust the reports coming from the terrorist organization that just went into Israel and massacred and sexually assaulted civilians and broadcasted it on GoPros and on the social media accounts of some of their victims. And then later proceeded to go on various media outlets and deny the atrocities they had just committed and documented for so many around the world to see. Maybe we shouldn't just trust them. What's happening again? A similar test now with that big hospital in Gaza City where the Israelis have documented a clear evidence that it was being used as they suggested earlier as a Hamas headquarters. And yet, I'm not convinced the press is giving us the story. Yeah, and it's not just the Israeli government, the US government and intelligence community has also come out and confirmed that Hamas terrorists have used this hospital for military purposes, which is a war crime and horrific. So yeah, I mean, I think that some of the, these examples of mainstream media just repeating misinformation fed to them by a horrific genocidal terrorist group. I think it has opened some people's eyes, but also the damage is already done. And there are far too many people around the world who still believe erroneously that Israel was responsible for that strike against the hospital. And it's very disheartening. I can only hope that there will be the appropriate accountability and fallout from this long-term, but frankly, it's not the first time we've seen major errors like this happen. It's just maybe the largest in scale we've seen in a long time. So we need a reckoning. Yeah, we need a reckoning among a number of media organizations that did the same thing. It wasn't only the New York Times, it was the cable news channels and it went as far as the BBC. I have seen BBC reports that were completely erroneous and biased and it's like they were proving a case against Israel when in fact there was no case against Israel, the case was against Hamas. And it's only now, 39 days after is the horrific attack that some of the facts about the massacre are coming out because the Israelis have been reluctant out of a quote of cultural sensibilities to reveal all the things that Hamas did. There was an article in the New York Times or maybe Washington Post this morning about how the rape that was going on was awful. And it was like a lot of women were raped and sexually abused and paraded in the streets. And I don't know if this is confirmed by intelligence, but the article suggested that why would they stop raping those same women who are in captivity? They would keep on doing it. So captivity turns into a seven circle for all those people. God knows what they're doing to them. But let me ask you this, and my feeling is that Israel didn't really understand the international global propaganda war at first and then after a while, if you watched the news reports, you began to get a picture of what they were like, what their generals were like, what their citizen soldiers were like, what the families of the hostages were like as people, as human beings. And that somehow along the way countered some of the outrageous propaganda that was coming from Hamas. So I'd like to ask you this, you spend your life, your a career person fighting against bigotry. And a lot of people, including a lot of Jews in this country have been sidelining those issues for their lives. And to some extent they continue now, although we do see groups, as we saw last weekend of Jewish people, people who support the Jewish state out there demonstrating. But what can I do, aside from think tech here, what can people do to join with you? You say, stand with us. What do we have to do to stand with you, Max? So number one, we're an education organization. We educate people around the world about Israel and fight anti-Semitism around the world. So we encourage everyone to educate yourself about these issues. We have a lot of educational materials on our website, standwithus.com. Also on our social media feed, if you follow us on Instagram or whatever your preferred social media platform is, we're constantly sharing educational information. So number one, educate yourself. And number two, educate others, other people around you, your friends, your loved ones. I think for us, all of this really starts with education. If you experience or you hear about some kind of anti-Semitic incident, we have a reporting form on our website again, standwithus.com, where you can report things to us and our legal department or another appropriate department will review the issue and respond in the appropriate way. And beyond that, I think whether you're interested in whether you're Jewish, whether you're not Jewish, I think it's very, very important, especially at a time like this with a war going on and immense, immense amounts of misinformation swirling around, a lot of it meant to really divide and fuel hate. I think it's very important to slow down, to take a minute, to not immediately believe every outrageous headline that you see or every outrageous thing someone tells you, but rather dig deeper into it, figure out what the truth is, what the different sides of the issue are reporting and avoid fainting the flames because the flames are intense right now and we need more firefighters out there spreading the truth and lowering the flames the hatred we're seeing across our society today. That's something to keep in mind at a Thanksgiving dinner where somebody was invited who may be a hate person and goes on about top of the line, top of the news stack issue and begins criticizing Israel and is misinformed and it puts a test to walk and it puts a test to all of us to exactly how to handle that. Do you leave? Do you argue? What do you do? What do you do? Do you get angry? And if you keep talking, will he let you talk or she? How do you handle that? This is a very likely possibility in our world today. Well, I think it's generally important in situations like that to ask questions, right? Someone feels very, very strongly about an issue if you immediately start to argue, to tell them why they're wrong in one way or another, for the vast majority of people, the instinct is going to be to get defensive, not engage with an opposing idea with an open mind but rather to just double down on whatever your original belief or your original idea is. So it's very, very difficult to have a productive conversation in that setting if you're just gonna start arguing. I think it's important to ask people questions. They put a certain statement out there and make a certain accusation. Like what do you mean by that? Get them to define their terms, get them to give you a better sense of what do they actually know about the issue in question? Maybe you know more than them. Maybe you actually have some facts that may surprise them but it's a much more open conversation if you can start asking genuine questions to delve into why someone has come arrived at the beliefs that they have. Well, that's why it's important, as you said, to educate yourself, to be completely ready for that conversation. And I think it's important that everybody be familiar with what's going on and be able to speak on it. Max, thank you so much for speaking to me. I really appreciate it. I really appreciate these discussions with you and I look forward to more if you don't mind. Thank you so much, Max Samaroff. Thanks for having me. Aloha.