 You mentioned the reactions around the world, the tearing of the posters, this incident at the Sydney Opera House. And we have a clip, we've pulled the clip from that incident, which as horrible as it is, I do wanna play just to have people absorb it. And also because it sparked a tweet thread of, it partially sparked a tweet thread of yours that I want to discuss with you. So let's roll a little bit of that clip.ła I mean, it is just shocking to see this happening in a place like Australia. And I am curious if seeing these kind of reactions in, I don't know, English-speaking countries has changed your political views at all. You posted this thread on October 25th saying that the beginning of the thread you write that the aftermath of October 7th is a test for the West and for all open societies, societies that nominally believe in freedom of speech and the press, such societies are now at a crossroads and must think about the direction they wish to head. What do you do about this kind of Jew hatred? I'll just pose that question back to you here. What do you think an open and free society should do in the face of the kind of hatred and vitriol we see on display in that clip? Well, I call that, I eventually wrote an essay on this. I called it the dilemma of the West because I don't think there's an easy answer to it. All my life I've been a very passionate advocate for freedom of speech, freedom of press. And I said nominally respecting freedom of speech and press because obviously over the last five years or so, 10 years in America and elsewhere, freedom of speech has been under attack and that's been deeply disturbing to me both, freedom of speech both as a cultural norm and often sometimes as an actual regulation there've been attempts to curtail speech, curtail opinions that made people uncomfortable and certainly culturally using norms and non-governmental methods to reduce honesty on the part of people about what they really think and feel. And I think that's very bad. And a few people still agree with me on that but it's surprising how much in American and the West that is a controversial opinion. At the same time, do we make any distinction? This is what I was trying to ask in that Twitter thread and in the essay, do we wanna make any distinction between say unpopular political opinions and Jew hatred, racism, exhortations to violence? I would make a distinction between writing and rallying. The thing I find disturbing about the rallying and the thing I find disturbing about the tearing down of the posters is there's an implicit threat of violence behind them. In that clip you just showed, my Arabic is not what he used to but I think those are Jihad flags being waived where Jihad is about killing infidels. And what do you do about that? You just say, well, that's their opinion. We don't agree with it. The way that the city of Sydney dealt with that rally is they told Jews to stay away from the Sydney Opera House. And if you look at that clip carefully, not carefully, just look at it the second time, you'll see policemen in reflective S standing on the steps there in the background watching this. I don't know what else one could do besides watch it. I'm not suggesting that they should have stormed the group for saying what they said. And I don't think there's an easy way to deal with this I use the other example in that essay that at some, I think pro-Israel rally, there was a group of Jews who conducted an evening prayer service. It was a very small group, maybe 15 people saying the evening prayer service, but nearby was either a pro-Palestinian rally or a response to the pro-Israel rally and the police barricade there and there were dozens, maybe hundreds of people shouting free Palestine while these Jews were trying to say their evening prayers. And what do we say about that? Do we say that's just protest? Do we make a distinction between a public space and a private space? So for example, if people want to hold a rally on behalf of either Palestine or Israel in a college campus meeting room, do people have the freedom? Should they have the freedom to chant things in response to that? And it really is a tragically beautiful example of how difficult it is to legislate kindness. A lot of what underlies the American culture of trust, of discourse, of searching for the truth, of mutual respect is inherently cultural. It's not legislated, you can't legislate it. And when it disappears, attempts to legislate it are not going to work. So I don't think there's a simple attractive magic answer to how do you deal with speech that is violent? How do you deal with a march that has violence around it? And just to leave, I'll finish with talking about the posters, what's depressed me, watching it from a distance here in Israel is how many people, when they film the folks tearing down the posters, beg them to stop and beg them to explain themselves. Why are you doing this? They cry out and that's the tone. It's a begging instead of saying, I don't approve of that and to stand in their way. And many of you watching this, I'm sure saw the clip of the New York construction worker who's got in the face of someone tearing down the posters and said, this is America. You don't do that and I'm not gonna let you. And intimidated the guy very, very unattractively to get him to stop, but what's the alternative? And the current alternative, which I don't particularly like is of taking photos of these people and identifying them and trying to get them fired. And I don't think somebody should be fired for a moment of emotional response to a kidnapped child that maybe makes them uncomfortable for a thousand reasons. But how do we handle that as a society? It's not an easy question. Yeah, so one thing I wanted to ask you about that is there's the cultural component which you alluded to there at the end with should there be social consequences for tearing down a poster of someone who's been abducted or yelling something horrible like gas the Jews at a protest? I would say certainly the latter I would not want to employ someone who was in that video but then there's the question, the very just real political question of should this be allowed? And is it, is there something insufficient about just the straightforward liberal or libertarian framework of you have to allow the bad speech particularly in a public space to take place and you draw the line at actual violence not really nasty words. We tolerate, for instance, famously here the Westboro Baptist Church saying horrible things on public grounds outside of funerals. I mean, you can't imagine something much worse than that and kind of the cultural response has been like these gangs of motorcycle, these motorcycle gangs follow them around and like drown them out with the motorcycle. So there's cultural response but they're protected in their speeches. Is there something that's not sufficient in that framework for this particular problem in your opinion? Well, I want to bring in something I heard from Tom Palmer who you may know from Atlas and who is a longtime friend of mine. I don't remember when this was as decades ago I got into an argument with Tom about freedom of speech and I said, I don't like that the Nazis marched in Skokie. For example, Skokie is a Jewish neighborhood suburb of Chicago and the Nazis marched through the streets of Skokie and someone recently pointed out to me, yeah, there are about two dozen of them. If there'd been a hundred thousand maybe you'd feel differently about that march. But I said at the time, they have a right to march. We can never know what where truth is in a democracy. The whole beauty of freedom of speech is to allow diverse viewpoints to be expressed peacefully. And Tom didn't agree with that. Tom felt very strongly and I'm sure he still does. And I started to think he's right that freedom of speech should not be allowed by people for people who don't believe in freedom of speech. That is if you are part of the Nazis or the communists and I would put it Hamas in with this also which is a grotesque theocratic death cult. It doesn't believe in freedom of speech. I'll just put a footnote here that story came out yesterday that there were a bunch of photographers and journalists who went with Hamas on October 7th through the gap in the fence and chronicled and photographed the atrocities and that this was an ethical violation. I'm thinking, do you really think there are any journalists in Gaza? Do you native journalists? Do you really think there are people who live in Gaza who can report, who can tell the truth, who can say critical things about Hamas? Of course there aren't, of course everyone there will at least say that they support Hamas and will act accordingly. They do not hold by the journalistic standards that we like to think other journalists hold by. And there are times that a slight challenge on this, they had a journalist there that they used as a stringer who admires Hitler and had posted on social media how great Hitler was. But the times assured us that he really reported very objectively as if you could possibly know. So these kind of insane situations where you're granting rights and freedoms to people who would be thrilled to either slit your throat or take those freedoms away from you seems a bit strange. And so Tom's view was if the goal of not any individual because that's, we don't get measure it and it's hard to assess and who knows but organizations that have as their charter the revolutionary desire to take away freedoms from other people should not be given those freedoms. And although it's hard for me to say that to agree with Tom, I think he's probably right. So any one protester might let them say their, say from the river to the sea even though that means killing me and my friends here and ending the Jewish state. I would probably let them say that or put it in a say in a classroom but an organization that wants the beliefs in that or the beliefs in gassing choose or murdering choose or any other group should probably not be given the same rights to express themselves as other groups. Maybe they shouldn't be given a permit to walk on the streets of Skokie. I'm in Florida and the governor here has just attempted to ban student groups that are supportive of Palestine on the pretense that they say that they're in alignment with what happened in Gaza. And therefore he's saying they're providing material support to them. I honestly, even though I find that repugnant I find it, I also find it disturbing as a gubernatorial action to and like a very clear example of how once you start saying, well, they are somehow affiliated with a group that is murderous, that they themselves don't have a right to express all these other views on a campus. So that is the heart of my concern with what you're saying, even though I acknowledge the very problem. I agree with you. I do not think, let me be clear about a couple of things. Israel makes lots of mistakes, does some horrific things. I'm not proud of them. I'm ashamed of them. Don't want them to continue. We could debate what those might be. I do not think the current ground offensive in Gaza is anything to be ashamed of. I think it's morally appropriate. And although tragically, I'm sure thousands perhaps of civilians have died in Gaza which is horrible and a tragedy. Israel gave them weeks to leave and Hamas at the point of a gun wouldn't let many of them leave. So I hold Hamas responsible for that. Having said that, Israel's done plenty of horrific things to Palestinians in Gaza, Palestinians in the West Bank and it's perfectly legitimate to be opposed to Israeli policies. It's perfectly legitimate to support a Palestinian state. It's perfectly legitimate to fight for the rights of Palestinians say to water rights or to fight for their ability to get better police protection or you fell in the blank. There are plenty of things that you can be pro-Palestine about without being anti-Jew. But if you're anti-Jew, it seems to be crossing the line. So groups that are pro-Palestinian should be allowed on college campuses and elsewhere in my view as long as it doesn't shade into the celebration of murdering people which seems like crossing a line. Now they would disagree by the way and to be fair to them at these pro-Palestine rallies in say London where 100,000 people marched many of them chanting from the river to the sea or free Palestine which does not mean rights for Palestinians. It means the land that Israel's on now should belong to the Palestinians and not to the Jewish state. They also say things like by any means necessary and of course they're an underdog and they don't have a good military and of course they're blockaded from getting military weapons not appropriately successfully. But so perhaps you can make the case that they have to use means that others would not stomach. I guess for me it's mainly the enjoying of it that's so disturbing. Hey, thanks for watching that clip from our conversation with Russ Roberts about life in Israel in the aftermath of the October 7th terrorist attacks. You can watch another clip from that conversation over here or the full conversation right over here.