 And the question is, why do people hate Israel so much? Why is there so many people who are pro-Palestinians? Think about Europe today. Think about, I mean, Europe is dominantly anti-Israel. I mean, I go to, I speak at the UK all the time. And the dominant people who are trying to obstruct my speeches and stop me, even though I'm not speaking about Israel, are pro-Palestinian groups. You know, in the US, I think that the number of people particularly among the young anti-Israel is growing. The boycott Israel movement is growing. And then there's the whole libertarian anti-Israel phenomena, which is just mind-boggling to me. You know, not really, if you understand what libertarianism is, but it goes against kind of their idea that they are pro-individualism, which at the end of the day, they're not. So what is your perspective on why people are so anti-Israel and pro-Palestinian? I think it goes to a moral premise that's prevalent in the culture. And I think it connects with both of those communities, both the sort of idealistic students. And if you want to put another category, the sort of libertarians that you're referring to, if you think of them as libertarians and it's not clear what that really means. So if you take students, and I've been on college campuses and I met a lot of these students, and part of what happens is this. So the moral premise in our culture is that there's a kind of sort of, you know, your attention, the premise is altruism, as Ayn Rand describes it. And I think it takes many forms. One of those forms is it programs people's thinking to be oriented to who's the sufferer, who's the underdog, who's down, and that matters. That's where your attention should go. And if someone is strong or productive or whatever virtues they actually have, real virtues we're talking about, then that's already suspicious, maybe even necessarily a problem. And you see this both in economic terms and you see it in foreign policy. And what happens is that if that's the sort of framing you bring to this issue. A lot of times you don't even look at the history. What you know is, wow, I feel really bad for the people suffering in Gaza. And look how poor they are. And Israel is so much stronger militarily and it's punching down and we're helping them. And the Palestinians have this whole history of and some of it is definitely something they accentuate and it's a big part of their propaganda. We're the victims here and we deserve your sympathy. And so if you're an idealistic person, the ideals that animate you often are, well, I believe in doing right and I believe in the good. And that means concerned with the suffering and well then sort of there's a default position that it's gotta be that the Palestinians have got something on their side and the Israelis, well, they're stronger. So we've got to be suspicious. And then if you fill that in with some of the arguments you hear from the sort of pro-Palestinian side of the Palestinian movement's argument, then it kind of reinforces that moral, what I think of as a prejudice, really, is the prejudice against the productive and the able in favor of the needy and the suffering. And part of what I argue in the book is that that's a corruption of the concept of justice. Like justice tells you not find the weakest person and be sympathetic to them because you can find lots of weak, small groups that are evil. Like, if you think of the jihadists, there are way fewer jihadists in the world than there are if you count every soldier in the US army. That doesn't mean you're sympathetic to the jihadists or, and then there are actually victims who are the underdog in a certain sense, who are innocent victims. So there's no necessary connection between being weak and small and suffering and actually having justice on your side. They don't go together necessarily. So what you have to do is actually judge and separate that out. And so what I think helps, what causes a lot of students and people on campus to be swept up in this is one part idealism informed by this kind of altruistic perspective that they've got to have. And, you know, the news coming out of this conflict is colored by this too. Like, look at all the people in Gaza who don't have water and their houses are bombed out. Okay, but why are their houses bombed out? What is the conflict read about? What do they believe needs to happen to their opponents? And talk about altruism just because you mentioned water. Israel is supplying them with the water. Whatever water they have in Gaza is being supplied by Israel, who has developed technology to desalinate the ocean. There's no water supplying Gaza other than what they get from Israel, which is an act of ultimate altruism because they're giving water to people dedicated to killing them. Yeah, and electricity flows and the control that. There's all kinds of ways in which that is playing out. Now, if you wanna talk about the other side of this, so another, let's make sure everyone understand. These two camps don't exhaust the sources of hostility to Israel, but they're significant for this audience because, I mean, and I think there's something good about what draws students to this perspective because it's the right premise to be on. Like, you wanna be on the side of the right, but how they think about what right and wrong and how to judge is that's the problem. That's what the book's trying to fix. Now, if you talk about the libertarian side, I think of that as a very fuzzy term, and I think there are at least two issues going on and they're both ultimately philosophical issues. One is, there's definitely people who are on that, kind of think of themselves as a libertarian whose moral perspective just is an altruistic perspective. They don't come at it, they don't come at their political philosophy from, I believe, in rational egoism and I'm an individualist to the core. Therefore, I think we need capitalism, which Sain Rand's perspective, for her, capitalism is the consequence of having a rational ethics that's individualist. And so their view is, well, libertarianism best solves for serving the needy in society, or their view is that, well, we need some sort of accommodation for the poor in suffering because that's their moral outlook, whether they recognize it or not. And that predisposes them to think, well, there's a whole bunch of poor people and they're suffering and then we gotta have some concern with that. And then the other thing that goes on for many people who identify as libertarian is, there's a kind of, this is certainly not true of all of them because there's really good people that I respect and think of themselves as libertarian, but there's this view of government as an evil. And in my view- It's not myself, no matter what its character is, yes. Right, and my view is government's a necessary good and that's why it's so important that you have a right kind of government. And so you look at the Middle East and you think, well, look at how controlling Israel, how strong it is and we don't like that. That's a bad thing. It's a government that's successful. We don't want any part of that. And it's this view that government is inherently a problem and there's other reasons they like, but to me it's not having a view of morality driving your political views. I think that's right. Now there's an interesting piece I read a while ago from, I forget, it's maybe the 60s or 70s by the famous anarchist libertarian, I think Marty Rothbard, I think maybe that. So he has a piece where he talks about Israel and the Palestinians. And one of the things he really kind of emphasizes is that it's, I mean, there's definitely sympathy to the Palestinians in that argument article. And it's surprising because the whole setup for the article, I forget the title, is we need deeper thinking on this issue. And the whole thing is incredibly superficial. It's like these are freedom fighters and Israel is just this too, it's a kind of religious tyranny. And even at the time that wasn't true. So there's just willful, unthinking approaches to this that I think are part of the problem. So. Yeah, no, I definitely think, I think the libertarian subjectivism there, again, some libertarians, their altruism, they haven't abandoned altruism, they consistently, so somebody here is complaining about Israel bombing children or bombing, bombing houses and so on. I mean, really, you're trying to defend yourself and therefore you're not gonna bulldoze, you're not gonna bomb, you're not gonna kill the people who are trying to kill you, you just stand there waiting. So there's a pacifist element, but I think all of it would underlies much of these anarchist perspective is really hatred, hatred of the good. It's a certain, they hate America. I mean, Rothbard, it comes out of this Rothbardian view that there's nothing worse than the American government. The American government is the worst. Stalin is better than America. And yeah, and if Stalin is better than America then Palestinians are better than Israel. So it's hatred of any government that is somewhat successful, right? Even a little bit because they're successful. So they really is envy and nihilism and all driven by kind of a horrible, moral subjectivism. And then I would add, particularly in Europe, but I think also more and more here that there's definitely anti-Semitism, definitely an anti-Jewish aspect to all of this because they don't listen to facts. Anybody else can defend themselves. France can go to North Africa in Mali and bomb terror, the Islamists and kill women and children. And nobody cares. The French certainly don't care. But Jews defending themselves, that is completely unacceptable. That we cannot tolerate. If Mexico was bombarding a city on San Diego, would anybody be overly concerned, Americans about where the bombs were hitting in Mexico? The whole premise that they live under is there's a different attitude towards Israel because they're Jews, not everybody, but from some people there's absolutely no question, no question that they do this. Some people, why did France bomb Mali? Because Mali is a haven of Islamists and the Islamists were attacking France. And France went into, Mali's a former French colony I think, and they went in there to help the government defeat the Islamists. France has been involved in North Africa for a long, long time, justifiably or unjustifiably. My point is, all over the world, people are killing each other. Nobody cares. Nobody cares. But Israel kills anybody and it makes the headlines in every major newspaper in the world. Yeah, I mean, what interesting data point that people can look up is around the time of the first Gaza war, I think it was 2008, 2009, and that led to a whole UN inquiry about war crimes and so forth. Around that time, Sri Lanka was winding down. It's, there's an insurgency in Sri Lanka. And the way they ended this insurgency was through what's called total war. They just killed tens of thousands of people. And it was like crazy amount of death. And I forget exactly the timing of this, but it was around this time that Israel was being, you know, pulled over the rakes for its conduct in Gaza. And I write about this in the book too. But how much did you hear about what happened in Sri Lanka, which proportionally in terms of human lives and the cost and the amount of time it took in the, even the conduct you might criticize? I don't think you heard nearly the same amount about Sri Lanka as you did in terms of what Israel did, which was, you know, numerical terms much smaller. And the wider point is that this issue of the anti-Semitism that you're referring to, which I think one of the greatest manifestations of it, which really reflects a global perspective, is what happens at the UN. So there is in the, I don't know, 10 or so year, how long it's been that there's been a United Nations Human Rights Commission. They used to be a different body, but ever since they reformed it, and it's, as a rule, they have singled out Israel more than they have singled out any other country, including countries where we see people being killed in the streets like Iran, and you've seen it in Venezuela and in all parts of the world, those countries aren't given the same kind of treatment. And part of it is there's dynamics within the UN, which is heavily dominated by these dictatorial regimes and sympathetic regimes to them. But there is definitely a kind of, you know, sometimes it's put in terms of double standards, but I think it's worse than a double standard because it's giving a special negative focus to one country. Because it isn't like they hold it to a higher standard. There's arguments about whether you would hold it to a higher standard, but it isn't even that. It's just, well, who are they to do this kind of thing in the first place? And it is, anti-semitism is not a topic I get into much in the book, but you and I have talked about it, and you've given talks on the subject, and one of the things that people, I think, really need to appreciate is, this is a long-standing phenomenon, and it isn't really about religion, in the sense that there were cases in Europe so part of what led to the growth of Zionism, the idea that Jews have to have a country, is that there were secular, assimilated Jews in Europe, meaning they were indistinguishable culturally and intellectually from the people that they grew up with in Germany or France or Austria. And independent of all that, they were still pointed to in the street and called a Jew. Why? Because there's a kind of tribal collective and a racial component to it that you could never get out of it. And this is part of why you look in the way the Nazis defined Jews, had to do with heredity, independent of whether you go to synagogue or not. And I'm actually a fairly militant atheist in my view as atheists go. And when I was growing up, I was true to, and people still pointed to me and I got all kinds of anti-Jewish criticism and things like that. So there's a phenomenon that deserves real attention and it's separable from what Israel does, but it's now compounded by the fact that there's a whole country that people can point to and use as a whipping boy for this issue.