 We're going to talk about Canada, a view from the north with our old friend Dr. Ken Rogers, who joins us from Canada, British Columbia. And we're going to talk today about Canadian colleges and are they having the same kind of outbursts that American colleges and universities are having about Hamas, supporting Hamas and protesting against Israel. So it's an interesting comparison because you can learn a lot about what happens in the U.S. by looking at what appears to be a copy of the U.S. in Canada. Welcome to the show, Ken. Well, hi, Jay. I don't think that your college problem is widespread, but it certainly exists. Well, it really surprised me that in New York City last week, we had protests and kids at the NYU area, which is my alma mater and so is yours, you know, pulling down the posters of the hostages and shredding them and throwing them in the trash. That was, you know, that was pretty mean and that's a very understated word for it. But in New York City, New York has a lot of Jewish people. New York is a liberal place. It's a blue state. It's a blue city. It's a city of some, you know, moral sophistication. And, you know, for example, the speech made after the attack by Eric Adams, the mayor there, was really, really interesting and a moral statement. So you wonder why this would have happened in New York. But okay, it happened on college campuses. It happened in the U.S. Harvard, Yale, Columbia, University of Pennsylvania. It happened at Stanford. It happened at NYU, both the undergraduate and graduate arts at NYU. And presumably it's still happening. And there was all this issue about firms that offered jobs to graduates. And then when they saw the graduate was involved in these pro Hamas, you know, protests and rallies, pulled the job with true job offer. That's really extraordinary. And then you have people who assigned letters but didn't want to press to know they signed the letters. That is siding with Hamas, supporting Hamas. You know, I just, nobody can tell me how this happened. So my thought is, I mean, why it happened. What is going on here with these kids? And I wondered, you know, if it was happening in a similar fashion in Canada. And if so, what is happening in Canada can reveal the why. Why are these kids in these colleges and universities on these otherwise liberal campuses are protesting in favor of Hamas? Well, I think that your use of the words favoring Hamas is wrong, as opposed to favoring Palestinian problems. You know, that is the human cost of the war is so devastating when you, you know, are killing children and women and innocent, you know, young men or I'm not sure that interesting, but you know, I was wondering what happened when they paraded the Israeli hostages after being raped, some of them murdered in Hamas, and they paraded them down the street. And I thought, well, maybe people are just intimidated that they would allow this parade of naked, you know, humiliated, scared for their lives women being paraded naked in the streets of Hamas. But then I read that no, no, they weren't, you know, shy about it. They were cheering. They were applauding. Those people were not all Hamas. They were Palestinian. And they were applauding Hamas. So I don't think you can say that poor Palestinians, because they are involved and they support what Hamas does, not all of them. And whether it's voluntary or involuntary, they were there in the streets cheering Hamas and cheering for what Hamas had done. So it's not, it's not as if there's a different moral fiber here. It's connected. Well, it's connected in the sense that and one of the people that I think knows the most about the Middle East was an advisor in the US government named Ben Rhodes. And I saw him the other day, and he really emphasized the idea that the Middle East has proved more than any place on earth that war simply gets for responses. It gets more animosity, more hatred, more discrimination and more terrorists. You know, in the Middle East has had nothing but wars for a long time. And so it's not surprising that it's full of those people. Well, if if you're in the Gaza Strip, and you've gone years and years and years with the press saying, you know, any economic problem in the Gaza Strip is solely the problem, you know, caused by Israel. And you got the propaganda machine, similarly to the way Trump can get away with raising money on, you know, getting a new indictment, you know, you put out enough false information and people are dumb enough to hear that information and think those are the facts. So, you know, you're sitting where you have, you know, two million Palestinians that have been in one sense, they're the innocent public, you know, but and they're being governed by people who took their power by force. But nevertheless, over, you know, many years, they've been indoctrinated to believe that, you know, all the crap that they've been fed. And so when you, you know, see the those people suffering, I don't think that they're they're totally innocent. They are certainly complicit in all the crimes that the masses have undertaken. But the protests that I see in North America, there's virtually nothing in the area that I live in. Anything around here has been, you know, pro-Israel and simply, you know, somewhat along the line that, you know, if if you were lived in a nice house and next door to you would say a home for homeless children and that it's run by half a dozen people. And over time, those half dozen people have come over and they've broken your window and they've kicked the door and they've put spray paint on your your house, you know, over and over and over. They've just been, you know, terrible neighbors doing damage to you, you know, and they kicked your dog or they shot your cat. And then, you know, last week they came over as a group and they when you were away and, you know, they kidnapped your wife and one of your kids and they raped one of your daughters and killed the other couple kids. Now, what are you supposed to do? You know, and you're supposed, you know, are you just supposed to sit there and be a nice guy? Now, of course, their house next door has all of these children that they're supposedly looked after. So they got, you know, 50 children surrounding, you know, surrounding these five guys, you know, and, you know, the five guys deserve to be dead. You should kill them. But how do you get to them without having some harm to those kids? No, the kids are not complicit. They don't know that what these terrible five guys have been doing or they may have observed something but they've been, you know, they've been growing up in that place and, you know, they've kind of been looked after no matter how lousy their standard living is. So you get a different point of view of, you know, where do you sit in this big circle of problems? You know, but to me, the majority of Canadians favor, you know, a peace in the Middle East. They like the two-state solution and they recognize very clearly that Israel has proposed this two-state solution over and over ever since its initial formation. But all of the neighbors have rejected that. All of the Arab states that surround Israel, including and in particular the Palestinians, have rejected the two-state solution and they have started the wars against Israel each and every time, you know, and then when they get thunked by Israel for invading, you know, they scream bloody murder. They say, oh, Israel is terrible. Look at what they're doing. You're massacring people. Now one of the, to me, important factors in the reaction of the rest of the world lives, maybe even Europe and North America, is that there's a long, long history that somehow Jewish people, you know, should be looked at differently than everybody else. I can remember when I grew up, you know, the idea was, you know, you know, gee, you've got to be cautious about Jewish people. Well, when I made it to high school, you know, I became good friends with several Jewish kids. I had not encountered any in scale prior to that. You know, I played on a basketball team with a couple of Jewish kids and kind of had to make up my own mind that what's this point of this, why should they be treated differently? You know, and as I started college, you know, and had looked at going into the real estate development business, immediately, you know, I got several adults who I thought were reasonably intelligent and reasonably informed, but had obviously had, you know, indoctrination passed down through the centuries, you know, of looking at Jewish people differently was, was they says, well, you can't go into real estate development. They got, look at these two terrible examples of real estate developers in Southern Alberta, you know, the province I lived in at the time that, you know, are just rotten scoundrel guys, you know, and they were both Jewish. Of course, that was their point. Well, it didn't take me too long before I realized that about, you know, 50% of the significant real estate developers in Calgary and Edmonton were Jewish, but virtually all of them were fantastic people. I mean, I did business with some of them. I, one of the kids I went to high school with, his father, donated an entire hospital. They're, pardon me, my emotional response coming back, but, you know, the historical idea, I tried to figure out why was there this long range, you know, everywhere in the world, this feeling that Jews are different. And I have come to the conclusion that it's because they are economically so successful, you know, and it's not all of them, but many of them are just absolutely outstanding in terms of their success. And it's kind of a jealousy, an envy, you know, and if you think of, you know, particularly the finance industry, you know, is, that seemed to be one that really rattles people or it grates their soul, but that a significant amount of the finance industry has over the centuries been dominated by Jewish people. And of course, nobody's ever happy with their banker. Yeah, but keep in mind that the reason, the reason historically that Jewish people went into finance and that sort of thing was that they were prohibited in most of Eastern Europe anyway, and maybe Western Europe too, from engaging in agriculture. They could not own the land, they were discriminated against in terms of the regular agricultural society. So they had no choice but to do something outside of that society. What they wound up doing was finance, and they got good at it. But, you know, the anti-Semitism has existed before the Jews ever got involved in finance. I guess, you know, what you're, what you're pointing to in all of this is that there must be anti-Semitism, okay? But what I cannot understand, and maybe you can help me with it from the, you know, view from the North, is why these young people in all of these universities, some of them have very high bars for admission, are anti-Semitic or whatever they're doing. I mean, it seems to me they are anti-Semitic. Where does that come from? Is that deeply ingrained in the American culture? Is it deeply ingrained in the academic world? Why is this happening? Why is nobody saying, stop doing that. It's not moral. It's not fair. It's not just. It's not right. It's bigotry of the worst order. We don't support that. And you can't do that on our campus. And then the crowd argues, well, this is academic freedom. So we can say anything we want, including hate speech, including speech that threatens and threatens violence against the Jews, like that group of Jews who was barricaded at Cooper Union, which is just a couple of blocks away from NYU, if you remember, barricaded in there because there were threats of violence made against them. What did they do? They didn't do anything. They're not even, you know, Israelis. They're not involved in Israel. And yet, here we are in New York City and other campuses around, you know, the United States where this anti-Semitism is coming out. And virtually hundreds of thousands of people have appeared in the street, many of them holding Hamas signs, what does that tell you, and tearing down posters of the hostages. This is really insanity. It's like trying to understand the Trump base. You know, people who would follow a fellow who is, you know, seeking policies that would destroy them, and yet they follow him. So I, you know, I just don't understand what is happening in the academic world in this country. These are students, and I think there are some professors around. There's faculty here in Hawaii who support Hamas and has been supporting the Palestinian, quote, movement input for years and years. They didn't say boo about Putin's invasion of Ukraine. They didn't say boo about all these other places, hot spots in the world. They say boo about Hong Kong and the loss of freedom in Hong Kong or the Uyghurs in Western China. Didn't say boo. But of course, Israel, you know, they criticized Israel. They've been doing it for years. They are monomaniacal in attacking Israel. Somehow, this has taken root in the American academic community. And I don't know, can you help me understand it? What is it? Is it just an expression of anti-Semitism? Is it a flaw in our societal values? Is it a flaw in the American culture? Is it a flaw in the European culture which came over? What is it? Well, I think that you're over-stressing anti-Jewish as opposed to the protests being very much against the obliteration of the public in the guess. But wait, it's clear enough for all these people who read and write that Hamas is doing this to kill all the Jews and destroy the state of Israel. And it is being supported by Iran, whose mission is to kill all the Jews and destroy the state of Israel. So if you support Hamas, that's the principle. If you support Hamas, you support Iran. And that's the principle. So it's impossible to extricate one from the other. And so if you believe in Hamas, that's what you get. And they can find that actually Hamas is using everyone in every Palestinian in Gaza as a human shield, some of them willingly, some of them not willingly, but they're all there. And they all were present at the parade of naked hostages. And they were all cheering it on. So it's very hard to extract the Palestinian situation. And furthermore, you and I had talking before the show about how the hospital that was bombed, that was struck. And the first thing that Hamas did is they told the whole world that it was the fault of the Israelis. Come to find it wasn't. It was the fault of the Islamic jihad, which is related to Hamas. Then we find two or three days ago, we find, and the evidence is complete, that where Hamas lives is under the hospitals in any event, all through Gaza, especially North Gaza. And because they want to use all the people in the hospital as human shields, which is against the law of war. It's against international law, but they do it because they don't give a rip about international law or morality. So I'm saying it's very hard to extract. And some of the people who were visiting the hospital with Palestinians knew that there was Hamas in the basement. Some of them didn't know. But some of the analysis made by the Israeli intelligence, what are you going to do? Your question. What are you going to do? You're going to give up? They say, I don't want to hurt anybody here. So I'm not going to try to stop them. We and I include myself have to stop them. We have to condemn what they did. And people, for example, the United Nations had a little trouble condemning them. And I saw a speech by the Israeli representative the other day. He was so right on. You want me to join in a resolution here that does not condemn Hamas? It doesn't even mention Hamas. And you want to make a big resolution that Israel should stop trying to defend itself? No way, Jose. We're not doing that. We have to defend ourselves. We have to survive. That was his message. What I'm saying is that it's very hard to separate the Palestinian cause, which is perverted and Hamas. It's connected. And what are you going to do? What are the Israelis going to do? I think there's so much propaganda, as you said, that it's very hard for people around the world to get a handle on what has happened and what should happen. But the tilt point is they don't like Jews too much. And they have been inculcated with this notion of anti-Semitism by the Palestinian movement emanating largely in the United States for years. I don't know what we're going to do, Ken, but I am very concerned. Well, I agree with most of what you've said. In fact, virtually all of it with one sort of major exception. And that is, if you're a reasonably intelligent person and well informed, you're dead on. But if you're coming back to what are all these protests about, which I think you are overpushing that it's anti-Semitic as opposed to anti what Israel is now doing. You see, I think that the less educated person or the person less up-to-date of what's going on simply sees a scattering of news which is overloaded with the wonderful PR from the Gaza Strip of some child with a bleeding running down his face or whatever it is being carried in somebody grieving in exaggerated fashion. And they're saying, in their mind, it's like, well, there's a handful of terrorists. And yet the Israelis are out there bombing the Bejesus out of two million people. They're just indiscriminately killing them. Just look at the news. I don't think that's true. I don't think that's true. Neither do I, but I think that's what the majority of the public sees and that's what the majority of the uninformed. It's a propaganda campaign. It strikes me so interesting that I'm asking the Palestinians in Gaza are always ready with the camera. They have taken photographs of all those bloody children to beat the band. And I'm wondering if anybody's looking to see whether these movie clips came from somewhere else or they're staged. I believe that some of them must be staged as too many movie clips. Notice too that the Israelis don't do that. They are more respectful of the dead and the tortured and the maimed. They don't take pictures of the bloody corpses. They tell you they show you people being buried. They show you funerals, but they don't show you the gore. It's the gore that really sends the message. And I might add that this is perfectly intentional by Hamas. And the Palestinians have been doing it for years. Let me show you a kid bleeding and it'll tear your heart out and you'll side with me and you'll side against Israel. This whole thing is a play of a play before except it reaches further because social media and all that. It's part of the war. It's a hybrid war and the hybrid war is the media and social media. So I take it with a grain of salt and certainly I listen to the Israeli reports, news reports and I say, this is not what's happening. It's not just these Palestinian kids. And remember the knock, knock bombs where they said, get out of this house, get out of this neighborhood, go south. And the Palestinians, only now do we reach a reasonable percentage of the Palestinians who are moving. But for weeks they would say, no, no, I'm not moving. Essentially I think Hamas is telling them, don't go south. We want you to be a human shield. We want you to get hurt. They also, in that regard, they have been the propaganda over the years, whitewash the idea that they're already refugees. Their homeland is where Tel Aviv is. That's where they should be. They've been shoved into this corner between the Mediterranean and Egypt, the skinny little strip. And they've been forced to be there and everybody would like to go home. They think of the Israelis as occupying what should be their homeland. They were shoved out unfairly. They just have never, ever accepted the 1948 solution to the mess that the Middle East was in them. But it was never their home. Never their home. I mean, the only country that has ever been named as a country in that area, from my less than perfect knowledge of history, there's been a Jewish state there in that general area, a major part of it. There used to be the Phoenicians. And other than that, and I don't know whether the Phoenicians were partly Jewish, partly Arab, or none of that. But nevertheless, there has never been a state called Palestine, or a country that was dominated by Palestinians. The word Palestine, Palestinians was invented in the early part of the 20th century. It really didn't mean anything. And there were no people by the definition of Palestinian until, I don't know, the late 20s, early 30s. So all this historical connection that they claim is really propaganda. But let me go back to the question, though. Can you explain to me why American students who might have very good grades out of high school, who may be doing very well in college, who go to the best universities by our reckoning so far, the best universities in the country, and protests essentially in favor of Hamas, carrying flags and ripping down posters of these terrified hostages? By the thousands, by the thousands, what is that? What kind of social process leads them out and signing letters and making all these public statements? What makes them do that? Does this mean that that generation in these American colleges and universities is fated to have their signals wrong? And as and when they get to be the leaders of the country, what kind of people will they be? People ask, if he's doing this now in the street, what kind of an elected official will he be? What kind of a corporate executive will he be? And the answer is great. It's not a good answer. Well, I might give a partial answer when I was 19 or 20 years old. My IQ might have been similar to what it is today, but certainly my smarts were not. My worldly smarts, what I should do and did do was not what I 15 or 20 years later recognized was wrong. College students might have good IQs, but they don't have enough experience, so they make some pretty dumb moves. I'm sure they do. And they love to follow the leader and they love to be rabble rousers and stir the pot, playing smart alecky almost. However, I use as an example of how one changes. As I tend to think that when I started college, anything to do with LGBTQ, whatever the string initials are, if I get them wrong, just was wrong. It was like, gee, that's just bestiality almost. I didn't know any better. I didn't have anybody give me specific training one way or another. It just kind of filtered in from the air or my surroundings and minor comments by others. And it didn't take me too long as a young adult to out in the world with the job to recognize that that was a pretty normal way of life for a fairly large number of people. But I'll bet you 10 bucks you never attended a rally against gay people. I bet you 10 bucks that you never got together with a thousand or 5,000 or 10,000 other college students who were similarly confused and enchanted hate speech against LGBTQ. And that's the difference. I mean, if you were mistaken in your worldview, okay, but how about a national phenomenon where virtually hundreds of thousands of students are mistaken in their worldview? It's different. I still think the majority of them are out there on the belief that Israel's overdoing the punishment of innocent Palestinians. I don't think the Palestinians are as innocent as the students do. I think that's just lack of knowledge. And I don't think that the students have thought through, what's the end again? You know, like in the end, the only thing that works in my mind is a two-state solution. And how do you get from here to there common sense? The problem I see is if you can and me, we go out to a campus rally, protest, what have you. And we stand in the middle of that crowd and say, you know, you guys don't have it exactly right. You're wrong to criticize, you know, Israel the way you do and you're wrong to support Hamas the way you do. What would happen to us? Would they say, you know, Ken, you may have a point there. Let us have a cup of coffee. No, that wouldn't happen. He might not remember. No, you're not able to be assaulted, you know, but even, you know, when you were 20 and I knew you, you were not dumb enough to, you know, look for a fight. You know, like, there's a time and a place to tell somebody that you think they're wrong. Most people do not take your wrong in a peaceful way. There's not a nice free exchange of views is not a normal. It might be psychologically correct, but it doesn't happen in day to day life. And, you know, it takes a little time for the humans to learn. I think you've touched on a very important point before kids or kids in college and university, that matter for faculty. It's the mob psychology thing. If you see people all around you, you know, taking a position that something is unfair, whatever it may be, then, you know, you're likely to join it. And maybe, you know, maybe there's a pretty girl right there who you'd like to be with. And, you know, it helps you that there's such a great social connector, you know, to do that. And, you know, and when I was in school, the Communist Party was active and there were, you know, guys who went to these rallies so they could get a date. I'm not kidding. It had nothing to do with ideology. But, you know, I think the problem is that this is a larger phenomenon than we've ever seen before in the country. And it is a phenomenon where people have not thought it through. And it is a phenomenon where the faculty administration is cowed. They don't know what to say, what to do. They let it happen, even if it reflects badly on the student body and the school. So, you know, the propaganda has found a way. Let us not forget that Vladimir Putin supports Iran, supports Hamas, is down on the Israelis. And he's joining Erdogan in Turkey in that regard. And he's an expert on the internet research social media propaganda machine. And every time something like this happens, a hate phenomenon happens in this country like we have politically, I think of Vladimir Putin churning his machine and trying to get people divided on anything. Because, you know, you divide and conquer. He just loves this mess in the Middle East. Because what have you heard about Ukraine lately? It's been put on the back shelf in most people's mind. Well, you know, he just loves that. But that does not, you know, fit my definition of right and wrong. You know, my right and wrong problem, you know, with what they mess in the Middle East is now. The only way I can see coming out of, you know, having peace over a long period of time is that Israel continues to obliterate the Gaza Strip until they dig out of the tunnels or wherever else Hamas is hiding. And those Hamas people who can get away can make it to Iran or Qatar or wherever they would have a safe haven, but for the most part would be out of the Gaza Strip. And that the Gaza Strip would be in such terrible physical condition that it'd be essentially uninhabitable. Now, it has been a welfare state supported by the rest of the world forever and ever anyhow. You know, it was 80% of the population was dependent on, you know, 20 trucks a day of evade chugging through the southern border. You know, well now they need 100 trucks or at least 25 trucks instead of 20 or whatever it would be. Well, to me, once the Israeli armies mopped it up, as long as that is where the military side is, that is, there's no extra fronts opened up by Hezbollah or equivalent, then you're going to need somebody like United Nations to manage the Gaza Strip and the West Bank until some level of government, like some level of stability physically, some the economies are running a little better and that there's some stability and they can get a government that wants the two-state solution. You know, and that might take 15, 20 years. You may have to go through a whole generation of people before you can do it and I can't see any other solution. What is an in solution other than that? I don't see a solution other than that. And I don't see the United Nations as playing any significant role, but the United Nations is completely over the hill and dysfunctional, non-functional. Unfortunately, I agree with that for the most part. I'm sure the Israelis have an idea about what they have to do because, you know, the United States learned in Iraq and Afghanistan too, for that matter, that if you just go to war with somebody and you leave them in a vacuum, then the same thing will happen again. You know what George Santiana said, those who don't remember history are doomed to repeat it and we have to go now. So Ken, thank you. We come back, we'll decide what else to cover, whether it be something purely Canadian or something global like this because, you know, the United States and Canada are connected at the hip and our discussions have revealed that to me so far. I missed a good point though, is one should compare the GDP per capita of all the Arab countries surrounding Israel and Israel. Israel ranks at the same level as Canada on GDP and Iran is about one-fifth of that per person. That's true. And all the rest of the countries are about the same unless they have a lot of oil. That's true but power comes out of a sword, doesn't it? Okay, thank you Ken Rogers, Dr. Ken Rogers in Kelowna, British Columbia. Thank you for joining us. We'll be back in a couple of weeks and explore all the other issues in the world today. Aloha.