Season 3 - Episode 4 - Polarisation, Extremism and Mis & Disinformation

In Episode 4 of Tensions Transplanted, Rob Kaldor and Isy Oderberg explore how political disillusionment, extremism and online disinformation are fuelling antisemitism across the political spectrum. Through interviews with pollster and social researcher Kos Samaras, activist and educator Zachary Schaffer, Professor Michele Grossman AM, author and commentator Van Badham and Movement Against Antizionism founder Adam Louis-Klein, this episode examines the rise of One Nation, the limits of horseshoe theory, the different motives behind left- and right-wing antisemitism, and the way social-media algorithms amplify emotionally charged falsehoods and how you might unknowingly be contributing.

Transcript

SPEAKER_02 0:00

Coming up on this episode of Tensions Transplanted.

SPEAKER_06 0:04

If you mentioned the term anti-Semitism, you were part of an evil conspiracy to shut them down. You were using anti-Semitism to justify genocide.

SPEAKER_03 0:12

The algorithm's only opinion is how many eyeballs can I get on this material?

SPEAKER_07 0:17

But I also know that to be a Jew is to be an agent of hope.

SPEAKER_01 0:20

Welcome to Tensions Transplanted for the Jewish Independent. I'm Rob Kaldor. Joining me for this series is journalist, author, and all-around good person Izzy Oderberg.

SPEAKER_04 0:32

Too kind, too kind. Thanks for having me. We are back.

SPEAKER_01 0:35

We're back for episode four. Now we've been just over a week since we dropped episode three and in the interim. We did an interview for the TAP Media Group, which is 2GB, 4BC, and 3AW. But if you've got feedback for us, you can contact us at tt at the Jewishindependent.com.au. Izzy, tell us what's happening in today's episode.

SPEAKER_04 1:01

We're going to be looking at the rise of One Nation and what we can understand from that. We're going to look at the horseshoe theory in a little bit more detail, this idea that if you go far left enough, you end up on the right, and vice versa. We're also going to look at the difference between miss and disinformation. And to round out this episode, we're going to look at the anti-Zionism movement.

SPEAKER_02 1:29

So let's get into episode 4. Extremism and Where the Threats Lie.

SPEAKER_04 1:38

Koz Samaris is Director of Strategy and Analytics at Redbridge and is an expert in analysing and translating polling data, meaning that he helps us understand what the Australian electorate is thinking and importantly how they are voting or how they're going to vote. One of the main topics I wanted to talk to Koz about was actually about the rise in popularity of One Nation. And while our conversation took place just after the South Australian election result, during which we saw an uptick in support for One Nation, we know that this trend has continued since.

SPEAKER_05 2:11

What we are seeing is an abandonment of support amongst Australians for the duopoly or established politics in general. They have many of the tops of Australians that are moving to One Nation, they're primarily in the outer suburbs and regions. They are overwhelming in their 40s, 50s, and 60s. Predominantly have a tail for trades qualification. And increasingly, I would say the support for One Nation is attracting a larger demographic footprint as well. So initially it was very confined to a very particular type of Australian. It's now a little bit more complex. And we could see that in the South Australian election. The coalition largely suffered as a result of this restructure of the centre-right of politics in this country, and this trend will continue. But to a lesser extent, we saw also one nation into some of Labor's base. That was curtailed to a certain extent because of the popularity of the Malinowskis government. That may not be curtailed in other jurisdictions where Labour's brand is not as strong.

SPEAKER_04 3:14

We also talked about what he sees as the long-term multi-party failure to dress some of the issues that have resulted in the uptick in anti-Semitism we're seeing now.

SPEAKER_05 3:25

The architecture that led to the community feeling uh vulnerable and attacked on the streets and their shops vandalized, the the the Bondi massacre, the architecture has been in place for years. Including under the Morrison government. What I mean by that is that the systems that allow this sort of behavior to be permissible, whether it's through education, whether it's through through through what governments say you you know um allow to happen, whether there are safeguards in place, this is a multi-party failure. It's easy to politicize because whoever's not in government can say, well, it's not us. Well, it is you because you were in government. This has been in the making for a long time. I vividly remember going to a synagogue years ago where under a coalition government and there was security out the front. Why is that well, because the community doesn't feel safe. So clearly there are issues in our broader Australian um uh community with regards to the way it treats choice Australians, and I'd say it is a multi-uh party failure which led to this.

SPEAKER_04 4:39

I remember after Christchurch, you know, when there was discussion about whether mosques in well that it was pretty much, you know, mosques did need security in Australia, um, which is horrendous, and you know, Islamophobia is a genuine issue and it's connected, irrevocably connected to anti-Semitism, and I don't seek to decouple them. But there was uh an interesting sort of move where everyone was like, it's outrageous that a mosque should need security in Australia. I have never in my 46 years of being a Jew have I ever walked in to an Australian, either Jewish place of worship, cultural center, or anything else without security. Ever. And I just think that there's a real lack of understanding about how Jews are almost the co uh the canary in the coal mine, in the sense of whenever there's unrest, it's the Jews' fault. Whenever there's a war, it's the Jews' fault. Whenever there's, you know, um, and I and I I don't think it ever went away, really. It's always existed. It's just how close to the surface you want to make it on this particular in this in any particular context or environment.

SPEAKER_05 5:47

Because Jewish cu the Jewish community, no matter where it where it's at around the world, has a um um multi-millennia awareness of religious violence that they've been subject to. Um, and they now understand that human beings can do some pretty nasty things to each other.

SPEAKER_04 6:05

I went back to Zachary Schaeffer, who is a facilitator, educator, consultant, and the co-founder of Project Shema, who spoke to me from New York, and I wanted to talk to him about the linkages between Islamophobia and anti-Semitism, and how, as well, his opinion on the horseshoe theory has changed. The horseshoe theory being the idea that if you go far left enough, you end up on the right, or if you go far right enough, you end up on the left.

SPEAKER_07 6:34

A trend line of my work that I must name to answer this question is the importance of dismantling binaries. We need to dismantle binaries, and the question is antisemitism related to other forms of bigotry, yes or no? Or should we handle anti-Semitism in isolation or in connection to other forms of bigotry, I think can sometimes perpetuate this polarized debate that doesn't help us to solve these challenges. Antisemitism is a its own conspiracy theory, it is its own systemic bigotry. And what that means is that anti-Semitism is a set of ideas that has existed for thousands of years, wherever Jews have lived and places we haven't. These ideas are woven into the fabric of our life and our history, and we're all socialized into specifically anti-Jewish conspiracy theories and bigotries. And in order to show up for Jews, we have to understand what it means to be Jewish, we have to understand what antisemitism is, the ways in which it operates, the trajectory of Jewish dehumanization and exclusion in society. And I think that does require a standalone conversation around Jewish identity, anti-Semitism, and what it means to be an ally for the Jewish community. I believe that's what equity means. We figure out how individuals and groups need our support, what their unique needs are, and we show up appropriately for them. And anti-Semitism is connected to other forms of bigotry, prejudice, and discrimination. We know uh the ways in which, especially in the United States, white supremacy, racism, and antisemitism fuel each other. We know how antisemitism fuels other forms of bigotry, we've seen how antisemitism can be a canary in the coal mine for the fraying of democracy, how it can fuel other conspiracy theories like the Great Replacement Conspiracy Theory in the United States, how it exists in this vicious cycle, this vicious relationship with polarization and the collapse of democracy. When we live in a society that enables the dehumanization of any one group, when I co-founded Project Shema, it was based on my lived experiences organizing on the progressive left, both experiences where I saw non-Jewish progressive allies show up to protect me and support the community. I've experienced death threats, violence, and have even been physically assaulted in some progressive organizing spaces. And in each of those moments, I was overwhelmed with the solidarity, allyship, and support from other allies in the space for whom I was showing up, who were then switching in these spaces at a Black Lives Matter rally for my black friends to show up and keep me safe there from others. So I have always felt like, as I said, anti-Semitism exists everywhere. We are all socialized into these ideas. There is no political ideology or identity or community that is insulated from anti-Jewish ideas or immune to anti-Semitism. So, of course, anti-Semitism exists on the left, right, and center. Ten years ago, I was very interested in how the political prisms through which we see the world influenced how we engaged in anti-Jewish thinking or action, which is to say there's a particular viewpoint and political lens on the progressive left through which we filter and synthesize information. There's heuristics that we all use within our own ideologies to understand the world. And I had spent the last 10 years building out systems to help the Jewish community understand that progressive worldview and to help progressives understand the blind spots that exist within our organizing philosophies and within how we understand power and allyship that enabled us sometimes to not show up for the Jewish community as we should, or even as many of us wanted to. And what I've seen over the last 10 years is that anti-Semitism today, I believe, needs to be approached not as a partisan issue, but as a cross-partisan or non-partisan issue. I have also found how 10 years ago anti-Jewish ideas carried alongside Israel-Palestine discourse was a phenomenon on the left or the far left. And now one's ideology does not determine whether or not they accidentally or intentionally perpetuate anti-Jewish ideas in their advocacy for Palestinians or in their discourse about Israel-Palestine. That has now become a nonpartisan issue from the right, left, and center. So I think the shift in approach that we need to make today is to recognize that anti-Jewish ideas within the Israel-Palestine conversation is no longer a problem of the left. It might be a challenge that arose from the left, but that has now saturated the political spectrum.

SPEAKER_04 12:00

Professor Michelle Gossman, A.M., is a terrorism scholar from Deakin University. And I went back to Michelle to ask her about why she actually doesn't agree with the horseshoe theory. She takes a very different approach in her thinking. And one of the things that she did for me in this conversation that you're going to hear is differentiating between the perspectives of left-wing extremists and right-wing extremists and how we can view them very differently.

SPEAKER_00 12:27

So I think I'm not a fan of the horseshoe theory. Having said that, what I observed were efforts by both those, you know, within various left movements and various right movements, and along the spectrum between the two to leverage this. Okay. So it was there, there were very um, and and to weaponize it, I would go so far as to say to weaponize it. Um and may I say that that weaponization was not limited to the left or the right, by the way. We saw um mid-spectrum mainstream politicians, uh, by any other name, um, you know, very quickly weaponizing elements of this uh against their um their stated or their perceived opposition. So it was uh to say that it was unedifying, um, you know, is the is the understatement uh of of the year. There were people and statements and groups on the left where I thought to myself, you didn't, you didn't even you didn't think about Palestine for a single day. Uh and now suddenly your whole world is this, right? How does how does that happen? But I wasn't surprised, and I wasn't surprised because I did think that the connection on the left, um by the way, where I would put myself, um largely in terms of my own politics, but I did think that there was less surprise there for me because it played so neatly into the idea that Jews are more powerful than other people. Um so if you think about left politics as, you know, traditionally being um, you know, to support um the powerless, to advance their the empowerment uh of marginalized people, um, you know, to be on the side of the underdog. Jews have never been seen as the underdog. And this is one of the this is one of the great mysteries for me of our of our history. Um doesn't matter how victimized we've been, right? Doesn't matter what's happened to us. We're never seen, like we're never really seen as victims.

SPEAKER_04 15:04

We're never seen as victims, but we're also constantly accused of overplaying our victimhood.

SPEAKER_00 15:10

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 15:10

Being perpetual victims. Like therein lies the irony, right?

SPEAKER_00 15:16

Yeah. So what I'm saying is it was it was fairly easy for some left-wing commentary to collapse into the idea that we were the that that Jews were the wicked ones. And I mean, there were things, you know, what was there were things that were happening in Gaza that were beyond wicked, right? Um, you know, uh perpetrated by the state. Um, but we're talking about Jews now, uh writ large, not just the state of Israel. So it was an easy position to collapse into, um, which was that Jews are more powerful than other people, um, and that therefore the the the the virtuous position was one in which you would side with the underdog, namely, uh, you know, namely the Palestinians.

SPEAKER_04 15:59

During COVID, when you had these sovereign citizen movements that were marching against lockdowns and they were marching next to Nazi flags, and you you know, we said you can't march next to a Nazi flag. Like you, you, you know, you if you march next to a Nazi flag, you are a Nazi. Like that that's it. Like there's no and they say, Oh no, no, no, I only agree with some stuff. We only have some stuff in common. I don't agree with them on everything. And it's like, it doesn't matter. If you are marching next to a Nazi flag, there's a problem, right? There is a problem. And I think if you are agreeing on any level with a neo-Nazi group on anything, there is a problem. Therein lies the problem. Have we found the horseshoe? I know you don't agree with horseshoe.

SPEAKER_00 16:46

I'm just hypothetical. Yeah, look, I think I think what you're pointing to here are the um, you know, is the phenomenon of coalition politics. Uh sometimes it's called rainbow coalition politics, where you end up with some very uh united around a particular issue or around a particular cause, um, you you find some very, very strange bedfellows uh um, you know, uh standing next to. So your your argument really is, you know, to to what extent are do people become complicit with? And I think, I think really what I hear and what you're saying, um, you're raising the problem of legitimacy and whether in saying, I don't agree with them as a whole, but on this issue, we do have something in common that what you end up doing is by proxy legitimating um uh other views that they hold that you might disagree with merely because you're willing to appear with them. Okay. So you, you know, one you know, that one there is a moral question about the extent to which um you know you're you're willing one is willing to platform or engage at all uh with a group where in general you might find their views reprehensible because on this one issue, whatever the issue may be, let's call it issue X, uh, you know, because on one issue you may find, but it's not something that we haven't seen. We're now in a moment um in various parts of the world, including Australia, where we are seeing um a real, it's you know, there are different names for it, hybrid ideologies, DIY ideologies. I just see this all as a form of uh late consumer capitalism saying you can pick and pick and choose is a consumer, it's like ideology is uh, you know, as a as a consumer object or something of ideology. Yeah, that's a thank you very much. I knew you'd have a pithier phrase for this than I would. Um it is it is the cost co of ideology. Um uh but but what that means is that the kind of what you might call the purity of um the old left-right divide, uh the the val the regimes of value that underpinned those movements, that a lot of the old certainties um there have also started to crumble, or they've crumble just sounds like they've you know sort of dissipated into rubble and there's nothing left. Actually, crumble's not quite the right term. What they have started to do is they started to morph into other things. Okay. Um let's come back though for a moment to what lies at the root of all of this. Um and there there are there are you know, in extremism studies, uh, you know, we we often say that there are really two key elements that underlie all forms of extremism. So beyond the in-group, out-group uh dynamics that people like Jay and Berger uh, you know, have so have so persist per perceptively uh sketched out. One of those is grievance and the other is sense of victimhood. Okay. So all extremists have a grievance about something somewhere. Uh the question is, is there grievance? So so my response to you about, you know, are the left and the right really meaning here? I would be saying, okay, you've got an expression of anti-Semitism perhaps in both camps, but is their grievance the same grievance? Okay. My answer would be probably no. Okay. My answer would be no. It's not quite the same grievance. And so I therefore would say it's not quite the same kind of anti-Semitism. This is all coming back to the question of what's the motive, the impact might be the same. If I'm on the receiving end uh of the discrimination or the hate, what do I care? My my experience is going to be the same, whether it's uh, you know, left or right. But if we're trying to think about the motive uh and the intent part of it, um, if we're trying to think about the nature of the grievance, I would say that there is a qualitative, um, you know, there is a qualitative difference. The um, and and I would put it this way now, on the left, let's have a think about this further minute. On the left, the impulse would be to identify always with the oppressed and not the oppressor. So here we see quote unquote Zionists and quote unquote Jews by extension as being the oppressor. Uh, who do you stand with? Well, you have to stand against the oppressor. But that's not where the right is at on these issues, okay? Where the right is at is um they are the actual victims. They are the victims. The people who were pretending to be the victims, namely Jews, right, who are actually the um not the uh endurers of the woes, but the causes of everybody's woes. And for the right, they would say, we so for example, think about the great replacement theory. That is that is one of the that is one of the biggest, um, most fantastic victim statements of all time. Right. We are being eliminated, right? We are the existential threat against us, you know, is right here. Who's responsible for this? The Jews. Yep. That's the narrative. Okay. So there's almost on the on the extreme right some kind of competition for who's the real victim here. And that's very different than what you find motivating or the kind of narratives and structures of thought and feeling than I think that you find on the left, which is more concerned with the dynamics of oppressor versus oppressed. It's just qualitatively different.

SPEAKER_04 22:36

Author and commentator Van Batham is an expert in miss and disinformation and conspiracy theory. She's the author of the book, Q and On and On. We start this conversation with a very, very useful differentiation between miss and disinformation because often they're lumped together and they are very much not the same thing.

SPEAKER_03 22:56

Misinformation is just incorrect information that is shared not because it's malicious, but has like has a purchase and is untrue. So the example I always use is uh the idea that you should drink eight glasses of water a day, right? That's misinformation. That's not true. Some people need to drink more, some people need to drink less. Like, but it's not information that's designed to harm you. Disinformation is like if you really want to be healthy, drink eight glasses of bleach, right? That's disinformation. Because don't do that. Don't do that, audience. Do not do that. An information source. And you may go, oh yeah, I should drink the bleach. The point is not necessarily you doing that. It's you going, Oh, I don't know what to believe. I mean, is it true? It doesn't sound true, doesn't I mean my mother said bleach was poisonous, and I don't really want to find out. So if you're telling me to drink bleach and this other person's telling me to drink water, oh maybe I should just not drink anything, and then you die of dehydration. That's basically how it's working.

SPEAKER_04 23:55

Between information that's wrong and information that's deliberately constructed to be wrong and lead people astray.

SPEAKER_03 24:01

Well, yeah, and look, the 2019 election is important to study because like the Labour Party, I was calling people who I knew were Labour Party people, going, this stuff is is really getting a big audience. Like allegations about Bill that were going viral, 8,000 shares in an hour. I and this is before I was doing the QAnon book, and I was like, this death tax stuff, there it's been copy and pasted, it's difficult to track, you need to address it. Like this is really serious, like this is untrue. I don't know where it's coming from. And of course, months later, um, and you know, and obviously the only Labour MP who did come out um because they didn't get a mechanism, because the advice used to be, I just leave her alone, never qualify rumours. But the thing is, the internet is a news source for people now. That's where people get the news, you know. So pretending it doesn't exist doesn't help. Claire O'Neill was um, who's the member for one of the Melbourne seeds, she came out and went, This is ridiculous, whatever, and she had one of the best electoral performances. It was just one of those statistical things, it could have just been a coincidence, but she addressed the rumours head on. And I actually got Bill Shorten to launch my book because by the time the book came out, the the wash-up of the 2019 election had been done, and people were very well aware that what killed the Bill Shorten campaign was disinformation on the internet and these these rumours that were just crazy and proliferating. While I was writing the book, the key piece of information is that, and this is long after the 2019, this is in 2020 or whatever, I came across an example of a campaign that Steve Bannon had run. Steve Bannon, obviously, Trump's right-hand um, you know, the true evil genius of the Trumpist movement, very keyed into Russian disinformation networks and spent time in Russia, building sort of like alliances between far-right movements in America and in Europe and with the Russians, you know, wanting to build this whole sort of disinformation infrastructure, genuinely the br the ideological brains and the organizational brains of the Trumpist movement, which is something that I discovered over the course of writing my book. And Bannon had run a campaign in Florida about a death tax that used exactly the same figures and exactly the same claims as the death tax campaign that had been run on the internet in Australia, but earlier. And it was one of those things of just going, oh my god, they just franchised the disinformation. Someone has presumably bought or been given a campaign to run that was minimally retooled for the Australian audience and delivered on the internet, and there were no you know a senior ALP figure said to me, it was like discovering you were in an air war only when all your cities had burnt to the ground. And of course, recently in the Epstein Files, in the revelations that have come out, there is uh discussion of a conversation um between uh Bannon and Clive Palmer, who obviously was a force in the 2019 election with a lot of money to spend, and quite a sophisticated knowledge of internet tools talking about campaign relationships with Bannon. Like that's something that has been revealed, and I hope there will be greater investigation of that. Obviously, nobody is accusing Clive Palmer of being involved in the uh the sexual trafficking or molestation allegations of the Epstein Files. I want to make that very clear legally, but the name is there in the context of campaigning, this kind of campaigning that's going on. And when we look at the voice, by the time the voice happened, people were obviously listening, and a lot of people had read my book. And when I say people had read my book, I mean people from all sides of politics had read my book, and conservatives had called me and said, We're also really concerned about what's going on. We feel like there there is something happen happening that is out of control, and your book was very valuable, and I wanted to thank you for the work that you've done. And I was like, Oh, you know, thank thank a lot of people who have been doing this work. Um, because you know, in America that does come with a dude with a gun on your doorstep, kind of thing. But um, but of course, what's happened since then is with the voice, what became very apparent, like we were in a winning position on the yes side. We were 60-40 when the referendum was announced. I was at the launch party for the campaign in Adelaide. We're leading kangaroo stew and had our hats on and taking photos and so excited we're all going to be part of history. And of course, over the course of the voice campaign, you saw the most unbelievable explosion of disinformation campaigning this country had ever seen. And because I was still undercover in all these networks I had joined to write my QAnon book, I was seeing this insane stuff. I saw accusations that uh the voice was a surreptitious campaign to make white children get into rap music. Um, there was the accusation that it was gonna steal your backyard and barbecue areas. It was wild. And then there was a really key um video that went around that the talking head in it was Nicola Charles, who used to be on Neighbours, whose career has taken very different and somewhat unexpected or expected direction post neighbours where she made a propaganda video um pushing the no case based on this idea that it was a conspiracy by the UN, that the United Nations was gonna steal your your land, and that's what it was all about, and citing all these sort of nonsense interpretations. And by this stage, of course, I've written my book on Watching the Voice, and I am now a PhD student, um, studying this stuff at university level because I have so much information, I'd rather like to um to give something back to the knowledge class about the things that I've seen and learned. And in the wake of the voice, all of this analysis has come out by disinformation academics in Australia who work uh in understanding transmission and network effects and how things get shared and why. Where they were looking specifically at the Nicola Charles video and a collection of other internet artifacts from that time. And one of the ways, this is a chilling piece of academic writing, that these texts get so much purchase. It's not just the people who agree with them. And disinformation is emotionally potent, it targets the part of your brain that gets you to act in an emotional way, not in an intellectual way, which is why so much disinformation, like QAnon, is about attack like cruelty to children or threat to children. The most basic instinct of either protecting a child and you know, a parental instinct about keeping children safe, or your own like trauma from a traumatic childhood, which provokes a CPTSD response, for example, that is the stuff that is deliberately targeted by disinformation campaigns to get you to act before thinking. And so you know, and it's not just about children, like it's about you know, nation or safety or w various fears or where however you're being targeted, or the performance of a certain virtue that defines your public character. They find a way to flip an emotional switch to get you to act in a certain way for a certain reason. And during the voice campaign, that Nicola Charles video and others like it, um one of the reasons they got such a purchase was because yes campaigners were commenting on them, going, Oh, but this isn't true. Like I'm gonna fact check this and I'm gonna argue with you about this and getting into like comment wars under these things that were going around, and were actually responsible for amplifying the content so it found a bigger audience and created more sort of noise and confusion than if they had just left it alone. And disinformation campaigners, professional operators, they know this. Like these are the things that they rely on. Internet arguments create amplification. The algorithms don't have opinions, the algorithm's only opinion is how many eyeballs can I get on this material to lead them towards more advertising so my owner can buy more Hawaiian islands for or a yacht, for example. And um, the algorithms will push anything vaguely related to your interest because it's part and parcel of a package to sell you more advertising. So when you engage in something, even if you disagree with it or you're fact-checking it, or you're calling people out or whatever, you're literally amplifying the stuff that is causing the problems. It's designed to do that. Sometimes it happens accidentally, but it becomes part of a discourse that disinformationists jump on and go, hey, I mean, this is one of the things about QAnon, which was completely insane, was that, you know, crazy 4chan participants were probably just playing a game when they started saying, Oh, yeah, Hillary Clinton she's gonna get arrested, it's gonna happen, blah, blah, blah. It was probably just a game of just freaks on the internet being freaks. But within four days, Russian disinformation accounts had 4,000 of them turned on the switches and pushed the material. And then conspiracy theorists were like, oh, well, I've seen these accusations and I'm gonna investigate them. And that's how you create like an almost organic amplification effect. And when it came to the voice, that was happening all the time.

SPEAKER_04 33:38

So let's let's just have a moment to repoint this discussion towards the anti-Semitism and hate that Jewish communities have been experiencing in the past two years. Because that's one of the key things that we're looking at. We're looking at at in this podcast, and we've got all this context now. So post-October 7, you were one of the few very, very high-profile left-wing commentators who immediately sort of showed support to the Jewish community amid what I would describe as an outpouring of hatred towards us in the weeks that followed as well. We've seen that hatred ratchet up post-Bondi, and we've seen absolute, like the disinformation around, you know, it's a false flag, Mossad did it, it feels relentless, the amount of disinformation around the Jewish community and around the specific the specifics of Bondi. Where does online hate and the sort of conspiracy stuff sit in the last two years and what contribution has it made to that? And also all forms of hatred, because we know all forms of hatred are connected. Specifically on for the Jewish community, where do you see that? You've you've observed it as a as a sort of, you know, I I want to say removed third party, but you're not, because you've got Jewish friends, you live in Australia, you're just as affected as everyone else when you see violence on our shores in the name of hatred and conspiracy. What are your thoughts?

SPEAKER_03 35:17

Well, I mean, I will not be breaking any news to you or probably the listeners of this podcast by saying anti-Semitism is a two and a half thousand-year-old disinformation campaign. And one of the things that became um very obvious to me when I was doing my QAnon research for my book was just how quickly you got to the anti-Semitic content. Like that the issue was there were Nazis on 4chan. There were Nazis on 4chan. I there's an essay that I quote in my book saying the the issue with 4chan and it's you know free speech, absolutist, free for all was that you might be saying anti-Semitic things ironically, you know, and in the and the extremity culture of 4chan and the sort of games that they played, saying the most offensive things possible, um, a lot of which involved anti-Semitic language or just nakedly anti-racist language. You're a combination of of those. I'll leave it up to your imagination to put the worst words you can imagine together into various combinations. Um, this essay that I quote in the book says the thing is that you might be being ironic, but Nazis just see an opportunity, and they will take your language and they will make it non-ironic. And they saw an opportunity through this sort of free speech fora to get back into the political discussion. You can look at somebody like Nick Fuentes, who is that far-right lunatic from the United States, um, who has has had dinner with Trump, who is massively influential on the American mainstream right now, and this was like some small-time anti-Semitic punk complaining about, you know, Jews going to Burger King or whatever. That's what we're dealing with, was that that ironic use of language, which you know was anathema to all of the cultural decisions that were made in the wake of the Second World War and knowledge of the Holocaust, were those those social values of protection never again were just being shredded in these places because it was like edgy and ironic and whatever, and and the Nazis moved in because they always do, because they don't go away, they're always out there somewhere. And the issue with anti-Semitism is it's been around for so long, it's totally it's culturally familiar in the West, and it's absolutely invisible to a lot of people. So there are people who will say and do explicitly anti-Semitic things, who, when challenged, will literally look like Bambi with the innocence of, but that's but what are you talking about? Like I have no problem, which is I've got Jewish friends and the rest of it, and it's like let let me take you let me take you through a few um tropes of anti-Semitic hatred. The Pizzagate notion, so Pizzagate, that conspiracy theory was that Hillary Clinton Witch King and Marina Obramovich and Huma Aberdon, who um was Hillary Clinton's uh chief of staff who was a Muslim woman who was married to Andy Wiener, who was a sex offender, as it turned out, which is quite upsetting, um, who was a Jewish democratic politician from New York. Like they were apparently having these satanic rituals underneath a pizza restaurant in Washington, DC, that was run by, you know, like a partnership of guys who were queer and had a lot of drag coins, a lot of punk acts, used called comet ping pong. Used to go there and play ping pong and drink margaritas and eat pizza. My friend Rachel was there the day this happened. Um, she had been like drinking margaritas with her friend, her friend had to go. Rachel went next door to a bookstore to pick up a book she'd ordered, came out. There's a man on the ground, face on the tarmac hands behind his back being arrested, guns everywhere, and that guy had heard these crazy internet conspiracy theories about this, you know, underground basement with children being tortured by Hillary Clinton in a pizza restaurant, and he'd gone with guns to shoot up the place and liberate the children. And the pizza restaurant, by the way, had no basement. He shot open a computer cupboard, like and my friend Rachel walks into the street seeing this going on, going, what is happening? And unfortunately, as Rachel now knows, it only got worse from there. But that in itself, that whole notion of the dark basement, you know, these ritual practices involving, you know, witch kings and um, you know, dark forces stealing children, that is an anti-Semitic conspiracy theory that has existed since the Romans, and this persecution of an ethno-religious community um for having different rituals and you know different religious beliefs and practices got drawn into this um deliberate mischaracterisation because everybody loves having a you know persecuted minority to persecute, um, got drawn into this whole sort of mythology of Jews stealing children, originally Roman children, then Christian children, torturing them for their blood and participating. This is the blood libel.

SPEAKER_02 40:19

Although Izzy did the majority of the interviews, I also spent a bit of time with a few of our guests, including Adam Louis Klein. Adam is a writer, anthropologist, and philosopher, and he is a founder of the movement against anti-Zionism, MAAZ. His work explores Jewish peoplehood, Jewish sovereignty, and contemporary forms of anti-Jewish hate, drawing connections between civilization, identity, recursive ethnography, and the politics of indigenity. I started by asking Adam about the anti-Semitism that's present in the university sector.

SPEAKER_06 40:58

So in academia, in Western academia, it's actually extremely recent. So we we don't really have mainstream sort of anti-Zionist hegemony in academia uh until the 2000s. Right. So before the 2000s in the West, the anti-Zionism that appeared in the West largely was uh projected from the Soviet Union, anti-Zionist propaganda campaign that started post-1967. Uh they basically established institutes called, you know, it was a pseudoscience called Zionology, where they studied Zionism as this imperial bourgeois conspiracy to oppress the working class and and socialist movements all over the world. And they projected this um through, you know, pamphlets, publications, uh, et cetera, into the West, into Western leftist communist groups. And so it had a bit of a presence within the third worldist movements as far as they made themselves known in the West. Now there were also Arab nationalist intellectuals, like Konstantin Zurich or Fayez Saeg, who were usually Protestant uh, you know, or Christian Arab intellectuals who for a long time uh uh had relationships with Levantine um sort of Christian missionaries who came from the US, right? And often spoke English. So they were another source, and eventually you get someone like Edward Saeed, who was an academic in the 70s and 80s and 90s, who who helped really transform Middle Eastern departments, um Middle Eastern studies departments, sorry, into kind of uh anti-Zionist departments, but still it it was confined, right? It wasn't until the 2000s, after Oslo failed, right, and after the Second Intifada, um and the Durban Conference Against Racism, it's a United Nations Conference in in South Africa, that anti-Zionism really started to gain a strong foothold in the West. And you have this thing called settler colonial theory that they started to develop and they started to construct Jews uh and Israel, right, as as a colonial enterprise, right, to to replace the so-called indigenous uh Palestinian population. And that was something that never really gained traction in the West before that, because most people understood that Jews are an indigenous, or if they didn't use that term, that the the Israel's the ancestral homeland of the Jewish people. They understood Israel and Palestine as a territorial or religious conflict. They didn't think Jews were inherently genocidal uh white settlers in Palestine. But that started to become uh kind of a trendy theory in the academy. It was just developed by a group of scholars who assumed it as a premise. They spoke amongst themselves until eventually they had the kind of moral legitimacy, the moral sort of trendiness of indigenous rights and and this whole kind of so called woke discourse behind them, and they were just able to capture the academy, especially after October seventh. It just accelerated. And for so many people who who grew up uh you know in that kind of world, that anti colonial kind of anti racist world, it just fit too smoothly into the grooves of Of people's moral intuitions to say, oh, Israel's a settler colonial state committing genocide. It's sort of the epitome of everything that's wrong with the West.

SPEAKER_02 44:08

As we've heard from a few of our guests, Adam is naturally more progressive, but has found since October 23 that his more progressive community has actually rejected him due to the fact that he's Zionist.

SPEAKER_06 44:25

Well, it was very hard, right? Because I tried to kind of reason with them. I tried to have debates with them. I said, you know, let's talk about it. Let's talk about the Israel-Palestine conflict. When I was younger, I sort of absorbed pro-Palestinian stuff. I was even a little pro-Palestinian, but now I'm sort of reconsidering. Um I actually think, given what happened on October 7th, an Israeli military response makes sense. I hear what you're saying about civilians, but I've looked at the data, etc. I quickly realized that there was just no rational conversation to be had with these people. There was no amount of counter evidence that would make them change their views, and they didn't engage with you as an interlocutor, right? They didn't engage and said, Oh, I want to understand your point of view. You know, let's hash it out. They engaged with you as someone who was a threat, who was marked as a so-called Zionist, and who was if you mentioned the term anti-Semitism, you were part of an evil conspiracy to shut them down. You were using anti-Semitism to justify genocide. So you were not someone to have kind of a political discussion uh about some overseas conflict with. You were marked as someone who was participating in evil actions, that you were an agent of genocide. And so I realized at that point that there really was no basis for rational discussion with these people, that they are spreading libels, that what they are doing is using sort of majority power, mass power, and and forming themselves into uh a hate mob and discriminating against other people. And I had to try and find a way to speak back to that. Because when you when you just try and say, I disagree, or that's not true, it's not a genocide, right? It just reproduces this pattern of, well, then they can just keep repeating the libels and call you a genocide denier and a Zionist, etc. The only way to intervene in this behavior was to start describing anti-Zionism itself, to talk about them instead of talking about us, instead of talking about Israel, to explain what they were doing and to condemn it on those terms. And the more you tried to kind of, let's say, cut off a limb, say, oh, you know, maybe I see what you're saying about the West Bank, or I'm not necessarily a fan of all of Netanyahu's policies, or I even I don't love Netanyahu, like I hate Netanyahu, it wouldn't really matter. For them, Israel itself is constructed as essentially evil, right? And Netanyahu is just a symbol of Israel's evil. You know, whatever if some Israelis commit a criminal act on in the West Bank, it's just a symbol of Israel's uh inherent evil. So it to sort of performatively condemn things about Israel, to try and gain credibility in their eyes, is actually to reduce your own credibility, to intervene and to condemn anti-Zionism as such.

SPEAKER_01 47:09

We've been speaking to fascinating people, and it was great, all these people that you've been getting access to, and you know, because Samaris is like he's a doyen of the polling world. All the other people in this episode, Zach Schaefer, Michelle Grossman, Van Batham, and of course Adam Louis Klein. Izzy, where are we going in our final episode?

SPEAKER_04 47:32

So this is where we start to look forward and we start to look at how we can unfuck this situation that we find ourselves in. And I mean, you could do a whole series just on that topic, but we have really tried to distill it and we've spoken to some really fantastic people, one of whom is Pastelal, who is one of the absolute shining lights of multiculturalism and social cohesion in this country and and cross-cultural and interfaith dialogue. So I can't wait to share this with you. Um, but ultimately, where we're going is how do we unfuck it.

SPEAKER_01 48:09

I'm Rob Caldor.

SPEAKER_04 48:10

I'm Izzy Oderberg. Thanks for joining us.

SPEAKER_02 48:16

If you're enjoying our content and you're interested in some more amazing content, listen to Asham to Admit by the Jewish Independent. It's a podcast for everyone ashamed to admit, they are not across the big issues and events affecting Jews in Australia, Israel, and around the world. Have a listen, you know you wanna