Understanding Intellectual Anti-Semitism

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It's actually one of the earliest writings of Marx in which he articulates his theory about basically

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Judaism as the worship of money, the love of business, hockstering, so on and so forth.

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And then he says this great line saying what we need to do is we need to liberate humanity basically from Judaism.

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And by this, he meant liberating humanity from capitalism, liberating humanity from commerce, from trade, from so on and so forth.

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Now, this way of thinking itself is central to the development of intellectual anti -Semitism.

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I read his piece, which is called Anti -Semitism is Humanism, and I have a number of his other pieces now queued up that I want to read.

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And it was one of the most clarifying pieces I've ever read on the academic, historic kind of framing of what anti -Semitism is.

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And, you know, we're going to get into even the term anti -Semitism. I've said before, I don't care for the term in the popular or political spheres because I think it's used as a hammer of the left just against anyone, even just modern, average, ordinary

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Christians. But I think that there is a historic 19th century definition, and much of the left has been informed by this.

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And the more I looked into Hussein, the more I realized his autobiography is absolutely fascinating.

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And I'm going to let him tell the story. I'm not going to tell it for him. I'm going to let him talk for the most of this podcast and tell you about his being raised in Egypt and the

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Muslim Brotherhood and seeking asylum in the United States. And then why he wanted to tackle this particular issue and maybe how some of his research can apply to the current situation.

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So with that, Hussein, thank you for being part of the podcast today. Oh, and I failed to mention, if people want to find your work,

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Critique and Digest is the substack. And you are a researcher at the

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Institute of Study of Global Anti -Semitism. So thank you for coming. Thank you for having me.

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Just a quick correction. The Abrahamic Metacritique, if you just put that in Google, you'll find my work.

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Right. Okay. The Abrahamic Metacritique. And you can go check that out. So I want to start at the beginning here and maybe get some autobiography from you.

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Because when I wanted to have you want to talk about the sort of your academic angle and study and research of mostly 19th century anti -Semitism in the writings of Marx and Hegel and others.

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But when I started looking into your biography a little, I was just absolutely fascinated. So tell me about growing up in Egypt, getting involved with the

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Muslim Brotherhood, converting to Orthodox Coptic Christianity and being in the

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United States now. Well, first of all, thank you. Thank you for having me. It's a pleasure to get the opportunity to speak to you and to your audience.

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As you said, yes, I'm originally from Egypt. I was born in 1989, grew up in Egypt in the troubled 90s and in the 2000s.

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And they were troubled because those were the primary decades of rising

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Islamism and radical Islamic movements in the Middle East in general. I mean, it started really with the

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Islamic Revolution in 1979. And then throughout the 80s and 90s, you get this rising extremism that then culminated, of course, in the rise of international jihad movements.

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9 -11 and 10 years later, you have Hamas, Hezbollah, all of these movements.

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And then 10 years after 9 -11, you get, of course, the Arab Spring and ISIS. So I'm basically from the generation that saw these massive upheavals and turmoils in the

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Middle East. And my life was largely determined by it. Growing up in Egypt in the 90s,

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I grew up in a middle -class family. You know, I saw it happening. It was kind of part of it.

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For instance, you know, early in the 90s when I was a child, there was not a single woman in our family that had her hair covered.

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It was Arab culture and Egyptian culture was largely conservative, but it was kind of a very modern kind of conservative

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Muslim culture. That is people, you know, people are Muslim. They go to Friday prayers.

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They fast Ramadan. They celebrate the major holidays. But they're also living in a modern nation state that have a national identity, and they enjoy a modern lifestyle.

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You know, even the major events in life, you know, you go to a wedding. The groom is wearing a suit.

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The bride is wearing, you know, a big white dress. They're cutting cake, just completely modern life.

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And it was through the 90s that you could see some major, as I said, major transformations.

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Like by the 2000s, for instance, not a single woman in my family had her hair uncovered.

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It took only one decade for this transformation to happen. And you saw increasing religiosity in society and religiosity of the worst kind, some of the worst kind possible.

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Extremism, just a hostility towards a modern culture, more hostility towards the

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Christian minority and so on, and their proliferation of radical and extreme movements.

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And, of course, there was a pivot or really a watershed moment when, of course, 9 -11 happened, because suddenly you have the rise of these jihadist movements who have these grand visions of Islam and the world, a cosmic struggle against the

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West, Jews, Zionism, so on and so forth. Telecommunications were changing rapidly.

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That's when Al Jazeera became known. For example, most Westerners never heard about Al Jazeera before 9 -11.

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By the way, there are a lot of Arabs also who haven't heard about Al Jazeera before 9 -11. It was really that era in which kind of the star of Al Jazeera rose, feeding kind of 24 -hour news and images of poor

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Palestinians being killed, speeches of bin Laden, so on and so forth.

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You had the war in terror. You had the war in Iraq. And it's just there was an air of struggle and ideology and radicalism.

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And as a young person, you naturally get attracted to this. I was attracted to a lot of this, like young people.

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It's like a living and real version of Star Wars, where there is an actual battle between the evil empire and the poor resistance.

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And I started going to radical mosques and started becoming very militant. And anti -Semitism or hatred towards Jews and Israel have always been central to all of these radical movements, even as they diverge from one another.

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Just the idea of Palestine as the central axis of all ideological dreams and fascination of historical fulfillment, of political salvation, of religious redemption, they all feed back ultimately to the idea of Palestine and liberating

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Palestine. And all the world evils will also always feed back to Israel, Zionism that represents everything.

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It represents colonialism, imperialism, Western villainy, Western war on Islam and Muslims and Arabs and so on and so forth.

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So I found for me, this was a very important topic. It's fascinating. And I decided to learn about it as much as I want.

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Back then, high -speed Internet was starting in the Middle East. So I started to go online and try to kind of teach myself everything

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I could, including Hebrew. And to cut a long story short, ultimately, in a few years, this effort completely transformed the way

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I think about all of this. And I started realizing that basically

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Egyptian culture was feeding on massive delusions, destructive ones, and that none of these understandings of the world actually have any close relationship to reality.

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Anti -Zionism, anti -Semitism, the obsession with Jews, anti -Westernism, and all of this tied together.

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Hatred for America, the sad support for Jihad and Islamic movements, so on and so forth.

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And I started talking about some of these issues that obviously brought me to conflict with my family, with people around me, and ultimately with the state.

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And of course, all of this happened during also a period of kind of spiritual loss and identity loss.

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And because now I was just losing completely every identity that I grew up in, that also culminated in me, thankfully, making my way to the church and making the way to Christ.

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And eventually, I had to leave Egypt, and I came to the United States in 2012. And since then,

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I've basically dedicated a lot of my work to try to understand how did this happen?

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How did a society like the one that I grew up in ended up organizing the way it thinks, religiously, morally, and politically on a single conflict, which is the conflict against Israel, that is now considered the embodiment of this cosmology of evil?

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That is, how did this become the way a very large number of people think?

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And I am one of those people. That is, I don't see them as evil. I don't see them...

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I grew up with my parents. You know, they are... How did it come to be that normal people think this way?

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And that led me, as you read, to the study of the history of anti -Semitism and modern anti -Semitism.

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And ultimately, it led me to the study of basically the

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Enlightenment and post -Christian thought in general, in which 19th century post -Christian thought, in which really the origin of all of this, including, ironically and counterintuitively to a lot of people who think, including the variance of this anti -Semitism and radicalism that then got developed in Muslim societies that also originated in 19th century

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Europe among post -Christian intellectuals. This is absolutely fascinating to me.

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We grew up actually in the same time. I was born in 1989, obviously in a different country, but I was exposed to a lot of religious right stuff, which tended to veer more towards pro -Israel.

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It was when I was about 12 or 13. I read a book and my parents didn't give it to me. I found it on my own that supported a narrative that Jewish interests were behind many of the negative developments that took place in the

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United States, especially from the civil rights era onward. And I didn't

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I wasn't like completely swayed by this, but I was aware of that particular narrative.

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And then in 2015, the alt -right, which was pushing much more of this sort of anti -Jewish narrative, anti -Israel narrative.

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I started tracking some of those guys, not because I agreed with them. I just was curious about where this movement was going.

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And I had some some people I knew who were getting caught up in some of that. And now, though, fast forward to 2025.

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I'm amazed at what's happened just in a period of about two years, even on the

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Christian right. And correct me if I'm wrong. I want to get into this deeper with you. But is this the line that you see?

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Because this is the line that I see. It seems like on one side of the line, there are reasonable people who can identify.

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Yes, Jewish people can have in -group preferences and can have very they're very high achievers.

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They can wield power. Some of it is against Christian values in industries like Hollywood. And we can be honest about those facts, that truth.

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But we don't make that the interpretive grid. This is where I think it goes on the other side of the line, where that becomes your ideology.

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And anything that happens, Israel becomes or Jewish interests become the blame for it.

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And I've said before, all the issues we've dealt with, feminism, communism, socialism, liberalism that were here in America, they were here before large groups of Jewish immigrants came in the 1880s from the

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Russian pogrom. So to me, this is like not the start of this. The origin of this isn't always

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Jewish. All the bad things that happen aren't necessarily Jewish. The reason you can't get a home or a girlfriend isn't because of the

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Jews necessarily. And this recent shooter thing has really made this clear to me that there were people without any evidence who are blaming

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Israel immediately. People I knew. So is that the line that you see as well coming from a very different society?

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But they're sort of like people who can see the facts for what they are. But then people who just make this an interpretive grid whereby evil is just associated with Israel or Jewish interests.

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It's one of, I think, one of the aspects of antisemitism.

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It's one kind of it. It exists in many forms. But so this is very difficult to talk about.

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And for disclosure, I work for an institute for the study of global antisemitism. I work for Jewish groups.

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I still work for Jewish groups. And I have no problem talking about what I honestly think about a lot of these things. So, yes,

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I would say that actually, and this has been historically true from my study of antisemitism in the last two centuries.

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They start from real observations. That is, they start from seeing.

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I'll go even further. I will tell you that a lot of the destructive leftist and intellectual movements of the 20th century would not have survived without radical

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Jewish intellectuals. I will go again. Jews pay me, by the way, my salary.

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I will tell you. Now people are just going to discount everything you say. Yeah, they want to.

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Well, they can listen and see. So, yeah, I would even go further than this. I would say and I tell my Jewish friends, many of my

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Jewish friends like this. A lot of the radical ideologies that have been very destructive. Jews have been central, radical

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Jews, not Jews. But that's the thing. You have to make distinctions and understand what you're talking about. Radical Jewish intellectuals have been central and empowered it, and it would not have happened,

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I guess. There is a radical intellectual that's been absolutely central to everything that's been happening in American culture and campus culture in the past 50 years.

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I'm sure that you've heard of him. His name was Edward Said. He invented the whole model of identity politics, of performative identity, of trauma confessions.

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So even there are people who've never heard of him who are just completely living in his shadow.

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And a lot of people talk about him in the context of Middle Eastern politics.

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And he wrote a lot about the Middle East. No, no, I'm not interested in that. I'm interested in the larger way in which he determined very important aspects of American culture.

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He was a radical, disastrous and destructive intellectual in many way. He has a very famous saying,

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I am the last Jewish intellectual. Now, a lot of my Jewish friends who don't like him because he was responsible for a lot of anti -Zionism and anti -Semitism, of course, on campus, basically think that he is appropriating their culture.

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He's originally Palestinian. He's appropriating the culture. He's claiming, what does he mean by being a Jewish intellectual?

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What a lot of them don't understand that he means it in a very specific sense that is established in the tradition of 20th century

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Jewish radicalism, in which the word Jewish means subversive in a good way. I mean, this is

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Jews who established, this is radical Jews who established the meaning of this. Being a Jew means being subversive.

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The queer foil to Christian straightness, the otherness, the subversive otherness to a conformist whiteness, so on and so forth.

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So that's what he meant. And if we agree that this is what Jewish means, he's right.

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But that's the thing. I don't think that this is what Jewish means. I think it means to a subset of subversive people who themselves are actually anti -Jewish.

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That is, even those Jewish radicals, if you know the amount of hatred that they have to Judaism, if they have to their own religion, if they have to the

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Bible, to Jewish history, to Jewish identity, you would understand what actually has been going on.

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So I'm just taking this an example of how there are first impressions, observations that are true, that then become a whole anti -Semitic theory to explain this cosmic conspiracy of Jewish subversion of society.

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So you're right. There is a part of it that the observation is true.

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It's just the use, then absolutized, discounting all other data.

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I mean, you can't just take the rational way of asking questions or the right way of asking questions, because those are people who just ask questions, is that you ask a question.

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You get answers. The answers modify your questions. Usually even you can't accept the answers.

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The answer is just a modification for a new set of questions. And this process goes almost indefinitely.

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But that's not what happens. You ask a question and you get an impression, and that impression gets absolutized, completely suppresses any other important data or input that you should have in order to have a modification, in order to understand the big picture.

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And then, as you said, it becomes an ideology on its own. And it's driven with a lot of people who already made up their mind about this.

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I mean, that's actually very clear who already decided who's the villain, who's already decided who's the bad guy.

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And they're just looking for fodder to fit into their worldview. And the amazing thing is it doesn't actually take a lot of work.

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It's a very lazy kind of way of looking at the world because you don't have to examine data. You can just automatically know who the heroes and the villains are based upon identities.

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And it explains everything. It explains everything. That's an ideology by definition. Yeah, for example, the whole thing with Jewish radicalism in the 20th century, in Marxist movements, queer movements from this movement.

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Great. Who invented these movements? It was actually white post -Christian

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Christians, many times atheist theologians. That is, if you go actually to the origins of a lot of these ideas, a lot of them were

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German atheist Lutheran theologians and sons of theologians who invented these absolutely most destructive ideas.

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And then the Jewish radicals that basically embraced them, they embraced them after the fact.

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And moreover than that, it wasn't only Jewish radicals. There are no white radicals who are embracing these ideas.

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There are no Muslim radicals. As a matter of fact, my entire work on now modern Muslim and Arab intellectual history is that basically.

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I mean, that's a bigger issue. I don't want to go deep into that. But basically that at one point in the early 20th century, the

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Muslim elites internalized so much a lot of these radical modern ideologies, including Marxism and so on.

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And basically what you see today, the Islam that you think that Islam that is a 14th century old.

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It's not a 14th century old religion. It's a 20th century old religion that was shaped mostly by Hegelian philosophy of history and Marxist radicalism and so on.

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And that's why it's so militant and radical. Black radicals in the 1960s and 1970s, they didn't adopt all of these radical ideas.

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So obviously there is a lot of variance here, a lot of input here that you have to see.

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The focusing, Jews are ultimately people who live amongst us. Whatever is happening in society, they are going through it as well.

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The good, by the way, and the bad. And this is why you see. And as you said, they are overachievers. And this is why you see them as central to radical leftist movements.

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You'll find you'll find them also visibly central to liberal movements. And you'll find them central to conservative movements.

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I mean, there is people who posted the shared that post from Charlie Kirk before he died.

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And he was talking about the three people he listened to the most. And they were Jordan Peterson, Ben Shapiro and Dennis Prager.

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That's two Jews out of out of three. He was listening. This is a listening list of America's most important conservative and Christian influencer in a very long time.

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And this speaks to what you said. They are overachievers. You see them everywhere. But if you decide not to actually be ready to the possibility that you actually don't know what's going on.

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And you have to look for all things. And you have to look at all much input in order for you to have a realistic picture about what's going on.

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You will come up with these simplifying stories. So I'd like to maybe go on a historical journey because I think that was the main thing that I found fascinating about your blog.

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Having read Syed and having read or known at least something about Hegel and Marx and needing to trace critical theory in order to explain the

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Black Lives Matter movement. I was resonating with what you said. I thought I've seen the same names come up.

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Fascinating thing. I didn't actually know before I read your piece that Karl Marx had written a pamphlet on the

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Jewish question. I thought, well, why have why do I not know about this? He was ethnically

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Jew himself, but he was critiquing Judaism. And it seems like if I could just summarize this, you can tell me if my summarization is fair.

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You are saying, you're arguing that from the 19th century, Wilhelm Marr and some of these

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Enlightenment rationalists were looking at Judaism and by extension, even Christianity as a foil to their globalist, egalitarian plan.

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Because there was a specificity and a uniqueness to Judaism, the relationship in the

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Old Testament you observe between God and his people, the distinction in their dress and their law, the harshness of some of that law.

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This was something that they believed extended into their culture, into the way that they lived, including capitalism, that they were always set apart, always different, responsible for the alienation of work and labor.

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And so they weren't compatible with modern society, with their utopian plans. Is that a fair assessment?

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Yes, for part of it. Again, it's such a large. So the modernist

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Semitism is such a large movement or a very central. Let me say, let me put it this way.

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It's a central idea to modern thought at large. And this is how

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I got to examine all of these things that you just mentioned. It's actually through my wish to understand what is anti -Semitism.

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I had no knowledge or understanding or will to go and look at Marx and Hegel. It's actually by tracing anti -Semitism kind of backwards.

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That's actually where I got to. The first thing to know about anti -Semitism is that it's an ism.

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And isms are new invention, that it's a modern ideology. There is a tendency amongst a lot of people to make it an eternal occurrence, right?

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Even a lot of Jewish scholars do this, and I disagree with them openly. That basically this is nothing new.

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This is kind of a timeless movement or essence that came with Christianity.

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And it's just continuing with us today. Some people would say even it's pre -Christian. They are generous and they don't want to accuse

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Christianity specifically. And I don't think that this is true. I think this completely misses the point.

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Hatred for Jews has existed historically in persecution of Jews in various forms, in Christian societies, in Muslim societies, in various ways.

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Anti -Semitism is an entirely different phenomenon. Anti -Semitism is an entire way of knowledge that did not exist before the 19th century.

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About man, about society, that centralizes

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Jews one way or the other, and proposes solutions to social problems.

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In a very real way, anti -Semitism is a critical theory. As a matter of fact, that's exactly my claim, that anti -Semitism is the origin of the critical way of thinking, or at least one of the main origins of the critical way of thinking, right?

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You look at society, anti -Semitism tells you things are not what they seem. There are actually forces that are determining the social, political, and financial structures and control it in a way that achieves certain interests.

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And this is your position. And if you want to change these problems, you have to overthrow the structure by overthrowing the powers that control it.

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If I say Jews, this is anti -Semitism. If I say capitalism, by the way, this is Marxism.

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Marxism, that's right. So it's an ism. It's a 19th century ism.

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And the thing about 19th century ism, that means that in order to understand anti -Semitism, you have to understand what happened in the 19th century.

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And in order to understand 19th century, you have to understand the complete atheization of Europe by the

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Enlightenment and European thought. And you have to understand kind of the Enlightenment and specifically the

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German parts of it, which is the central part of this story. Isms in the 19th century. Were basically seen as sciences.

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That is, it was a scientific, that was the period in which this is pure post -Christianity, seeking the true final form of knowledge after Christianity and after the

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Enlightenment, in which basically isms were supposedly these ideologies that were not used then in a pejorative sense, that are also sciences in the sense that they are 100 % real and through them you have, or you're able to completely control society and reality and produce outcomes you want.

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Marxism, of course, is also from the same period.

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But if you go back, so if you go specifically to the Enlightenment, so even before the ism and before the idea of a science, because before science, we had philosophy.

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So you had social, before you had the, those who became social scientists were philosophers a century earlier.

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And then they were theologians a century before that. So you do have the process of the

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Enlightenment itself. Already in the Enlightenment, when the idea of God was substituted by an idea of reason or this kind of a mystical source of all reality, you already see it in the writings of people like Kant that using

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Judaism as the foil against which you are constructing your idea of yourself.

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So to give an example, Kant, of course, his idea is moral autonomy.

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So freedom, freedom happens through moral autonomy. Moral autonomy means you're able to follow your categorical imperative.

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That is, you're able to follow your own inner moral categorical imperative, nothing external.

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If you follow anything external, so if you behave like anything external tells you, whether your desires, whether in external law, you're heteronymous.

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You really, you can't be free. You're just, you have no existence at this point. In the writings of Kant about Judaism, he basically used

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Judaism as the epitome of heteronomy. This is really what, because Judaism is about law.

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You follow law. You're not following any moral categorical imperative.

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You can't really listen to a moral categorical imperative. It imposes on you an external law.

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So basically you can't be free. And of course, if you understand Kantianism, if you're really not free, you're less than human.

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So Judaism makes you less than human. This idea of writing

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Judaism or seeing Judaism as the, or constructing it, imagining it as a complete opposite of what you think you are was an indelible feature of a lot of those

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German Enlightenment thoughts and will continue until after the Enlightenment, until you enter the 19th century.

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You see it also in Hegel. And this is the part that you read. Hegel has one of the most misanthropic and terrible readings of the

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Bible, of the Old Testament, of the story of Abraham you can ever find.

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And I think it's very useful for people to see it in order to understand what is antisemitism, understand that also antisemitism in my perspective can never exist in separation from hostility to the

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Bible and hostility to Christianity. So Hegel would talk about the story.

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Hegel's big idea was unity. That's kind of his mission, the unity and the healing of alienation through the journey of the spirit.

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Summarizing, simplifying. Judaism for Hegel in the way he wrote it is about separation.

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So it's about the lack of unity. Abraham left his family in order to go to this land alone.

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So he hated humanity or the idea of hating his own people, wanted to be separate, wanted to be exclusive.

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And this is, of course, tied to the ideas about Judaism as this exclusivist religion, those particularist people who refused to universalism and so on.

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This way then goes all the way to Marx in the pamphlet that you spoke about in which basically

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Marx talked about Judaism as the worship of money. And this is actually the first time

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Marx, it's actually one of the earliest writings of Marx and in which he articulates his theory of communism, which will really be explained later of all of his later works.

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But basically Judaism as the worship of money, the love of business, hockstering, so on and so forth.

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And then he says this great line saying what we need to do is we need to liberate humanity basically from Judaism.

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And by this he meant liberating humanity from capitalism, liberating humanity from commerce, from trade, from so on and so forth.

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Now this way of thinking itself is central to the development of intellectual anti -Semitism, academic anti -Semitism, and which will produce a lot of the movements that will become known throughout the history, throughout

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Europe by the late 19th century. Can you bring us to the critical theorists at the

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Frankfurt School? And I don't know to what extent Adorno and Horkheimer and all these guys were participating in this, but they were obviously

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Jewish. So I think that's the natural thing that a lot of people who understand critical theory are thinking. And you already addressed this a little bit.

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So many of them are Jewish ethnically. How could they be the ones promoting anti -Semitism, quote -unquote?

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No, they didn't promote anti -Semitism. So my own way of understanding is this.

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So thinking about Jews in this way, in supposedly critical manner, which was critical here is specifically a

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German term. From that critical thinking developed a lot of the most important and dominant social theories and critical thought that dominated the 19th, 20th century, specifically

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Marxism. And we mentioned how central this is. But the idea of anti -Semitism itself and the importance of Jews after that way of thinking developed, they were not really central.

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That is, you could actually kind of ignore it. Your understanding of these things that the world, that you have this universalist project, and that Judaism ultimately will disappear.

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It will wither away and Jews will kind of merge and be assimilated into this new universal humanity.

33:40

And that will be the end of the story, right? Because really Judaism here is the enemy of humanism. And that's why I said anti -Semitism as humanism.

33:47

If you understand Judaism to be hatred for mankind, separation, capitalism, everything that's bad, and you want to be a humanist, then you have to be an anti -Semite.

33:57

And you see, by the way, you see echoes of this today. So is this, just real quick, is this where Zionism in some circles takes the place of Judaism?

34:09

Because I've been doing some research on early Zionism, and initially the majority of Jewish leaders were all against it, didn't like it.

34:16

They wanted to assimilate into these cultures. In fact, the first World Zionist Congress couldn't even take place in Germany because the rabbis said you can't come here and do this.

34:26

Is this sort of like where the separation comes, where you have a lot of Jewish people who are even today on college campuses marching to free

34:34

Palestine? And maybe it traces back to the roots of this 19th century project you're talking about, but it's not

34:42

Judaism per se, it's Zionism that they are against. Well, it takes roots in the 19th century, but all of this is moving.

34:50

So remember that there are a lot of developments that came later, including for Zionism. So as I said, 19th century, the primary story in the 19th century is atheistic humanism.

35:02

That's really the central story. Western thought becoming thoroughly post -Christian, which becomes thoroughly atheistic, thoroughly post -Christian.

35:14

Obviously, this has an effect on everybody, including Jews, and that's what I'm saying, including actually Muslims. People don't think that way, but actually

35:21

Muslims were also reading these books and they were also impressed by them and also thinking, yeah, you know what? The stories of Muhammad are a joke.

35:27

We're moving now to this world, the universal. Now, there were many possibilities of what would come after Christianity.

35:38

The fact that we decided that now we're moving to the post -Christian atheistic humanism doesn't mean that we agree on what it is that we want.

35:47

So humanism could mean different things. So humanism could mean a universal humanism, the way that Marxism thinks.

35:56

It could be also nationalism. So nationalism is a form of humanism, but basically what it means is that man takes place of God in our understanding of the world.

36:10

Anthropology basically replaces theology. That is anthropological study.

36:15

And this is actually how you see the academy is today. Anthropology is a replacement of theology.

36:21

A lot of young secular people, when they want to discuss human behavior and how human behavior...

36:27

They go to anthropological studies. They talk about anthropology because that's really the replacement of theology.

36:33

And politics is the replacement of religion. Psychology, sociology, et cetera. So yeah, and politics become the replacement.

36:41

And this was happening to everybody, including Jews. So not all Jews. We're talking about Christians and Jews, but at the end of the day, we're talking a subset of people.

36:48

I want to make that distinction clear. And Zionism, or the understanding of what

36:56

Christianity and Judaism are, went through phases that correspond to the phases of the development of Western post -Christian thought itself.

37:06

And to give an explanation for this, when Kant was talking about Judaism, he was not talking about Judaism as a race because that idea had not existed yet.

37:14

But yet he was not talking about Judaism as a religion because we were already past that idea.

37:20

He was talking about Judaism as a historical idea, as a principle that gives a universal philosophy.

37:28

So that was an idealist way of thinking. Same thing, Hegel, when he talked about this Judaism that's about division and separation and hatred for mankind.

37:35

He was not talking about the people. He was talking about an idea in history. Even his conception of history is idealist.

37:43

By the mid 19th century, you get materialism. And materialism materializes things.

37:49

So you're no longer talking about this metaphysical idea of Christianity and Judaism. You're talking about things that are eminent in matter.

37:57

And this gets biologized into race. And this is why Judaism becomes race.

38:04

And part of the change or possibly a race, possibly a nation, there was also disagreements.

38:10

Zionism, yes, comes out in this moment as basically the new phase of Judaism.

38:17

That's the world is entering a phase of nations in which people are then identified as these historical communities.

38:25

And Zionism, for the sake of simplification, seeks to actually take Jews also to that phase that Europe is going into and to use that as to solve what was known at the time as a

38:37

Jewish question, which is anti -Semitism, Jewish assimilation, and so on. Now, anti -Semites also saw things, some of them saw things this way.

38:45

They are a nation or a race, but in very negative terms.

38:51

It's either the anti -race or basically it's actually an anti -nation in terms that it's a degenerative principle for nationhood, for my nation.

39:01

So a lot of this, yes, you can map the structure of this idea on the free Palestine against Zionism. So Zionism represents the attack on humanity.

39:11

But here Zionism is a successor for historical Judaism. I think that's what I wanted to say. And liberating

39:17

Palestine would be saving humanity from that Jewish principle. So could you maybe...

39:26

I'm sorry if I confused you about... No, I think I am tracking with you actually. I think that's very helpful.

39:32

And maybe some people who are listening might need to go back and listen to it again, but that's okay because there's a lot of history.

39:37

And I think you do need to understand a little philosophy, a little history to even grasp the world that we live in now.

39:43

We have on the right a version that has popped up and been more,

39:49

I don't know if I want to say mainstream, but it's become more popular on the internet over the last few years.

39:55

And I don't know to what extent this has similarities and distinctions from what we see on the left, because we're very familiar with what's happened on the left.

40:06

That's been ongoing since I was a kid. They've always been against the state of Israel.

40:12

They've always seen it as a colonial power, a Western power, all the rest. But now I hear similar things happening on the right.

40:18

In fact, I saw recently a BLM leader, a major BLM leader was retweeting everything

40:25

Candace Owens is saying and complimenting her and all the rest. And I'm like, okay, what's going on here?

40:31

Are forces converging or is what's happening on the right something distinct? For example, is...

40:38

And you can pick any character you want, but I'm thinking is something like what a Nick Fuentes is saying. How does that compare to what's happening on the left in BLM circles when they say they are against Zionism in Israel?

40:50

Is there a difference? No, there are differences. But usually, even historically speaking, antisemitism on the right is much more crude, much more populist and kind of unashamedly conspiratorial.

41:06

The left by its nature, is a rationalistic academic political movement.

41:14

It's always been like that. It's led from the academy lifted theories or philosophical theories. They are not like conservative or right -wing movements who are basically...

41:27

You either have nationalist leaders, you have religious sentiments.

41:33

The left is not like that. They go by... They are followed by... Or they follow thinkers and philosophers and so on and so forth.

41:39

So the antisemitism on the left is never crude. That is, it comes in very sophisticated and elaborate systematic structures of thought and theories.

41:51

For example, they will tell you we're not antisemitic. I'll give you an example to clarify.

41:59

So you can say that Israel is an evil country, that everything that's been happening wrong in the

42:05

Middle East is actually because Israelis have been doing it and because of them, America went to Iraq.

42:11

But basically, Israelis, that tiny country, is actually the cause of all of this death and destruction that we've seen in the

42:18

Middle East. If you say this, it's either somebody who's a

42:24

Middle Eastern background and obsessed about Israel or something more a right -wing type.

42:30

The left doesn't say it that way. The left would say, oh, this is antisemitism. But here is their idea. Their idea is

42:36

Israel or Zionism acts as a forward operating base for global capitalism and imperialism that wants to ensure the entire dependency of the

42:46

Middle East on Western security and Western hegemony. And that way it secures the access of Western capital to whether Middle Eastern resources in terms of oil, they used to say that in the 50s and 60s, or control over this.

42:59

And in that way, then it empowers authoritarian governments in order to suppress their own nations and take away their freedom, creating the reaction of populism and Islamism and so on.

43:12

So it's a much more sophisticated way to say exactly what you said, what I said earlier, that all the problems actually are because of Israel.

43:22

So when you walk into the Holocaust Museum in DC, I don't know if you've been there, one of the first things you'll see, because we went in my grad school

43:29

Holocaust class, we went to the museum. And one of the first exhibits is a video on Christian antisemitism.

43:38

And I spent a lot of the time in my class debunking much of this, studying John Chrysostom, studying

43:44

Martin Luther. I don't believe those people were involved in any of the ism, as you said earlier, this was a separate thing.

43:50

This was more of a religious critique they had, but the Nazis obviously appropriated many of the things

43:56

Luther said in order to justify, he was a bulk hero. So they justified their policies based on snippets they could take.

44:05

Do you see Nazism, we'll say, and as a right -wing movement, that's how it's categorized, as tracing the way that the

44:15

Holocaust Museum says it traces back to Christian sources, or is this more of a 19th century ism like we're talking about with the left?

44:25

Because I see it more as that, but I'd be curious to hear your thoughts on that. It's obviously an extremely complex issue.

44:33

So I agree with you. I know. I agree with you. I actually see there's a lot of two simplifications, like the story of 2000 years of antisemitism, it's false.

44:42

It's not just, oh, it's not complex enough or it's very simplified. No, it's actually false. I do believe that.

44:50

Having said that, the history of Christian anti -Judaism is real, right? I read the church fathers and you do have this outbursts and I don't agree with a lot of them.

44:58

And so it's just like, you were wrong there. I agree. Okay. The religious critique of Judaism is different, but ultimately, yes, this critique was transformed in history into a social reality.

45:11

That is, you treat Jews based on it. And that's, I think, the problem that a religious critique doesn't stay a religious critique.

45:18

It actually becomes now a way society deals with people. This is how you become a persecuted minority and so on and so forth.

45:25

This is clearly happened. Yeah, isms are a 19th century thing.

45:31

And you have to start from there. You can't start, you can't tell me, oh, this is basically, no, this is an eternal, there's just a new phase of Christian.

45:42

Because ultimately, this very large historical perspective, I really don't actually believe in any of them.

45:49

Anti -Semitism has to do directly with the emergence, as I said, of post -Christian identity, post -Christian thought, the attempt to find these things.

45:57

And post -Christian moralists, obviously, a lot of these attempts failed. And we're living through their failure, basically.

46:04

We're one attempt after the other to find alternatives to Christianity that a lot of them end up disastrous.

46:11

Now, anti -Semitism is central to this because it achieves multiple results. And as a matter of fact, as I said earlier, and they want to emphasize this, if you read a lot of the anti -Semitic writings of the 19th century, 19th century

46:22

Germany, they were primarily attacks on Christianity. They were primarily attacks on the

46:29

Bible and on the biblical worldview, on biblical values, because it was understood correctly, to the credit of all of those

46:38

German thinkers, it was understood correctly that Christianity, by the end of the day, is an outgrowth of Judaism.

46:47

That is, it was Judaism that gave birth to Christianity. And the hatred for Christianity was many times expressed best through hatred to Judaism that deprived us from the pagan beauty of the classical world, from the pagan beauty of the

47:07

Teutonic legends and mythologies of Central Europe. And this idea made its way, a lot of people who are familiar with Nazi history know that the

47:15

Nazis talked to this way. Yeah, and there was attempts among the pastors and clerics who were pro -Nazi to de -Judaize their

47:25

Bibles, their hymnals, to make it compatible with Nazism. But in so doing, obviously, they completely transformed

47:32

Christianity into something different. It was subservient to Nazi ideology. So what I'm trying to establish,

47:37

I suppose, is whether or not there's a similar source here, that the same waters that we see on the right that glorify

47:47

Hitler, and then if you read Hitler's writings, he thinks that every impulse is biological self -preservation.

47:54

He thinks that Jews represent the enemies of mankind. I mean, very sweeping ideological statements he makes.

48:01

It seems to me like there is a similarity there. And I know you're saying it's crude, it's more populist, but it seems like they're drinking from a similar water and it's in the 19th century, and maybe that's the place to look.

48:12

I'm not saying to discount Christian history, but that would be the primary place to look. That's what I'm trying to establish, if you agree with that.

48:18

No, I agree. So historically, okay, the right and the left in Europe were different than the right and the left. But basically, if we're going to see the right and the left, fascism and communism, yes, they are both offshoots of the same source.

48:30

That is, they are both... It's an in -house fight. That's what I always try to tell people. Not to mention that, ultimately, any struggle is mimetic.

48:40

I mean, that is, it starts a mimetic dynamic. That is, the people who fight each other end up mimicking each other.

48:47

So, of course, they feed into each other. What is happening today? I'm always, despite that I talk about all these historical things,

48:54

I'm very cautious of straight lines. There are no straight lines. Actually, we're living in a postmodern age. Things today are just complete pastiche of just these influences from every source that comes and feeds into each other.

49:11

You know, I saw the other day... That was wild. I saw the other day a Christian nationalist post that was quoting approvingly, celebrating and using

49:23

Nietzsche. And that was very, very weird. That is weird.

49:29

Given how Nietzsche felt about Christianity and what he wrote about Christ and what he wrote about Jesus.

49:36

I mean, he hated nothing. Friedrich Nietzsche, the German philosopher, probably hated nothing more in the world than Christianity.

49:42

He thought that Christianity was a source of all evil. But that's the thing.

49:47

I don't think that those kids or those people today, I don't think they read Hitler. I don't think they know much about National Socialism.

49:53

Actually, what was National Socialism? I don't think they read these thinkers. I think it's really this influences of impressions and half ideas that become their own kind of ideology or symbolic mythological matrix or complex that they get involved in.

50:19

But if we are looking for coherence, I don't think we'll find much coherence in there.

50:28

Yeah, I see that in the internet, especially. It's in the news cycles, too, are so short that you move on another topic before you finish evaluating the previous topic.

50:40

And you just sort of settle on a theory about what happens or what Wright's way to pursue a remedy is in a previous problem before ever actually considering it fully.

50:50

I want to ask two final questions, really. One of them is more personal, but do you see parallels?

50:56

Are there things that concern you about what you see happening in the West or in the United States that you think to yourself, goodness, this is similar to what

51:04

I saw in Egypt? Because I sense maybe that coming from you, but I'm not sure. And then what are some of the solutions to this problem, this ideological problem?

51:16

Because it acts sort of like as a brain virus, but at the same time to not throw out the baby with the bathwater and just say, you know,

51:24

Jewish people, secular Jewish radical, as you said, the Jewish people don't have negative influences, et cetera.

51:30

Okay, let me start with this last part. I just want to make clear because I don't want to… Of course, they are a subset of Jews.

51:37

Even they are a subset of secular Jews. There are a lot of secular Jews who hate those Jewish radicals, by the way.

51:44

There are a lot of secular Jews who are conservative. There are a lot of secular Jews who are not conservative. Maybe they are more liberal, but they are in no way on board with radicalism in general.

51:56

Moreover, today, and this is the fact that I have… If you go to actual radical academic environment, you will not find them dominated by Jews.

52:07

Actually, they are dominated by third -world immigrants, sadly. That is, the post -colonial intellectual is today the vanguard of radicalism.

52:17

I noticed that. And this is, by the way, that was the plan that I said. Edward Said, that's why he said, I am the last intellectual

52:24

Jew, right? Jewish intellectual. That was the idea that the post -colonial intellectual is now supposedly…

52:30

That's the fantasy. And again, this fantasy is a myth. It's important to understand because it's the myth of radicalism about itself.

52:37

So it's important to understand how do they think about themselves. But this is actually not true. But this is how they think, that Jews were the vanguard of the radicalism to subvert white,

52:50

Christian, heteronormative, so on and so forth. And now the post -colonial intellectual is going to inherit this glorious place.

52:58

That's the idea. And if you go truly to a lot of these places, for example, somebody told me the other day, by the way, the

53:05

Soros Foundation, yes, it's the Soros Foundation, but almost all of its management is women, brown and black women.

53:13

It's women of color, which makes sense if you think about it. Yes, of course, that's how it is. That's where the progressive world is today.

53:22

So talking about Jewish radicalism, I think it's an important subject, but it's overblown in proportion.

53:31

I agree. People lack a completely historical and adequate understanding of what that is.

53:37

Real quick, I want you to continue. One other example I'll supply here, and I have a million of them, but one is

53:43

I remember about a year ago there was an anti -abortion testimony.

53:49

And a lot of the Christian right passed this clip around of this lady who was on,

53:55

I think it was a board, I think it was in the state of Georgia. She was on some kind of board there, elected official, and she said,

54:02

I'm Jewish, my Jewish values are abortion. And this got passed around. Well, I watched the whole thing.

54:08

And sure enough, there was a female, I think it was Episcopalian priest or pastor or whatever, rector, who goes up there and she says basically the same exact thing.

54:22

This is part of my Christian faith. You know who was ignored in that? So to reinforce your point, so keep going.

54:28

I'm sorry. I just had to inject. No, it's a great addition. That's exactly what people need to understand. Yes, it's true, but it's not the

54:34

Jewish community alone that went through this. If you go and ask an Orthodox rabbi, go and ask an Orthodox rabbi about this woman and see what it says.

54:41

Forget about just a normal Jewish person or a normal Jewish family. Go ask it about this. Yes, there is a group of radicals amongst the same exact way that there are cliques of radicals in amongst every other community, and together they form a very large group, and they are very capable and powerful because they control all the cultural institutions and so on and so forth.

55:05

And we have to deal with them in the way that we deal with them. So your first part of the question is 100 % true.

55:15

There are a lot of things that I look around and it's like, Oh my God, this is like Egypt all over. The radicalism, the fake news, just the complete destruction of the value of truth.

55:30

That is you see people having absolutely no problem spewing lies that they made up.

55:37

What really puzzles me about people who put that fake information and the false stuff that go viral, that somebody sat there and made this up.

55:47

They know, even if no one else knows that they made it up, they know that they made it up and they were fine with it.

55:53

They just made up stuff and they just sent it out there. You know, growing up in Egypt, that was actually all the information.

56:00

I mean, you know, fake news is a recent phenomenon. It's like I grew up with fake news. That's all what you had.

56:05

We had nothing but fake news. So yeah, there's a lot of terrible things. The antisemitism, the radicalism, the complete destruction of the distinction between truth and falsehood, identity politics.

56:20

If you look at the Middle East, the Middle East is basically identity politics on steroids. That's really a lot of the conflicts that you have.

56:27

So seeing this also becoming this powerful culture here is scary.

56:36

Now you're asking about the solution. In my opinion, I am a schizophrenic person.

56:44

I mean, I can speak about practicality, what I think is like immediate things. It's just because of the many jobs that I held.

56:49

I can speak about the practical things I think that can be done. Generally, I don't think any of this can be solved other than people going back to seeking

57:01

God. I think ultimately, and I'm not just saying that. I saw it in my life.

57:08

I saw it in the lives of so many people. The destruction of people's even ability to understand religion or to go to religion

57:19

I think is responsible for a lot of what we're seeing today. And this is why, by the way, I want everybody to go back.

57:25

I want Jews to go back to the synagogue. Unlike what people, what the radical or the anti -Semites think,

57:33

Judaism is a wonderful religion. The synagogue is a wonderful place. I have a lot of friends who are rabbis who are great people.

57:39

And I want a lot of my circular Jewish friends to go there instead of going to these prestigious universities that are ruining our lives.

57:46

And same thing with a lot of the young Americans and the young white and Christian people and post -Christians who are completely lost.

57:53

You're not going to find meaning for your life anywhere else.

57:58

That's just a fact, and we need to work together. Now practically speaking, no, there are a lot of things to be done practically, fighting misinformation by providing real information, providing people with actual clarity, with opportunities to discuss ideas rationally and reasonably with real information, and ultimately to build, and this is really

58:18

I think the most important thing to be done, to build alternative institutions to all the institutions that now got captured and destroyed.

58:24

And I don't think none of them is coming back. I think a lot of the universities are simply gone, good riddance, and basically need to start a new institutional structure that compensates and fights even the evil influence really of a lot of these institutions.

58:40

I couldn't agree more with so much of what you said. I think that's why I went a little crazy, not crazy, but I was,

58:47

I made, I don't know how many posts yesterday about Candace Owens and what she was saying, because I was like, I don't want my listeners, my followers to buy this.

58:55

Some of them probably listened to her and it's hard. You need prudence to know what battles to fight. One thing

59:01

I would probably disagree with though, and I just, I'll say this. I believe the

59:07

God of Christianity is the true God. And I, so when you say Jews go back to the synagogue,

59:12

I think, I think Christianity is going to look a bit different in different places. Anglo -Protestantism has its own unique flavor.

59:20

It's hymns, it's pews and everything. But I would like to see Jewish people come to know the

59:25

Lord Jesus Christ, their Messiah. That's my heart for them. But I understand the sentiment you're saying that we need to get back to a transcendent standard for truth.

59:36

We need to get back to worshiping someone external who gives us law, which is exactly contrary to what the 19th century ideologues that we talked about believe.

59:44

So I think this has been so fascinating and so helpful. And I'm so grateful for your voice out there talking about these things, doing this research.

59:52

I would just encourage people, if you want to research more, you can go to, it's the

59:57

Abrahamic Metacritique. It's critiqueanddigest .substack .com. And I don't know if there's any, can people check out the

01:00:05

Institute of the Study of Global Anti -Semitism? Yes, it's called

01:00:10

ISGAP. You just put it in Google, you can find the website. But mainly you'll find a lot of research.

01:00:16

We've been tracking foreign funding to American universities that are responsible for promoting and empowering a lot of these radicalism, primarily

01:00:23

Qatar. Qatari money, I'm sure people heard about this. You don't hear a lot of these very

01:00:28

America First passionate pundits talk about this a lot. But you have billions of dollars coming to American universities.

01:00:36

Billions of dollars are channeled in very specific ways that empowers radical, anti -American, anti -Semitic, anti -Zionist professors.

01:00:47

And we publish a lot about that. I think we should talk about that maybe sometime because I started looking into, because AIPAC obviously gets a lot of attention.

01:00:55

I started looking into the funding coming from places like Qatar and China, not just under FARA regulations, but into our universities.

01:01:04

And it's a lot. So anyway. It's a lot of money. And by the way, AIPAC is, they are

01:01:10

American citizens. They are pro -Israel. I work for Jewish organizations. The money that, you know, it's donations from American Jews who live in this country.

01:01:20

It's their civil organization that basically foreign money from undemocratic, not just undemocratic regime.

01:01:28

We know that they are anti -American. In the case of Qatar, we know that these people sponsor terrorism all over the

01:01:35

Middle East, whether it was Hamas, whether it was Al -Nusra Front in Syria, so on and so forth. Yet we take our most prestigious universities that have been scolding the country for being misogynist, racist,

01:01:49

Christian, have no problem taking money from those terror -supporting

01:01:56

Middle Eastern countries, taking large sums of money to empower their ideologies here.

01:02:02

I think this is also something very important because also it shows that a lot of the, this is not a self -contained problem.

01:02:09

That is the radicalism in America. We have our issues, but also now you have all of these foreign countries who basically are involved in pushing the propaganda and the bots and all the things we know.

01:02:21

Yeah. Get them all out. America first. All right. With that, thank you so much, Hussein.