2023-12-23 David Deutsch Antisemitism in Britain
Duration: 00:31:14
Transcript
Razi Ginzberg
Welcome to the Daily Objective, Day 78 of the War in Israel. Today I have the great honor of interviewing renowned Oxford physicist, and of forgetting to lower the volume on my YouTube, Dr. David Deutsch. He’s known for his work on quantum computing, and he has been vocal in recent months about the situation in Israel, the response and the reactions we see here in Britain and elsewhere. Welcome, David. Thank you for joining me.
David Deutsch
Thank you for having me.
Razi Ginzberg
So, you know, today’s a Saturday, right before Christmas. You know, we’re two days before Christmas. It’s Christmas Eve, Eve, or Festivus, depending on your preferred American sitcom. But in central London, it is like every other Saturday, an opportunity for many, many thousands to take to the streets, express supposedly their concern about the situation in Gaza. But we know it’s a lot more than that. Today they are blocking Oxford Street on what is undoubtedly one of the busiest shopping days and what is the busiest shopping street in the country and maybe the world. How do these protests we’ve seen since October 7th on every Saturday, how do they compare, as far as you can tell, to other anti-Israel protests in the past, whether just randomly that took place throughout the year or in different, during different rounds, let’s call it that, in that area, and to just general protests and other activism that we see in this country?
David Deutsch
Well, I’ve never seen anything on this scale in Britain by way of anti-Israel protests. There’s also been, and this is, I think, more important, a rise in anti-Semitism. But I don’t even think that, I mean, this is my idiosyncratic view, the thing which is called anti-Semitism, I would characterize as violence against Jews, incitement against Jews, persecution of Jews, exclusion of Jews from society, that kind of thing. But I think there’s an underlying phenomenon, and that thing which I just called anti-Semitism, that thing goes up and down and tends to have, it tends to break out at times. And some people think it sort of breaks out randomly, and some people think it happens once in a generation or once in two generations. But I think there’s an underlying phenomenon that does not go up and down, which I call the pattern with a capital P. And it’s a pattern of moral derangement, which is very common. It affects people who would not dream of thinking of themselves as anti-Semitic or racist in any way. It affects Jews as well as non-Jews. And it can be defined as a moral view or a moral compulsion to legitimize hurting Jews for being Jews. And that, I think, changes only very slowly over time. It doesn’t have outbreaks. And it occasionally, fortunately, quite rarely gives rise to actual anti-Semitism. So in this respect, the Holocaust is extremely unusual. We think of the Holocaust as something that sort of broke out in 1933 or 1942 or something. But that conceals the fact that underneath the Holocaust and anti-Semitic outbreaks, there is this moral derangement, which was there all the time, which things like Nazism and so on, and all sorts of philosophical movements throughout the millennia have harnessed, made use of. Not they incited it. It’s the other way around. It’s not that Christianity incited anti-Semitism. It’s anti-Semitism was adopted by Christianity opportunistically because it made them more popular. And it’s the same with the Nazis and so on. Now, I can’t say exactly when these outbreaks happen, but they tend to happen when the legitimacy of hurting Jews is challenged. And so there were outbreaks at the time of the Enlightenment when Jews were emancipated and everybody thought anti-Semitism would go away. On the contrary, there was a massive upsurge of anti-Semitism in Western Europe, the very place where the Enlightenment happened, where you would have thought anti-Semitism would have been considered obsolete. But no, that’s exactly where the upsurge of anti-Semitism happened because the Enlightenment challenged the pattern. It challenged the legitimacy of singling out anyone, but in particular, singling out Jews for being hurt. And the existence of Israel, the very existence of Israel from 1948 has been a red rag to the bull of the pattern because Israel is the one place where, by definition, it’s not legitimate to hurt Jews for being Jews. And the one, I say one more thing.
David Deutsch
This has been rather a long, tedious answer. But as well as the Enlightenment being the enemy of the pattern and therefore paradoxically causing the pattern to break out into anti-Semitism, sometimes the greatest enemy of the pattern is the Anglosphere or rather the political institutions of the Anglosphere, Britain and the United States and the other Anglosphere countries. They haven’t had. How can I put this? There’s plenty of the pattern in those countries, but actually enacting it is violently opposed to the basic political philosophy and everyone’s assumptions about what the state is and what to expect from other citizens and so on. And so the pattern has been less historically in the Anglosphere than in every other country of the world. So I’ll stop there.
Razi Ginzberg
So I’ll actually jump to something I was going to ask you later because I think it kind of fits in. So I was checking earlier today and you know Jeremy Corbyn’s tweet from October 17th accusing Israel of the Al-Ahli Hospital, accusing Israel of bombing the hospital, which we now know and we quickly thereafter knew that was not the case. Saying 500 people died, which of course was also not the case. That tweet is still up. Chris Williamson, for people who are not familiar, he’s a former member of parliament here in the UK. He constantly calls for Israel’s dismantling on Twitter. You know the list of public figures expressing views like that goes on and on. I think that list is longer than the list of people who express pro-Israel views and many on that list of people who express pro-Israel views do so half-heartedly, apologetically. And this is not something you hear about any other country. It’s very unique to Israel. You don’t hear people saying North Korea needs to be dismantled or really evil regimes. You don’t hear that about them. You don’t see these protests about anybody else. So looking at that, what do you think? Where do you think we are in terms of the pattern, in terms of historical context? You know, some of us have become very pessimistic and think we are living in some version of 1930s Germany. Yeah, where do you see it?
David Deutsch
Well, I think it’s too early to prophesy where this is going. But I don’t think, as I said earlier, I don’t think the pattern itself has increased. If anything, it’s decreased because you said there has been this flood of accusations against Israel. I would put that down to ordinary anti-Semitism. In other words, that was there before. It’s just that people didn’t feel such a need to express this and express it so clearly. But at the same time as this is happening, I think there’s been an unprecedented increase in the number of people openly defying the pattern. And that’s not easy to do because the pattern is woven into the culture. As I said, less in the Anglosphere than in any other country, really, except maybe some countries in the Far East, which have never, never been in touch with the pattern or with Jews, but perhaps not even there. But this is an issue on which people are prepared to ditch their friends if their friends refuse to join in with the pattern. And at the same time, the pattern is built into everyone’s thinking. It’s built into my thinking as well. And, you know, I can’t speak for you, but it is very common and no one is immune. And it’s in culture. In some cultures, it has become the dominant morality, but that it is a part of morality, if not the dominant one, then a hint of it or in some way integral to the morality of the society or the country. That is ubiquitous. And so the fact that so many people are explicitly defying the pattern is a very hopeful sign. Much more significant, I think, than the actual outbreaks of violence, intimidation, cruelty, and so on, which might be called anti-Semitism.
Razi Ginzberg
Well, I see I’m going to be the voice of pessimism on that because I was thinking about how people who do raise concern about anti-Semitism here and also in America nowadays often combine it with Islamophobia very recently as well in the past couple of months. Do you think that’s fair? Do you think there are valid reasons or similarities, differences?
David Deutsch
Well, so Islamophobia is the name. If it denotes something, it denotes a kind of bigotry or racism or that kind of xenophobia, that kind of mental attitude. And that does exist in regard to Jews as well. In the Anglosphere, it almost never gives rise to persecution or violence or that kind of thing. It’s just extremely rare. I mean, you know, it’s unpleasant, of course, but by the standards of the past and of other countries today, it is almost negligible. And so is Islamophobia. But the pattern is unique to Jews. And fortunately, it usually does not give rise to physical manifestations or legal manifestations or anything like that. It’s just, you know, built into people’s attitudes. And Jews have learned to live with this for hundreds of years. And there’s a wonderful essay or speech given by Max Nordau at the first Zionist Congress, which I recommend anyone who’s interested in the subject to read, where he both explains why, as he calls it, anti-Semitism, or I forget what he calls it, why that broke out at the heart of the Enlightenment in Germany and France and why it did not break out in England, even though emancipation of Jews in England happened after it happened in those European countries. So that to the normal way of thinking about racism and bigotry and so on. That’s, I would say, inexplicable. I mean, it’s a paradox. And yet it was a stark effect that the Holocaust began in Germany. It could have begun in France as well. It could not have begun in Britain or America. That’s just inconceivable. So I don’t think that we are in Britain, for example, I don’t think that we’re in Germany in 1933, mostly because we’re not in Germany at all. And the events of 1933 were a kind of manifestation of something that existed already. And in Britain, it exists, but is far weaker. And more importantly, it is at odds with the general political culture. It is fighting a war with it and has been for over a century.
Razi Ginzberg
I want to quickly thank our super chatters. Thank you, Jeff, Jonathan, Bonnie, Kathleen, Jonathan again. Kathleen says great work, guys. She also says I fell out with someone about this conflict. Yes, so have I. And I wondered why it took this conflict for that to happen. So a few days ago, I saw that Delta Airlines announced a codeshare agreement with El Al. Now, these are the kind of things that undoubtedly they work on for a long time. It didn’t probably start after October 7th, but it was announced after October 7th. And that’s a very close cooperation between airlines. And I contrast that with some other news we heard in the past week or so of British Airways canceling and then uncancelling a show from its in-flight entertainment system, a show called Hapless, a sitcom about a Jewish newspaper. When they canceled it, they said it was because they didn’t want to appear to be taking sides in the conflict. So even within the Anglosphere, I think you see you do see at least on the face of it, very different attitudes between the US and the UK.
David Deutsch
Well, I would consider the differences between US and UK attitudes to be minor. In both cases, the reaction of the political class to the current pogrom has been better than I’ve seen at any time in the past. We’ve had statements, for example, about Israel’s right to defend itself and to eradicate Hamas and so on, which have been sustained not just on day one and two, but sustained when it was politically difficult. And there has been I don’t think I’ve seen the US president say anything like that ever. And the British prime minister and foreign secretary as well. Sorry, the defense, the new defense secretary. I’m not so sure about the new foreign secretary. But anyway, I remember when I remember the Six Day War and I remember George Brown, the deputy prime minister at the time, immediately after Israel survived the war. And it was a very scary six days saying, not saying anything about the danger Israel was in, but saying we will not accept territorial aggrandizement by military means that I was just a kid. I had to look up what aggrandizement means. But certainly George Brown was aggrandizing himself by issuing a formal statement in favor of the pattern. And this has been the case for every conflict Israel has been in ever since, except this one. So although there have been members of the government who’ve stepped out of line, it’s that way round. It’s the ones who’ve stepped out of line and said a bit too much who are the exceptions in the ruling class. So I’m not saying that the government is behaving satisfactorily, quite the contrary, but they are behaving better than they ever have before. And there is the movement to defy the pattern, which I said is difficult to do. It’s not because the case is any more black and white than it has been in the past. It’s because some improvement has happened.
Razi Ginzberg
So you think the fact that the reaction is better has nothing to do with the fact that the attack was just so much worse and so, you know, impossible to deny. Although we’ve seen some try to deny it. You know, the fact that they’re live streaming themselves, the fact that so many people died in the most horrific ways.
David Deutsch
Well, the pattern is a moral perversion and morality trumps logic. So when you say they try to justify it, what is really happening in my view is that they feel compelled to say things because it’s about legitimization. So they feel compelled to legitimize things. And depending on how ingenious they are, they may or may not be able to talk sense while legitimizing things. But the people who feel less of this urge to legitimize things, all sorts of other things come into play, such as common decency or political culture. And also the focus of these weekly demonstrations and so on have been on the far left and in Muslim immigrant culture. So they and both of those are kind of minority cultures. The majority, as you say, hasn’t entirely stepped up, but they haven’t joined in anywhere near as much as they typically have in the past. And in the other direction.
Razi Ginzberg
So where there are those differences between the US and the UK, how much of that do you think is, like you said, let’s say specifically Muslim immigration, multiculturalism, the fact that immigrants to this country are probably not encouraged as strongly to assimilate as they are in the US.
David Deutsch
I don’t think they’re encouraged to assimilate in Britain or in the US. And that is a major problem in both countries. I think immigration would not be a problem if there hadn’t been this policy of multiculturalism, which is centered in the US. It’s a hangover from slavery. It’s because the political culture in America attached itself to the view that slavery, rather than being an abomination as a political institution, was a sign of badness in people’s minds, racism, this idea of racism, which has nothing to do with actual racism. This racism was adopted by the slave owners as a ridiculous justification of their position. And the abolitionist movement, instead of saying that’s ridiculous. What you’re doing is a violation of human rights and is an abomination and is unacceptable. They switched to saying, yeah, yeah, you’re racists. And although the issue of slavery has gone away, that mistake has remained and has spread to the whole of the West. And has sabotaged things like assimilation of minorities. Every previous minority before. I don’t know when to draw the line before the 1960s or something. Every previous wave of immigrants has assimilated with no trouble. It’s only when the doctrine of multiculturalism was introduced and became a political imperative that assimilation was reduced, basically stopped happening. And the immigrant subcultures, which are forced to remain in existence by the policies of multiculturalism became hostile quite naturally to the mainstream. And that’s true in both the US and Britain and other countries.
Razi Ginzberg
I want to also thank Christopher for his super chat and thank you, Stephen, as well. So my last question is about the future, but also the near future. So I saw earlier today that a ship with ties to Israel, I think, is how I saw it in the Hebrew report that I saw, was attacked near India. And it was attacked by an Iranian drone. And Iran said they will continue to shut down maritime shipping routes, which is interesting because it’s kind of admitting that they have been doing what we already know that they are backing the Houthis in Yemen. They will continue to do this. And they said, including in the Mediterranean. So it’s not that unlikely with that, with Hezbollah in the north of Israel or the south of Lebanon. It’s not that unlikely that this could escalate into a wider regional conflict, perhaps a conflict that the US and maybe others will get involved in. What would you I know I’m asking you to predict the future, but what would you expect if that happens? What are we going to see here in the UK? In terms of anti-Semitism.
David Deutsch
So I think, oh, I think it won’t affect anti-Semitism. But I think apart from the pattern, there’s another wholly different unrelated or almost unrelated thing at play here, which is the what shall I call it? Appeasement, Western apologism, lack of confidence in Western values in America, isolationism. Many other countries can’t afford isolationism, but America thinks it can. So all those things are in play as well. And because of that, the US Navy is not doing its job to enforce freedom of navigation in the ocean and so on. Now, as you say, I can’t prophesy, but I would expect that they will wake up and do this. I think the British and Norwegians have already stepped in where the Americans should have done it. And with the far weaker navies have stepped in to protect cargo ships in the Red Sea. And I think it is known to everyone who thinks about this seriously that such an interruption to world trade is a catastrophe that is simply not acceptable. And the Americans and the West generally will step in to prevent it. I don’t think there’s any reason to believe I’m being very careful not to prophesy this. I don’t think there’s any reason to believe that the situation will escalate. If it had escalated, it would have escalated on October the eighth. And quite the contrary, the modes of escalation, which one would have expected from past times, have been damped down rather than exacerbated by the attitudes of the governments concerned. So I don’t think so. But if it does happen, if there is an outbreak of world violence and interruption to trade and economic dislocation and so on. Yes, quite likely, Israel will be blamed. You know, the Jews will be blamed. But I don’t think anti-Semitism in the sense of violence or persecution of Jews will get any worse than it is now. That is, there’s no reason to think it will. I mean, maybe it’s going to anyway, but not because of that.
Razi Ginzberg
Well, I hope you’re right, even though saying I hope anti-Semitism doesn’t get worse. It doesn’t sound as too optimistic a message two days before Christmas. But that’s where we are. Thank you, Gail, for the super chat as well. So, David, where can people find out more about you?
David Deutsch
Well, I’m easy. My website is easy to find on the Internet. Just look for my name. So you can find some videos where I talk about various things. I don’t often talk about the pattern, but Richard Landes has occasionally persuaded me to do so. And he himself has done some nice videos on the pattern.
Razi Ginzberg
And the link to your website is in the live chat. It will also be in the description. David Deutsch, thank you very much. I think we only scratched the surface. Hopefully you’ll be back on the channel. And thank you, everybody, for joining us. We will be back tomorrow with the Daily Objective at a special start time of 430 p.m. UK time, 1130 a.m. Eastern. And sorry, people on the West Coast, but that’s 830 a.m. Pacific. Yeah, it’s a one time thing. Back to our normal scheduled time on Monday. Thanks again, David, and we’ll see you all tomorrow.
David Deutsch
It’s been interesting.
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