00:00:00:00 - 00:00:41:22

Unknown

Good morning everyone. I'm an invite all of my fellow panelists, onto the zoom. I'm Kal Raustiala, the director of the Burkle Center for International Relations at UCLA. And today we come together, as we do every year, to honor the life and work of Daniel Pearl. Over 20 years ago, Daniel Pearl was murdered in Pakistan while working as a foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, a free and active press has been an essential part of American democracy since our founding, and as a journalist, Daniel Pearl devoted his life to seeking truth about the world, and he risked and ultimately gave his life in order to bring that world home to all of us.

00:00:41:25 - 00:00:57:04

Unknown

Today, we remember his work, and we honor his legacy. I want to thank our partners in this event, the Daniel Pearl Foundation, UCLA Hillel, the UCLA Nazarian Center for Israel Studies, and the Annenberg Foundation for helping us make this event happen.

00:00:57:04 - 00:01:07:13

Unknown

For this year's Daniel Pearl lecture at UCLA, we're fortunate to have as our guest someone who's given substantial thought to the work, the challenges and the pitfalls of foreign correspondents.

00:01:07:15 - 00:01:29:25

Unknown

But before we get to hear from our special guest, have you ready Gur of the Times of Israel? As is our tradition at the Pearl lecture, we have a few preliminaries. Judea Pearl, Daniel's father and an emeritus professor here at UCLA, will begin with a few words of remembrance. Following professor Pearl of evil, give this year's Daniel Pearl a memorial lecture when he concludes.

00:01:29:28 - 00:01:53:19

Unknown

Akiko Fujita, a veteran foreign correspondent, will come on to have a conversation with him and, time permitting, will pose a few questions for all of you. So please use the Q&A portal on the bottom of your zoom screen to submit your questions. Again, you can submit those questions really at any time, but use the Q&A portal and they will be conveyed, to Akiko and have you.

00:01:53:21 - 00:02:16:09

Unknown

Now, I'm going to briefly introduce each of our speakers in the order of their appearance. And then we're going to begin with professor Pearl, then go to Aviv and his remarks for the day, followed by the conversation with Akiko. So again, I'll introduce all three before I turn it over to today. Judea Pearl is professor emeritus of computer science here at UCLA.

00:02:16:12 - 00:02:42:26

Unknown

He's the author of many scientific papers and books. Among his books, heuristics, probabilistic reasoning, causality. Those are three books, not one. And the Book of Lie. Maybe the book he's best known for. He's also the author of the forthcoming book coexistence and Other Fighting Words, which will be out this year. Today, a Pearl is the recipient of the Am Turing Award, often called the Nobel Prize in Computing Computing.

00:02:42:28 - 00:03:06:03

Unknown

And in many respects, the foundations of modern AI are built on his work, paving the way for driverless cars, voice recognition software, and many other advances. As Eve Rudiger is a senior analyst at The Times of Israel. He has covered Israeli politics and the country's foreign and regional policies, as well as its relationship with the Jewish diaspora for many years.

00:03:06:06 - 00:03:30:10

Unknown

He's reported from over 20 countries on the issues of the day. And he previously served as director of human communications for the Jewish Agency for Israel, Israel's largest NGO. He's also the host of a new podcast, ask of Eve anything, which is available anywhere you can find a podcast, and we recommend it. Finally, Akiko Fujita, our moderator, is a veteran journalist with more than 20 years of experience.

00:03:30:12 - 00:03:59:17

Unknown

She was most recently at Yahoo Finance, where she anchored the platform's daily live newscast while reporting on the intersection of geopolitics and technology. Prior to that, she spent eight years as a foreign correspondent based in Asia for ABC news and for CNBC international. In that capacity, she traveled across the region reporting on the biggest business and political stories, including the rising influence of China, the conflict on the Korean Peninsula and the Fukushima disaster.

00:03:59:19 - 00:04:37:18

Unknown

So we're very excited for today, and I'm going to begin by turning, the stage over to Judea Pearl today. Go ahead. Thank you, Carl, for your kind introduction. And thank you all for being with us today. Friends and colleagues and students and supporters and sponsors of the Daniel Pearl Memorial Lecture and the entire Los Angeles community, for whom this annual lecture has become a cultural landmark of shared aspiration and shared values.

00:04:37:20 - 00:05:23:28

Unknown

And this is the second time that the lecture was being conducted via zoom, a restriction imposed on us by distance. By topic. Security demands necessary to protect Israeli speakers? Yes. Unfortunately, this campus has yet to recover from the dark and ugly forces unleashed on October 7th. Forces that make today's topic and speaker profoundly relevant to us. The hope of UCLA, who are still striving to resume normal academic discourse.

00:05:24:00 - 00:06:07:01

Unknown

Despite the hostilities surrounding us, is strangely, what makes Harvey so uniquely qualified to speak about the new Middle East is the depth of knowledge and insight he brings with him about the old Middle East, how it has been shaped since the 1980s, the 1880s, the Sui first to give new birth to a persecuted people and later to become one of the most contested spots on the planet whose future everyone wishes to predict.

00:06:07:04 - 00:06:49:18

Unknown

It was from Harvey that I learned what drove my grandfather out of Poland to immigrate to Eric Israel in 1924, why his descendants can't and won't go back to Poland, and why his great grandson, Daniel Pearl, found his 1924 journey to build a town of able black so fascinating and inspiring. My forthcoming book, Coexistence, was profoundly informed by Harvey's perspectives on this pivotal period of history.

00:06:49:21 - 00:07:27:16

Unknown

Harvey articulates for us the authentic voices of a traumatic yet resilient Israeli society, voices that have been glaringly absent from the academic discourse. He is usually in the history department, for example. Students are still being told that Israel is a settler colonial enterprise with barely any historical connection to the land, and that the Palestinians are the sole indigenous claimant to this land.

00:07:27:18 - 00:08:03:07

Unknown

The Voice of Israel was purged from the center of New East Studies 15 years ago. I remember when Hamas became the fabled darling of that center. His voice was later erased from the Department of Gender Studies and Asian American Studies, which now tell the students on UCLA website that Israel is guilty of 76 years of settler colonialism, racial apartheid and occupation, quote unquote.

00:08:03:10 - 00:08:46:07

Unknown

And let us move now to journalism. Another point of contact Harvey has with our son, Danny, how we've defined the role of journalist is documenting lived history, the experiences of millions of ordinary people rather than the narratives of elites. He asks why journalists have failed so miserably in modern times, particularly in conflict zones. And I'm sure we are all eager to understand why they continue to produce the caricatures we see so often in Middle East coverage.

00:08:46:09 - 00:09:09:10

Unknown

Thank you, Harvey, for sharing with us your knowledge and experience from that precious corner of the planet, and for honoring our son, Danny, with your lecture today.

00:09:09:13 - 00:09:45:14

Unknown

Thank you so much, Judea. I'm going to start. I was very moved by the story, of, your grandfather, 1924, and Daniel Pearl's interest in it. We live in, in an enormous historical arcs, and we don't really understand ourselves. Until we understand them. So thank you. I'll dive right in and I'll try and speak, as briefly as I know how anybody who's heard me before knows that this will be a challenge for me.

00:09:45:16 - 00:10:09:01

Unknown

It is an absolutely extraordinary honor, to be here, to speak with you when, professor Pearl asked me to deliver this talk in memory of his son. The first thought that went through my head was that I couldn't possibly accept. I'm a provincial journalist, a political analyst. That's my day job. Back in in Israel from, you know, small country, far from UCLA.

00:10:09:03 - 00:10:38:22

Unknown

And from the lives and the politics, of America. I know American journalism from the outside. I know it as a consumer. And I never knew, Danny Pearl. So what could I, as an outsider, come in to this this, this talk that has had Christopher Hitchens and and just, Anderson Cooper and Jake Tapper and the the biggest names, the leading lights, of the English speaking intellectual world.

00:10:38:24 - 00:11:09:10

Unknown

What could I say? What could I say about Danny? And what could I say, about journalism and about his legacy. But you don't turn down, the Pearl family when it asks you to honor their extraordinary son. And, certainly not for a reason. As minors not being worthy of the honor. So, here I am, and I, I realized that I actually had something very big to say and something that I feel is very profound because I learned, from Daniel Pearl.

00:11:09:10 - 00:11:31:18

Unknown

I learned a lot. And I learned, not just, the points of contact for me. He was a Jew, and he was a Jew at the last. And in ways that are profound in ways that I feel. Being a Jew is a big part of my sort of cognitive framing of the world. It's important to me.

00:11:31:21 - 00:11:56:16

Unknown

He was a Jew while also being this extraordinarily talented and proud and productive citizen of the world. He was this complex and interesting man who went to all the four corners of the world to tell the world story. But I think that I ended up reading Daniel Pearl because as I went into journalism, as I grew up learning his story was was part of that experience.

00:11:56:19 - 00:12:28:20

Unknown

But I started reading him and I discovered in him in Daniel Pearl's actual journalism, something that I came to think of as the solution to the main trouble that that, afflicts the public debate, in the democratic world, certainly. But throughout the world, of our age. Daniel was knew something about journalism that I am afraid and that a lot of data points tell us is being lost.

00:12:28:22 - 00:12:55:23

Unknown

And it's something that we have to reclaim if we're going to right the ship, of public life in, in most the developed nations. I'll be blunt and, and I'll be quick. Journalism is collapsing. Journalism as we know it. Journalism in the sense that the word evokes is collapsing. And most of the reasons for it are external to journalism, the things happening to it, not things that it is doing.

00:12:55:25 - 00:13:21:17

Unknown

It's a story we've been hearing for 20 years. The internet created aggregators, essentially mostly social media, that detached advertising revenue from the production of actual journalism, and the result was a catastrophic collapse of the business model of newspapers and in many cases also local television. In the United States. I used examples in the United States, but this was happening in France, this was happening in Israel, this was happening in Britain.

00:13:21:19 - 00:13:47:10

Unknown

The number of American newspaper journalists fell by half over about 15 years. That's according to the Washington Post in 2021, that collapse has continued. The new economics of journalism have basically drowned, local and small newspapers and left only big national ones standing in many, many places. Tens of millions of Americans live in something called a news desert, which is a local news desert.

00:13:47:10 - 00:14:05:29

Unknown

In other words, they don't have local newspapers that take a keen interest in what's happening in their city. And if millions of people, populations in America larger than the entirety of Israel, who live without a local newspaper in Israel, those would not be considered or Austria or Ireland or those any country that isn't the scale of the United States.

00:14:06:01 - 00:14:46:01

Unknown

Entire country's worth of populations, that is to say, are living in places without meaningful local journalistic oversight of their of their public, life, of their local governments, of state government, and in place of local news, national news stepped in partly New York Times, Washington Post, some of these newspapers have grown, but mostly social media stepped in and social media created a fascinating new information flow because news went while local news died, hyper local news so hyper local that it's personal.

00:14:46:04 - 00:15:12:25

Unknown

In other words, social media would create an information flow, absolutely tailored through its algorithms to to each of our own thoughts and feelings. We were, you know, a lot of people talk about the radicalization, the polarization that social media drives through its algorithms. But there's also an atomization and individualization. We no longer not only don't have large national shared information flows through the old, you know, established media outlets.

00:15:12:25 - 00:15:50:13

Unknown

We we, we don't even have partizan ones as much as we used to. And we're locked in increasingly to these individualized information flows. And the result has been, a polarization of public life and atomization of public life, a decline in basic trust in shared institutions, a decline in trust in your political opponents, a vicious circle, because if I distrust you, I will act in ways politically, publicly that will validate your distrust of me and vice versa.

00:15:50:13 - 00:16:14:19

Unknown

And so these are cyclical patterns. And it's getting worse and it's getting worse everywhere. This is a phenomenon that's radicalizing the Israeli public debate that I know. Well, we can see visibly from the outside that it's doing the same to British and Canadian politics, to French voting patterns. It's everywhere and it's getting worse. And folks, nature abhors a vacuum.

00:16:14:21 - 00:16:47:11

Unknown

And what does that mean into the trust deficit created by these technologies and not just by these technologies? I want to get to journalism's own culpability in a moment. But the primary source of this problem has been technological structural. The trust vacuum created by this polarization has produced a new kind of discourse, and it's bred a new kind of bigot who has stepped into the breach, who has filled the gap over the last week, in America over in recent months.

00:16:47:11 - 00:17:16:04

Unknown

But most of this happened over the last week. You've had people like Tucker Carlson, a man who's just asking questions. So nobody has to be upset platforming a historian who thinks Hitler was just misunderstood. Joe Rogan this week, the single biggest podcaster on earth with tens of millions of downloads. Hosting a conspiracy theorist who's trying to get answers about why the Jews would carry out nine over 11.

00:17:16:04 - 00:17:41:11

Unknown

That was very mean of the Jews and why the Mossad would deploy that honeypot. Jeffrey Epstein, that seems like not a nice thing for the Mossad to do. Theo von, hosted Candace Owens, who offered us an extremely worthwhile take on, the vileness of the Jews because, you know, they only ever care about themselves. She she argued these interviews that we've seen just this week on podcasts.

00:17:41:11 - 00:18:04:07

Unknown

And if you don't know what I'm talking about, that's part of my point. They weren't just bigoted that these interviews were stupid. They were cheap bait. They were one of the oldest forms of entertainment. They're the kind of entertainment that emerges spontaneously on every playground and every school on earth. They were a form of entertainment we call bullying, and they were collectively put together.

00:18:04:11 - 00:18:31:11

Unknown

Those three podcasts I mentioned this week, collectively, the single biggest show in America, you probably didn't hear about it. That's quite likely based on the kinds of people who would tune into this conversation. But tens of millions of your fellow Americans were there for it, left it up. The baseline of the conversation has become crass. It's become abusive.

00:18:31:13 - 00:18:58:16

Unknown

The style is different on the left and on the right. But the fundamental radicalization and the replacement of a shared information space with this kind of bread and circuses focused, like the bread and circuses of old, like the original bread and circuses and abuse, humiliation. It's happening throughout society, and it's happening in ways that are miserable, and it's happening to millions upon millions of people.

00:18:58:19 - 00:19:38:03

Unknown

It starts with the Jews. It's circles around the question of the Jews. But it isn't about the Jews. Anti-Semitism is never actually about the Jews. So we have a breakdown of distrust and a journalism that, for economic reasons, as much as any other, is struggling to be at the head of the conversation, to be a platform for the conversation, not to be elite, not to be a narrow discourse that can't predict elections and can't really influence them, but actually to be part the place where people converse in a serious way and it's failing.

00:19:38:05 - 00:20:07:08

Unknown

And I want to suggest to you that everything that's happening to your domestic politics, and again, it's happening throughout the world, is happening to your understanding of the world as well. In this sense, this is not a new phenomenon in the United States. America has always it in a way. It's not even a criticism. It's just a, America has often sort of the world, through a domestic lens, through a lens of Partizan politics.

00:20:07:11 - 00:20:35:18

Unknown

Certainly in recent, years, when the Obama team, took office, I remember as an Israeli journalist, we had conversations with, American officials and, and American analysts who were explaining to us the new administration. And one of the startling things for me as a young journalist was to hear that the basic thing to know about the Obama team and its policies is that they're not Bush.

00:20:35:20 - 00:20:59:06

Unknown

Not being Bush was a really important, baseline for how the Obama administration understood itself. And that seemed very frustrating to an Israeli who wants to understand the policy ideas and the analysis and the sense of what what's happening the larger Middle East that was actually shaping and driving policy. And then when Trump took office, we had the same experience.

00:20:59:09 - 00:21:31:11

Unknown

The Trump team was on many questions and issues. An anti-Obama policy, whatever he was, we're not we're the opposite. And and so on. In other words, that that fundamentally continues. There is a deep domestic ization, domestic politics, lens through which American political the American political world deals with foreign policy and it's getting worse and it's getting shallower and it's getting more radicalized through these same mechanisms that debate about the world.

00:21:31:11 - 00:21:55:04

Unknown

The debate in America today about Ukraine is not as strong and good and serious debate. It's not a thoughtful debate. It's a debate that functions exactly along the lines of the domestic political breakdown of discourse. There's a profound gap between those who learn about the Middle East or learn about the world through traditional media, and those who learn about it through social media.

00:21:55:06 - 00:22:22:14

Unknown

And it's a similar gap to the domestic questions, folks. Social media is not a bad thing. Social media is often a powerful good and a necessary good, and a solution to some fundamental and important problems. Very recently, of course, there's the question of the Gaza war. Tens of thousands of people have died in this war. Leave aside the debate about, you know, how many of them were Hamas fighters, how many civilians?

00:22:22:14 - 00:22:53:03

Unknown

The debate that sometimes is pure propaganda and sometimes is genuine and authentic, and they're real problems in understanding exactly what happened on the ground. Even the most optimistic estimates of the lowest possible death toll for children is still thousands of children killed in this war. And so when social media drives home, the costs of the Gaza war in ways that people can't look away and can't ignore because it's on their phones, that's not necessarily a bad thing.

00:22:53:03 - 00:23:13:13

Unknown

If it creates a demand in the world to end the war, to end war itself, because war is revealed in very personal and immediate ways for the hell that it is, that's that's a good thing. The problem isn't that the costs of war are suddenly brought home as never before. The problem is that they aren't brought home enough.

00:23:13:15 - 00:23:42:24

Unknown

There are other terrible wars now underway, other crises that could be reduced by international attention. But they don't serve the algorithm. And so they're ignored. In other words, if we take what social media has done for Gaza, which has certainly been a pressure Israelis have felt Israeli policymakers, Israeli military planners have felt, why hasn't it extended elsewhere? This is not the same as the Israelis arguing no Jews, no news.

00:23:42:24 - 00:24:15:03

Unknown

All you care about is Jews. It's the argument why? Why actually this place is not Syria, Yemen or Sudan or so many other places, even where Western militaries in Western policies and Western weapons are involved. And the answer is that ultimately social media as a, as a, as a mechanism, as a platform is algorithmic. And often those algorithms serve the interests of either the social media platforms or of various masters of the algorithm.

00:24:15:06 - 00:24:45:01

Unknown

And so social media proves that this new world of information, of atomized information, of closed information, even when it moves us beautifully, even when it tells us there is pain in the world and it's our duty to witness it and to change it, even then, it is manipulating us. And what do we do with that? What do we do with the fact that social media, because of that fact, struggles to bring a real reckoning, struggles to bring a real reparation to the world because there's too much left out, too much.

00:24:45:01 - 00:25:17:13

Unknown

The algorithm doesn't notice too much of our own ideologies. And bigotries are confirmed by social media algorithms, and reinforced to the point where it is manipulating us, even our our good, even our empathetic responses to bad places. It hides causes and effects. It doesn't allow for a serious platform of discussion and debate. It hides the complexity and the humanity of the sides, and it hides the paths forward for changing any of these dynamics.

00:25:17:15 - 00:25:56:29

Unknown

If you follow the American news, including the major mainstream organizations as well as social media, you would have struggled to understand what is rarely seen over the last 17 months. You would have struggled to understand what most Palestinians see. There is, for example, among Israelis, the conviction that we have found in research and in polls and in qualitative interviews, it's a conviction shared by almost all Israeli Jews, 90% of Israeli Jews, that the Palestinian political world's fundamental impulse is to annihilate US.

00:25:57:01 - 00:26:27:01

Unknown

Leave aside whether that's true, the perception of that shapes the Israeli perception of the Palestinian side and the same people, the same large poll that was conducted by Tel Aviv University on the Israeli side and by Kandinsky, the preeminent Palestinian pollster on the Palestinian side, asked the same question of Palestinians, and 90% of them said the same thing about the other side that ultimately the Jews want to remove them totally.

00:26:27:03 - 00:27:18:20

Unknown

And so we have two sides that have a perception of the other that describes the tragedy. And it's why neither side is ultimately really profoundly moved by international, by the international pressures or discourses or anger or moral movements or political protests. There are among Palestinians another thing that doesn't really come through, either in the social media landscape or in the mainstream media landscape, political and religious movements, popular ones, profound ones that aren't Hamas movements born in conservative Islam, that nevertheless recognize Israel as a Jewish state and make demands of of of the Jewish state, but recognize it.

00:27:18:23 - 00:27:45:19

Unknown

And if you don't know about them and you don't see them, and you don't know that they exist, and you don't hear them speak, because the journalistic world isn't coming to the Palestinians and talking to the Palestinians about their lived experience, but is instead too much mired in the algorithms of social media, which affect journalists as well, and too much in very simple structures and ideologies that drive a lot of the mainstream media because of this polarization.

00:27:45:21 - 00:28:12:11

Unknown

Well, if you don't know that there are profound and big and popular non Hamas religious and political movements, then you might be convinced that there's no meaningful way to support Palestinians other than supporting Hamas. You may not see Hamas as destructive influence, not just on Palestinians. It is an authoritarian regime. It is it is a regime that premised its strategy for this war on the destruction of Israel.

00:28:12:14 - 00:28:35:13

Unknown

And if you think the Israelis are bad people, then that makes that strategy all the worse, because it wasn't going to end any other way except the destruction, more destruction in Gaza. You don't see Hamas as destructive influence on the Palestinian cause. If you don't see an alternative. And that brings me to journalism and specifically to Daniel Pearl.

00:28:35:16 - 00:29:12:25

Unknown

There are, I think, three stories that Daniel Pearl wrote. That tell me how journalism can change the world. He went to Kosovo. He went to Croatia, he went to Tehran, he went to places with bitter and profound conflict. And he found there through ordinary people, through details to history, through lived experience. He found there the weeds that you have to go into.

00:29:12:27 - 00:29:46:16

Unknown

You have to go into the long weeds of a, of a culture you don't understand and don't know. And you dive in and you come out the other side and you see things. And then he, in on June 2nd, 2000, he published in the Wall Street Journal, behind the music. Rock rolls once more into Iran is Hardliners Back, a pop revival in which he explored the absolutely astonishing fact that Western pop music was exploding in Iran in popularity.

00:29:46:18 - 00:30:23:08

Unknown

But it was driven by the conservatives of the regime. They didn't want Iranians to be affected by smuggled music coming in from the West, so they initiated a market, a a large musical world, a musical scene of Western style music that is Iranian and approved by the regime. And it's the kind of window that you open into a society in which all the fractures become clear and profound and apparent, but not because you've laid it out in some kind of a schematic way.

00:30:23:10 - 00:30:58:07

Unknown

He went to Croatia and spoke to Serbs displaced in those wars and spoke to them in 1999. Serbs displaced from Croatia in 1995 about being able to ever come home, and about how the larger picture that he found in the small stories about how you reverse population exchanges, ethnic cleansing, fleeing mass flight, the kind of mass flight that is a big part of the Palestinian experience and a big part of the Jewish experience that created Israel.

00:30:58:10 - 00:31:34:25

Unknown

You find the stories on the ground, you learn what is happening from the people it is happening to. The big things flow from the small. You humanize us by walking into a place and cracking open those stories and listening and not imposing simple, narrow stories that you bring from home your own ideologies, your own mental structures, your own learned academic structures even that you impose if you come to the Middle East and try to impose on the Middle East American racial politics, it won't make any sense.

00:31:34:28 - 00:31:58:18

Unknown

There are blond, blue eyed Palestinians and very, very dark skinned Palestinians, and there are blond, blue eyed Jews and very, very dark skinned Jews. And we have every problem under the sun, and we can have marginalization and discrimination and all the things that everyone else can have, but it's not racial. And so if you come in with one experience, it might be fundamentally different.

00:31:58:18 - 00:32:27:26

Unknown

We're still human. We're still weak in ways other humans are weak. But you have to come to us and talk to us. I have often asked myself, what would that kind of journalism, what would Danny make of the Gaza war, of the fact that we have polls that tell us that most Gazans don't want to be ruled by Hamas, don't like Hamas, think Hamas is an authoritarian dictatorship that hurts them, but are also proud of Hamas and proud of October 7th.

00:32:27:28 - 00:32:53:26

Unknown

But what do you make of that complexity? What story would he tell? How do I reach out and find that story? What courage would he have to go in and tell that story? The vivid, the three dimensional, the complex, the story that doesn't give you an easy way out, an easy answer. A 42nd TikTok video. We are now in the Middle East.

00:32:53:28 - 00:33:36:13

Unknown

In a moment of profound change. Just one of the most dramatic moments, probably in the last three generations in this region, the Iranian regime had built itself into one of the great regional powers and had led proxies in half a dozen countries and had committed itself publicly, repeatedly, to the destruction of Israel. And Hamas triggered a broader regional confrontation on many, many of these fronts that reveal that that Iranian empire of proxies is far weaker than anybody understood.

00:33:36:16 - 00:34:13:25

Unknown

And we are already watching that drive, first of all, a more desperate Iranian consideration to push to a nuclear bomb, because now it needs that umbrella, because it can no longer project an aura of power to to be safe for that regime to be safe. And so it actually needs the power itself. And secondly, everyone else recalculating as the understanding sinks in that Iran is far less than it appeared that the Israelis have far more capabilities in terms of being able to challenge Iran to overfly Iran with 120 planes, pretty much it will.

00:34:13:28 - 00:34:19:02

Unknown

The Middle East dynamic has changed.

00:34:19:04 - 00:35:15:19

Unknown

Conservative Sunni Islamist political ideologies and movements and governments and regimes. The Saudis, the Emiratis, who are very much in that conservative Salafist world, but not now jihadist Salafists, quietest Salafist. These are terms that are not known to the newsrooms covering the region, but just that conservative, old pietistic Islam that says that a return to the old versions of Islam, to the forebears, to the first three generations of Islam is what will solve the great problem of Islamic weakness in the modern age the ideology and ideas that created what is today the Saudi regime the Muslim Brotherhood of Egypt, the party of Erdogan in Turkey, the Hamas political world and ideological world.

00:35:15:22 - 00:35:46:07

Unknown

These ideas, this this world of Islamic conservatism and Islamism and political Islam are divided between the very violent and the pietistic, nonviolent. And now that the very violent seem to be pushed back, even if temporarily, the nonviolent are asserting themselves. There are new tensions, there are new puts possibilities there, new futures available. Is there going to be a massive Israeli-American strike on the Iranian nuclear program?

00:35:46:09 - 00:36:15:02

Unknown

That's a question for a journalist to figure out in Washington. Well, from leaks from the American administration. But there's another question the journalists aren't even asking. I've had conversations and they've complained rather bitterly to some American journalists in Israel. And I've said to them, it's not a my complaint to you is not that you're anti-Israel. If you show up in a place with a bitter war, and your first instinct is that the more powerful side has to you, you go to them first with demands.

00:36:15:05 - 00:36:43:16

Unknown

That's legitimate. That's journalism. My complaint is the lack of curiosity. You come to a place in which a country called Iran, a regime that rules this country, has no border with Israel, no interests in Israel. Why has it devoted so much of its economy and so much of its politics to destroying Israel? Not morally. Don't judge them diagnostically.

00:36:43:19 - 00:37:15:05

Unknown

What's happening there? What is that ideology? What is the modernism of the of the regime? How does that regime understand the Middle East? Wouldn't that be an interesting feature to actually read in the New York Times or the Washington Post, cracking that open that window, assuming Iranians aren't extremist or radical, or these terms that journalists use, instead of explaining three dimensional people, vivid, real, three dimensional people live in the Middle East.

00:37:15:07 - 00:37:52:28

Unknown

Israelis are not villains. Palestinians are not victims. There are victims. There are errors in mistakes and crimes. It's a war. And it all should be debated. But what what do they think is happening to them? That's the task of journalism. Daniel Pearl did that. And for all the reasons that we've been watching with great worry over the years, that's disappearing, we now face a middle East in which two major visions of the future of Islam are competing.

00:37:53:01 - 00:38:26:15

Unknown

Born in 150 year debate within the Muslim world, the Arab Muslim world, certainly about what it means for Islam to be so weak. Islam in its early generations were astonished. Muslim thinkers and theologians were astonished at their success, at their massive expansion, and they asked themselves a question what explains our massive expansion? And very early on in Islam, success, geopolitical success came to be seen as a theological point.

00:38:26:18 - 00:38:50:14

Unknown

We are successful because we are in sync with God's plan for history, because our revelation is the true revelation, because we have divine grace. And so when Muslim theologians in the last century have been debating why Islam now finds itself weak in the face of European imperialism of the 19th century and the crises the Muslim world is going through today, the answer was we are no longer pious enough.

00:38:50:14 - 00:39:23:24

Unknown

We're no longer part of God's plan for history. We're no longer close to God. We have to return to piety. This is a profound idea, and it shapes everything happening in the Muslim world. And thinkers like Rashid Reader, who lived in Cairo in the 1890s, and when the South when the Saudi clan took over the Hejaz, the holy part of Arabia, Mecca and Medina, and began to establish their kingdom, they sent to read for his students to come be teachers in their Wahhabi education system.

00:39:23:27 - 00:39:58:07

Unknown

And when Aminul Hosseini, the mufti in Jerusalem in 1931, in Jerusalem, set up a conference to for the rescue of Jerusalem from Zionism, Rita was the elder statesman on stage. And one of his great students in Egypt, he lived in Cairo was a man named Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. This man who's a linchpin who more than you know, I sometimes read that Winston Churchill in many ways created the modern Middle East or other various Western powerful leaders.

00:39:58:10 - 00:40:29:21

Unknown

Rashid read. That actually created the modern Middle East. He was a theologian worried about Islamic weakness and who saw piety as a, as as a restoration is as a restoration is the element that could bring Islam back to power, back to success and the Muslim Brotherhood. Hamas was founded as a muslim Brotherhood branch in Gaza in 1987, and the education system of the Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia and movement after movement, idea after idea.

00:40:29:21 - 00:41:05:18

Unknown

You don't understand it. One if you don't read from 100 years ago, this theologian named Rita, who for a short period liked Zionism and then became worried about Zionism because a Jewish success in pushing back Islam in Palestine. It wasn't about Palestinian nationalism, it was about what that the signal that that meant. So that was a signal of Islam's weakness, and that was a signal of how much Islam had grown a distant from God, because geopolitical weakness was a sign of distance from God.

00:41:05:20 - 00:41:43:03

Unknown

There are deep stories here, old discourses. When Hamas leaders talk about the devastation in Gaza, they speak with pride. Why? It's not enough to just call them terrorists. What do they think is happening? And so a middle East that is undergoing profound change, a middle East with deep roots in all discourses and profound ideas, three dimensional human beings who know more about what's happening to them than Westerners looking in from the outside, have these stories to tell.

00:41:43:05 - 00:42:10:13

Unknown

And the West is becoming deaf and dumb to these stories, incapable of interacting and learning and seeing people for who they actually are. Because journalism is facing this terrible crisis and this terrible collapse, the kind of collapse that can allow Joe Rogan to interview a rabid anti-Semite, and that to be the single most popular media event in America this week.

00:42:10:15 - 00:42:36:19

Unknown

Lance Morrow, I'll finish with this, wrote about Daniel's death in time magazine. Lance Morrow is the legendary columnist at time magazine that did many other man of the year, person of the year, columns. For decades, for many, many decades, when they were still called man of the year. The sheer avidity to know things he wrote about Daniel Pearl is the most endearing trait of any journalist.

00:42:36:21 - 00:43:02:10

Unknown

Long ago, the novelist and journalist John Hersey wrote in a sketch of Henry Luce, he was amazed and delighted to learn whatever he had not known before. Curiosity is the noblest form of intellectual energy. Your mind goes nowhere without it, except maybe to fanaticism. For the polar opposite of Daniel Pearl's intellectual curiosity was the sort of dogmatism that took his life.

00:43:02:12 - 00:43:28:10

Unknown

An ideologue with a closed mind killed a splendid young man with an open mind. Not the first time that the desire to know has been murdered by the need not to know. Half the world belongs to candle sniffers, to people who have no curiosity to find out. Still, I think I would rather have dinner in Belgrade, in Islamabad, in Jerusalem.

00:43:28:13 - 00:44:10:07

Unknown

For all of journalism's problems with people like Daniel Pearl, then with either the faculty of Harvard University or the first 100 names in the Boston Telephone book. Why? It is their knowledgeable, companionable talk, the stories that their curiosity has unearthed and accumulated, their confidence that the world is a fascinating place and the journalism, though it may sometimes be wrong handed, wrongheaded or squalid, is also critically important and quite often a huge amount of fun correspondence like Pearl of the True Students of the World's diversity, as opposed to narrow gauge group identity ideologues at home, each crowd sitting at its own table in the cafeteria and gazing at the others through a haze of grievance.

00:44:10:09 - 00:44:39:04

Unknown

Western journalism I absolutely, manifestly include Israeli journalism has shrunk at this moment to moralizing at this moment when we need it to be clearheaded, to be curious, to be telling us the human stories. On the other side, I would like to submit to you this is something that is profoundly true of Israeli journalism as well, but that the kind of journalists who hoped that Paris would win the election aren't quite sure why Trump won the election.

00:44:39:07 - 00:45:06:10

Unknown

Not that they preferred one or the other, but that they struggled to tell a story across the cultural divide. Journalism is telling that story across the cultural divide and opening those windows. We need a journalism that can explain our world. We need the journalism that is less moral, less moralizing and more curious. We need a journalism that thinks less about itself and more about the people it is interviewing.

00:45:06:13 - 00:45:10:18

Unknown

Thank you.

00:45:10:21 - 00:45:26:26

Unknown

Harvey, thank you so much for that. I found myself nodding in silence here as I was listening to a lot of the comments you made. I just want to start out by saying it. It is a real honor for me to be taking part in this lecture as well. I was just an aspiring journalist when, Daniel Pearl was tragically murdered.

00:45:26:26 - 00:45:50:15

Unknown

But I remember thinking just the humanity he brought to the story sort of opened my eyes to the world, as you mentioned. And in preparation for this, I went back and read a lot of the stories. The one you mentioned about, rock and roll taking off in Iran as well, and sort of have myself wondering, you know, can this kind of journalism still be possible in the structure that exists today?

00:45:50:15 - 00:46:22:18

Unknown

And so, you know, I want to start by asking you about this erosion of trust in media. There's a Gallup poll that they put out every year. The most recent one came out last fall that showed just 31% of Americans, have a fair amount of confidence, a great deal or fair amount, that the news can fully, accurately and fairly mainstream media outlets are reporting that, and I wonder if you can answer this question.

00:46:22:18 - 00:46:36:11

Unknown

I think a lot of journalists, including myself, are sort of grappling with which is the basis of journalism, what is considered objectivity today? How do you define objectivity?

00:46:36:14 - 00:47:01:19

Unknown

That's a great question. You know, it's the great problem journalism faces is that it is absolutely impossible to do. That's that's the baseline problem of journalism. Journalism is not possible. You cannot know the objective historical truth. You cannot know the objective political truth there. Presumably is an objective truth out there in the universe. It is not knowable to us humans.

00:47:01:22 - 00:47:25:12

Unknown

And so faced with that fact that we cannot actually know perfectly the truth of the great and true out there, journalists are faced with two options, but basically. Right, one of two options. One is if I can't any way tell the soul and complete an objective story, and nobody can, I don't try. I succumb to this unbelievably alluring thing called activism.

00:47:25:14 - 00:47:51:16

Unknown

Activism is amazing. I get to feel like I'm changing the world. I get to feel like I'm screaming at people who should be screamed at. I get to feel like I'm right and I'm righteous. And I don't have to tell the parts of the story that don't fit my activism, because my activism is so important. And there's a second option a journalist can also choose to try to tell the full, objective story.

00:47:51:18 - 00:48:18:29

Unknown

And this is the tragic option, because they're going to fail. And they know they're going to fail. But here's the thing. And this is something that no journalist I've ever talked to has ever disagreed with. But we are the the, incentives of social media and the incentives of our new world, our new information world. Don't incentivize this to take that path of telling as much of the objective story as you can, knowing you're going to fail.

00:48:19:02 - 00:48:48:04

Unknown

But the honest attempt being what journalism is, is so much more useful. It's so much more interesting. At the end of the day, if I'm trying to tell you the Palestinian story honestly, in a humanizing way, I, an Israeli journalist, Jewish Israeli journalist, the worst kind to ever tell you the Palestinian story. But if I'm trying to do it honestly, I will reveal something you did not know eventually.

00:48:48:07 - 00:49:04:13

Unknown

And if I'm not trying to tell it honestly, I'm trying to win in some war that I am fighting in my head, that I believe I need to be an activist, and I'm going to fail to ever tell you anything useful or new. And so the answer is to the tragic view of journalism, which is we are definitely going to fail.

00:49:04:13 - 00:49:28:00

Unknown

It is an impossible task. It's impossible to not to do the history after the fact by a professional historian. How was the first draft of history going to be real and good and true? Right. But the honest attempt is everything. And that's the difference between a society that has a serious debate about its problems and its future and its past, and what it needs to do, and a society that simply doesn't have that debate, which increasingly is what we have in the West.

00:49:28:03 - 00:50:05:17

Unknown

You know, the question is, how do you break through with that honest attempt? There are still organizations that are very much trying to meet that goal of objectivity through reporting. But as you've pointed out, there's a lot of noise out there. Whether it is on social media, through podcasts, through YouTube, how do you break through that when there is so much noise coming through, claiming to be news, when in fact it is opinion?

00:50:05:19 - 00:50:29:18

Unknown

Good people have to fight back with all the tools and all the clever mechanisms and all the knowledge at their disposal. I can tell you from my personal experience, I have a lot of content out there on YouTube and podcasts and all these different kind of forums, probably 1200 or so essays written in a couple of different websites.

00:50:29:20 - 00:50:57:19

Unknown

The things that went viral and I mean, 500,000, you know, I don't do Joe Rogan numbers, right. But the few things that went massively viral in my career were the moments where I tried to empathetically, seriously understand the other side, to try to figure out why there are Palestinian ideological elites that think that terrorism works and is smart and is moral.

00:50:57:22 - 00:51:23:20

Unknown

And if you want to understand that, you have to go to the SLA and experience in Algeria, where eight years of terrorism kicked out 130 year French colonization project in Algeria and history generally judges that war, which was terribly cruel on both sides as a moral war for liberation and independence. And if you're a Palestinian generation raised on that example, well, it all makes sense to you.

00:51:23:26 - 00:51:56:10

Unknown

You're not a crazy person, an extremist. Empathy is vital to journalism. Empathy is not sympathy. Empathy is not agreement. I have a friend in the Israeli, who was for some period in Israeli intelligence and, he told me, and I assume it's right I was never in any intelligence unit, but, that, the, the Persian in the Iran, staffers, analysts, of the Mossad and Army intelligence, they have Persian movie nights and they have Persian movie ties for several reasons.

00:51:56:10 - 00:52:21:17

Unknown

One to work on their Persian two, because Persian cinema apparently is amazing. And three, because you need to understand Persian culture and you need to seriously understand they actually like Persian music and Persian interests. And that's that's intelligence agencies charged with fighting a war against the Iranian regime. Empathy is necessary. This is not new wisdom. I'm not breaking ground here.

00:52:21:17 - 00:52:54:11

Unknown

This is Sun Tzu, right? But knowing your enemy seriously and empathetically, and as a human being, as a three dimensional person, is fundamental to winning a war against the enemy as as much as making peace with that enemy. And if that's true of armies in a war, it's doubly so in Tripoli. Sulfur journalists, if you tell the story across the divide, if you crack open the humanness of the other side in the in the case of, the New York Times, I would suggest that would be the Israeli side, because there's a lot of empathy and sympathy and storytelling on the Palestinian side.

00:52:54:11 - 00:53:19:03

Unknown

But there is no I have not seen my story, but I think it's happened to me and my people told in the major news outlets. I would say that, let's say Democratic voters in America. And that's not a story that exonerates Israel, but it's a story that humanizes the choices Israelis think they're living through. Right. And that's important to understand whether you're going to criticize or you're going to or you're going to support doesn't matter.

00:53:19:03 - 00:53:49:14

Unknown

You have to understand that. Yeah. You know, that's sort of the perfect setup to the question I had, because you had mentioned if you watch mainstream outlets, you'd be missing what Israelis see every day, what Palestinians see every day. You know, it that differentiation between government and people, Benjamin Netanyahu is not Israelis, right? It's it's you've got the government and then you've got millions of people.

00:53:49:16 - 00:54:26:10

Unknown

What is what are these outlets missing? You think the story of everyday Israelis? So a couple of examples. I mean, the answer is 40 years of love life in a different language, in a different culture. So it's it's everything. But, but a couple of really pertinent examples to try to understand what's happening. For example, the Israeli political left, in the early years of the state that really founded the state, the Labor Party, it was deeply, deeply Marxist and socialist, and it saw socialism as far more than a and an economic ideology.

00:54:26:10 - 00:54:49:00

Unknown

It really was its sort of civic religion. It was its sense of what morality looks like in the world. It was pro-American, but very Marxist. And when the Israeli left encountered a collapse of the socialist idea in the 1970s and 80s, because Israel went through eight years of triple digit inflation basically, and the economy had collapsed because it was a controlled economy, the Israeli left was kind of lost politically.

00:54:49:00 - 00:55:22:22

Unknown

It had no new idea, new organizing principle, until 1987. With the beginning, the the Israeli currency collapses. In 85, the shekel is canceled. The new shekel is issued, and the Israeli left is now out at sea. And very quickly, a new thing presents itself in 1987, which is the start of the first Intifada, the first, the grassroots Palestinian uprising, the rock throwing children who who were understood by the Israeli left by half of Israelis as being a moral argument against the fact that they're under military rule.

00:55:22:24 - 00:55:45:21

Unknown

That principle of ending the occupation replaced socialism as the foundational, deepest idea of the Israeli left and became a new civic religion when it struck, Rabin was assassinated by an Israeli Jew, not, some Palestinian terrorist right out to assassinate the Israeli prime minister, but an Israeli Jew opposed to the peace process. The Israeli left rose in the polls because it had it had its martyr.

00:55:45:21 - 00:56:14:18

Unknown

The other side looked like it would kill a prime minister to stop it. Maybe our side was a little bit the problem. The Israeli left had this profound idea. And then, after the assassination in 1986, we went to an election. And in the week before the election, Hamas carried out massive suicide bombings in Jerusalem that turned the election away from the left, which was winning in the polls and basically gave Benjamin Netanyahu his first victory in 1996.

00:56:14:20 - 00:56:34:22

Unknown

And then in 2000, when Barak was back again, the left was in power talking about a Palestinian state negotiating shared Selma to two with the Temple Mount. Back in Camp David with Bill Clinton and Yasser Arafat. That's when the 140 suicide bombings, the second father begins, a lot of it driven by Hamas. So, for example, an Israeli knows and I'm not saying knows as an objective truth.

00:56:34:22 - 00:56:57:01

Unknown

I'm saying knows it's the lived experience of millions of people that Hamas has targeted peace processes first, long before it ever claimed to be against occupation. And so Israelis don't perceive with Hamas some alternative. It's not as though we can give them something. And it ends. They were at war with the peace before they ever were pretending to be a war with the occupation.

00:56:57:04 - 00:57:19:04

Unknown

Now, that's not a talking point of Israeli officials. In fact, Israeli officials don't talk this way. That's the lived experience of people that you have to actually talk to them, to find out about. And then so much makes sense. Why was there almost unanimity in Israel on going to the war in Gaza? The left is not usually eager with the right to go after a war in Gaza.

00:57:19:06 - 00:57:43:25

Unknown

Why this time? Yes, and the answer is a 30 year perception experience of what Hamas actually represents, which is not a Palestinian in demand for independence. And so that's a way to open up how the world looks to Israelis. That suddenly makes sense. Again, Israelis could be wrong, but they're not stupid. And that points to, just as you were saying, the layers, right?

00:57:44:01 - 00:58:10:24

Unknown

The complexities of a story that, for many reasons, outlets don't necessarily commit the time to or the space to I want to get to some of our questions. We do have quite a few coming in. One of the ones is, is, I think, something a lot of journals are thinking about right now, journalists being targeted by state governments all over the world, dangerous development.

00:58:10:24 - 00:58:36:04

Unknown

How can journalists still report and reach civilians on the ground in conflict zones when their access is restricted or denied? That's a wonderful question. And it ties, you know, powerfully into into Daniel Pearl story. I wish I had an answer. I have the profound privilege of, living in a society where I can write and say just about anything I want.

00:58:36:04 - 00:59:10:05

Unknown

I've never encountered something I've wanted to say. There's there's a military sensor that the military reporter sometimes has to submit articles to on troop movements in Gaza. Nothing I have ever written has ever been submitted to that. And I have absolute freedom to say anything I want. I can't imagine either journalists living in a place like Iran, where what you can say publicly is very circumscribed with in very specific ways, or the courage, the courage of a journalist who will who will take one of those trips available to North Korea and then come out and tell that story that could go wrong very fast.

00:59:10:05 - 00:59:34:02

Unknown

I don't think I have that courage and when I find journalistic colleagues, I have journalistic colleagues, Israeli journalistic colleagues who have been in Syria and been in, northern Iraq and many other places in the region to tell that story. And they they amaze me. The answer is attention to them, not while they're there, but immediately, you know, if they're, for example, kidnaped, which happens, which currently happens.

00:59:34:04 - 01:00:04:25

Unknown

A colleague of mine is currently in Iraq kidnaped, the world attention to it and, you know, praise for them doing that unbelievably important work. When Israeli journalists go into Syria and come back with stories, they are almost invariably powerful, humanizing stories that that go viral in Israeli media and Israeli social media. And they're a huge service to Israelis understanding the world around them, which because of war, because of ideology, because of culture and language barriers, isn't really open to them.

01:00:04:27 - 01:00:34:16

Unknown

So they're the best of us. Yeah. Just looking at the numbers. From Committee to Protect Journalists, more than 100 journalists killed, last year alone, in these conflict zones. Let's get to another question here, which there's been a few of this, which goes to sort of how these organizations are run today. You talk about a place like The Washington Post, by Jeff Bezos.

01:00:34:18 - 01:01:10:08

Unknown

I'm thinking, you know, on the TV side, how many ownerships there are from from corporations, billionaires owning news outlets. We're seeing it with the LA times as well. How do you, you know, to what extent does that influence coverage? But also to your point about diminishing investments, is this only going to accelerate given the ownership of major media outlets today?

01:01:10:10 - 01:01:40:01

Unknown

I think I think I would like to know your answer to that. That's something that absolutely fascinates me. My instinct is very pessimistic. I can't imagine that this will that this will go well. What we're seeing with Jeff Bezos is essentially the argument that there's such a multiplicity of voices. There's so much out there. People can get so much information, a big newspaper with that fact check that just edits for spelling, right, is already going to be so slow that it's not going to compete with the news cycle in social media.

01:01:40:04 - 01:02:01:03

Unknown

So we might as well have some other value added. And what's the easiest value added to reach for opinion? And so we're going to take an opinionated stance. That's just the only reason you would come to us rather than open TikTok if you're a young person. That's the theory. And it, it might make economic sense. The economics of it might force media to go that way.

01:02:01:03 - 01:02:20:19

Unknown

And so my basic instinct is very pessimistic. Do you think there's another path ultimately for American Journal of a major journalism anywhere in the West? Yeah, I mean, it's certainly been interesting to see the layoffs that have been happening and then to see those journalists who've been laid off, what's the path they've taken? So many have turned to Substack, right?

01:02:20:19 - 01:02:54:08

Unknown

To to outlets, you know, it. Can you make money is the question. But it does speak to being able to do independent journalism in a way that potentially, that just wouldn't be possible. It is about, you know, going back to what I was saying earlier with, with, Daniel Pearl and the time he spent on the stories, the investment these outlets made to be able to get to the human side of that story, you know, that that you have to wonder if that if those days are gone.

01:02:54:10 - 01:03:21:12

Unknown

That's something I think a lot of journalists are grappling with. Today, can I see? And also, in a sense, it's a wide open market because anybody can go and do anything. And if the market likes it, fantastic. But the market doesn't need what it, when, when, the Apple iPhone was first introduced, the basic idea, you know, nobody had ever seen anything like or the iPad was introduced, nobody seen anything like it.

01:03:21:15 - 01:03:42:19

Unknown

And so, but the the argument from Apple's marketing department was, how do they know they don't want it if they've never seen it? Right? So, people don't know whether or not they want real, powerful, hard hitting, deep, difficult, expensive journalism until they see it and until it shapes their world. And it's written well in a way that's engaging in the way that that brings them in.

01:03:42:19 - 01:04:04:27

Unknown

And it has the video that they need to access and all of that. Nobody can do that. In the atomized sort of TikTok world. There's such wonderful journalists running around on YouTube and on TikTok or going places and interviewing people. Either they're independently wealthy, funded by a couple of investors, and can do it or, you know, they're they're going to be limited in what it is that they can produce.

01:04:04:27 - 01:04:25:13

Unknown

So, we're having an atomization of journalism result. And so a lot of people are doing a lot of good work, but because it's not in a major outlet and doesn't have that resources, those resources, they're not doing the kinds of things we need from journalism. Could Daniel Pearl have self-funded his amazing journalism? And I think the answer is no.

01:04:25:15 - 01:05:11:20

Unknown

There is a question about whether there is a formula, or we can change the way we tell stories. And I ask this because I think the reality is you've got a whole generation of readers and viewers who get their news through different avenues. You mentioned social media. Is there is there a way to tell these stories, layered stories that bring truth through social media, through other outlets that are gaining more and more traction through other platforms, I should say, or avenues?

01:05:11:22 - 01:05:37:22

Unknown

My experience, with that kind of journalism is that it is as likely to go viral on a major news site as it is on YouTube. The audience doesn't care where it gets the information from. There's a hunger for real deep dives and insight, and journalism isn't supplying it, and it can supply it and if it does, the audience doesn't care if it has to go to one website or paywalls the audience cares about, but nothing else.

01:05:37:22 - 01:05:59:19

Unknown

And so, nothing is stopping a journalistic media outlet. I think, from being profoundly relevant by just being a little bit more profound, a little bit deeper. And we are seeing those who can stand on their own two feet and survive, and all the buffeting winds of this moment of the economics of the last 20 years, are the deep dive journals are the thinking journals.

01:05:59:19 - 01:06:25:05

Unknown

And they have, I think, proliferated and, and are successfully, growing and paying salaries to good journalists. So, I think I think the audience no longer needs, minute to minute news. It should have minute to minute news from serious fact journalists, but it doesn't necessarily need it feel that it wants it. But the deep dives, it's begging for, yearning for, hungering for.

01:06:25:05 - 01:06:50:23

Unknown

And if serious journalism doesn't go into those deep dives, doesn't talk about history, doesn't incorporate that, then they're going to find it with people who are not honest and not serious. I want to get to another question. Can the global rise in anti-Semitism, manifesting largely in democracies, be seen as a leading indicator of an assault on democracy and democratic values and institutions?

01:06:50:26 - 01:07:30:18

Unknown

Antisemitism, is a we understand quite a bit about it. We know, first of all, obviously where it can lead to. But we also know what drives it. A lot of what drives it. Professor Ruth Weiss, has argued that, anti-Semitism is deeply embedded, in Western ideology, basically through religion. In other words, early Christianity has this problem with with Jews who are not accepting that Jesus Christ, you know, fulfilled their story and by not accepting it, created a theological tension in early Christianity to explain it.

01:07:30:18 - 01:07:52:06

Unknown

And sometimes that theological tension, came out, in ways that are oppressive and ways that are hateful. And one of the astonishing people to read on this is Saint Augustine, who has such a theologian of love. But when it comes to Jews, Saint Augustine writes that they should be oppressed for all time. Because of that, rejection is a sign of the truth of Christianity.

01:07:52:08 - 01:08:18:16

Unknown

And this is seen also in early Islam, in the Koran itself, Jews are honored and respected, and there are customs that are borrowed from Jews that Muhammad inculcates into his followers. And then in the Koran itself, there are these later periods where it turns viciously on Jews and argues for their death and destruction. And it's a similar kind of tension of a sense of super secessionist competition.

01:08:18:18 - 01:08:54:07

Unknown

And that that paradigm buried deep in, other monotheistic, basically mission izing religions that borrowed these ideas from the Jews. But the Jews remained what they are. And that was seen as a kind of, rebuke of, of the new religion, drove mass murder of Jews through the ages. The Crusaders, as they come down the Rhine River on their way to the Holy Land, the People's Crusade, the Zeroth Crusade, the crusade before the First Crusade, which is 40,000 peasants walking down the Rhine about 40km into Muslim territory.

01:08:54:07 - 01:09:11:24

Unknown

They're massacred by the very first Seljuk army they meet. They were not a successful crusade, and they're not remembered well in Christian history. But on their way down the Rhine, they managed to kill 1 in 4 Jews in the cities of the Rhine. And when they do that, we actually have memoirs, about them saying it's because they didn't accept Christ.

01:09:11:27 - 01:09:38:00

Unknown

That idea is secularized in the modern age, but the paradigm remains. And so for Marx, the Jews play this role of just as with Christians, just as with early Islam, in some profound sense, standing in the way of redemption. And because they're capitalists. And for Hitler, world jewelry was this communist Bolshevik, capitalist thing that oppressed the Volk from all sides.

01:09:38:02 - 01:10:00:04

Unknown

When Jews encounter on a college campus the idea of intersectional ism. They're they're literally t shirts given out at the Columbia encampment. And the these people don't think they hate Jews. And there are Jews at the encampment, but there are t shirts in which there is in the center the word Palestine. And all around the center the word Palestine.

01:10:00:10 - 01:10:28:19

Unknown

All these other social issues like police violence, like, you know, climate like inequalities in America. And the point of the t shirt, what it says on the t shirt is everything is Palestine. Now, if you're Jewish, you look at that and you say, wait a second, I know what this is. This is a secularized, modern, progressive version of the idea that Zionism is some distillation of all evils in the world of all oppression on earth, the Jews once again stand in the way.

01:10:28:22 - 01:10:46:18

Unknown

So when you go looking for the thing that stands, you're you're going through some crisis, you're experiencing some kind of social collapse. It's hard to talk about, you know, fish don't know they're swimming in water. You're inside. Something is a very bad time to try to analyze it because you're literally within it. You don't know what the alternative is.

01:10:46:21 - 01:11:06:25

Unknown

And so you experience this kind of crisis. You don't know what you're experiencing. It's very easy to find something that's standing in the way of healing and redemption and solution. And the Jews of the paradigm, the Jews of the paradigm for 2000 years of Western thought. And and that's been there in Islam. Not always, not always. And often it's a very different relationship.

01:11:07:02 - 01:11:36:23

Unknown

Very often. But the paradigm is there to borrow. And so, yes, anti-Semitism profoundly is a sign of massive crisis. Possibly, if you don't deal with it. Well, and if you're turning to antisemitism, you're not dealing with it. Well, that's a good signal. Possibly presaging a kind of collapse. I know we're out of time here, but I want to get one more question in, which is, from a student journalist who says, he or she is interested in becoming a foreign correspondent.

01:11:36:25 - 01:11:57:20

Unknown

What is your advice? How can I best prepare? What should guide my thinking? And I think this is a good question to end on. One that I get quite often and in sort of, you know, the advice I got was just go there. I was a local journalist doing local news. I knew I wanted to be a foreign correspondent.

01:11:57:23 - 01:12:23:09

Unknown

And I remember I made 20 calls asking people how do I get there? And they said, you guys just go to the country, pick up your bags, get a camera, because I was in TV journalism and just go there, which is what I did. I'm curious how you answer that question for those, especially in, as you point out, a different, you know, a journalism model that is changing every day economically.

01:12:23:11 - 01:12:49:06

Unknown

More and more pressure against journalists as well. I mean, how do you answer that question for an aspiring foreign correspondent to say, I still want to do this? Very simple. You don't know anything. You're going to people who are real, honest, thoughtful, deep, have lived through history and know things and you don't know things. Don't go to a place thinking you understand it because you've read a book about it or a Wikipedia article about it.

01:12:49:06 - 01:13:09:11

Unknown

I heard the Secretary of State of the United States give a speech about it. You're going to a place you don't know. Come with profound humility. You're going to learn everything. And there's the rough and tumble of it, right? You're never telling the complete story. You can't. It's physically impossible. So tell that piece of the story. And the only guarantor that your journalism is real and honest and authentic is your own humility.

01:13:09:14 - 01:13:27:02

Unknown

So come to a place, ask people what it is they think, what it is they believe. Take them at their word. If you want to say, actually, what's happening here is some deeper, more subtle, nuanced construct. Don't just impose it from the beginning. You don't know enough. You're just you're just essentially using them as a mirror for your own views.

01:13:27:05 - 01:13:48:02

Unknown

Listen to them build something, an idea, a story and analysis and understanding out of what it is that they tell you. Journalism is that humility? Journalists love talking about journalists. We're doing it right now. But in fact, journalists are not the story. And that's the most important thing to know when you're encountering people who are not you.

01:13:48:05 - 01:14:27:12

Unknown

Yeah. Humility is a good word to end on here. Harvey Rudiger, it is great to talk to you today. Really enjoyed this conversation. And thank you to all of you for joining us today as well. Thank you.