‘Jew hatred is a form of ideological brain worms’

Since 7 October 2023, anti-Semitism has exploded across the West. Violent attacks on synagogues and ‘hate marches’ against Israel are now a feature of life in every Western capital. The well educated and woke in the cultural elite seem especially vulnerable to this dangerous way of thinking. New life has been breathed into the oldest hatred.

Gad Saad – evolutionary psychologist and author of The Parasitic Mind – witnessed a similar surge in anti-Semitism when he grew up in Lebanon in the 1970s. He sat down with spiked’s Fraser Myers to discuss what’s gone wrong in the West and how we can confront the mindset that produces this poison. You can watch the full conversation here.

Fraser Myers: What resonances are there between your upbringing in Lebanon and what we’re experiencing in the West today?

Gad Saad: I was among the last remaining Jews in Lebanon in the mid-1970s. Most of my extended family had already left – maybe they read the writing on the wall better than my parents did. Or maybe my parents read the writing on the wall and chose to ignore it.

It was a brutally nasty civil war, where former neighbours became arch enemies. During the first year, we saw things that no human being should see or experience. My parents took several return trips to Lebanon after we had emigrated to Canada, and on one of them, they were kidnapped by Fatah. So many of the things that we see today – the kidnapping of hostages and so on – are things that I lived through in my childhood.

Myers: When you were younger, one of the boys you were at school with said he wanted to be a ‘Jew killer’ when he grew up.

Saad: That’s right. In The Parasitic Mind, I’m trying to demonstrate that Jew hatred is not something that just arose as part of the civil war. When I was five years old, the president of Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser, died. The people were lamenting in the streets in Beirut, screaming, ‘Death to Jews, death to Jews’. When I turned to my mother to ask why, she said, ‘Keep your head down’. That was the first time I saw what endemic Jew hatred looked like.

The incident you’re referring to occurred when I was eight or nine years old – about a year before the start of the civil war. The teacher had asked us to each get up and tell the class what we wanted to be when we grew up. ‘I want to be a doctor’, ‘I want to be a soccer player’, ‘I want to be a policeman’. And one of the kids, with whom I had grown up for many years, and who knew I was Jewish, got up and said, ‘When I grow up, I want to be a Jew killer’. This was met with raucous laughter and applause. That’s the reality we faced in Lebanon.

Myers: You’re living in Canada now. Are there any similarities?

Saad: Worrying similarities. Huge similarities. That fateful day that we left Lebanon, and the airline pilot announced that we had just cleared Lebanese airspace, my mother put a Star of David around my neck. She said, ‘Now you can wear this – wear it proudly – and no longer hide your identity’.

Fast forward to two weeks after 7 October 2023. My son, who at that point was almost the exact same age as I was when that story happened, returned from a soccer match in the east end of Montreal, where a particular demographic group is prevalent. In the car, he said, ‘Daddy, if you had come to watch me play soccer today, and you had been wearing a Star of David, you’d be dead’. What I had escaped in 1975 is now the reality again.

Myers: You describe bad ideas like anti-Semitism and wokeness as ‘infectious’ and ‘parasitic’. What do you mean by that?

Saad: The field of parasitology explores host-parasite interactions, and there are many instances of that in the animal kingdom.

An example of a neural parasite – one that needs to end up in your brain, altering your circuitry to suit its interests – is the hair worm. Wood crickets abhor water, but when it is parasitised by a hair worm, the hair worm needs it to jump into water in order to complete the reproductive cycle. So the wood cricket commits suicide in the service of this parasite that has zombified its brain. That was my ‘eureka’ moment. I decided to take that framework and argue that human beings can be parasitised not only by physical brain worms, but also by ideological brain worms.

Myers: Your book discusses the idea of ‘suicidal empathy’. What do you mean by that?

Saad: Empathy is a perfectly beneficial virtue to have. It makes sense for us, given that we are a social, cooperative species, to exhibit empathy to others. While you and I are having this conversation, I need to put myself in your mind in order for us to have a meaningful interaction. So my book isn’t a rejection of empathy. It’s a rejection of the misfiring of empathy.

If I am more empathetic towards MS-13 gang members from El Salvador than I am to American veterans, that’s suicidal empathy. If I argue that all immigrants, irrespective of which culture they come from, are equally likely to assimilate into the host society, that’s suicidal empathy. If I think it’s not very nice to punish felons who’ve already been arrested 137 times, that’s suicidal empathy. Basically, what I argue in the book is that many of our failings in our domestic and foreign policies are due to this misfiring of empathy.

Myers: How do we push back against these ‘parasitic’ ideas when they seem impervious to reason?

Saad: That’s a great question. I don’t want to say it’s an intractable problem, because then there’d be no point in me getting out of bed, or writing those books, or being a professor. I do think that with enough repetition, you can get people to move away from their cherished, anchored, sacred cows. But as someone who has spent his career trying to understand how people think, it’s very, very difficult to do so.

I appeared on a show hosted by a British psychiatrist about a year and a half ago. At the end of the show, he said, ‘Professor Saad, you’ve been a behavioral scientist for more than 30 years. What is the single phenomenon that has most surprised you about the human condition?’ I thought for a second. I said it was the inability for people to change their minds, irrespective of how much evidence you show them. As a matter of fact, often they become even more emboldened in their stance.

So depending on the day, you might catch me being a bit more optimistic or a bit less optimistic. But I do believe it’s a winnable battle – you’ve just got to be fighting it every second of every day.

Myers: People talk these days about a ‘vibe shift’. How important will changes in the broader culture, or in politics, be in restoring rationality?

Saad: If you have a zeitgeist that doesn’t create as much fear or self-censorship, obviously a student will feel more inclined to put up their hand and say, ‘Professor, what do you mean “men can menstruate”?’. People would be afforded permission to actually challenge their lying eyes. Many people have asked me if we’re ‘free’ now that Trump has won a second term. I say absolutely not. Some of these ‘parasitic ideas’ have taken between 50 and 80 years to flourish and be promulgated across society, so it will take more than a four-year Trump presidency to do away with them. The virus hasn’t ceased to exist. There will be a culture war. But I’d like to think that it won’t take another 50 to 80 years to win the battle.

Fraser Myers was talking to Gad Saad. Watch the full conversation here: