I'm John Betts with my good friend Peter Berkowitz, the Tad and Diane Dobbs, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution.

Most importantly, the author of a collection of his remarks from 2014 to 2024 in public at Real Club Politics.

I recommend Peter's column because this column writing is real time.

We have 2020 hindsight.

So I go immediately to a column that he publishes very helpfully based upon remarks and the writings of a very famous Frenchman,

Bernard Levy Strauss, whom I've talked to and Peter's talked to over the years. The reason I choose

that column, Peter, is because I want to address anti-Semitism.

What happened during the worst of the war fighting in 2020, 2024, and what we see today,

Levi-Strauss has four points to make that are important for those who oppose the state of Israel or demonstrate against

the state of Israel or take to writing graffiti or camping out in college campuses or challenging

people on the street or gathering in the tens of thousands in the center of London. It's going on

for a year, more than a year now.

He has four points, sovereignty, colonialism, the Hitlerites, and the Gaza casualties.

Let's begin in order.

First, sovereignty.

The anti-Semitic behavior, are the opponents of Israel aware that it is a sovereign

state, that it is as sovereign as any other that the protesters probably carry a passport for?

Well, no, they aren't. And all we need to do is consider the following. There is no other country,

no other member of the United Nations concerning whom intellectuals in the West feel free to raise

the question, does it have a right to exist? And the answer many intellectuals give is no, on the grounds that Israel is a settler colonial, colonial power, or a stolen land, or other arguments.

But you know you're dealing with something different, a double standard, when only one country in the world has that question posed of it.

Justify your very right to exist.

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