Terry Glavin
speaker
167 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard Dec 2024
Terry Glavin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
I would say probably the overwhelming majority of Muslims are not anti-Semites, although that's hard to say. It also depends to some degree on how you phrased the question. That's right. In fact, I refer to a study... of Muslim public opinion.
And it was actually the proportion of Muslims who agreed to answer a particular question about suicide bombing and about whether or not the state of Israel should be allowed to exist. It was pretty high. There was, do you remember, there was a big debate about five years ago, six years ago, about Islamophobia.
In Canada. You know, there was going to be a law, there was going to be statutory reform to sort of outlaw Islamophobia.
And the liberals refused to define what they actually meant by Islamophobia.
Yeah. And you would hear the liberals say that every day, you know, Muslims in Canada are subjected to racist abuse and intimidation. And I remember because I'm a complete public opinion poll nerd. Data is the thing I need to get. Give me the data. Everybody's opinion. Who cares? Give me the data.
And public opinion back then showed that the overwhelming majority of Muslims in Canada were actually demonstrated a higher degree of pride in their country than than what you might call old stock Canadians. And the main complaint that Muslims had about Canada was, it's so damn cold here. Nobody was worried about, nobody was freaking out. Perfectly valid complaint, by the way.
It's just, I think we have to be very, very, very careful about understanding the nature of the problem. And we have to be very careful about the words that we use, the language that we use. And we all use these words, the kind of euphemisms, left-wing or progressive. Are you kidding me? What is progressive about the phenomena that we end up describing as progressive?
How is this in any way an aid of human progress or civilizational progress? It's reactionary. It's regressive.
Yeah, well, I'll go back, I think, to what I was inarticulately trying to describe about the trajectory of the left since the 1990s. I think by the 80s, I think, or the 90s, you could say that we'd won we, if I can say that, because I kind of came from the left, although I have no ideological commitments, and I'm kind of sour these days on the left. But anyway, we'd won all our bouts.
We've won them all. Civil rights, equal rights for people of color. Gay marriage. Gay marriage, the right of women to equality in the workplace, the right of unions to organize, labor relations standards, environmental laws were coming along. We'd won all our big battles.
Yeah. And I think, I mean, a mistake to get too weird, not to get too weird about it, but one mistake Marxists made was this idea that there is no more useful role for the bourgeoisie in the progress of human society. They actually were wrong about that because it was the bourgeoisie that led the charge against slavery and for women's rights.
So at any rate, by the 80s or the 90s, you know, we'd won. So something peculiar has happened, and there is this very dark phenomenon that has occupied all the places where the left used to be. And it is invariably... masochistic, sinister, self-hating. Let's tear down the liberal democracies. Let's cast Canada as this illegitimate, racist, colonial settler state.
Let's identify Israel as the epitome of everything that we loathe and despise. it's an ugly, ugly, ugly thing. And I mean, I think it's ugly. Maybe that's an opinion. I don't know. I think it's demonstrably true.
And that was the thing that I was watching over the years is that, you know, I spent a lot of, well, my last major book was about Afghanistan and I spent a lot of time in Syria and the Northeast with the Kurds and
Okay, here's a proposition. Everybody likes to beat up on the news media, right? I've come up in the news media in the old discipline. You spend six years as an apprentice before you're a journeyman in the old guild system. Six years as a reporter. After that, well, maybe you'll be allowed to have an opinion about something.
Really elaborate conventions and disciplines in what was essentially a trade, a craft, right? Um, and with the, uh, you know, the golden era was about the 1980s, I would say 1970s, 1980s. And then with the advent of digital technologies and a whole bunch of other reasons, um, news, the news media, the conventional news media began to wither away and collapse.
And it's replaced by, you know, people talk about the mainstream media. Well, the mainstream media today is Twitter. That's the mainstream media now. And so in this period, it became increasingly difficult for journalists to actually tell a story. The results be damned.
It's much easier to basically fill your shift with three or four stories for deadline, each of which more or less uphold the narrative framework of the subscriber base that your media organization is targeting. A lot of it really is about the decline and the collapse of news media. I mean, I can talk about that a little bit because it's something I know.
But I think a lot of it too, I think, is language. It's simple language. that probably ends up with most ordinary people who are only casually interested in the struggle for democracy in China or events in the Middle East or this strange creature that has come to occupy all the spaces where the Liberal Party used to be. It's the language that we use. How conservative are the conservative?
How liberal are the liberals?
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