Candace Owens' Interview with Rabbi Michael Barclay #1

Anatomy of a failed communication.

When a “bigot” debates with a “monster” now can emotions not get the best of both of them?

I’m not going to analyse what was said much, but what was trying to be communicated and what actually was communicated. Most human communication is after all, non-verbal. I’m also only going to go into the timeline up to the point where the communication irrevocably broke down between these two. They began by trying to define definitions so they would not be talking past one another. This strategy failed at around the seven-minute mark. So, I’m only going to look at the first seven minutes.

It would be a hard push to say that this debate began in good faith. These two were there to fight and not by Queensbury rules. Rabbi Barclay has already delivered some ungentlemanly below-the-belt jabs beforehand — in print — calling Owens “a Jew hating bigot.” This was the first stressor. Owens is a born fighter if ever I saw one, and was clearly smarting at this accusation. In response, before the bell sounded to start the first round, she counterblowed with a quick kidney punch, telling her audience that the Rabbi, by making such claims, was either “genuinely ignorant” or “a monster.” The point being that the guy was clearly not genuinely ignorant. Touché!

Where Owens went wrong

They started off defining terms and specifically defining antisemitism, the main topic of the debate. Defining terms is always a good idea and both were smart enough to know this. Barclay began by explaining his definition of antisemitism as a different type of hate from any other, and referring to British Chief Rabbi Jonathan Sacks’ definition, “Jews have no right to live collectively as Jews with the same rights as other human beings.” Barclay then referred to antisemitism as a “mutating” form of hatred, another of Rabbi Sack’s ideas outlined in his essay and video, The Mutation of Antisemitism: What is antisemitism, and how has it changed over the centuries? If Owens had been sent a link to this video and watched it, I think the interview would have gone very differently.

As it was, you can see that Owens disagrees with the idea of changing the meaning of terms as soon as Barclay uses the term “mutating”. Owens is a relatively young woman and is not an expert in the history of anti-semitism: she is firmly rooted in the contemporary context and not a deep religious historical one. Today’s cultural discourse is all about contesting terms: men can be women, anti-racism is racism, and classical liberals are fascists. Hence, it’s very normal for a young conservative to be dubious of claims of “mutating” meanings, and smell bullsh!t. Why? Because it usually is bullish!t!

But as Owens was not sent Dr Sach’s video explaining the deep historical roots of “mutating antisemitism” her contemporary BS alarm went off when it shouldn’t have. In that moment, however, and you can see it, she reined herself in and didn’t interrupt. This was the second stressor.

Barclay then harked back into deep history to explain how the tropes of Jews with horns and supposedly drinking the blood of children (the blood libel) came about. He explains the blood libel occurred in England in 1144. He then goes further back in time to talk about The Vulgate, the 4th-century Latin translation of the Old Testament by Saint Jerome, which contains an infamous mistranslation that has Moses descending from Mount Sinai with horns instead of a halo. Jews had been linked with the “Anti-Christ” since they rejected Christ, and this mistranslation further embedded the idea that Jews were “devils” into religious culture. Particularly since this mistranslation was not corrected until the 1970s. In this context, Barclay was explaining the history of antisemitism in the Middle Ages, as a hatred of the religion, not the people and not Israel. By this time, I would have forgiven Owens for perhaps wondering if she’d gotten herself bogged down in a Putinesque history lesson.

Importantly, however, note that Barclay talks about these issues back to front. This was the crucial third stressor. He first talks about the blood libel issue which happened in 1144AD, then goes back in time to talk about The Vulgate. I think this is crucial to how the debate failed very early. Owens has been listening carefully but needs some clarification here with the backward time jump. It’s bad historical narration by the Rabbi. Such a jump in continuity will bamboozle any close listener of complex, new information for a moment as they sense a dissonance in the narration and need to expend extra cognitive effort to put events in the correct order to make sense. You can see this happening in this clip here. Owens has been listening to Barclay’s disjointed two thousand-year potted history for two minutes straight — all new information to her — interspersed with added personal anecdote from the Rabbi, but at this point, her concentration has been interrupted and she struggles to regain it.

He now turns to the 18th-20th centuries when many Jews are assimilated into culture. Here his point is that antisemitism as a hatred of the religion mutated over time into a hatred of the “race” of people. This began with pogroms throughout the Russian Empire and culminated in Nazi Germany and the Holocaust, which led to the creation of Israel. Barclay was about to go into a description of the third mutation: antisemitism as a hatred of Israel and Zionism, but Candace had lost concentration and discipline. She had listened patiently for nearly four minutes straight now (that’s a long time in such a high-pressure situation), and she decided to follow her BS detector, and weigh in on the “mutation” trope based on her experience of it in the contemporary discourse. Rabbi Barclay had been trying to explain that it was not based on contemporary discourse, but ancient discourse. It was now too late, however.

If she had seen Sacks’ video, if Barclay had not meandered so much to get to the point, if the animus was not so explicit, in which importantly Barclay was the instigator, this discussion might have had chance.

Unfortunately, within seven minutes, it was already doomed.

link to full interview here

Look out for Part 2: What the Rabbi did wrong!