Gad Saad Growing up in Lebanon, October 7th, and the future of the West

Gad Saad is a professor at Concordia University in Montreal, Canada - one of the cities that has seen the biggest eruption of antisemitism since Oct 7th. Gad was born in Beirut, Lebanon to a Jewish family with roots in Syria. As a child, the antisemitism his family encountered is one of the reasons why they fled from Lebanon to Canada. And now in Canada, he has to hear professors telling students to “go back to Poland” in reference to Auschwitz and the Holocaust where millions of Jewish people were murdered. Gad and I spoke about antisemitism in the Arab world and how disorienting it is for us to see it so naked in the west today, with students in Columbia University in NY asking for Hamas to make them proud and burn Tel Aviv to the ground. As one of the few voices who was warning about where this capitulation to extremism could lead, we will find out how Gad feels now that he is being ‘vindicated’ and how he thinks we can move beyond this crisis.