Freakonomics Radio XX
[0] There is a saying I've heard in many forms, in many places over the years.
[1] Maya Angelou used to say, when someone shows you who they are, believe them.
[2] There's another version that goes like this.
[3] If there is a crowd in the street shouting that they want to kill you, you should take them seriously.
[4] There are parts of the world where crowds gather to shout death to the Jews.
[5] We should believe them.
[6] The latest evidence?
[7] On October 7th, thousands of Hamas fighters having been trained in Iran, financed by Hamas leadership in Qatar and positioned in Gaza, crossed the Israeli border and killed some 1 ,400 Jews with a level of barbarism that hardly seems believable in the 21st century.
[8] The details are too grotesque to keep repeating.
[9] One Hamas attacker phoned his mother from the site.
[10] Your son killed Jews, he said.
[11] Mom, your son is a hero.
[12] They also kidnapped Jews more than 200 and took them back to Gaza.
[13] They had apparently been promised a bounty of $10 ,000 and an apartment for each Jew they kidnapped.
[14] Since that day, every Israeli, every Jew in the world, has been forced into grief and at the same time forced to reckon with an ancient reality.
[15] Anti -Semitism is one of the oldest and most lasting hatreds in the world.
[16] It is far from the only hatred of its kind.
[17] The economist Ed Glazer once wrote a paper called the Political Economy of Hatred.
[18] He was trying to understand, as he put it, anti -Black Hatred in the U .S. South, anti