RM: Then how do you personally, as a scientist, as an individual Jew, react to the idea that the Arab world hates you and would like to see you and your type dead?

HB: I hate them. I respect them, I follow them like crazy. I'm a scholar of Islamic culture and history. When I am with my Islamic enemies, like the head of one of the major Islamic groups who I debated on television, I invite him out to lunch. I'm fascinated by him. He's a wonderful human being. It's like the good Germans who were running the concentration camps and listening to Mozart and Vivaldi and all the music that I listen to. And getting the same exhilaration out of it that I get out of it, while they had their Jewish woman who cleaned their houses and who they fucked. And who when they were finished with them, they threw into the ovens. They ran the ovens. These were wonderful people if you were a part of their family and they liked you. But if they were determined to exterminate you, they did. You were "stucken." Livestock. Jews and Slavs were livestock. To be eliminated. Hitler was a wonderful person if you spent time with him. He loved his dog. He loved Eva Braun, he loved nature. He loved many of the same things that you and I love. We'd love to spend time with Hitler on his "Eagle's Mountain" or whatever. He was a fucking genius. I study him like crazy. But the fact is, if a person is determined to eliminate you, then you have to retaliate with all the power in you. It's tit for tat. I don't want to eliminate them, but I sure don't want to allow them to eliminate me. Not by a longshot. Germans are wonderful. They are wonderful people. A wonderful people tried to kill my people, A wonderful people exterminated my family in Europe, probably about 350 people.

A cousin of mine put together a magazine and assigned a story is to a top journalist, who is Jewish, then sent him to Jordan. He tells in his article of dancing with a Jordanian girl and they had a wonderful time. They went clubbing until they were utterly blown and blissed out. Then he asked "What would happen if you guys went to war with Israel?" and she said "I'd have a knife in your back and you'd be dead in two seconds."

RM: What motivates that? What makes it so that the mind of the super organism takes over from the mind of an individual to the extent that a woman will kill her lover?

HB: The best way to explain these things is we are still operating on impulses not that we learned, not as hunter-gatherers, but the impulses we learned from our days as bacteria. The bacteria from 3.5 billion years ago are our ancestors and we share something like 70% of our genes with them. You can consider yourself, from your feet up to your nipples, A bacterium. And bacteria are processing organisms, thinking organisms, highly creative organisms. They operate in communities, in intelligent communities of a vastness that we cannot comprehend. A bacterial colony in a stromatolite has a population roughly a trillion times larger than all the human beings who have ever existed and yet it operates as a single metropolis with a sense of singular purpose and a collective intelligence. These colonies last for billions of years.

Let's take the example of sea anemone, because I know their structure in battle better. Bacteria have not been studied enough in the wild to know what the nature is of their intergroup tournaments. But sea anemones have been. When you see a mass of sea anemones in tidal pools on the coast of Monterey, they look harmless. They are like plants. The only thing that we don't realize is that plants if you watch them on their own time scale, are in furious competition with each other. Like the sea anemones, they are in battles for land and territory that last hundreds of years. A sea anemone colony is set up in such a way that the ones in the center of the colony, the vast mass of sea anemones, are just there to basically eat and multiply. But there is whole periphery of warrior sea anemones on the colony's border that are equipped with specialized weaponry, with poisonous tentacles, and their entire purpose is to make war on the colony next door and attempt to crowd it out of the territory and to take possession of its stretch of seabed.

These are behaviors we inherited. We got them not from our primate ancestors, but from our unicellular, microbial relatives of 3.5 billion years ago, who already had degrees of social sophistication and warfare that are unimaginable to us. They had a degree of complexity that went far beyond anything that we have ever achieved. They had information swapping mechanisms that are beyond our newspapers, our magazines and our Internet. They did it by swapping bits of genetic material. They still do it constantly.

And what is a piece of genetic material? It's a massive . . . it's like swapping out a 14 megabyte disk. In fact it's like swapping out a 14,000 megabyte disk. Yet they swap these things constantly. What's more, they generate new ones--when they run into problems they reengineer their own genomes and add a new level of layer of learning and innovation which they can then swap around and trade with others. And of course when you put a new network together of these learning modules, you've got a larger "whole" that operates in an entirely different way.