This essay is about the mechanisms behind the common human phenomenon of solving one’s problems by blaming them on someone else. (TO LISTEN TO THE EPISODE CLICK HERE!)
(LISTEN TO THE EPISODE CLICK HERE!)
It has taken a long time to write this. Even longer to translate. Well, relatively. Usually I write things up in a matter of days. I do enjoy taking my time, but deadlines are a reality. This text has taken me months. It’s not like I’m Goethe writing the first part of Faust. For the English speaking listener this essay was originally published in Swedish fifth of May. Although as I just said I’ve been working on it since February. Most of my work is in Swedish since I’m a Swede living in Sweden.
It’s an interesting country from the point of view of this essay. The world’s oldest social democracy can not only boast most years in power for a social democratic party but also with being the country that has taken in the most immigrants from the Middle East and Africa in relation to the size of the Swedish population. You can read more about Sweden’s social democratic party, their antisemitism, their cooperation with Nazi Germany, and their alliance with the Muslim brotherhood in my book THIS IS A SWEDISH TIGER that you can find on amazon.
A lot has happened since I began writing, prior to my journey to Israel in February. It should be said that this essay is pitch black. Not that there aren’t glimmers of – let’s call it hope – in the world. There are. It’s just that I won’t discuss those aspects here and now. That will have to be the subject of another essay or discussion.
ISRAEL’S STRAUSSIAN MOMENT
The seventh of October 2023 was Israel’s ”Straussian moment”. In that instant the vast majority of Israelis realized they had been wrong about their enemies. They had deceived themselves. Hamas could not be appeased with money. No material comfort and no rational argument could divert them from their goals.
Like the hijackers of the aircrafts that crashed into World Trade Center in 2001, the actions has nothing to do with oppression or economics. Al-Qaeda’s suicide candidates came mainly from the fairly wealthy upper middle class. And Osama Bin Laden was born with a golden spoon in his mouth.
The barbarians who murdered with such lust the seventh of October were not motivated by a reward in this world. They reject our entire civilization. Modernity is an existence where spiritual matters are relegated to the private sphere. Since the enlightenment we westerners have resided in Logos. Or at least attempted to. We cannot possibly understand those who live in mythos. We have nothing to offer them but our own death. Israel, as well as much of the West, is faced with the impossible choice of surviving by becoming like its enemies and thereby losing themselves, or just to perish. It’s a lose/lose scenario.
POGROMS & THE HOLOCAUST
On Tuesday 13th February 2024 I read a post on @vgoteborg’s Instagram. A black box with white text – ”Ban Israel from the Eurovision contest” signed by the Left Party (formerly Communist Party) of Gothenburg with the political party’s logo stamped in the bottom right corner. It’s hard to resist the temptation to go into the comments section, which Instagram counts to a total of 66.
There I can partake of the grossest kinds of slander directed at Israel. The commentators claim that Israel is deliberately killing as many civilians as possible. Preferably children of course. I’m used to the discourse in the comments section of my own posts where I’m repeatedly accused of being a child killer or a Nazi. Not infrequently both. Proponent of genocide is also a recurring, seemingly popular, slur.
The commentators on the Left Party’s Instagram seem to agree that the only way to prevent Israel from defending itself against Hamas is to remove Israel from the music competition.
Just one comment disagrees with the choir.
It says: ”Ban the Left Party from everything”.
Something the Left Party’s administrator answer with the word ”Mature”.
The jokes write themselves, it seems.
The administrator seems completely unaware of the humor that arises from his lack of self-awareness. Something that either makes the joke funnier or really tragic. I can’t decide.
Another commentator agrees with the Left Party’s call for a boycott of Israel by asking why Israel is allowed to participate at all since it is not in Europe anyway? A question that never seems to be asked about Azerbaijan.
I can’t bear to answer that it’s because Israel is ostracized from the Arab world and therefore is allowed to be with Europe instead. To be honest I don’t really care about the Eurovision Music Contest. But I am interested in the demand for a cultural boycott.
At elite universities in the US Jewish students are asked not to visit the campus. Swedish university students are wise enough to wait for the first sunny day before they pitch their tents but they follow as soon as one can camp out comfortably.
At Columbia students have set up a tent camp outside the main buildings to block the activities in solidarity with Hamas. And yes, it is in solidarity with Hamas. They say so themselves.
The mob attacks Jews, chants that Jews should move back to Poland, that the intifada should be made global. Their demand is, among other things, that universities must cease all forms of collaboration with Israel. A call for an academic boycott.
The UN has condemned Israel 153 times since 2015. More than twice as many as the rest of the world combined.
And then there’s the ICC and the ICJ. Trials that aim to sanction Israel.
Historians I have read divide the path that led to the Holocaust into four steps. It began in 1933 with boycotts, demands for resignation or dismissals of Jewish academics or public officials, and economic boycott of Jewish owned businesses. In 1935 the Jews were deprived of their civil rights. Then they were moved into ghettos in 1938. After that, in 1942, came the Final Solution. The Nazis themselves called this process, in fact a sort of social engineering program, Arification or Aryanization. A better description would have been de-Jewification. They wanted to make “Deutschland Juden rein”.
One should also know that the Holocaust was preceded by sixty years of persecution of the Jews. Which began with pogroms in Russia in the 1880s. The harassment of Jews broke out along the trans-Siberian railway. Town after town suddenly exploded into fits of Jew hatred in the form of “Jew-bashing”. From Russia onwards it spread like wildfire into Eastern and Western Europe. Infecting everybody. Thus arose “The Jewish Question”.
The whole world wanted to get rid of its Jews. But they had nowhere to go. Israel did not exist. Most of the Russian Jews took refuge to the United States. Two and a half million. A great number fled to countries that did not want to receive them, others were massacred.
Those pogroms contribute to the birth of political Zionism. And to a world where Nazi Germany was silently approved to murder its Jews without the world getting too caught up in that particular aspect of the Nazi project. So what exactly makes me think the world is preparing for another Holocaust?
“REALPOLITIK”
I’m afraid to even type the word. As if writing it down is a spell that will conjure my fear to reality. It should perhaps be mentioned that the most common cause of death in my family, on both my maternal and paternal side, in the last hundred years is Nazism. So maybe I’m a little extra sensitive to its expressions? Or maybe it’s those 2000 years of persecution and oppression my forebears had to endure that, through an evolutionary bottleneck, created an individual with a talent for recognizing the signs? No matter what, right now all my genes are screaming ”run!”.
I suspect that this process towards a new Holocaust is largely subconscious. But, in the case of a country like Iran, that has proclaimed that the Jewish state must be wiped out, it seems to be less so. The Ayatollah has called the Jews a cancer on humanity. Iran denies the Holocaust. At the same time as the Ayatollahs say they really want another one. It’s quite absurd. But has really happened. Is happening. And will probably continue to happen.
Iran’s proxy armies in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Gaza also claim they want to annihilate Israel. The Houthis have apparently started doing the Hitler salute at their military’s formations. Their creed is long but has the advantage of being very clear. ”God Is the Greatest, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam”.
Since November the Houthis have attacked shipping to Israel as a kind of blockade of the country. Hence a boycott. A violent one. Although I’m not clear if it should be defined as a marine or an economic boycott. Or both?
It also says something about today’s world that a group of young men with just a few rubber dinghies, an Iranian drone or two, and a dream can actually accomplish a doubling of costs for Western consumers is truly amazing.
In short, there are actors in the world who have genocide of Jews as a stated goal and who seem to putting their convictions into action. For them the process is quite conscious.
Muslim anti-Semitism has a long history that predates the Holocaust by over a millennium, but the kind that is manifest today has clear connections to the Holocaust and Israel’s founding in 1948. As well as the Soviet union.
Currently, the Palestinian Authority is led by the Holocaust denier Mahmoud Abbas, whose predecessor in office, Yassir Arafat, was a Soviet-trained and KGB financed terrorist from Egypt; whose predecessor was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husayni. Known as Hitler’s mufti.
Husayni was involved in the Holocaust and trained Muslim SS divisions in the Balkans before escaping from Germany after the war, via France, to Egypt. Where he was embraced by the Muslim Brotherhood and formed what is today’s Palestinian movement. A cause Husayni led for 40 years until Yassir’s takeover. Hamas, which unlike Fatah is Islamist, is also a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. In a sense closing a circle beginning with Muslim Jew hatred from the time of Muhammad (cursed be his name), to Hitler, the KGB, and back.
The PAs current president Mahmoud Abbas still hasn’t condemned his arch-rival Hamas’ pogrom against Israel on October 7th 2023. But then again, if you still haven’t acknowledged the Nazi Holocaust in 2023 can you really be expected to accept something happening before your own eyes? So whatever differences of opinion the PA has with Hamas about public plumbing doesn’t seem to affect their view of Israel as their common enemy.
The Palestinian movement is thus a Nazi construction that was built over with a Soviet communist organization and then finally covered with an Islamist ditto. It is these people that the outside world demands that the Israelis make peace with. Whether or not the other side ever shows any propensity for peace. Which they absolutely don’t. Which I guess is why everyone is calling for a “ceasefire” instead of peace.
There is nothing about the facts on the ground to suggest that a future Palestinian state would be a democratic and peaceful one. No other Arab countries are democratic or, for that matter, particularly peaceful. Everything suggests rather that it would be an ISIS- or Taliban like Iranian vassal state.
The only glimmer of hope is to bring about a normalization between Israel and the Saudis. The leadership of Saudi Arabia and the UAE seem to want this. Whether their populations are in tune with their leaderships is another matter. Jew-hatred is part of the bone marrow of their subjects exposed to state anti-Semitism 24/7 for decades as they have been.
As for the Palestinians, Abbas has ruled the West Bank as its despot since succeeding Yassir Arafat. And Hamas has ruled Gaza since the elections in 2006, after which it massacred Fatah and declared for a future caliphate.
Right at the beginning of its statutes, Hamas quotes the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Banna, who says that ”Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it”. Someone seems to have neglected to mention that it is very insensitive to confuse Islam with islamism.
The charter ends article 7 by quoting ”The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.”.
Which means I’ll definitely start growing Gharkad trees just in case.
This is right before article 8 which states that ”Allah is its target, the Prophet is its model, the Koran its constitution: Jihad is its path and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes”.
If it had only been this, that Israel has enemies who claim to be willing to wipe them out, and demonstrated in action that this is the case that made me fear a new Holocaust, that would have been bad enough. But what is worse, the Islamists are already in the West and are in cahoots with the international left.
The left, at least the western left, in its latest iteration has constructed a hierarchy of race, gender, sexuality and disability that few fascists can match. Being an oppressed minority is fine unless you happen to be a successful one. Then you destroy the Left’s basic assumptions by merely existing.
In their world, you can only succeed by being a white man. If you succeed without being a white man, you must be whiter than white. Otherwise, they cannot explain your success. Which is why the Jews suddenly, once again, as always, find themselves at “the top” of an imagined pyramidal world order where they rule everything.
And before you say ”but running everything sounds great?” you have to remember that for the left personal responsibility is a bad thing.
The left has thus constructed an ideology by taking the Nazis’ racial pyramid and turning it upside down. And yet somehow they still succeeded in letting the Jews remain at the bottom. Which, in their utter moral confusion, is the top.
Just like the Nazis, the international left now claims that everything is the Jews’ fault. For what is the idea that everything in the Middle East would be solved if only Israel made peace with its Arab neighbors other than the idea that everything depends on the Jews? As if there would not be war, suffering, and oppression in the Middle East regardless of whether Israel existed or not.
But this is the general idea. Believed by, among others, the Left Party in Gothenburg. Because in their comments I can read myself that their instigators do not believe that Israel has the right to exist. That the land in its entirety “belongs to the Palestinians”.
It was always in the cards that socialism would reach this natural end point. Firstly, because the somewhat simplified myth that underlies the socialist perspective on the world has the same structure as antisemitism. In feudal Europe, poor monarchs whose nations weren’t doing too well could invite the Jews as a kind of bourgeoisie. Through trade, the economy was built up, and should things go badly due to war, crop failure, or plague, the king could always blame the Jews and let the population take out their aggression on them. And then cast out whomever survived.
If you just replace the word “bourgeoisie” in the chant “Kill the bourgeoisie!” with “Jews” you can see the similarities. All it takes is a cliff notes understanding of Karl Marx.
But mostly there was always a risk of socialism revealing itself as antisemitic because socialism has always been a form of identity politics. It only tied the identity to the material circumstance of class, which has the advantage that it is possible to respond to the problem by constructing a dynamic enough system to allow class journeys. Up and down. A system that aims to equalize opportunities and not outcomes.
After the fall of the Berlin wall and the complete failure it entailed for socialist economic theory, socialism shifted from class to biological characteristics such as sex (which they call gender but only when it suits them), skin color, or sexuality whose immutability locks these new classes into an eternal struggle.
The ”long march through the institutions” is part of what has led to this point. Anti-Semitic protests at elite American universities are now equated with the ’68 movement protests against the Vietnam War by venerable publications such as the New York Times and Financial Times. Which is quite a stretch. The protests have more in common with the anti-Semitic protests that swept through American institutions in the 30s.
Back then Jewish presence at universities was limited. The students now occupying universities in the United States are just doing exactly what they have been raised to do by the professors, the administrators, the media and their political party.
Regardless of whether you believe that ”woke” consists mostly of gender, intersectionality, critical race theory or climate justice, they have now flowed together through our institutions for so long that they have overflowed them and are now the single biggest reason for the division you can see in the West in country after country. But it is important to remember that they all flow from the same well. Socialism.
The demonstrations and protests at universities you see are organized by the left. It has been said that “anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools”. Which means the opposite must also be true. Socialism is the anti-Semitism of intellectuals.
Something that is now being proven by the American university students and faculty.
The movements that organize them are financed either by rich oligarchs in the United States such as the Rockefellers or George Soros, the left themselves with membership fees and donations; or as in Sweden with tax money. According to the Republicans the same is going on in the US too but to a lesser extent. Donald Trump banned DEI, (Diversity, Equity & Inclusion), which is another expression of woke-ism, in American administration. But Biden revoked that decision.
The American teachers’ unions have also been pushing hard for a long time for these radical socialist ideas to be included in teaching. As they are. Biden is relying on these unions’ votes, and campaign work, in the upcoming election.
Which means that what we see now is only the beginning of the Western world’s problems. The children all over the West who are steeped in these ideas will grow up without having them questioned. On the contrary, in large parts of the public these students are praised for their courage in speaking out. They feel that they have the support of the outside world. Especially now since the Ayatholla Khameini tweeted that ”Dear university students in the United States of America, you are standing on the right side of history,”.
The UN has condemned Israel 153 times since 2015. More than twice as many as the rest of the world combined. UNRWA receives 1,174,647,272 USD every year. 70 percent of their budget goes to education. Which means that cirka 70 percent of those who partook in the October 7th massacre would have been educated in UNRWA schools. In just one Whatsapp group, over 3000 UNRWA teachers celebrated the massacres of Israeli civilians on October 7th 2023.
The new anti-Semitism is now also fueled by social media that have abandoned individualistic user interfaces for collectivist dittos. Dissenting voices who could curb the collective’s herd instinct and lead it in a more favorable direction have been deliberately suppressed and silenced, which has the consequence that the herd often stampedes.
And finally, since 1986, Arab states in the Persian Gulf have also paid US universities alone $8.6 billion. What these countries have received in exchange for this money we can only guess. But presumably it has affected appointments of lecturers and professors. Maybe even entire departments within the universities? Who knows? The agreements between these parties are secret.
Over half of these 8.6 billion USD, approximately 4.3 billion dollars, comes from Qatar, which finances Hamas, holds court for both the Hamas leadership and the Muslim Brotherhood, owns Al-Jazeera, and cooperates with Iran.
All these factors, which are facts of “realpolitik”, contribute to my fear that the world is preparing for a new Holocaust. But on a deeper level, to return to the subconscious, lurks a need for the scapegoat.
MIMETIC VIOLENCE AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
Modern man’s complete incomprehension of the problem, which is man’s own nature, contributes to my suspicion that this is partly a subconscious process. The left seem to think they can placate the jihadists to soften their claims when the opposite is true. Any concession is interpreted as a sign of weakness on our part and a victory for their cause.
But the same could be said of Swedish conservatives or for that matter British ones. They think they can placate the left by giving in to their demands. The opposite is true here as well.
Anti-Semitism is, as I wrote in THIS IS A SWEDISH TIGER, a conspiracy theory. In this way it differs from racism. On stage I usually illustrate this by explaining the difference thus: “Racism is when you hate people from lower races and antisemitism is when you hate people from….” All in good fun.
But there are more aspects to consider. Like where does this need for the conspiracy theory come from? What evolutionary purpose could it possibly serve?
René Girard, French thinker, literary critic and anthropologist, developed a comprehensive theory of human culture and social relations that is largely based on the concept of the scapegoat mechanism. Grounded in observations of literature, mythology, and anthropology, Girard’s ideas seek to understand the underlying causes and effects of human violence and conflict. Which is appropriate given the circumstances.
The scapegoating mechanism refers to the process by which a group of people collectively projects their aggression, guilt and conflicts onto a selected individual or subgroup, who is then designated as the scapegoat. This scapegoat becomes the object of guilt and aggression, leading to exclusion or sacrifice. Through this process, social peace and unity within the group is temporarily restored, as the common aggression is given an outlet.
To understand the scapegoating mechanism, it is important to first introduce Girard’s concept of mimetic desire. Girard suggests that human desires are mimetic, that is, our desires are shaped by imitating the desires of others. It is not hard to imagine a group of apes hiding in the grass on the savannah observing a lion tearing a zebra to shreds with its claws. And the apes seeing those claws thinking “I want me one or two of those!”. And thus the knife was born. Probably out of some sharp stone.
The Swedish term for copycat is “imitation ape”. And in English you can say “to ape somebody”. And that is what we “humans” are – Pan Imitandums.
As we compete with each other for dreams of status, material possessions or whatever it may be, rivalry and conflict arise because the resources we demand are finite. In the case of the Israelis and the Palestinians, it is relatively easy to apply that perspective. Two peoples who are at war with each other over the same piece of land.
And it’s not like Israel was internally harmonious before the seventh of October. The attack united the country against Hamas, and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, PFLP, DFLP, PA, Hezbollah in Lebanon. You name it. In this case, however, Hamas is not really a scapegoat because it is actually the movement that has committed the sin. Hamas de facto broke into Israel with the goal of murdering as many Israelis as possible.
There is also another aspect that makes me suspect that the Palestinians are not scapegoats. Either for the Israelis or the world. With each new death toll that comes from Gaza, the pressure on Israel increases. Had the Palestinians been the intended scapegoat, these macabre numbers, concocted by Hamas, would have had a cathartic effect. But the outcome is the opposite. The frustration just builds.
If Girard is to be believed, then something is not right with the narrative.
In a larger context, Girard’s theory is easier to apply. In part, it is an Arab-Israeli conflict, but since 1979 it has also been an Iranian-Israeli conflict. Add that within the Muslim world the dream of a re-established Muslim empire, a caliphate, is a living dream and an ambition in cities like Riyadh, Istanbul and Tehran. They all aspire to a status lost since the fall of the Ottoman Empire.
They may agree on the goal but they have their own little religious war with political elements.
As mimetic rivalry intensifies, society becomes increasingly permeated with chaos and violence. In order to avoid self-destruction, society turns on a scapegoat.
The scapegoat is often chosen because it is similar enough to the group to be a credible recipient of its projections, while being peripheral or different enough to be excluded or sacrificed.
The Jewish state must bear the blame for the lost honor of the Muslims. Their failure to establish a new caliphate. Israel’s existence is a disgrace that stands in the way of their greatness. Not only has the small country won all its wars against its Arab neighbors and terror. Wars and terror that are always initiated by the Arabs. With the added sting that despite all their attempts of annihilation, Israel not only remains, but flourishes as a high tech, modern, democratic model in the region.
When the Arabs, Iranians, or the Muslim world at large, reflect themselves in the Israelis, they don’t recognize themselves. The Muslims and the Jews have been neighbors for over a thousand years. The history of the Arabs with the Jews predates Islam. If you believe the Bible, it goes all the way back to Abraham. The mythical progenitor the two peoples share.
The exclusion or victimization of the scapegoat leads to temporary cohesion and restoration of peace within the group, thanks to the externalization of the common aggression.The process, when it works, creates an illusion of unity and order, without resolving the underlying mimetic desires that drove the violence in the first place.
The Arab world, the Turks, Iranians and Africans have their own problems. So big in fact that it is only natural if they should feel a bit overwhelmed. It’s much easier to blame all one’s own shortcomings on someone else. Especially if this someone seems to be more successful than you at everything.
The mortal sin of envy is the driving force behind the scapegoating mechanism. It is no coincidence that it is precisely this feeling that socialism claims to alleviate.
As the clamor for a scapegoat grows louder, or as on October 8th when the feeling of ecstatic joy at the rapes, tortures, and murders of October 7th, are replaced by the horror that comes from the scapegoat not only surviving but that it also defends itself, then only blood can appease the primal urge. If the group fails to sacrifice the scapegoat, they must shed their own blood as compensation for their failure. In this case, it is the Palestinians in Gaza who bear the brunt of the group’s lost reputation. Their loss of face.
Girard was a Christian and thought a lot about the role of Jesus Christ as the ultimate solution to the human need for a scapegoat. By sacrificing his own child, God replaces the human sacrifices that were customary in pagan polytheistic cultures.
Without reducing Jesus’ sacrifice to a mere expression of a primal human social need, Christianity offered the pagan cultures it wanted to convert an alternative to human sacrifice. Specifically the most important of all offerings. Sacrificing one’s own child.
It is the greatest of all sacrifices because it is sacrificing something that is innocent. It is a recurring theme in all religions that the offering must be without fault. Spotless, that is innocent. Whether it’s seven boys and seven girls to the Cretan Minotaur or Red Heifers in the Old Testament.
In Christianity, God has already sacrificed his own child. A child who may be a little too old when he is executed to be considered innocent. But the essential point, for Girard and for the argument I am making here, is that Jesus is innocent of what the mob accuses him of. It says something about the injustice that is the foundation of our current societal order. It illustrates the sacrifice we had to make for peace.
A sacrifice that is symbolically repeated every communion.
Jesus, God’s own child, replaces the human sacrifice of the polytheists. Establishes monotheism. And lays the foundation for a belief in truth in contrast to the more relativistic worldview of the pagans. By revealing the scapegoating mechanism. The sacrament itself reminds you of this human need for sacrifice.
It goes hand in hand with the decline of Christianity in Western countries and not least in Sweden that the mob, the digital as well as the physical, must constantly find a substitute for transubstantiation. Theoretically, it is thus possible that Christianity has had a certain mitigating effect on a behavior we were born with the prerequisites for. But that has not prevented Christian societies from pointing out scapegoats historically. Whether heretics, witches or Jews.
It’s an elegant solution to a human need. Everyone can understand the longing to be reborn cleansed of their sins and wrongdoings.
Instead of that, now, through the long hegemony of social democracy, a kind of secular paganism prevails here in Sweden, and we see the same movement all over the West. A relativistic world where there are either an infinite number of principles why no one can be said to be better than anyone else or, even worse, a world where there are no principles at all.
In such a nihilistic universe power becomes the only principle. One’s narrative must be the prevailing one. A relationship, if there is no objective way to measure truth, that can only be maintained through some form of terror. Clearly illustrated in gender revolutions like the Metoo movement, racial revolutions like BLM or the Gaia worship you see in Extinction Rebellion and Greta Thunberg’s Fridays For Future movement. Which should really be called Fridays for Skipping School.
It helps to explain why these digital and physical mobs in recent years replaced each other in the condemnation of scapegoats. As the mob fails to crush patriarchy it stampedes on to stop oil, or to abolish racism. Metoo, BLM, Extinction Rebellion, Gaza. They are all expressions of religious worship.
All are also left-wing movements. The Left is collectivist. Most of its adherents are collectivists. They are very susceptible to peer pressure and group think. Hence the recurring argument from Hamas’ defenders on the left that “the whole world is on the side of the Palestinians. Do you think everyone in the whole world is wrong?”.
The answer to that question is yes. Appealing to the will of the people is not an argument. It is a fallacy. Argumentum ad populum. It doesn’t matter if everyone thinks the earth is flat when it isn’t. It’s obviously sausage shaped. And sure, we can argue about whether it’s a bratwurst or a kabanoss as long as we at least agree on that.
CHILDREN OF ISMAIL
Should you believe Girard, the scapegoat mechanism should also exist within Islam because it exists in all cultures and times. In Islam, the animal sacrifice is a replacement for the human sacrifice. As it was in Judaism in the time of the Temple. The muslim holiday Eid Al-Ahda is the reminder of when God first orders Abraham to sacrifice Isaac. Only to replace Isaac with a ram to sacrifice instead. Something that within Judaism is interpreted as a prohibition against human sacrifice.
Islam has the same interpretation. Although on TodaysMuslim.se from 2019 under the heading Eid Al-Ahda it only says that ”Muslims and Druze celebrate this day in memory of the Prophet Ibrahim and Ismail’s willingness to follow God’s orders”.
Instead of illustrating that there are sacrifices your God cannot ask of you, the moral of the story becomes that you should always obey God’s commands. In that case, only mimetic desire would remain. That is, the envy of the Muslim world towards the prosperity and technology of the West. A perspective that instead locks us into a perpetual cycle of violence where one party can only compete with the other’s superior technology through their degree of brutality.
Everyone who studies antisemitism realizes sooner or later some variation of what Grossman formulated as, and now I paraphrase, ”tell me what you accuse the Jews of and I’ll tell you what you’re guilty of.” Noteworthy when speaking of those who now accuse Israel of genocide, infanticide, rape and forced starvation. There is an infinite need, it seems to me, to judge the Jews (in this case represented by Israel as the Jewish state) guilty of what the Israelis themselves have been subjected to.
If it is due to a need to normalize genocide a la ”what we did to the Jews was not that dangerous – everyone does it – even them!”, or if it is just the usual instinct to blame the victim “it was the Jews’ own fault!”, a combination of the two, or something else is less relevant for the moral question.
Both Muslims and Arabs have committed genocide and ethnic cleansing against other peoples and their own as I’m writing this. Arab Christians have been subjected to ethnic cleansing, or living as dhimmis. Not to mention what ISIS – a force made up of Muslims traveling from all over the world – did to the Yazidis.
At the same time as the Chinese are subjecting Muslim Uygurs to cultural annihilation. Rohingyas are being massacred in Myanmar. The Muslim world shrugs it off as if these people were nothing. If Israel is not involved, Muslim’s simply don’t care.
Its enemies accuse Israel of being a colonial state. But the Jews of Israel all have an idea of what Israel’s borders look like. Even religious Zionists demand nothing more than what their God, according to their religious tradition, promised the Jews. Biblical Israel is a relatively clearly defined area.
Unlike the Arabs, who have an imperialist tradition, and actually colonized Israel. Later it was occupied by other Muslims. The Ottoman Empire.
Furthermore, colonies are usually satellites of a mother nation to which the colonizers can return if they fail to harvest or are displaced by the original inhabitants. But there have always been Jews in Israel. And the Jews who emigrated there in the nineteenth and twentieth century were expelled from their countries of birth. They have nothing to return to. They are refugees. Now children and grandchildren of refugees. What are these idiots on the left imagining? Modern Israelis packing up their belongings and moving back to Damascus, Baghdad or Yemen?
The left of the West also assumes that all Israelis are white but ”white” Jews, Ashkenazi, make up only about thirty percent of Israel’s population. The rest are from the Middle East and North Africa. Israel is a country founded by refugees.
And then there’s the incessant focus on how many children have been killed by Israel. A focus you don’t see the media having when reporting on the war in Ukraine, or Sudan, or any other conflict they cover or ignore, and reveals that the charge is blood libel in modern guise. These accusations pile on. Faster than anyone can debunk them. When the arguments are lacking, the strategy is to repeat the lies so often and so loudly that you give up from exhaustion and everyone else is intimidated into silence.
The mob feeds the Israelis with accusations until they personify the stereotype of the Jew that it has come to be in the Arab world. It’s the process of fattening the scapegoat before slaughter. That is, to build it up into something it is not but which resembles the mimetic object.
As for the Jew, it is not difficult to take the antisemite’s fantasies of Jewish power in politics, banking and the media as a kind of fertilization. After 1967 one can add accusations of abusing military power, infanticide and genocide. Albeit symbolic and largely subconscious. Until the victim can be claimed to deserve to be subjected to what the mob accuses it of.
It has been argued that Girard’s ideas should not be revealed to a wider audience. The purpose of the scapegoating mechanism is to avoid a war of all against all, by replacing it with a war of all against one. Hence the scapegoat.
If true, the mere publication of this essay would trigger a war of all against all.
Should that be happen, it again rules out the Palestinians as scapegoats because most of the world is on their side.
Girard is right about at least one thing. The search for the scapegoat is a universal human trait.
And the Muslim world is both divided and stricken with misfortune. Poverty, oppression, wars between the Muslim nations, wars within the Muslim nations, and religious wars between different kinds of Islam. If there ever was a cultural sphere in need of a scapegoat I’d say the muslim world in general and the Arab in particular qualifies. It would not be strange if what ex-muslim refugee from Yemen Luai Ahmed told me regarding our conversation about his trip to Israel after the seventh of October is true. In the Muslim world ”there are two religions. One is Islam and the other is Palestine”. Where Palestine is code for Jew-hatred.
Moreover, he is not the first person from the Muslim world to tell me this. I’ve heard it before. My friend Gad Saad had a similar story to tell about why his family had to flee Lebanon. And Omar Makram. An atheist refugee, and former devout muslim. I have also read excellent analyses written by people from the cultures in question.
Most such essays attempt to trace the ideological currents that have contributed to contemporary extremely virulent jihadist anti-Semitism. Everything from the Russian forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion to Hitler’s Mein Kampf and philosophers such as Franz Fanon or Judith Butler are invoked, but in the end most of those who march ”for Palestine”, i.e. against Israel and for Hamas, have not read any of these works or authors. Possibly they may know of the existence of such works but then only to be able to refer to their existence. Although these ideas might have contributed to the direction of the mob’s leaders, for most of the protesters these treaties are nothing more than a reassuring justification for an impulse the participants want to live out anyway.
DER UNTERGANG DES ABENDLANDES
In all honesty things are going badly for everyone at the moment.
The US is a superpower in decline. Pax Americana has fallen. Although it still supports Israel, supposedly. However, the pressure from the White House has become so great that it negatively affects Israel’s warfare. Biden is not even demanding the surrender of Hamas. Just a truce. When the Americans speak out, they can’t avoid singing along to the chorus of Hamaspropagandists in the West.
The Americans are also heavily in debt to the Chinese, whose economy in turn no one can be sure of and whose increasing repression, lousy demographics and aggressiveness towards some neighboring countries suggest they are preparing for conflict. Or collapse.
China’s friend Vladimir Putin in Moscow needs war to maintain power in Russia. In addition to entering the history books.
And Iran’s mullahs must murder their own youth to stay in power.
Europe’s states are becoming increasingly poor and unstable.
Ordinary people all over the world are suffering from high inflation.
And the whole world is on the brink of, if not world war, then at least several major regional conflicts that if they break out simultaneously will closely resemble one.
Everyone has reasons to find a scapegoat. Which might be why incitement against Israel fills everything from the world media to the graffiti on the wall of your local supermarket. If what is going on at the moment in country after country is allowed to continue, it will complicate Jewish life in the West to a degree where a large percentage of Jews will emigrate to Israel. As if the world is subconsciously pushing the Jews to gather in one place. Ready for slaughter.
Israel, founded by Jews who escaped the extermination in Europe, and pogroms in the Arab world and Africa, will be the place where its foes can finally finish the job. Because who in 1948 thought that the newborn country would survive the combined onslaught of five invading Arab armies?
Seen from this darkest of perspectives, it looks like the whole world habitually condemns the Jews and occasionally succeeds in sacrificing some of them, if they can, to the God of the volcano. In Israel, where the memory of the Holocaust is vividly alive, it evokes a horror embedded in their genes.
When you know that the Holocaust began sixty years before the Germans forced Jews into gas chambers on an industrial scale. The fact that most of the world is against Israels right to defend itself, there aren’t too many other possible outcomes from our current situation.
If a new world order is to come out of this what injustice will it be founded on?
This is what makes me worry about another Holocaust.
