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Heaven On Earth
Category Archives: Conspiracy and Hidden Hands
As Flattering as it is Self-Destructive: David Brooks on Arab Narratives
David Brooks has an interesting column on the impact (among other factors) of the Carter-Walt-Mearsheimer attack on the Israel Lobby on Arab elites. (Hat tip: Robert Schwartz)
April 8, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
A War of Narratives
By DAVID BROOKSOn the Dead Sea, Jordan
I just attended a conference that was both illuminating and depressing. It was co-sponsored by the Center for Strategic Studies at the University of Jordan and the American Enterprise Institute, and the idea was to get Americans and moderate Arab reformers together to talk about Iraq, Iran, and any remaining prospects for democracy in the Middle East.
As it happened, though, the Arab speakers mainly wanted to talk about the Israel lobby. One described a book edited in the mid-1990s by the Jewish policy analyst David Wurmser as the secret blueprint for American foreign policy over the past decade. A pollster showed that large majorities in Arab countries believe that the Israel lobby has more influence over American policy than the Bush administration. Speaker after speaker triumphantly cited the work of Stephen Walt, John Mearsheimer and Jimmy Carter as proof that even Americans were coming to admit that the Israel lobby controls their government.
Note that this kind of thinking fits into the Arab mentality of seeking conspiracy theories everywhere. Everything, no matter how public — even a published book by Wurmser — gets thrown into the “secret blueprint” hopper. And just as Arabs can claim the Holocaust didn’t happen and then accuse Israel of acting the way Hitler did (not), so they can imagine the US run by secret conspiracies even as all their evidence comes from published books.
The problems between America and the Arab world have nothing to do with religious fundamentalism or ideological extremism, several Arab speakers argued. They have to do with American policies toward Israel, and the forces controlling those policies.
As for problems in the Middle East itself, these speakers added, they have a common source, Israel. One elderly statesman noted that the four most pressing issues in the Middle East are the Arab-Israeli dispute, instability in Lebanon, chaos in Iraq and the confrontation with Iran. They are all interconnected, he said, and Israel is at the root of each of them.
We Americans tried to press our Arab friends to talk more about the Sunni-Shiite split, the Iraqi civil war and the rise of Iran, but they seemed uninterested. They mimicked a speech King Abdullah of Jordan recently delivered before Congress, in which he scarcely mentioned the Iraqi chaos on his border. It was all Israel, all the time.
The Americans, needless to say, had a different narrative. We tended to argue that problems like Muslim fundamentalism, extremism and autocracy could not be blamed on Israel or Paul Wolfowitz but had deeper historical roots. We tended to see the Israeli-Palestinian issue not as the root of all fundamentalism, but as a problem made intractable by fundamentalism.
In other words, they had their narrative and we had ours, and the two passed each other without touching. But the striking thing about this meeting was the emotional tone. There seemed to be a time, after 9/11, when it was generally accepted that terror and extremism were symptoms of a deeper Arab malaise. There seemed to be a general recognition that the Arab world had fallen behind, and that it needed economic, political and religious modernization.But there was nothing defensive or introspective about the Arab speakers here. In response to Bernard Lewis’s question, “What Went Wrong?” their answer seemed to be: Nothing’s wrong with us. What’s wrong with you?
The events of the past three years have shifted their diagnosis of where the cancer is — from dysfunction in the Arab world to malevolence in Jerusalem and in Aipac. Furthermore, the Walt and Mearsheimer paper on the Israel lobby has had a profound effect on Arab elites. It has encouraged them not to be introspective, not to think about their own problems, but to blame everything on the villainous Israeli network.
In other words, W-M and Carter have offered them a “face-saving” solution to their problems. In honor-shame cultures, guilt is consistently projected, and Israel is the scapegoat for Arab feeling of inferiority. The brief moments of introspection that might come in the wake of particularly appalling Muslim deeds — 9-11, Beslan — cannot last because the work necessary to change the dynamic takes too long, and the shame is unbearable. Like someone on opium, the Arabs keep falling back into their self-justifying slumber because coming out of it takes too much of the kind of moral fibre they lack. As one Israeli student of Arab culture notes:
In contrast, Arab Islamic political culture externalizes the guilt: Do I have a problem? You are guilty! The Arab-Muslims have no guilt remorse towards the outsiders, certainly not to share the guilt with them. They don’t feel any shame towards the infidels. They don’t blame themselves. They are always right.
This lust to blame (libido accusandi) can have only two resolutions: either we Westerners hold their feet to the fire and “trip-sit” them through the painful process of self-examination and development, or we defeat them in the war their thinking inexorably leads to and they apparently so desperately want.
And so we enter a more intractable phase in the conflict, which will not be a war over land or oil or even democratic institutions, but a war over narratives. The Arabs will nurture this Zionist-centric mythology, which is as self-flattering as it is self-destructive. They will demand that the U.S. and Israel adopt their narrative and admit historical guilt. Failing politically, militarily and economically, they will fight a battle for moral superiority, the kind of battle that does not allow for compromises or truces.
Americans, meanwhile, will simply want to get out. After 9/11, George Bush called on the U.S. to get deeply involved in the Middle East. But now, most Americans have given up on their ability to transform the Middle East and on Arab willingness to change. Faced with an arc of conspiracy-mongering, most Americans will get sick of the whole cesspool, and will support any energy policy or anything else that will enable them to cut ties with the region.
What we have is not a clash of civilizations, but a gap between civilizations, increasingly without common narratives, common goals or means of communication.
It looks like we’re not only not waking up, in taking out sleeping pills, we are awakening the wrong instincts even among the “moderates.”
On the Dangers of Conspiracy Theory: Polio from the Muslim Clerics of Pakistan
The Guardian has a story on the return of polio to Pakistani children due to rumors that the vaccine was a secret American plot to sterilize Muslims. In a culture where every move from an outsider is suspect, presumed to be a trick to harm you, it’s very hard to process so “altruistic” a campaign as one that claims it’s designed to keep your children healthy. Nice bundle of anti-modernism, paranoia, anti-Americanism, and self-destructive behavior. (Hat tip: ES)
Polio cases jump in Pakistan as clerics declare vaccination an American plot
· Rumours leave thousands of children unprotected
· Aid workers increasingly targeted by tribal militantsDeclan Walsh in Peshawar
Thursday February 15, 2007The parents of 24,000 children in northern Pakistan refused to allow health workers to administer polio vaccinations last month, mostly due to rumours that the harmless vaccine was an American plot to sterilise innocent Muslim children.
The disinformation – spread by extremist clerics using mosque loudspeakers and illegal radio stations, and by word of mouth – has caused a sharp jump in polio cases in Pakistan and hit global efforts to eradicate the debilitating disease.The World Health Organisation (WHO) recorded 39 cases of polio in Pakistan in 2006, up from 28 in 2005. The disease is concentrated in North-West Frontier Province, where 60% of the refusals were attributed to “religious reasons”. “It was very striking. There was a lot of anti-American propaganda as well as some misconceptions about sterilisation,” said Dr Sarfaraz Afridi, a campaign manager with the WHO in Peshawar.
Interesting. So Islam has made paranoia is a “religious reason.”
The scaremongering and appeals to Islam echoed a similar campaign in the Nigerian state of Kano in 2003, where the disease then spread to 12 polio-free countries over the following 18 months. Pakistan is one of just four countries where polio remains endemic. The others are Nigeria, India and Afghanistan.
[snip]
Temple-Mount Watch
It’s a regular practice of Palestinians, when things are going badly for the extremists, to pick a fight with Israel. Generally this comes in the form of either a provocation — suicide terrorism works — or a piece of Pallywood — Gaza Beach worked well. Right now the Palestinians are at a nadir of sorts: they’re killing each other; they can’t stop killing each other; and “the whole world” sees what a profoundly dysfunctional political culture they’ve got. Sooooo, they need to pick a fight.
Enter the archeological activity of the Israelis near the Temple Mount / Haram al Sharif. Over the past week a growing chorus of complaints about Israeli activity, increasingly shrill and angry, have complained that
“What Israel is doing in its practices and attacks against our sacred Muslim sites in Jerusalem and al-Aqsa is a blatant violation that is not acceptable under any pretext,” the monarch was quoted by the state news agency Petra as saying.
“These measures will only create an atmosphere that will not at all help in the success of efforts being undertaken to restore the peace process,” the monarch said.
And that’s from the King of Jordan, a “moderate.” Like so many other aspects of life with Muslims both in the Middle East and around the world, others must yield to their outrage over deeds that they imagine. The conspiracy world in which they live means that anything remotely resembling an attack on them becomes a causus belli, and a cause for loud protest. And they count on the unwillingness of the West to fight over such matters, to have them back down. A good description of the “spirit of Munich” that reigns over a dying Europe today.
So the plan is, either force the Israelis to back down, or push for a confrontation so that, as soon as some Palestinian civilian is hurt, the MSM can come in and do their “politics of compassion and outrage” job to rally world opinion against the Israelis who refuse to be reasonable… like the Europeans.
And what the Israeli government should be doing right now, is telling every station in the world that this is an invented grievance, that there are no plans to tunnel under the Dome of the Rock or the al Aqsa mosque and destroy it. Probably, if the thing explodes and Israel is once more on the hot-seat accused of crimes against the poor Palestinians, they’ll then come out with their defense. Too late, once again.
Watch this space.
Interview with Me on the Background to the Middle East Conflict
Tovia Singer of Israel National News Radio has a talk show where he interviewed me. The interviews are available. The titles are his, a bit more sensational than we medievalists normally go for.
I’d say:
“Islam at War with World because of a not uncommon pathology of Honor-Shame mentality”
and
Europe willing to Self-Destruct Because it Can’t Give up Moral Schadenfreude at the Expense of the Jews.
But that’s why he’s got the show and I’ve got the blog.
A7Radio: Islam at War w/ World Because of Honor-Shame Mentality
16:48 Aug 13, ’06 / 19 Av 5766A7 Radio’s “The Tovia Singer Show”
Renowned Boston U Historian:
Islam at War with the World because of Honor-Shame Mentality (Special Three-Part interview)In an eye-opening interview, Dr. Richard Landes, noted professor of History at Boston University and founder of The Second Draft, exposes the medieval mindset that nourishes Islam’s war with Israel and the US.
Listen Now -or- Download
Also on Tovia Singer:
Europe Willing to Commit Suicide Just to Destroy Israel?Exclusive interview with BU history professor continues as the medievalist exposes the media and continent that astonishingly supports a teaching of contempt.
Listen Now -or- Download
Response to smintheus: Conspiracy vs. Manipulation
Smintheus fires back his response to my “obtuse” criticism. Interesting stuff. I’ve only kept the most relevant because it’s very long. But do read the whole thing.
Smintheus’ blogpost in bold.
How low will the superpatriots stoop to justify the neocon agenda of war, war, and yet more war? Pretty darn low, apparently.
After my post the other day on the Qana bombing, the reaction to it among the Fighting 101st Keyboardists was hyperbolic and uncomprehending. By rejecting their conspiracy theory, it turns out I’ve handed a victory to the terrorists.
Why is staging a photo-op a conspiracy theory? Smintheus uses the term with obvious derision, as if to suggest that Arab journalists and their buddies in Hizbullah might have arranged a photo-op was somehow up there with Mossad and the Bush administration blowing up the World Trade Center or the CIA knocking off JFK. Smintheus, do you distinguish between manipulation and conspiracy theory? Why is it so hard to believe that Qana photos might have been faked?
Are Arab photographers and hospital personnel automatically above suspicion? Do you even know about Pallywood? Or is that more conspiracy theory?
You might not be aware of it, but your dismissal of criticism as conspiracy theory recoups the reaction to the accusations of al Durah as staged: you Zionists are just as conspiracy-minded as the Arabs. What this suggests is that any time you accuse someone of manipulation you’ve become a conspiracy theorist. I find it hard to believe that smintheus follows such a procedure in his own life — never met a manipulative person? never steered clear? — much less in his analysis of the neo-con warmongers. So why is manipulation unthinkable from the Arabs? Would that be racist of me? Or would this be an example of the “human rights complex“, in which it’s the identity of the perp that counts. People of color can’t be guilty.
If I have you wrong, smintheus, please let me know. I don’t see anything on your blog about Darfur, but I do see stuff on the UN Human Rights Commission on the record of the USA. Do you know anything about the people who run the show over there? For example, their neglect of Sudanese genocide for decades. Or do you not care as long as they come out with what you want to hear?
One superpatriot even insinuated that I’m dangerously psychotic, literally. He described what purport to be the clinical details of a mental breakdown dating to the 1970s. It is despicable, all the more because the author is allegedly a practicing psychoanalyst. And ‘ShrinkWrapped’ is no lonely ranter; his blog is a favorite among right wingers. Just the other day, Wolcott took aim at him for making “the narcissism of the Left his house specialty.”
I notice you link to Walcott — interesting essay, witty but low on substance — but not to Shrinkwrapped. I cannot find anywhere in Shrinkwrapped’s post where he insinuates, literally, that you are dangerously psychotic. He makes an analogy to psychosis. He suggests that the condition of the left today (you are not the target but the illustration of the larger problem) is dangerous. But your own favorite, Wolcott, is careful to remind those he criticizes for misusing the word “literally.”
But attributing an actual mental breakdown? I suspect that it’s slanderous-and anyhow, it’s malicious in the extreme.
Okay, I’m confused. Shrinkwrapped never even uses the expression mental breakdown. And his point, as I understand it, is that the same mechanism that operates in the psychotic episode he describes — the necessity to maintain self-esteem even as things begin to fall apart — also characterizes your and other “leftist” reactions. I think he saved the “literal” psychotic comparisons for the Jihadis.
Eurabia
As part of a program to bring the blogosphere up to date on the elements involved in the Al Durah affair in preparation for some legal trials this Fall in France, we are bringing over some of the essays from the Second Draft to the Augean Stables on a regular basis. We’ll start with the background essays in Media Reflections, then move on to the essays on Pallywood and Al Durah. We welcome comment, suggestions, additions.
EURABIA
“Eurabia” refers to the synthesis of Arab and European culture, a grand cultural project undertaken by European and Arab elites to create an open Mediterranean zone of economic, demographic and cultural symbiosis between Europe and the Arab world. Bat Ye’or, in her recent book, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis, has denounced this project as a foolish alliance in which Europeans think that by helping the Arabs destroy Israel, they can use the Arabs to isolate and compete with America. In fact, she argues, the Europeans’ sacrifice of Israel will only whet the appetite of Islamists who aim to take over Europe as well.
Bat Ye’or traces the creation of the Euro-Arab dialogue in the seventies that created a journal by that name and orchestrated the growing symbiosis of Europe and the Arab countries:
[Eurabia] is a project that was conceived, planned and pursued consistently through immigration policy, propaganda, church support, economic associations and aid, cultural, media and academic collaboration. Generations grew up within this political framework; they were educated and conditioned to support it and go along with it. This is the source of the strong anti-American feeling in Europe and of the paranoiac obsession with Israel, two elements that form the cornerstone of Eurabia.
(See the interview here and here).
In addition to these diplomatic trends, she identifies a demographic and cultural level where an anemic European culture that has ceased to reproduce itself, whose increasingly aged population demands full social services, and whose youth refuses to do manual labor, import Arab laborers to avoid facing its own heavily mortgaged future. Over the last generation, these workers have immigrated in large numbers, to the point where a number of cities are a majority Muslim (Malmo, Sweden, Rotterdam, Netherlands).
Current demographic trends suggest that a significant number of European countries will be a majority Muslim by mid-century. As Bernard Lewis commented in a controversial interview with a German newspaper, “Europe will be Islamic by the end of the Century,” a prediction that Robert Spencer then took for the title of an article. And however the initial immigrants may have felt about the Western countries to which they moved and in which they accepted state support, recent years have seen the spread of a particularly powerful strain of Jihadi Islamism among many, especially an alienated youth.
Eurabia represents an extreme version of the Jihad Paradigm, an alarming if not alarmist update of Samuel Huntington’s 1996 thesis about the Clash of Civilizations. Eurabia anticipates a militarily weaker tribal population taking over and transforming a larger but declining “greater civilization,” a process that has not occurred since the fall of the Roman Empire.
If this indeed is taking place it seems to represent a situation where the European political elites, stricken with what Kenneth Minogue calls an “Olympian complex,” fall prey to their own hubris. They seem to think that this bargain, in which they compete with their natural ally (USA, Anglophone culture, other civil polities) by allying with their own natural enemy (Arab, Muslim, prime-divider societies) will work out to their advantage. Their calculus seems based on a prime divider mentality that takes an undifferentiated attitude towards commoners. For them, it does not matter whether the manual laborers are Christian, post-Christian, or Muslim. They expect to remain on top.
Rally held in London on February 11, 2006 to protest the Danish Muhammad cartoons.
The PCP reactions to Eurabia have been either to ignore it (Borders and Barnes and Noble do not carry it on their bookshelves), or to dismiss it as paranoid conspiracism or racism on the one hand, and an attempt to ally neo-conservative thinking with Christian fundamentalism on the other. More recently, as events increasingly corroborate the thesis, the Economist has dedicated an issue to the topic, in which the editors did not review Bat-Ye’or’s book, and in which they basically dismissed the problem. The thesis, critics claim, is at once absurd – an Islamic Europe? what nonsense! – and demonizing – viewing all Muslims in Europe as a fifth column. From this perspective, Eurabia feeds the worst Islamophobia even as it deflects criticism from the US and Israel, confusing legitimate European and Arab concerns about US imperialism and Israeli colonialism with conspiratorial back-stabbing.
Any description of large societal movements orchestrated by cultural and diplomatic programs will strike most readers as conspiratorial, to say the least. And it will be to each person to decide what degree of credence to accord these cries of alarm. In considering the case, however, it seems worth noting several observations:
- Cognitive egocentrism can blind people to significant elements in the thrash of cultures. The danger here is that European elites, confident of their moral and cultural superiority are being duped by demopaths.
- The issue is not just whether Islamists can take over Europe and the US, but whether they think they can, and what the unintended consequences of actions inspired by that aspiration will bring on.
- Large cultural and social programs that serve to destroy civil society and restore an elite to decisive power are not wild conspiracy theories, but the stuff of history. In some senses, all prime divider societies are the successful conspiracy of the elite to dominate the commoners.
- Not everyone who engages in behavior supporting a “conspiracy” like Eurabia need be either conspirators or malevolent. For reasons ranging from idealism to ressentiment, Muslims, Jews, European Christians and post-Christians can support and advance an agenda that they neither understand, nor approve of.
- There is heavy pressure not to denounce Eurabia, both from the politically correct progressive camp, and from the Islamists, some of whom do not hesitate to use violence to silence criticism.
As with weighing JP and PCP, the judge must beware. If we decide to reject the thesis because we want to feel morally good, and refuse to believe such nasty things about others, or in order to find favor with progressive friends and colleagues who heap scorn on the thesis, or because we truly believe in the transformative power of multiculturalism to create a world of peace and understanding, we may be tempted to reject Eurabia as conspiracist racism. But if we are wrong, there are consequences. Unlike UFOs and the Loch Ness monster to whom some readers compare Eurabia, Jihadis have committed notable and highly visible acts of violence that reflect values profoundly opposed to civil society.
If, on the other hand, we decide to accept the theses because we feel threatened and angry, and morally offended by such wanton religious violence, theological intolerance, and patriarchal domination of women so characteristic of the Arab culture with which the symbiosis is taking place, and paint every Muslim an enemy and Islam a religion of terror, we close off avenues towards a real resolution to the problem. Identifying demopaths needs to be selective. When we allow no exceptions for the many people who will side with (those they think will be) the winners, we strengthen the conditions for apocalyptic warfare. Given the tens of millions of dead that such ultimate wars to exterminate the enemy have caused in the last century, that does seem like something worth avoiding.
England’s Dilemma on the Eve of 7-7 Anniversary: How to Deal with Demopaths
The NYT (and International Herald Tribune) published a piece by Alan Cowell on England at the approach of the anniversary of the 7-7 bombings of 2005. In it one can see the problems that beset the West as it confronts a Muslim population which, to some extent by ideology, to a much greater extent by solidarity with an honor culture, produces a wide range of demopaths. My interlinear notes bring out this particular dimension.
A year after London bombings, what lessons?
By Alan Cowell The New York Times
July 5, 2006LONDON One year after three of the four London bombers set out from a grim northern neighborhood called Beeston, the place they left behind forever is keeping its secrets to itself.
And, with some anxiety, Britons are still asking what inspired the onslaught by British-born Muslims and whether the dark undercurrents of July 7, 2005, could resurface in a new attack.
Gous Ali, a 31-year-old property developer, for instance, traveled to Beeston recently with a single question on his mind: Why did people from there, British-born like him, from his same immigrant generation, drive a rental car to London last July to kill 52 people, including his partner, Neetu Jain, who died when one of their bombs exploded on a No. 30 London bus?
But he does not feel he really learned. “They don’t want any intrusion, they want to be left alone,” Ali said in an interview. “They are hiding from the shame, the embarrassment, the horror of what was created here.”
Would this were true. It would suggest that England need no longer fear further deeds of the sort from this community. The alternative may be that they are hiding from the shame and embarrasssment of having the outside learn just how much of a culture of hatred and resentment — unrepentant since 7-7 — has developed there, that their desire to avoid intrusion means that they don’t want the outside to know how bad it is. If they are really committed to democracy, then the former conjecture would hold; if their response is demopathic, then the latter.
His assessment plays into an increasingly rancorous debate almost one year after the four bombers struck on three subway trains and a bus on July 7, 2005. The government of Prime Minister Tony Blair is locked in recrimination with Muslim leaders, who say the authorities have failed to reduce Muslim discontent.
“Failed to reduce Muslim discontent…” Like the French Muslims, the attitude is, the bombing (or the riots) are an expression of discontent that you must address, rather than these actions were unacceptable responses to a discontent that we must address. In placing all the onus on the British government for not rying to assuage Muslim discontent the Muslims essentially demand rewards for unacceptable violence and validate (in the case of England) suicide terrorism as a legitimate and successful form of protest.
What are these discontents? The most frequently mentioned is British foreign policy. As Asghar Bukhari of the MPACUK stated quite baldly on the BBC, they blew themselves up because they were angered at Britain’s foreign policy. In other words, when a Muslim angrily claims that the British government has not done enough to “reduce Muslim discontent” he might well mean that they have failed to align their foreign policy with the Arab Muslim position of anti-Americanism and anti-Zionism. Part of the problem, of course, is that since the “Left” agrees more and more with the Muslim position, including conspiracy theories, they are reluctant to chastise so welcome, if dangerous, an “ally.”
Palestinian Medical Practices and Mark Garlasco’s Beggared Imagination
Here’s a picture of a child being brought into the hospital by what seems to be (judging by his one hand gloved) a hospital orderly.
I’m neither an expert in hospital procedures, nor in the behavior of wounded children. But I have seen enough of Pallywood to be suspicious. One of the main features of Pallywood is the brutal treatment of the “wounded” — little use of stretchers, grabbing people and rushing them in front of the camera, very few if any signs of injury (the white cloth near her neck may mean the injury is against the orderly’s chest, but again not a sign of blood).
Now in most Pallywood footage the apparent explanation for the rush is, presumably, the presence of the terrible Israelis shooting wildly at anything that moves (despite the observable fact that the players take the wounded back in front of the Israelis, and after the evacuation, stand around in front of the Israeli position with no signs of concern). Here, however, we’re looking at a girl begin brought from the ambulance to the hospital… so no need for a rush, unless this patient is so badly wounded that she needs immediate attention. But then, all the more reason for a stretcher. And given the plethora of ambulances and equipment available to the Palestinians, one could hardly argue that they’re short of equipment. And finally, given how the picture has been cropped, there’s no sign of blood or injury on her body.
So what’s going on? I can’t say, and the thoughts I’m writing are entirely of a hypothetical nature.
[Update: I was right to maintain the hypothetical nature of my conjectures. A reader has left the URL of an uncropped photograph if this girl being taken to the hospital.
The injury is to her hand, and it does make sense to carry her, so my introductory example does not work.]
Other blogs, including a series of posts from the very beginning of the affair at Déjà Vu, and lengthier ones at Adloyada, the indefatigable Atlas Shrugged, and Solomonia, have important discussions of these questions. I know nothing about the girl, where she was allegedly injured, and what the nature of her injuries. But it does raise important questions about the nature of Palestinian medical practices, and may connect with another issue, the handling of the wounded once they are in the hospital.
Doctors from Israeli hospitals report that they received the two victims from the Gaza Beach explosion in strange condition: all the shrapnel had been removed from their bodies in procedures that were neither called for, nor good for the patients.
Niham suffered serious damage to her abdomen and upper limbs, with cuts all over her body as a result of the surgical intervention performed on her at Shifa Hospital in Gaza.
Strengthening claims that the IDF was not responsible for the explosion, the Tel Aviv hospital said that no shrapnel was found in her body, except for one piece that was not reachable by surgery and would have to be left there. The damage to her body was “without doubt” caused by shrapnel.
Ichilov hospital did not accuse Shifa Hospital in Gaza of directly of removing shrapnel for no medical reason, but it said that it had never received a patient who was in an explosion with all the shrapnel removed (except for one unreachable piece).
“This is surprising and raises questions” about the care she received in Shifa, the Ichilov spokeswoman said. Asked whether Ichilov surgeons had contacted Shifa doctors who treated the patient to ask the reason for the incisions to remove shrapnel, the spokeswoman said: “We are not in such close contact with Shifa. We received the medical report on the patient, and that’s all.”
Similar reports came from Sourasky Medical Center where a member of the Ghalia family, Ahyam, was sent.
The only reason I can think of for such invasive and unnecessary procedures is to remove incriminating evidence. In other words the doctors working at Shifa hospital were afraid that the explosion was of Palestinian origin, and in order to cover-up, they removed the shrapnel. The presence of one piece of shrapnel they could not reach and that the Israelis could remove without danger to the patient reveals precisly that. Now, according to the IDF, the second piece of shrapnel is also not of Israeli origin.
An additional piece of shrapnel was removed during surgery on Adham Ralya on Wednesday, June 14, and was sent for initial analysis by the IDF Technology Unit. “Examination of the second piece of shrapnel,” said Major General Kalifi, “proves conclusively that this was not a 155-mm shell. As also has been demonstrated by the first piece of shrapnel, based on analysis of the composition and content of the shrapnel, and of course on examination of the explosive compounds found on the second piece, evidence of 155-mm shells was clearly absent.”
There remain questions. The Palestinians have produced a whole range of evidence, from time codes noting the presence of victims in the hospital early enough for Israeli shelling, to craters in the sand made by the Israelis 155 mm shells, to fragments of those shells, one with the name on it, one of which allegedly had the blood of one of the victims of the beach bombing on it.
These reports were given further credibility by the conflicting reports on Israel’s channel 2 and channel 10 on the nature of the shrapnel, with Shlomi Eldar of Channel 10 supporting the Palestinian version. Every self-critical scruple of Israeli journalism then becomes an opening for claims in the Muslim media to accuse, as in this Turkish article. And of course, there’s always the Jewish, masochistic messianic blogs like Tikkun Olam ready to declare that the IDF’s claims are unraveling even as some of us see that happening to the Palestinian claims.
Actually, in the case of channel 10, it’s not apparently scruples, but that peculiar (but not uniquely) Israeli/Jewish pathology of excessive self-criticism and siding with one’s enemies. Miri Regev, the spokeswoman from the IDF commented today in Maariv:
“Most Israeli reporters… ask hard questions, investigate, criticize… and make sure to operate in accordance with professional ethical codes that require caution and responsibility… To my great sorrow, throughout the period that the Rhalia family story has been in the news, the Channel Ten news department, led by journalist Shlomi Eldar, has chosen to adopt, without any question, the speculations and the questionable and fabricated evidence with which the Palestinian side tried – and still tries – to influence the world media… This is not genuine investigative journalism. This is wanton journalism… that prefers not to be bothered by the facts.”
As one of my students commented after reading the al Durah dossier and in particular this article: “I thought Ha-Aretz was an Israeli paper. Why does it sound like a Palestinian paper?” For the outsider, uninformed by the enormous gap separating an almost pathologically self-critical Israeli press from an even more pathologically demonizing Palestinian press, the situation favors the Palestinians. They accuse Israel; Israelis admit they’re guilty. Case closed.
The main proponent of the Palestinian side is the allegedly impartial representative of Human Rights Watch (which presumably wants to find out who did this terrible deed, not make up their mind beforehand and engage in propaganda), Marc Garlasco.
He said he examined the site a day after the explosion and acknowledged that wind and the number of people who trampled the area after the blast made conclusions difficult. Nevertheless, he said shrapnel he found lodged in a car near the explosion and other samples collected by the Palestinian bomb-disposal unit made clear it was from a 155mm shell.
But the circumstantial evidence seems powerfully in favor of a Palestinian shell, with an outside chance of an Israeli shell that had not exploded and remained on the beach. The Palestinian evidence, which Garlasco produces in full confidence, seems highly suspicious. In the footage from Ramattan we see no crater, but he’s found a crater and shell fragments. The scene was thoroughly compromised from the start, which he admits, but Garlasco finds the Palestinian evidence compelling, largely because he can’t believe they’d be so dishonest as to fake it.
“If the Israeli allegations of tampered evidence are to be believed, many Palestinians would have to have engaged in a massive and immediate conspiracy to falsify the data,” said Garlasco. “The conspirators – witnesses, victims, medical personnel and bomb disposal staff – would have had to falsify their testimony, amend digital and hand-written records, and dip shrapnel into a victim’s blood. It beggars belief that such a huge conspiracy could be orchestrated so quickly.”
Apparently, Garlasco has no awareness of the lengths to which Palestinians will go — and have gone — to falsify testimony. Nor does he process the information at hand. If the doctors will butcher their patients — children! — in order to remove evidence, then what won’t they do? Unaware of the systematic falsification of evidence, only one aspect of which is Pallywood, Garlasco’s imagination is beggared by the thought of such activities. Indeed, he embodies all the attitudes that make rethinking al Durah virtually impossible.
I understand him. I too found my imagination beggared by the viewing of Talal abu Rahme’s rushes at France2. I walked out of France2 studios in shock. I had no idea they could be so openly and systematically dishonest. Beggared in both cases — Garlasco’s and mine — was our liberal cognitive egocentrist imagination: we would never do that! Heaven forbid we accuse them of such base activities. That would be racist.
The only real question here is: is Garlasco’s comment mere rhetoric, or will evidence lead him to stretch his limited imaginative capacities?
Let us recall, here, that the behavior of Shifa’s doctors now replicates closely their behavior in the Al Durah case. Muhammad and his father were taken there after the incident at Netzarim Junction on September 30, 2000. They did no examination of Muhammad’s body aside from taking gruesome pictures of a boy whose stomach had been blown open. I unfortunately do not have a copy of this photo, although I saw it among the France2 rushes from the following day. If that gaping stomach wound that goes from his abdomen to the top of his chest is real, then he must have been shot by a dum dum bullet in the back and the entire scene photographed by Talal should have been bathed in blood; if not, then the doctors butchered a boy’s dead body. If so, this would not be the only case of such grotesque practices: see the testimony of an Australian human rights activist working in the Palestinian Authority and her horrifying realization of what was going on in the hospitals there, recorded by Pierre Rehov in The Road to Jenin.
Despite claiming almost a dozen wounds in the father and the son, Shifa produced no bullets. They were smarter about not sending the father to an Israeli hospital (his boss and friend, Moshe, the Israeli contractor, called him right away and offered to pay all fees), instead they sent him to Jordan. The hospital claimed the bullets had passed through; but the “investigators” on the ground found none. To this day, an either credulous or dishonest Charles Enderlin claims that the Palestinian general still has them in a sack in his desk.
Collaboration to produce devastating propaganda against Israel by Palestinians? The Palestinians have lots of practice, and Garlasco is either a babe in the woods, or an eager dupe (or maybe both, and eager babe in the Gaza woods). And right there by his side is a Western media, captive to the same politically correct attitudes and concommitant lack of imagination, who, once the tale goes problematic, cease to cover the story, leaving Israel once again between libel and silence.
In the long run, what the evidence strongly points to is that Palestinian society has produced people in positions of authority — journalists, hospital staff and doctors, politicians, “activists”, teachers — who do not hesitate to abuse their own people in search of vengeance on Israel. They can only succeed, however, by dint of the kind of “naïve” advocacy of Western specialists who can’t imagine how bad it can get, despite the evidence. And that, to some extent, is due to the exceptional reluctance of the Western media and intelligentsia to let the Western public know just how bad it is in places where terrorists run the show.
Who would imagine that the Palestinians would victimize their own? It beggars the imagination.
Mainstreaming Conspiracy Theories IV: Moral Equivalence and Multiculturalism
[Note: This is the final installment of a revised paper delivered last week at a conference in Jerusalem on Antisemitism, Multi-culturalism and Ethnic Identity at Hebrew University under the auspices of the Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Antisemitism, June 16, 2006. The first installment can be read here.]
Moral Equivalence, Multiculturalism, and Conspiracy Theory
Brief note: I’m in favor of multiculturalism of the variety described in Rabbi Jonathan Sack’s book The Dignity of Difference: How to Avoid the Clash of Civilizations. I’m terrified of a particularly dangerous form of multi-culturalism informed by what strikes me as a virtually suicidal adherence to such dogmas as “moral equivalence.” By and large I will be treating the latter form, which I consider pathological.
This kind of thinking, which I have dubbed the PC Paradigm (in the liberal form, Politically correct, in the radical, Post-colonial paradigm), certainly has its appeal. Since the early 1980s it has dominated both the media talking heads and the academic discourse about the Middle East… forbidding us, on pain of accusations of racism, from identifying primitive cultural traits, (like warrior honor-shame culture), and their pathologies (like “playing the victim” and honor-killing your daughter when she’s raped by your son), from discussing the less savory aspects of Islamic imperialism, and their lengthy pedigree (like Dar al Harb, and dhimmitude).
Moral Equivalence constitutes an important dimension of multi-culturalism as it is currently practiced. “Who are we to judge?” All cultures have their own sets of values, and to imply a hierarchy of values is a form of cultural imperialism that we must renounce in order to live in peace with each other. In a kind of therapeutic act of good will that features our generosity, our stupidity and our secret condescension, we say: “Don’t worry, we are as bad as you are.” Saïd’s Orientalism appeals fundamentally to such sentiments.
Now this kind of “therapeutic approach” is the inter-cultural variant of a peculiar trait of modern civil societies, and that is their extraordinary willingness to be self-critical. Self-criticism is at the core of modern society’s abilities – without open criticism and the ability to change one’s mind and learn from one’s mistakes, there would be no modern academy, no science and technology, none of the transformative elements that permit a civil society. But self-criticism can become pathological, a kind of intellectual form of beaten wife syndrome: “if he’s angry it must be my fault.” At its extreme, it has a kind of messianic quality to it, a kind of masochistic ominipotence fantasy, in which if everything is our fault, then by changing we can fix it. Thus we have the spectacle of a culture (the West, with Israel in the lead) willing to publicly self-criticize at levels never achieved in the recorded history of civilizations.
And at its most pathological levels, it produces not just moral equivalence, but moral inversion: “we (Israel, the US, the West) are not only as bad as you are, we’re worse.” It is that kind of moral disorientation that has fueled the massive failures of the “progressive left” since 2000, its hate-fest at Durban, its feeding frenzies over Al Durah and Jenin, and were it not for the world cup, the Ghalia family’s tragedy in Gaza. In a sense, when Chomsky declared in the wake of 9-11, that Americans were the worst terrorists, he opened the door to the conspiracy theories that teem through Western culture today.
Think of the reaction of a 9-11 conspiracist to the suggestion that Hamas planned the Gaza Beach massacre of 6-9-06 because of sagging polls, the threat of Abbas’ “peace referendum,” and a desire to embarrass Olmert before his trip to Europe. Outrage! “You racist! How dare you suggest that these people would be so base! You must really hate these people to imagine that.” And yet he or she, without hesitation, embraces far worse thoughts about our own administration, a product of over two centuries of sustained effort to purge such vicious behavior from our elected elites. How intellectually and morally crude! How self-destructive.
In that sense, 9-11 actually constitutes a new direction in the history of Conspiracy theory. Normally Conspiracy theories operate in order to scapegoat someone else and assert both one’s innocence and one’s right to violence. It depends on what psychologists call cognitive egocentrism: “they” think like “we” do – libido dominandi all around. 9-11 Conspiracy theory, as part of a larger project of morally equivalent multiculturalism, actually reverses this process.
Left-wing Conspiracy theories, progressives who believe in 9-11 systematically project good will onto the cultural “other” – Islam is a religion of peace, Bin Laden and Hamas have good reason for their anger, if only we’re nice to them they’ll be nice to us. Thus the next step after blaming Bush is to exonerate Bin Laden: Bush is creating an Islamic boogy man who does not exist; the Americ an government’s behavior since 9-11 presents a greater threat than Bin Laden. Bin Laden is an agent of the USA. Meanwhile, the “other” – global Islamism, particularly in its dominant Salafism – systematically projects bad will onto us (concessions, apologies cannot be sincere or meant to help, they are either a trick or a sign of weakness). This Moebius Strip of cognitive egocentrism is very dangerous and policies based on it tend to explode in the faces of those who earnestly seek to make them work. They have brought us Oslo, the current French response to their own Intifada, and the Anglican bishops dialogue with Islam as described by Margaret Brearly yesterday, to take a few examples.
Why would such good intentions lead so quickly to hell? Why is not “good neighborliness” working right now?
Partly, because we are dealing with demopaths, with people who use the language of democracy, human rights, moral equivalence, tolerance, not because they believe in them, but because they can use them to disarm us. Demopaths “use democracy to destroy democracy.” And when you let them in, they plan to push you out. Right now the largest collection of demopaths and their dupes can be found at the interaction between Islamists and westerners. From our point of view, it’s dialogue and moderation; from theirs, it’s Dawa, or the verbal dimension of Jihad of conquest.
Given the radical instability of sustaining such an intensely inaccurate view of reality, those who insist on seeing their enemies as innocent, must find an explanation for what the evil that continues to flourish despite (I would argue in part because) of their efforts. And here we get the peculiar post-modern twist. We’re the ones at fault. We’re the evil ones. If Bush did 9-11, then the world makes sense: they are angry with us for our aggressive imperialist ways; our leaders continue to act in aggressive imperialist ways; if we stop them, then everything will be better. Get out of Iraq, withdraw to the West Bank, give money and programs to the “lost territories”, open dialogues and dismantle the apparatus that, whatever its origins like the Anglican Church, have brought us civil society.
And in so thinking, speaking, and acting, those with Bush Derangement Syndrome and an according attraction for 9-11 conspiracy end up thinking and speaking like the paranoid Muslims who initially cheered on 9-11 and then, when it didn’t go well for them, immediately blamed it on a conspiracy. This convergence of “left,” “progressive” conspiracism (far more mainstream among Europeans) with the most aggressive versions of global Islamist discourse, represents a genuinely terrifying example of an alliance of dupes and demopaths around the Moebius strip of cognitive egocentrism. For the Western dupes (among whom I suspect are some demopaths), this is the height self-criticism and commitment to overcoming our imperialistic impulses; for Islamist demopaths, this is a standard expression of imperialist ambitions demonizing an enemy. Both positions are poison; and together, they’re weaponized poison.
Now in this entire talk, I have scarcely spoken of Jews and anti-Semitism. That will have to await another conference or discussion. But let me just make the following brief observations:
1) the more fevered the Conspiracy theory, the more the Jews play a key role
2) post-modern anti-zionism reflects this fevered quality: Israel, whose behavior in both the battle field and the street has set standards that no other nation has come near, becomes a symbol of moral degradation; the Palestinians, whose behavior sets new lows in moral degradation, become the chosen people.
3) the Jews, via anti-Zionism play a key role in the culture conflict at work now. The British boycott illustrates the phenomenon: like some mafia making an undercover cop kill another one to prove loyalty, the left wants Jews to kill Zionism in order to be “admitted.” Any “liberal” who defends Israel gets exiled from the “progressive” camp. The result is a catastrophe for any real liberalism.
And if the driving wedge of the culture conflict which can, under current conditions, kill us, is the status of the Jews, it may follow that the route to resolving the culture conflict is also the Jews. If the Anglicans had the generosity of spirit not to still harbor supersessionist fantasies about the Jews, they could turn to the real and dangerous supersessionists, the Muslims, and, instead of engaging in a private and deadly embrace with them, insist that the measure of their ability to get along with the Jews was the mark of their sincerity in wanting to participate in civil society. The same for the French and their Muslims, whose aggressions against the “Republic” began soon after they turned on the North African Jewish communities with which they had shared neighborhoods from the time they immigrated. And the same for the world community who, if they want a genuinely multi-cultural globe in the 21st century (to say nothing of the 3rd millennium), need to say to the Muslim and Arab world: “Learn to live in peace with Israel; as long as you harbor fantasies of revenging your honor, as long as you treat your own commoners like cannon fodder, and as long you will not accept the consequences of your failed aggressions, do not come to us with complaints about how “they” oppress “you.”
But in order to do that, the West would have to act with honor, and not with an eye to the loss of contracts that offending the notoriously prickly egos of the Arab and Muslim world might entail.
Mainstreaming Conspiracy Theories III: American Conspiracies and 9-11
Conspiracy theory in West
The situation in the West is different that in the Middle East. We have considerable resistance to conspiracy theory – as we also do, not coincidentally, to apocalyptic narratives, especially cataclysmic ones. One might argue that these resistances are indispensible elements of a successful civil society, and that when they fail — as they did in France in 1793, or Russia in 1917 — you get tyranny and terror.
Before 2000 there were certainly important elements of conspiracy theory at play in Western culture – Kennedy assassination and UFOs, to take the two most popular forms – but voicing these conspiratorial narratives was a ticket either to obscurity or to Hollywood. While Westerners may have played with conspiracy theory for fun (X Files), Arabs and Muslim killed for it (Iraq-Iran war). For the West, conspiracies are a last resort to explain reality; in the Middle East, the first and often only resort.
But conspiracy thinking cuts deeper into Western attitudes than simple contrasts like this suggest. Nazism and Communism both imploded on their paranoia, and totalitarianism is a Western invention. The lack of scholarly attention to the subject may understandably reflect the profound unease that non-conspiracists feel when getting involved in these exceptionally intricate and overheated explanations for reality. But understand them, we must. Especially now that Petrie dish of the internet has changed the dynamics so much at so dangerous a time. The ease of communicating Conspiracy theory through cyberspace, on the one hand, has combined with a serious culture war between a “progressive secular left” and a “conservative, fundamentalist, right” on the other, to increase the appeal of Conspiracy theories just as they become more readily available.
The approach and passage of 2000 have played a significant role in intensifying Conspiracy theory culture in the United States: the mythical imagination – UFOs, unknown underground races, scientific experiments gone awry – combined with the politics of impeachment to foster an ever-expanding menu of possibilities to believe in. Clinton had more conspiracy theories circulating about him than the previous half-dozen presidents. And in his first term, George Bush has surpassed him handily. In particular the events of 9-11 have fostered an immense range of conspiracy theories not only – and immediately – in the Arab and Muslim worlds, but in the West as well. Indeed, one might argue that these have penetrated farther and effected people more, than any previous case of presidential conspiracy theory.
Here’s where the bad faith Republicans demonstrated with their scorched earth assault on Clinton (e.g., publishing the most lurid details on the internet even as they complained of how the media were polluting our children with their sexual permissiveness), has intensified the political culture wars. These in turn, have made the receptivity to Conspiracy theory even greater among the left. Democrats have the same (if not greater) hostility to the current Republican president as did the Republicans for “Billary.” Indeed this hostility has prompted Charles Krauthammer to coin the expression Bush Derangement Syndrome:
Bush Derangement Syndrome: the acute onset of paranoia in otherwise normal people in reaction to the policies, the presidency — nay — the very existence of George W. Bush.
Considering the deranged behavior of the Republicans over Clinton’s trysts in the back corridors of the White House, and before that, the ferocious attacks on virtually every American president, one might better call the latest version, Presidential Derangement Syndrome, Version 43.2.
The hostility between “liberals” and “conservatives” in the USA, a reflection of the larger “culture wars” that plagues every “modern” culture to some extent, feeds Conspiracy theory by making the people on both sides eager to believe the worst of their opponents. In the case of the most recent, current, and still as-yet undetermined Conspiracy theory – namely Bush and 9-11 – the role of personal animus plays a significant role in the attraction of 9-11 Conspiracy theories. This is true both of Europeans across the political spectrum, and people on the American “left.” (Here, I observe that, by and large, the Canadians share European patterns.)
This animosity is critical in imagining a President capable of, at worst plotting to destroy three of the most important American sites, kill thousands, if not tens of thousands of Americans, all in based on motives that range from sagging polls, a desire to avenge his father in Iraq, Halliburton contracts in wartorn Iraq and Afghanistan, and plans for a new fascist world order. The degree of bad faith that these conspiracies accept as “assumed” in the logic of the argument says a great deal about how they view their fellow Americans. In order to have a conspiracy on the level argued for – that is, active planning and cooperation – we would need the following phenomena:
• A President and a tiny inner circle capable of thinking in these terms about politics, power, and American citizens, planning this during the first 9 months of the administration, and keeping it secret from everyone else in the cabinet.
• Multiple members of the FBI and CIA willing to work on this kind of malevolent and radically unconstitutional deed, without a leak, before or (even more unlikely) after. (Even in 24 season 5 which plays a 9-11 presidential conspiracy, there are people of integrity in the inner circles of power.)
• Contemplating such a damaging attack – both for the economy and the prestige of the USA – during one’s own presidency for either petty or megalomanic motives would make sense to a man like George Bush, chosen to bring good times to rich people.
In other words, people who believe in a conspiracy theory have an immensely low opinion of the people in our government. In a sense, they consider our elites every bit a unprincipled and predatory as earlier aristocracies who would, indeed, sacrifice commoners’ lives with little hesitation. One might even argue that this particular conspiracy, when attributed to an American president, represents one of the most terrible of all such theories, far worse in its moral implication the one about Roosevelt and Pearl Harbor.
Nor are Conspiracy Theorists unaware of the issue, but for them it explains the reluctance of people to believe their Conspiracy theory, rather than a reason not to. As Paul Griffin, author of The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions about the Bush Administration and 9/11, writes: “It is very difficult for Americans to face the possibility that their own government may have caused or deliberately allowed such a heinous event.”
But of course Griffin, whose work is riddled with errors and inconsistencies, and others feel no need to explain how our government could get involved in such morally aberrant behavior and no one leaked it. It goes without saying for Griffin and others, that this kind of thing can and does happen. Like all conspiracy theory, this one assumes that people in power are naturally evil.
The success of Conspiracy theories about 9-11 represents a relatively new stage in Western European Conspiracy theory. Unlike the Arab and Muslim world, where Conspiracy theories were already mainstream before 2000 and become virulent afterwards, in the West, Conspiracy theories were banished from the mainstream. Take the attitude towards the Protocols of the Elders of ion, for example, the very mention of it stigmatized the speaker.
9-11 Conspiracy theories, on the other hand, have invaded the private public sphere — the coffee house, tavern, dinner table conversations — and are knocking at the gates of published discourse and the elected officials. Mainstream media still refuse to give these conspiracy theories any credibility, but just under the surface these ideas simmer. In 2003, when I spoke with a journalist for ABC about al Durah, he asked me at the end of the conversation what I thought of these rumors that Mossad knew about the bombing beforehand, suggesting that in his circles the idea circulated with at least plausibility. In 2006, I asked my class how many had heard the conspiracy theories about Bush’s involvement, and two-thirds reported hearing them from at least one source who considered the hypothesis likely. Now we have our first (annual?) conference on 9-11 conspiracy, and an article about it in the NYT topped its list of “most emailed.”
These conspiracy theories about Bush show all the signs of serving the normal functions of Conspiracy theories: demonizing and scapegoating the target while exculpating major sources of the problem. In other words, far more than a real battle of “facts,” these Conspiracy theories represent a major piece in a chess game of culture wars, in which one sees the near-enemy – here Republican administration – as far worse than the far enemy – in this case Global Jihad. Indeed recognizing this near-evil – Chomsky’s Fateful Triangle – enables us to deny the very existence of the far-enemy. Behind the 9-11 deception Bush has launched a “false war on terror.”
We have met the enemy and he is us. As for those Muslim fellows out there who rant and scream about wanting to massacre us, they are artifacts of our imperial arrogance. When we stop oppressing them, they’ll stop wanting to kill us.
Next: Moral Equivalence, Multiculturalism, and Conspiracy Theory
Mainstreaming Conspiracy Theories II: Arab Conspiracy Thinking before and after 2000
Conspiracy theory in Arab/Muslim world
It is something of a commonplace that the Arab and Muslim media are full of conspiracy-thinking. Indeed, anyone bold enough to defy Edward Saïd’s prohibition on seeing Arabs as different from Westerners, remarks among the most salient features of Arab culture a propensity to conspiracy theory: Everything is part of a plot; every motive has secret and malevolent motives. The frequency with which even quotidian political events are conceived as the playing out of conspiracies confirms what observation also notices: this is a culture where the political axiom “rule or be ruled” dominates.
Nor is this kind of thinking a recent phenomenon. After WW II, for example, the Nazi conspiracy theories about the Jews, in particular, their foundational conspiracy theory, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, found earnest welcome in the Arab world. It provided the perfect escape from facing the nature of their failure to wipe out any trace of an independent state made by dhimmi. This same need to explain their humiliating failure by blaming the conspiratorial malevolence of others accounts for why one of the major disagreements in the Arab world today is whether the US is a pawn of Israel or vice-versa.
Dan Pipes’ 1998 book, The Hidden Hand, describes the role of conspiracy theory in the Arab world. There he finds a mentality that pervades almost all forms of thought, that contributes fundamentally to both the insolubility of the Arab-Israeli conflict and the economic stagnation of the Arab world. But he also finds that conspiracy theory works primarily as a depressant: the forces are so great, the Arabs such victims, that nothing can be done. Pipes finds this quality among the most damaging:
Imagining conspiracies of malicious, omnipotent adversaries can induce a profound sense of hopelessness. After all, how can an enemy so shrewd, so powerful, and so vast be challenged? At the same time, how can one negotiate or compromise with such an implacable and evil force?
Since 2000, however, things have changed significantly in the Arab world on two major levels. First, the intensity, variety and sophistication of the conspiracy has risen exponentially. The elaborate film and TV series that depict the most horrendous, bloodthirsty Jewish conspiracies to destroy Arabs and Islam have brought public discussion of these themes to a new and vivid prominence. Similarly the variety of conspiratorial narratives, taken over from the Europeans (e.g., blood libels) and given new twists (e.g., Humantashen made with Christian or Muslim boys’ blood), appear in prominent and respected mainstream media. Any glance at the contents of many of the most mainstream of Arab media (from the PATV to Al Jazeera, to al Ahram) reveals an intensity of paranoid hatemongering conspiracism with few parallels in recorded history. Indeed, some future, impartial judge will probably find the early 21st century Arab and Muslim anti-Semitism was even more fevered (if, hopefully, less effective) than Nazi anti-Semitism.
Right after 9-11, 60 Minutes ran a piece on the conspiracy theory that the Mossad was responsible (can’t find this, pretty sure it was CBS). The narrator expressed astonishment not at the existence of such a rumor, but its pervasiveness, even in educated circles, even in non-Arab countries (he was attending a wedding in Pakistan). That TV program should have been a wake-up call to the problem of an entirely different mentality operating in the Arab and Muslim world, where conspiracy is not relegated to the commoners, but publicly embraced by the elites. Even in moderate, pro-Western Muslim circles one finds an almost naïve recourse to CT. In a recent statement by the apparently genuinely moderate Muslim Canadian Congress (MCC) [they’re against Sharia law]), their spokesman, Tariq Fatah, expressed relief at the recent pre-emptive arrest of the terrorists in Canada, and, while attacking Muslim extremists, let this comment slip:
It is ironic that Muslim extremists are portraying themselves as anti-imperialist, when in fact Al-Qaeda and the Taliban are nothing more but a creation of the CIA.
Note how the conspiracy theory – with all its profound misunderstandings of how things “work” – allows Mr. Fatah to deny any Islamic dimension to the imperialism of Al-Qaeda.
But in addition to new intensity since 2000, we also find an even more alarming switch from passive to active. Indeed the emergence of global Jihad has accompanied, fed, and ridden on the wave of this intensified conspiracism. One might suggest – I would – that the turn of the millennium has shifted the gears of the Muslim world from passive to active, that the narrative of conspiracy that had previously had so soporific an effect now offered the very rhetoric of incitement to aggression.
This shift to the offensive, already in motion among certain, relatively marginal jihadi figures like Abdullah Azzam and Bin Laden and organizations like Hizbullah, Hamas and al Qaeda, first encountered success in the public arena with the outbreak of the Intifada in the Fall of 2000. The previously marginal found eager ears for conspiracist narratives that incited to action, not to fatalism, militant Islamism and global Jihad. From that point on a new and more aggressive form of Conspiracy theory took on world-wide proportions: from the outbreak of the Intifada, to the convening of the Durban conference, and 9-11. It continues to spread, from the Middle East to Europe, the USA, Far East Asia, etc.
Like most active cataclysmic conspiracy theory (there is a massive conspiracy out there and we can and must fight it), this one has heavy doses of apocalyptic rhetoric, symbolism and, accordingly, absolutist logic. Suicide terrorism first receives its terrifying justification in the framework of an apocalyptic battle between good and evil; and after 2000, receives large majorities of support in opinion polls. In other words, in the Arab world, conspiracy theory has, since 2000, both taken over even more of the public sphere – i.e., taken over the mainstream – and gone active… a highly ominous development.
Mainstreaming Conspiracy Theories I: Culture Wars, Moral Equivalence and Suicidal Paradigms
Conspiracy Theories from Margins to Center Stage: Dynamics and Implications
Paper delivered at the conference on Antisemitism, Multi-culturalism and Ethnic Identity at Hebrew University under the auspices of the Vidal Sassoon Center for the Study of Antisemitism, June 16, 2006.
Introductory Remarks: Two Anecdotes
Let me begin with two anecdotes from a relatively calm, non-radicalized American campus.
No. 1: I once suggested to a colleague in African-American Studies that we have a conference on conspiracy theory. He blanched somewhat, and said, “but how could we control the audience?”
No. 2: I was on a panel consisting of three rappers, and an African-American professor discussing apocalyptic themes in hip-hop music. The notion that the US government was injecting AIDS in African-American communities came up so often that a member of the audience asked, “how many on the panel believe these AIDS conspiracies?” The three rappers all said they did. The African-American professor said, “I don’t want to answer that, because if I say I do, I’ll lose credibility with my colleagues, and if I say I don’t, I’ll lose credibility with the brothers.”
Between them, these two anecdotes tell us two extremely important elements of conspiracy theories:
1) Conspiracism is volatile: even talk about conspiracies and they can run away with your audience. In James C. Scott’s terms, conspiracies are “hidden transcripts,” pushed out of what’s permissable to say publicly. Just to speak of them, is to court an eruption of hidden transcripts into the public sphere. And given that the Shoah came to us via a people in the grip of mass paranoia, believers in a giant Jewish conspiracy that acted as a warrant for genocide, this is no small matter.
2) Conspiracism is far more common than the public record registers. More than the three rappers, the professor’s response reveals both the depth of the belief and its community-wide validity. No one can question this one without being viewed as having abandoned the community, here, without becoming an “Oreo.” It suggests that within certain communities, a public transcript at complete variance with that of the larger culture exists.
Conspiracy Thinking: Definitions and Dynamics
A conspiracy theory seeks to explain either one extremely important event (singular conspiracy), or a whole pattern of events (global conspiracy) by positing a small group of conspirators who are manipulating the public’s perception in order to a) carry out a nefarious deed of great damage to the public, and b) have the public blame the wrong agents. Most singular conspiracy theories tend to work on the principle of cui bono (to whom the good? i.e., who benefits?), and concern past events which they explain. They also tend to be passive – who can fight such powerful hidden forces? They are cognitive and emotional booby prizes: “Now we know why we’re screwed and it’s not our fault.”
Most global conspiracy theories seek to explain larger cultural phenomena, in particular, modernity (earliest modern Conspiracy theories begin in the late 18th century with the Masons (Illumiinati) blamed for democracy in America and France). Because they warn about a conspiracy in progress, they often (almost always) involve a critical question of timing – how far advanced is the conspiracy? Global conspiracies, because they have not already happened, can, under the right circumstances, become active. The most powerful large scale conspiracy theories convey a sense that the final stages have been reached; that a great battle looms; that if action were not imminent, it will be too late.
All global conspiracy theories have apocalyptic elements in all three senses of the word: they are radical and stunning revelations about the opaque present; they are part of a larger cataclysmic final transformation, of the world, and they are about to happen, imminent. Virtually all active cataclysmic apocalyptic (we are the agents of the huge cataclysm that precedes/accompanies the great apocalyptic transformation) has global conspiracy theories as a central element of its discourse (Nazism, Communism, Global Jihad).
Psychological dynamics: Appeal?
Conspiracy theories explain catastrophes as the work of men who appear beneficent, but secretly conspire to bring about those catastrophes. They assume the worst of these men, so consumed by the desire to dominate others that they will stop at nothing – including the most dastardly conspiracies – to achieve their goal. Conspiracy theories simplify the moral universe: the bad things that happen to us are not our fault, they are the fault of evil others. Future-oriented Conspiracy theories seek to warn an innocent victim population of the plots that these unscrupulous “others” even now set in motion against them. In particular, global Conspiracy theory tends to scape-goat. As René Girard has pointed out – scapegoating emphasizes the innocence of the scape-goater and the guilt of the designated victim. “Conspiracism,” points our Chip Berlet, is a particular narrative form of scapegoating that frames demonized enemies as part of a vast insidious plot against the common good, while it valorizes the scape-goater as a hero for sounding the alarm.”
Conspiracy theories work on several psychological levels. Cognitively, they offer a gratifying world view that explains everything. All details cohere, unnoticed or unexplained facts fit into place, everything connects, gains shape and color. To the believer, now semiotically aroused with his new hermeneutic, the troubling world makes sense. Furthermore, Conspiracy theories tend to engage in systematic projection of bad faith onto the conspirators, or the cognitive egocentrism of bad faith. The articulators and believers in Conspiracy theories live in a universe where everyone is driven by libido dominandi, everyone wants to dominate and, as Eli Sagan so eloquently puts it describing the basic political axiom of the pre-modern world, it’s “rule or be ruled.” The only motivation possible among the conspiring “enemy” is a ruthless lust for power. And finally, Conspiracy theory is Gnostic: it is powerful hidden knowledge, available only the initiate, attractive, even true by very virtue of its being proscribed.
The emotional blandishments of Conspiracy theory are at least as attractive as the cognitive rewards. They offer above all freedom from any responsibility: failures, setbacks and sufferings, are not the victim’s fault; they are the work of the conspirators. The dualistic moral universe of “us” and “them” that Conspiracy theory provides shows up in stark and simple contrasts with no grey areas. Conspiracy theories are a quintessential expression of what, using James Scott’s term, we might call a hidden transcript of resentment.
Furthermore, Conspiracy theory at once eases the conscience – we are not at fault, we are innocent – and liberates it – no limits on what we must do in order to defend ourselves. The more dire the conspiracy, the more liberated the violence of the response: anything is permitted when struggling for one’s very existence against some agent who is plotting to destroy “us.” Conspiracy theories are narratives that justify aggressive action; the worse the conspiracy, the more aggressive the justifiable action. At their worst, they are “warrants for genocide.”
Conditions for conspiracy theory
I wish to posit the argument that Conspiracy theories are always present at a low level in any society. The real question is, when do they take over and drive a culture to act on paranoid fears. Or, to take up a problematic suggested to me by Anthony Kauders on Tuesday, how does it go from the public sphere of private conversations – coffee shop and tavern culture – to the published sphere, part of the public discourse. To take a graphic example, when and how did the paranoid chatter of the sans culottes become the policy of the Committee of Public Safety; when does paranoia dominate the public and political discourse.
Singular Conspiracy theories arise from specific events – Pearl Harbor, the assassination of JFK, 9-11 – and unless they are connected to a larger plot, remain relatively low key. Collective or global Conspiracy theories tend to arise in civil societies, among what we might call “Nietzsche’s ‘blond beasts’ as losers”: those who, formerly dominant predators, having lost the authoritarian powers of aristocratic societies, imagine modernity as an unfinished conspiracy designed to replace their (now former) aristocratic dominion with a new and far more vicious form of universal slavery. These latter Conspiracy theories seem to be a natural companion of modern societies. When modern societies fall into conspiracy theory… when, for example, those in power invoke a clear and present danger to eliminate any criticism since criticism is part of the conspiracy, historically the consequences are grave. The French revolutionary terror, repeated on a colossal scale by the Russians and Germans and Chinese in the 20th century, represents the catastrophic results that can ensue from such madness taking hold.
Conspiracy theory seems to be a low-level constant, a marginal but enduring discourse. The key issue in terms of conditions under which Conspiracy theory takes over public discourse concerns less what produces such thought – it (Indeed, meditating on Scott’s work, I suspect that conspiracy thinking is a major dimension of most “hidden transcript” discourse in most cultures, especially in ones where an aristocratic minority has managed to monopolize power (i.e., successfully pull of a conspiracy of dominion). Given their destructiveness, successful modern societies have developed a healthy resistance to Conspiracy theories. They tend to break out at moments of crisis, when social forces that seem out of control bring ruin upon many (e.g., the great Depression), and they work best in populations filled with a sense of unavowable guilt which they eagerly project onto another party.
The more the conspiratorial narrative identifies marginal and vulnerable populations as the conspirators, the more they appeal to the desire to victimize the innocent and dishonestly absolve guilt. The dishonesty of this kind of scapegoating conspiracy theory of course leads to seriously self-destructive behavior, misidentifying the source of the suffering. As a result, although attacking the mistaken foe may offer immediate if temporary psychological relief, in the long run intensifies the grip of those who do impose the suffering. When European populations rose to the paranoid call of rumors about witches and Jews and lepers poisoning their wells and blighting their lives, they ended up putting themselves ever more firmly in the grip of an ecclesiastical Inquisition that blighted European life for centuries.
At the simplest level, by alleviating the need for self-criticism – indeed, declaring self-criticism a form of betrayal of the cause against the conspirators – conspiracy theory relegates the cultures that indulge in it to a cycle of failure and depression: when serious consideration of past errors cannot take place (i.e., history is dishonest), societies have flat learning curves. Moreover, rendering all relations with the “other” conflictual, makes it difficult to solve problems with positive-sum outcomes (win-win). Conspiracy theories are the crystallization of a whole world view of absolute scarcity: every relationship, every event is zero-sum; every motive hostile; every exchange an attack; everyone suspect.
Given its destructive capacities, Conspiracy theory discourse tends to get banished from public space; and when it does appear, it gets beaten back with silence, contempt and hostility. So one of the keys in determining when one gets an outbreak of conspiracism, comes from paying attention to what happens when a Conspiracy theory discourse goes public. If it gets well received by the public rather than rejected, the culture in which such a narrative “takes” is in for a rough ride, especially if that narrative is a global or future-oriented conspiracy theory.
Role of media
For conspiracy theory to go public it must have means of communicating itself. Many who think conspiratorially never go beyond their own selves, since when they share their concerns with family and neighbors they are rejected and find no friendly ear, or if so, only the ears of other losers. The existence of means of communication for people whom the “gatekeepers” normally keep out of public discourse vastly increases the ability of conspiracy theory to “take” among a larger audience of people who can be reached. Thus, print, telephone, and especially the internet have immensely increased the scope of conspiracy. Indeed, given the capacity of the internet to bring together people from all over the world to exchange conspiracy theories and anomalous “facts,” the number of identifiable conspiracies, and the heat their discussion generates has grown exponentially in the last 20 years. If anything, the WWW represents a Petrie dish for conspiracies. This is especially evident in the increase of the number of conspiracies circulating about the last few presidents. Bill Clinton had more than all the previous sevesan – Nixon and Kennedy included – and Bush surpassed Clinton’s record in his first term. I’ll come back to this point. First, let me make a side journey, via the Middle East.
Inayat Bunglawala and the Western Press: Studies in Demopathy
Most people who inhabit the blogosphere are probably aware of the Reuters-Little Green Footballs affair. The latest update sends us to an article at the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (MPAC-UK) which at once rants against the world-wide Zionist conspiracy and denounces the pitiful resistance put up by allegedly Islamic defense organizations, ending with a pitch for donations.
One aspect of these remarks in particular caught my eye because it reveals the nature of conspiracy thinking, and the ways in which Muslim notions of advocacy and Western journalism in principle contrast vividly, but in practice mesh so seamlessly as to make Pallywood a forgone conclusion.
The article begins with an invocation of one of the great Jihadist generals and companions of Muhammad.
“See with your own eyes that I am standing here firm and determined, and I will not flee.”
Khalid Bin WaleedToday we can reveal that Inayat Bunglawala the pro Palestinian Media spokesperson for the MCB has been the target of Zionists around the world, in an onslaught that began last Thursday (25.05.06), in an all out campaign to have him sacked from his job. Someone had sent an offensive email from the same workplace to a Zionist Blog. The person who sent the email was indeed suspended last Friday (26.05.06).
The Zionist machine as organised and well funded as it is, tracked it back to the work place of Inayat. Now the central nervous system of the Zionist machine sent an alert around the world. Thinking they had him trapped, they launched a world wide campaign to have him sacked.
So the invocation at the beginning is supposed to be a rallying cry for Inayat to stand firm at his journalist’s post at Reuters and stand firm against those who would have him fired. This is an open admission that — at least as far as his supporters are concerned — Bunglawala is a warrior for Jihad. That’s not exactly what journalism is about, at least not, supposedly, in the West. But it is a good description of what it means for journalists working for the cause of Islam, Palestine, what have you. Indeed, the description of Bunglawala is unashamedly open: he is an advocate for the Muslim Council of Britain, an organization whose activities have already created a blog dedicated to tracking their covert activities on behalf of Jihad and which has already commented on this issue:
Today we can reveal that Inayat Bunglawala the pro Palestinian Media spokesperson for the MCB was targeted by Zionists around the world last Thursday (25.05.06) in an all out campaign to have him sacked from his job.
And if, indeed, he is just such an advocate, why is he working as a journalist for Reuters?
This is precisely the kind of problem that produced Pallywood, the systematic use of medium journalism to carry out warfare.
Behind this lies a fascinating aspect of the Moebius Strip of cognitive egocentrism, in which the Muslims project their own mentality onto the West, and especially on to the Jews. In the conspiracy narrative so favored in the Muslim world, and constantly fed by the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Jews control the media for their own nefarious purposes. As so often in conspiracy theory, the people who hold them reveal more about themselves than they do about the people they “describe.” Here we see the Muslims imagining that, with so many Jews in the media, they must be using it to advance their personal (tribal/religious) agenda, and, by contrast, if only they could get as many people in the media as the Jews have, then they would be able to do so.
The irony here is that the Jews are so prominent in the media because they bend over backwards not to be partisan, even to support the other side. (One of the major reasons the NYT played down the Holocaust was because its Jewish owners did not want to have their flagship paper dismissed as a Jewish propaganda organ.) People like CNN’s Andrea Koppelshow remarkable credulity about both the claims of Palestinian sources, and an alarming readiness to condemn Israel on that basis. Suzanne Goldberg of the Guardian did a hatchet job on the Israelis over Muhammad al Durah. And NPR (which Israel advocates commonly refer to as National Palestine Radio) is full of “even-handed” Jews. Wolf Blitzer has moved from the Jerusalem Post and AIPAC to one of CNN’s stars, not because he is an Israel advocate, but because he has impressed everyone with his fairness and willingness not to push an agenda other than professional journalism.
On the other hand, Muslim journalists often treat the media as a front in a larger battle. The Palestinian Journalists Association, has a record of avowed advocacy, repeated recourse to intimidation, and violence in the service of the Palestinian cause.
Journalists moving up in the ranks of Western media outlets, often as a result of a desire for “even-handedness,” have been known to systematically use their positions to apologize if not propagandize their causes. The suicide terrorism of 7-7-05 that struck London brought up one particularly revealing case.
Dilpazier Aslam is an English-born Pakistani Muslim hired as a journalist by the Guardian. In addition to his news articles, Aslam wrote an editorial using first person plural pronouns to speak about England and the English. He argued that, because ‘we’ (the English) have committed so many wrongs against ‘them’ (the Arabs, Muslims), ‘we’ cannot be surprised by ‘their’ understandable responses of rage and terrorism. See, “Today’s muslims aren’t prepared to ignore injustice“. But Dilpazier was, at the time he was hired and wrote, a member of the UK branch of Hizb ut Tahrir, an Islamic group outlawed in central Asia, working to establish a worldwide caliphate where all religious practice would be regulated by Sharia Law. Websites connected to the group have been openly promoting Jihad, suicide bombers as martyrs, racism and anti-semitism. So while, Dilpazier was claiming to be an understanding outsider representing the oppressed minority’s views to his co-citizens, he was actually one of “them”, using the protection of the press, the right to freedom of speech, the right to respect – and even to a job – in order to slip a justification for Jihad, and an opportunity to chastise the West for the hatred and regressive revolution that he foments.
The response of the Western media, eager to be afford the “other side” some affirmative action, and, in the case of the Guardian, perhaps also committed to anti-Israeli journalism, resist acknowledging the problem. Initially, after the discovery of Aslam’s concealed activities, the Guardian refused to fire him, saying the matter was “under review”. Eventually, when they did fire him, (not a consensual process though, one editor resigned) Aslam was outraged and invoked the principles of journalistic freedom, despite the fact that his Jihadi ideology rejects that value. This is classic demopathy.
The irony of it all comes out clearly in the piece at the MPAC-UK. Bunglawala, despite his advocacy journalism, and his demopathic positions as a journalist for Reuters, (Danish Cartoons are bad because they disrespect Islam; Da Vinci Code is good because it disrespects Catholicism), has every “right” to hold his position as a journalist for Reuters and a spokesman for MCB, and anyone invoking the principles of modern professional journalism to question his professional credentials, is, like Charles Johnson, nothing more than an evil Zionist conspirator.
Can we stand up for journalistic standards?
Update:
Commenters who came here from the LGF post have corrected me on the fact that I. Bunglawala is not a journalist… an observation that does change the thrust of my argument. If I.B, is not a journalist, but an op-ed writer (as is, for example, Melanie Phillips), then part of my complaint is invalid. European papers distinguish less than American ones between op-ed and news sections (often, in US papers, there’s a fire-wall between the two).
In any case, a number of my complaints — “And if, indeed, he is just such an advocate, why is he working as a journalist for Reuters?” — are inappropriate given that he’s not. I apologize to readers for misleading them, and I thank the commenters from LGF, some favorable, some hostile) for their comments. Mostly one hears complaints about the level of comment at LGF; this suggests a sharp and well-informed body of commenters.
On the subject of Inayat Bunglawala, however, there is more than enough evidence to suggest that his relationship to journalism, which includes both apology for things like honor-killings and his double standards when it comes to apologizing for Islam and attacking Christianity deserves criticism. That’s not to say he should be cashiered, but also to say that full disclosure when running his articles is appropriate.
Essays in Judeophobia VI: Arab-Israeli Conflict and Anti-modern Antisemitism
[This is the continuation of the essay on Anti-semitism which will appear in its entirety (eventually), here.]
The perspective developed above offers a wide-ranging analysis of the Arab-Israeli conflict. Here we have a virtual morality play of the conflict between civic and prime-divider values. On the one hand, the Zionist (i.e., modernized) Jews, who come to the area with the most developed sense of civil commitments, quite unlike the imperialist Europeans (British, French, German). Many came with radical social values of egalitarianism and justice for the in-group, and non-coercive attitudes for the outgroup. On the other, the Arab Muslims, inheritors of a long tradition of prime-divider politics, with wealthy and arbitrary elites dominating impoverished commoners, to whom they threw the bone of dhimmi inferiors, religious minorities legally impotent before the law, against whom they could always direct their frustration and rage.
On the one hand, we have a society in which the discourse of civil society has advanced so far in practice, that they launched the most successful experiments in radical communist egalitarianism in recorded history (kibbutzim). On the other, we have a prime divider society where the elite violently defend their right to distribute wealth as they see fit. On the one hand, a culture committed to values of impartial justice, free press, and vigorous self-criticism, on the other, a classic case of the Anthropologists’ “shame culture,” an honor society that held sacred the right of a man to shed the blood of another for the sake of his own honor. On the one hand, a culture in which a rigorous epistemology of skepticism and demand for honesty informs both the journalistic and academic standards; on the other, one in which lying, especially to outsiders, is an art.
Normally the results of such a culture clash, played out on the home turf of the prime-divider societies, and not accompanied by the massive use of military force, dooms the experiment in civil society. Only with great difficulty do civic (modern) cultures successfully resist the hostility of prime-divider societies, who try to destroy the civic experiments in their midst — as Walter Map put it, “if we let them in they will drive us out.” Characteristically, even predictably such pressures drive the leadership in these revolutionary experiments in egalitarianism to adopt techniques of totalitarian control in order to survive. The French, in a pattern we would see repeat with variants all over the world for the next two centuries, started in 1789 with a revolutionary enthusiasm for egalitarianism (liberté, égalité, fraternité) only to swing wildly towards a paranoid terror that maintained its purity by shedding the blood of anyone – even its own – who criticized the leadership. Under pressure the political pattern of revolutionary movements seems quite consistent: the older patterns of prime-divider culture resurface with a vengeance – the violent reaction to criticism, the remorseless grip on the mechanisms of power, the projection of blame onto enemies, real and designated. Prime divider values triumph, and the revolutionary movement subsides and the political culture returns to a different but recognizable prime divider – the restored monarchies, the “Third Republic.”
The common accusation against Israel – that it is not “really” a democracy, but rather an apartheid state – gets the story precisely wrong. Under conditions of enormous security and self-confidence, it took America centuries to stop committing genocide against natives, and grant African-Americans full civil rights. Under the conditions of radical insecurity and immense pressures of attack, no democracy has survived, even in terms of the rights of the “in” group, much less those of a hostile minority. Except Israel. The apartheid is about two different cultures with radically different atmospheric pressures — a prime divider society with a heavy, debilitating atmosphere that favors honor-sensitive alpha males, and a civil, open society in which women and beta males can also carry public weight. The more hostile the former, the more the latter must insulate itself from the atmospheric pressures of hostile prime divider societies. (The current “barrier” is actually a form of space-suit. — added RL)
Indeed, were people to have an historical perspective, the endurance and continuously expanding world of Israeli democracy over the last half-century – the free press, the academic revisionism, the multiple parties, the almost complete lack of assassination (except, tragically but exceptionally, Rabin), even the presence of Arab members of parliament (who continuously push the very limits of the system) – represents an anomaly almost as exceptional in the history of politics as the survival of Jewish communities under the crushing pressures of diaspora for millennia represents in the history of culture.
Essays in Judeophobia V – Modernity as a Conspiracy to Enslave Mankind: The Protocols Reveal “Jewish” Goals
[This is the continuation of the essay on Anti-semitism which will appear in its entirety (eventually), here.]
Modernity as Conspiracy to Enslave
Theories about a conspiracy of illuminati who secretly sought to take over and rule the world go back to the 18th century, and initially focus on the secret society of the Masons. To some extent they may well be right. To judge from Mozart’s The Magic Flute (1791), written at the height of enthusiasm about the French Revolution, the Masons constituted a secret society dedicated to getting rid the authoritarian elites and their monarchical systems that ruled Europe at the time.
“He is a prince!” gushes one character about Tamino. “He is more than a prince, he’s a man (Mensch),” corrects the Mason. Just as Rip Van Winkle noticed when he awakened after the American Revolution and found that the caps (commoners) no longer showed deference to the hats (gentlemen), the Masons sought a world in which deference was gone, a world where the prime divider had ceded to world of equality in which all men “can walk upright.”
The key issue, of course, concerned the purpose of this overthrow. For the elites who felt threatened, the secret work of the Masons could only signify the work of men who, like themselves, sought to dominate others. Thus the purpose of a vision of world “liberation” on the part of the Masons could only mean the intention of world “domination” to the prime divider elites. Thus they heard such “noble-sounding” sentiments as merely the trap, the weapon whereby these people planned to disarm their opposition. Only an imbecile would possibly believe in such ideas as “Liberty, equality, fraternity.”
Thus the intelligent elites who were taking over were using these notions to gull the foolish and greedy masses. These duped mobs who overthrew their aristocracies for promises of freedom and prosperity had a nasty surprise awaiting them. After losing their only real, if iron-fisted, protector, they would be at the mercy of forces over which they had no control, especially those of the technologically enhanced market place. When these new manipulators had achieved their goal – constitutional democracies everywhere, they would then engineer a global crisis that would then permit them to enslave the entire world. At its simplest, these conspiracies represented a political argument made explicit by Plato and Thucydides: the painful order of prime divider society is better than chaos and enslavement of democracy.
Letter of Condolence to Big Pharaoh and Apologies
Big Pharaoh (hat tip PJMedia) lives up to his reputation for straight shooting in his analysis of an Egyptian website poll showing that 49% of those who voted believe that the Mossad blew up Dahab — twice as many people as any other possibility. He discusses the response of a well educated friend:
“Israeli tourists don’t go to Eilat (a southern Israeli resort) anymore. Dahab and Sinai is much more cheaper and so they come to Egypt instead of spending their holidays in Israel” she explained.
“So you’re telling me Israel targeted a resort that is frequented by its own people and could have killed Israelis just to stop them from sunbathing in Sinai???” I asked.
“Yes. They could kill a few of their citizens to save the tourism industry there” she shot back.
Now this logic is particularly interesting since it concerns purely internal Israeli financial calculations. By this logic, Egyptians do not even figure in the calculus, it’s all about Israeli economic interests.
As students of conspiracy theory regularly point out, the way that people imagine the conspirators represents a projection that tells you about the way they think. Here a member of the Egyptian elite (on top of the prime divider) contemplates a government strategy that, for a minor economic advantage, kills a couple of dozen people (including “their own”) without a second thought. That’s not Islamic fanaticism, that’s classic aristocratic contempt for the rest of mankind.
Moreover, the sheer casualness of the analysis — of course Israelis would kill a few of their own civilians for an uptick in the Eilat tourist trade — gives a stark insight into one half of the Moebius strip of cognitive egocentrism. The Israelis are capable of any disgusting deed, including knocking off their own people for temporary economic gain to the owning class. Never mind that they will sacrifice their own soldiers’ lives to avoid casualties to the enemy’s civilians. No wonder Jenin must be a “massacre.” If it were seen for what it was, how could people go on with this kind of analysis. No wonder there can’t be peace between these people, when one side cannot begin to imagine what’s going on on the other side — and the two sides are not! the same.
I wanted to bang my head against a wall!
I have said countless times before that the root cause of the darkness we’re living in is our unwillingness to look in the mirror and start criticizing ourselves and the cult of death we allowed to infect our society. We don’t want to admit that many of our children are willing to kill themselves in order to massacre others. We don’t want to admit that religion needs renewal and reform to suit the year 2006 and not 1006. We don’t want to admit anything of that. Do you know why ladies and gentlemen we don’t want to do that? We’re just busy and in a constant state of denial. We’re busy hating America. We’re busy blaming Israel.
We are also living in a disgusting state of narcissism. We think we are the best nation handpicked by God. Our nations have the best religion approved by heaven. Nothing wrong can be in us, nothing wrong can be in our culture, and nothing wrong can be in our religious beliefs. It must be the evil “outsiders.”
This is a good example of “chosenness as privilege” rather than as “responsibility.” It gives an excellent view of the “normative” view of chosenness that historically has informed both Muslim and Christian supersessionist thinking — we are the new chosen people who replace the old (for Christians, Jews; for Muslims, Jews and Christians). When one then projects that envious and imperialist notion of chosenness back onto the Jews, one gets the widespread dislike of Jews for being so arrogant as to think of themselves as the chosen people.
There is no doubt whatsoever that all Egyptians condemned this terrorist attack and were shocked when it happened. Yet I am not really talking about this specific attack. I am referring to our general condition that gave birth to murderers from Bali to New York. Many are to blame here. Our repressive governments, the economic disaster they created, the humiliation millions of youth are feeling, and above all the deadly religious rhetoric that wants to draw us hundreds of years backward.
Allow me to add to your list, a media (both Arab and Western) so eager to believe the worst about the Israelis, so ready to forgive any excess from the Palestinians (chosen people of the left), that when the bombings first started many people — even good-hearted people — they found it relatively easy to say, “what choice do they have?” So in addition to your own cultural problems, Big Pharaoh, you have a supposedly enlightened West eagerly (if unconsciously) feeding your people’s own worst instincts. It’s hard to fight that.
I thought we’ll finally start looking in the mirror once we ourselves get bombed by terrorists. I thought that once we get torn into pieces by suicide bombers we’ll realize that the Palestinian suicide bomber will not end up in paradise but in the lowest pit of hell. Unfortunately, I was wrong. We’re still so busy to look in the mirror and see the ugly face there.
One could restate this in terms of a European lament: “Once the suicide terrorism has hit us, then we’ll rethink our championing of the Palestinians.” But Madrid and London, like 9-11, had mixed results. Many rushed to appease and self-criticize (really to blame the West), and only some people began to rethink the situation rather than to continue to slide into moral disorientation. Apparently there are too many psychological factors lying behind the demonization of Israel and the “chosenness” of the Palestinians for a mere suicide bombing or two of one’s own people to cause such a massive paradigm shift.
My condolences to you, your people, and your painful predicament, and my apologies for the unconscionable ways in which my culture’s supposed progressives contribute so irresponsibly to all our suffering, yours, ours, the Muslims who must live through this wave of fascist theocracy, and, perhaps in first place, the suffering of the Palestinian people.
The Blindness of Even-Handedness: Fisking the Independent
The Independent recently ran a brief article that typifies the problem of media bias, even from someone who is avowedly sympathetic to Israel. (Hat-tip Tom Gross.) Below I fisk the article, not because it is so bad, but because it tries to be fair, and because a fair number of Israeli advocates would find it if not good, at least a relief from the kind of British coverage to which they have become accustomed. The article appears in blockquote in bold.
Aggressors and victims on both sides of the wall
In election week, Israelis and Palestinians agree on one thing: the Western media is biased
By Vincent Graff
The Independent on Sunday
April 2, 2006Arnold Roth did not choose to become entangled with the international media. That decision was taken for him by Izzedine al-Masri, a Palestinian man who walked into a Jerusalem restaurant four-and-a-half years ago with a bag containing nails and explosives strapped to his body. When al-Masri blew himself up, he took Roth’s 15-year-old daughter, Malki, and 14 other people with him.
In an unpublished letter to the editor Roth notes on the slight but significant inaccuracy of this comment:
Perhaps you need to be the parent of a murdered child to be sensitive to the distinction. But the fact is he was carrying a guitar case. Inside the guitar case was a real guitar, and inside of that was a deadly load of explosives and nails. That is what he exploded when he went to his seventy-two virgins, ending my daughter’s life as well as the lives of fourteen other innocent visitors to a restaurant. 130 other people were maimed and injured, by far most of them women and children.
Two things about that massacre need to be understood in order to make sense of Mr Graff’s article’s title.
First, the name of my daughter’s killer has appeared on every published list of Palestinian “martyrs” since August 2001. When numeric comparisons are made between Israelis and Palestinian Arabs killed since the start of the Arafat War in 2000, my daughter’s murderer along with many other murderers is in the list of the Palestinian victims.
Secondly, Israel’s policy of having soldiers at crossover points check into whether musical instruments carried by Palestinian Arabs are real has been severely criticized in the past two years. That criticism, which I consider to be mostly unfair and wrong, takes on a different meaning when you know that one of the many massacres of Jews in Jerusalem was done via a booby-trapped guitar. Many people simply don’t know about it, which is why I am pointing it out here.
The “Jewish lobby” …
A new report written by Harvard academics John J. Mearsheimer and Stephen M. Walt for the Kennedy School of Government claims that the pro-Israel lobby in America causes the United States to skew its Middle East policy in favor of Israel.
.. no lobby has managed to divert US foreign policy as far from what the American national interest would otherwise suggest, while simultaneously convincing Americans that US and Israeli interests are essentially identical.
For them US support of Israel undermines the War On Terror:
It argues that supporting Israel is not in America’s best interest and furthermore, that it complicates the US’s international stand and its ability to fight terror. “Israel is in fact a liability in the war on terror and the broader effort to deal with rogue states,” the authors write, claiming that “The United States has a terrorism problem in good part because it is so closely allied with Israel, not the other way around.” The paper also argues that the US would not be worried about Iran, Iraq and Syria, if not for its close ties with Israel.
Finally, the lobby manipulates the media and academia:
They point to the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC)’s activity in Congress and in the executive branch and talk about how it allegedly “manipulates the media” and “polices academia” in order to make sure the US maintains a pro-Israel approach. The authors add that AIPAC also uses the claim of anti-Semitism, or “the great silencer” as they refer to it, to shut off any criticism of Israel.
Some of the accusations strike me as eerily familiar to the ones found in books such as the Protocols. What do you think?
The Muslim Brotherhood’s Project
PZ posted recently on “The Project.” I think it worthwhile to add that this text deserves careful study. The single best link is at Scott Burgess’ Daily Ablution. The text is now out in translation in French. Comments at Powerline. The connection with Eurabia deserves attention.
It’s difficult to assess things like this. On one level, given the devastating impact that the forgery, Protocols of the Elders of Zion has had on the Jews, it is extremely dangerous to suggest that members of a religion are bent on world conquest. On another, each case needs to be weighed on the evidence, and the evidence for Islam’s imperialist propensities are farily strong. (I will post later on the elements that make some forms of monotheism imperialist.)
If indeed there is a plan to carry out the Islamicization of Europe (and eventually the world), pretending it does not exist can only assist. And acknowledging the plan does not mean that we need demonize and ostracize every Muslim as part of the plot. Not only are many Muslims the target of Islamists, but there may be some who seek a form of Islam that can live in a multi-religious universe without seeking to dominate. It does mean, though, that we need to be informed and to ask hard questions.
So weigh the evidence, and do so carefully.
The Project: dominating the West
Interesting details from a new book published in France.
A new book published by Le Seuil in Paris in October may further Western understanding of this reality. Written by the Swiss investigative reporter Sylvain Besson and not yet available in English, it publicizes the discovery and contents of a Muslim Brotherhood strategy document entitled “The Project,” hitherto little known outside the highest counterterrorism circles. Besson’s book, La conquête de l’Occident: Le projet secret des Islamistes (The Conquest of the West: The Islamists’ Secret Project), recounts how, in November 2001, Swiss authorities acting on a special request from the White House entered the villa of a man named Yusuf Nada in Campione, a small Italian enclave on the eastern shore of Lake Lugano in Switzerland. Nada was the treasurer of the Al Taqwa bank, which allegedly funneled money to al Qaeda. In the course of their search of Nada’s house, investigators stumbled onto “The Project,” an unsigned, 14-page document dated December 1, 1982.
But, what is “The Project”?
One of the few Western officials to have studied the document before the publication of Besson’s book is Juan Zarate, named White House counterterrorism czar in May 2005 and before that assistant secretary of the treasury for terrorist financing. Zarate calls “The Project” the Muslim Brotherhood’s master plan for “spreading their political ideology,” which in practice involves systematic support for radical Islam. Zarate told Besson, “The Muslim Brotherhood is a group that worries us not because it deals with philosophical or ideological ideas but because it defends the use of violence against civilians.”
“The Project” is a roadmap for achieving the installation of Islamic regimes in the West via propaganda, preaching, and, if necessary, war. It’s the same idea expressed by Sheikh Qaradawi in 1995 when he said, “We will conquer Europe, we will conquer America, not by the sword but by our Dawa [proselytizing].”
Thus, “The Project” calls for “putting in place a watchdog system for monitoring the [Western] media to warn all Muslims of the dangers and international plots fomented against them.” Another long-term effort is to “put in place [among Muslims in the West] a parallel society where the group is above the individual, godly authority above human liberty, and the holy scripture above the laws.”
Conspiracy theory? A look into the future?
You decide …