You're listening to deconstructive criticism. I am Aaron Flam. This essay is about the mechanisms behind the common human phenomenon of solving one's problems by blaming them or someone else. It has taken a long time to write this, even longer to translate, well relatively.
Usually I write things up in a matter of days I do enjoy taking my time, of deadlines or a reality. This text has actually taken me months. It's not like I'm girth writing the first part of Faust. For the English speaking listener, this essay was originally published in Swedish 5th of May, although as I just said, I've been working on it since February.
Most of my work is in Swedish since I'm a Swede living in Sweden. It's an interesting country from the point of view of this essay. The world's oldest social democracy can not only boast most years in power for a social democratic party, but also with being the country that has taken in the most immigrants from the Middle Eastern Africa in relation to the size of the Swedish population. You can read more about Sweden's social democratic party, their anti-Semitism, their cooperation with Nazi Germany and their alliance with the Muslim Brotherhood in my book, this is a Swedish tiger that you can find on Amazon.
Israel's Strausian Moment. The 7th of October, 2023 was Israel's Strausian Moment. In that instant, the vast majority of Israelis realized they had been wrong about their enemies. They had deceived themselves.
Hamas could not be appeased with money, no material comfort and no rational argument could divert them from their goals. Like the hijackers of the aircrafts that crashed into World Trade Center in 2001, these actions has nothing to do with oppression or economics. Al-Qaeda's suicide candidates came mainly from the fairly wealthy upper-middle class, and Osama bin Laden was born with a golden spoon in his mouth. The barbarians who murdered with such lust the 7th of October, 2023, were not motivated by a reward in this world.
They reject our entire civilization. Modernities and existence where spiritual matters are relegated to the private sphere, since the Enlightenment we Westerners have resided in logos or at least attempted to. We cannot possibly understand those who live in Nithos. We have nothing to offer them but our own death.
Israel as well as much of the West is faced with the impossible choice of surviving by becoming like its enemies and thereby losing themselves, or just to perish. It's a lose-lose scenario. Programs and the Holocaust. On Tuesday 13th of February 2024, I read a post on Via Yata Bori's Instagram, a black box with white text, ban Israel from the Eurovision's Son Contest, signed by the Left Party, formerly Communist Party of Gothenburg, with the political parties logo stamped in the bottom right corner.
And of course it's hard to resist the temptation to go into the comment section, which Instagram accounts at that moment to a total of 66. In the comment section I can partake of the grossest kinds of slander directed at Israel. The commentators claim that Israel is deliberately killing as many civilians as possible, preferably children of course. I'm used to the discourse in the comment section of my own posts where I'm repeatedly accused of being a child killer or not, not infrequently both.
Proponent of genocide is also recurring seemingly popular slur. The commentators on the Left Party's Instagram seem to agree that the only way to prevent Israel from defending itself against Hamas is to remove Israel from the music and competition. Just one comment disagrees with the choir. It says, ban the Left Party from everything.
Something the Left Party's administrator answer with the word, mature. The jokes write themselves, it seems. The administrator seems completely unaware of the humor that arises from his lack of self-awareness, something that either makes the joke funnier or really tragic, I can't decide. Another commentator agrees with the Left Party's call for a boycott of Israel by asking why Israel is allowed to participate at all, since it is not in Europe anyway.
A question that never seems to be asked about Azerbaijan. I can't bear to answer that it's because Israel is ostracized from the Arab world and therefore is allowed to be with Europe. Instead, to be honest, I don't really care about the Eurovision music contest, but I am interested in the demand for a cultural boycott. At elite universities in the US, Jewish students are asked not to visit the campus.
Swedish university students are wise enough to wait for the first sunny day before they pitch their attempts, but they follow as soon as one can camp out comfortably. At Colombia, in the US, students have set up a tent camp outside the main buildings to block the activities and solidarity with Hamas, and yes, it's in solidarity with Hamas. They say so themselves. The mob attacks Jews, chance that Jews should move back to Poland, that the Intifada should be made global, their demand is among other things that universities must seize all forms of collaboration with Israel.
A call for an academic boycott. The UN has condemned Israel 153 times since 2015, more than twice as many as the rest of the world combined, and then there's the ICC and the ICJ, trials that aim to sanction Israel, judicially, diplomatically, and economically. Historians I have read divide a path that lead to the Holocaust into four steps. It began in 1933 with boycotts, demands for resignations, or dismissals of Jewish academics or public officials, and economic boycott of Jewish own businesses.
In 1935, the Jews were deprived of their civil rights. Then they were moved into ghettos in 1938. After that, in 1942, came the final solution. The Nazis themselves called this process, in fact, a sort of social engineering program, orification, or orientalization.
A better description would have been de-duification. They wanted to make Dojland-Yun-Ain. One should also know that the Holocaust was preceded by 60 years of persecution which began with pogroms in Russia in the 1880s, where rasment of Jews broke out along the trans-Siberian railway, town after town suddenly exploded into fits of Jew hatred in the form of Jew bashing. From rasche onwards, it spread like wildfire into Eastern and Western Europe, infecting everybody.
Thus arose the Jewish question. The whole world wanted to get rid of its Jews, but they had nowhere to go. Israel did not exist. Most of the raschengs took refuge to the United States, two and a half million.
A great number of fledged countries that did not want to receive them. Others were massacred. Those pogroms contributed to the birth of political Zionism, and two world where Nazi Germany was silently approved to murder its Jews without the world getting too caught up in that particular aspect of the Nazi project. So what exactly makes me think the world is preparing for another Holocaust?
Realpolitik. I'm afraid to even type the word. As if writing it down is a spell that will conjure my fear to reality. It should perhaps be mentioned that the most common cause of death in my family, on both my maternal and paternal side, in the last 100 years, is Nazism.
So maybe I'm a little extra sensitive to its expressions. Or maybe it's those 2000 years of persecution and impression my forebears had to endure that through an evolutionary bottleneck created an individual with Italian for recognizing the signs. No matter what, right now all my genes are screaming. Run.
I suspect that this process towards a new Holocaust is largely subconscious. But in the case of a country like Iran that has proclaimed that the Jewish state must be wiped out, it seems to be less so. The Ayatollah is called the Jews a cancer on humanity. Iran denies the Holocaust at the same time as the Ayatollahs say that they really want another one.
It's quite absurd, but has really happened and is happening and will probably continue to happen. Iran's proxy armies in Lebanon, Yemen, Iraq, Syria and Gaza also claim they want to annihilate Israel. The hoodies have apparently started doing the Hitler salute that their military's formations, their creed is long but has the advantage of being very clear. Quote, God is the greatest death to America, death to Israel, a curse upon the Jews, victory to Islam.
End quote. Since November, the hoodies have attacked shipping to Israel as a kind of blockade of the country, hence a boycott, a violent one. Although I'm not clear if it should be defined as a Marine or an economic boycott or both. It also says something about today's world that a group of young men with just a few rubber dingies, an Iranian drone or two in a dream can actually accomplish a doubling of costs from Western consumers is truly amazing.
In short, there are actors in the world who have genocide of Jews as a stated goal and seem to be putting their convictions into action. For them, the process is quite conscious. Muslim anti-Semitism has a long history that predates the Holocaust by over a millennium, but the kind that is manifest today has clear connections to the Holocaust and Israel's founding in 1948, as well as the Soviet Union. Currently, the Palestinian authorities led by the Holocaust and Ayamah Murabbas, whose predecessor in office, Yasser Arafat, was a Soviet trained and KGB finance terrorist from Egypt, whose predecessor was the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Hajjamin al-Husaini known as Hitler's Mufti.
Husaini was involved in the Holocaust and trained Muslim-esque dilation in the Balkans before escaping from Germany after the war. The Afranz to Egypt, where he was embraced by the Muslim Brotherhood and formed what is today's Palestinian movement. A cause Husaini himself led for 40 years until Yasser's takeover. Hamas, which unlike Fatah is a Islamist, is also a branch of the Muslim Brotherhood, in a sense, closing a circle beginning with Muslim Jew hatred from the time of Muhammad, of course, his name, to Hitler, the KGB, and back.
The PA's current president, Mahmoud Abbas, still hasn't condemned his arch-rival, Hamas, Pogrom, against Israel on October 7th, 2023. But then again, if you still haven't acknowledged the Nazi Holocaust in 2023, can you really be expected to accept something happening before your own eyes? So whatever differences of opinion the PA has with Hamas about public plumbing doesn't seem to affect the view of Israel as their common enemy. The Palestinian movement is a Nazi construction that was built over with a Soviet communist organization and then finally covered with an Islamist ditto.
It is these people that the outside world demands that Israelis make peace with, whether or not the other side ever shows any propensity for peace, which they absolutely don't. Which, in turn, I guess, is why everyone is calling for a quote ceasefire instead of peace. There is nothing about the facts on the ground to suggest that a future Palestinian state would be a democratic and peaceful one. No other Arab countries are democratic or for that matter, particularly peaceful.
Everything suggests, rather, that it would be an ISIS or Taliban-like Iranian-bassel state. The only glimmer of hope is to bring about a normalization between Israel and the Saudis. The leadership of Saudi Arabia and the UAE seem to want this, whether their populations are in tune with their leaderships is another matter. Jew hatred is part of the bone marrow of their subjects exposed to state anti-Semitism 24-7 for decades as they have been.
As for the Palestinians, Abbas has ruled the West Bank as its despots since succeeding Yasser Arafat and Hamas has ruled Gaza since the elections in 2006, after which it massacred Fathah and declared for a future caliphate. Right at the beginning of his statutes, Hamas quotes the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan al-Bana, who says that, quote, Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it, end quote. Someone seems to have neglected to mention that it is very insensitive to confuse Islam with Islamism. The charter ends Article 7 by quoting, the day of judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews, killing the Jews, when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees.
The stones and trees will say, oh, Muslims, oh, Abdullah, and there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Garkad tree would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews, end quote, which means I'll definitely start growing Garkad trees just in case. This is right before Article 8, which states that, quote, Allah is its target, the prophet is its model, the Quran, its constitution, jihad is its path, and death for the sake of Allah is the loftiest of its wishes. End quote.
If it had only been this, that Israel has enemies who claim to be willing to wipe them out and demonstrate in an action that this is the case that made me fear a new Holocaust, that would have been bad enough. But what is worse, the Islamists are already in the Western or in cahoots with the international left. The left, at least the Western left, in its latest iteration, has constructed a hierarchy of race, gender, sexuality, and disability that few fascists can match. Being an oppressed minority is fine unless you happen to be a successful one.
Then you destroy the left's basic assumptions by merely existing. In their world, you can only succeed by being a white man. If you succeed without being a white man, you must be whiter than white. Otherwise, they cannot explain your success, which is why the Jews suddenly once again, as always, find themselves at the sort of top of an imagined pyramidal world where they ruin everything.
And before you say, but running everything sounds great, you have to remember that the left's personal responsibility is a bad thing, as its ownership. The left has thus constructed an ideology by taking the Nazis' racial pyramid and turning it upside down, and yet somehow they still succeed in letting the Jews remain at the bottom, which in their utter moral confusion is the top. Just like the Nazis, the international left now claims that everything is the Jews' fault. But what is the idea that everything in the Middle East would be solved if only Israel made peace with its Arab neighbors, other than the idea that everything depends on the Jews, as if there would not be war, suffering, and oppression in the Middle East, regardless of whether Israel existed or not.
But this is the general idea, believed by, among others, the left party in Gothenburg, because in their comments I can read myself that their instigators do not believe that Israel has the right to exist, that the land in its entirety belongs to the Palestinians. It was always in the cards that socialism would reach this natural endpoint, firstly because the somewhat simplified myth that underlies the socialist perspective on the world has the same structure as anti-Semitism. In feudal Europe, poor monarchs whose nations weren't doing too well would invite the Jews as a kind of bourgeoisie. Through trade, the economy was built up, and should things go badly due to war, crop failure, or plague, the king could always blame the Jews and let the population take out their aggression on them, and then cast out whomever survived.
If you just replace the word bourgeoisie in the chant, kill the bourgeoisie. With Jews, you can see the similarities. All it takes is a cliff-notes understanding of Karl Marx. But mostly there was always a risk of socialism revealing itself as anti-Semitic, because socialism has always been a form of identity politics.
It only tied the identity that a material circumstance of class, which has the advantage that it is possible to respond to the problem by constructing a dynamic enough system to allow class journeys up and down, a system that aims to equalize opportunities and not outcomes. After the fall of the Berlin Wall and the complete failure it entailed for socialist economic theory, socialism shifted from class to biological characteristics such as sex, which they call gender, but only when it suits them, skin color, or sexuality, whose immutability locks these new classes into an eternal struggle. The long march through the institutions is part of what has led to this point. Anti-Semitic protests at elite American universities are now equated with the 68 movement protests against the Vietnam War by venerable publications such as the New York Times and Financial Times, which is quite a stretch.
The protests have more in common with the anti-Semitic protests that swept three American institutions in the 1930s. Back then, Jewish presence at universities was also limited. The students now occupying universities in the United States are just doing exactly what they have been raised to do by the professors, the administrators, the media, and their political party, which in case you wondered, I think might be the democratic one. Regardless of whether you believe that woke consists mostly of gender, intersectionality, critical race theory, or climate justice, they have now flowed together through our institutions for so long that they have overflow them and are now the single biggest reason for the division you can see in the Western country after country.
But it is important to remember that they all flow from the same well. Socialism. The demonstrations and protests at universities you see are organized by the left. It has been said that anti-Semitism is the socialism of fools, which means the opposite must also be true.
Socialism is the anti-Semitism of intellectuals, something that is now being proven by the American university students and faculty. The movements that organize them are financed either by rich oligarchs in the United States, such as their Rockefeller's or George Soros, the left themselves with membership fees and donations, or as in Sweden with tax money. According to their Republicans, the same is going on in the US too, but to a lesser extent, Donald Trump banned the DEI, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, which is another expression of wokeism in American administration, but Biden revoked that The American teachers unions have also been pushing hard for a long time for these radical socialist ideas to be included in teaching, as they are. Biden is relying on these unions votes and campaign work in the upcoming election, which means that what we see now is only the beginning of the Western world's problems.
These children all over the West who are steep in these ideas will grow up without having them questioned on conquering large parts of the public. These students are praised for their courage in speaking out. They feel that they have the support of the outside world, especially now since the Ayatollah Khomeh Ne tweeted that, quote, Dear University students in the United States of America, you are standing on the right side of history. Now, he didn't tweet that to just the American students.
I'm sure he feels the same way about other Western students as well. The UN has condemned Israel 153 times since 2015, more than twice as many as the rest of the world combined. Unran, the United Nations Relief and Works Agency receives billions of US dollars every year, 70% of the budget goes to education, which means that circa 70% of those who partook in the October 7th massacre would have been educated in Unra schools, in just one WhatsApp group, over 3000 Unra teachers celebrate that the massacres of Israeli civilians on October 7th, 2023. The new anti-Semitism is now also fueled by social media that have abandoned individualistic user interfaces for collectivist ditos.
Disenting voices who could curb the collective's herd instinct and lead it in more favorable direction have been deliberately suppressed and silenced, which has the consequence that the herd often stampedes. And finally, since 1986 Arab states and the Persian Gulf have also paid US universities alone $8.6 billion. What these countries have received in exchange for this money, we can only guess, but presumably it has affected appointments of lecturers and professors, maybe even entire departments within the universities. Who knows, the agreements between these parties are secret.
Over half of these $8.6 billion US dollars approximately, $4.3 billion comes from Qatar, which finances Hamas holds court for both the Hamas leadership and the Muslim Brotherhood, owns Al-Yazirah and cooperates with Iran. All these factors, which are facts over the al-Bulidic, contribute to my fear that the world is preparing for a new Holocaust, but on a deeper level to return to the subconscious lurks a need for the scapegoat. Mimetic violence and its consequences. Modern man's completing comprehension of the problem, which is man's own nature, contributes to my suspicion that this is partly a subconscious process.
The left seems to think they can placate the geodists to soften their claims when the opposite is true. Any concession is interpreted as a sign of weakness on our part on the victory for their cause. But the same could be said of Swedish conservatives, or for that matter, British ones. They think they can placate the left by giving in to their demands.
The opposite is true here as well. Anti-Semitism is, as I wrote in this is a Swedish tiger, a conspiracy theory. In this way, it differs from racism. On stage, I usually illustrate this by explaining the difference, thus, racism is when you hate people from lower races and anti-Semitism is when you hate people from all-in-good fun.
But there are more aspects to consider. Like, where does this need for the conspiracy theory come from? What evolutionary purpose could it possibly serve? Rene Girard, the French thinker, literary critic, and anthropologist developed a comprehensive theory of human culture and social relations that is largely based on the concept of the scapegoat mechanism.
Grounded in observations of literature, mythology, and anthropology, Girard's ideas seek to understand the underlying causes and effects of human violence and conflict, which is appropriate given the circumstances. The scapegoating mechanism refers to the process by which a group of people collectively projects their aggression, guilt, and conflicts on to a selected individual or subgroup who is then designated as the scapegoat. This scapegoat becomes the object of guilt and aggression, leading to exclusion or sacrifice. Through this process, social peace and unity within the group is temporarily restored as the common aggression is given an outlet.
To understand the scapegoating mechanism, it is important to first introduce Girard's concept of mimetic desire. Girard suggests that human desires are mimetic, that is, our desires are shaped by imitating the desires of others. It is not hard to imagine a group of apes hiding in the grass on the savannah, observing a lion, tearing a seabrata to shreds with its claws, and the apes seeing those claws thinking, I want me one or two of those. And thus the knife was born, probably out of some sharp stone.
The Swedish term for copycat is imitation ape, and in English you can say to ape somebody, and that is what we humans are, pan-imitandums, imitation apes. As we compete with each other for dreams of status, material possessions, or whatever it may be, rivalry and conflict arise because the resources we demand are finite. In the case of the Israelis and the Palestinians, it is relatively easy to apply that perspective to peoples who are at war with each other over the same piece of land. And it's not like Israel was internally harmonious before the 7th of October.
The attack united the country against Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, PFP, DFP, PPA, has fallen in Lebanon, you name it. In this case, however, Hamas is not really a scapegoat because it is actually the movement that has committed the same. Hamas, the fact of broke into Israel with the goal of murdering as many Israelis as possible. There is also another aspect that makes me suspect that the Palestinians are not scapegoats, either for the Israelis or the world.
With each new death toll that comes from Gaza, the pressure on Israel increases. Had the Palestinians been the intended scapegoat, these macabre numbers, concocted by Hamas, would have had a cathartic effect. But the outcome is the opposite. The frustration just builds.
If Girard is to be believed, then something is not right with the narrative. In a larger context, Girard's theory is easier to apply here. In part, it is an Arab-Israeli conflict, but since 1979, it has also been an Iranian-Israeli conflict. And that within the Muslim world, the dream of a re-established Muslim empire, a caliphate, is a living dream and an ambition in cities like Riyadh, Istanbul and Tehran.
They all aspire to a status lost since the fall of the Ottoman Empire. They may agree on the goal, but they have their own little religious war with political elements to deal with. And as pneumatic rivalry intensifies, society becomes increasingly permeated with chaos and violence. In order to avoid self-destruction, society then turns on escapement.
And the scapegoat is often chosen because it is similar enough to the group to be a credible recipient of its projections, while being peripheral or different enough to be excluded or sacrificed. The Jewish state must bear the blame for the lost honour of the Muslims, their failure of establishing a new caliphate. Israel's existence is a disgrace that stands in the way of their greatness. Not only has the small country won all its wars against its Arab neighbors and terror, wars and terrors that are always initiated by the Arabs will be added sting that despite all their attempts of annihilation, Israel not only remains, but flourishes as a high-tech modern democratic model for the region.
When the Arabs, Iranians or the Muslim world at large, reflect themselves in the Israelis, they can barely recognize themselves. The Muslims and the Jews have been neighbors for over a thousand years. The history of the Arabs with the Jews predates Islam. If you believe the Bible, it goes all the way back to Abraham, the mythical progenitor that two peoples share.
The exclusion or victimization of the scapegoat leads to temporary cohesion and restoration of peace within the group thanks to the externalization of the common aggression. The process when it works creates an illusion of unity in order without resolving the underlying mimetic desires that drove the violence in the first place. There are a world the Turks, Iranians and Africans have their own problems, so big in fact that it is only natural if they should feel a bit overwhelmed. It's much easier to blame or one's own shortcomings on someone else, especially if this someone seems to be more successful than you at pretty much everything.
The mortal sin of envy is the driving force behind the scapegoating mechanism. It is no coincidence that it is precisely this feeling that socialism claims to alleviate. When the scapegoating grows louder or as on October 8th when the feeling of ecstatic joy at the rape storchers and murders of October 7th or replaced by the horror that comes from the scapegoat not only surviving the sacrifice but that it also defends itself, then only blood can appease the primal urge. If the group fails to sacrifice the scapegoat, they must shed their own blood as compensation for their failure.
In this case, it is the Palestinian Zingaza who bear the brunt of the group's lost reputation, their loss of face. Girard was a Christian and thought a lot about the role of Jesus Christ as the ultimate solution to the human need for a scapegoat by sacrificing his own child. God replaces the human sacrifices that were customary in pagan polytheistic cultures. Without reducing Jesus' sacrifice to a mere expression of a primal human social need, Christianity offered the pagan cultures it wanted to convert an alternative to human sacrifice.
Specifically the most important of all offerings, sacrificing one's own child. It is the greatest of all sacrifices because it is sacrificing something that is innocent. It is a recurring theme in all religions that the offering must be without fault, spotless, that is innocent, whether it's seven boys and seven girls to the Creighton Minotaur or red haters in the Old Testament. In Christianity, God has already sacrificed his own child.
A child who may be a little too old when he is executed to be considered entirely innocent, but the essential point for Girard and for the argument I'm making here is that Jesus is innocent to what the mob accuses him of. It says something about the injustice that is the foundation of our current societal order. It illustrates the sacrifice we had to make for peace. A sacrifice that is symbolically repeated every communion.
Jesus, God's own child, replaces the human sacrifice of the polytheists, establishes monotheism, and lays the foundation for a belief in truth in contrast to the more relativistic worldview of the pagans. By revealing the scapegoating mechanism, every communion reminds you of this human need for sacrifice. It goes hand in hand with the client of Christianity and Western countries and not least in Sweden, but the mob, the digital as well as the physical, must constantly find a substitute for transubstantiation. Theoretically, it is as possible that Christianity has had a certain mitigating effect on a behavior we were born with the prerequisites for, but that has not prevented Christian societies from pointing out scapegoats historically, whether heretics, witches, or Jews.
Regardless, it's an elegant solution to human need. Everyone can understand the longing to be reborn cleansed of their sins and wrongdoings. Instead of that, now, through the long hegemony of social democracy, a kind of secular paganism prevails here in Sweden. And we see the same movement all over the West, a relativistic world where there are either an infinite number of principles, why no one can be said to be better than anyone else, or even worse, a world where there are no principles at all.
In such a nihilistic universe, power becomes the only principle. One's narrative must be the prevailing one, a relationship if there is no objective way to measure truth that can only be maintained through some form of terror or other. Clearly illustrated in gender revolutions like the Me Too movement, racial revolutions like BLM, or the Gaia worship you see in extinction, rebellion, and Greta Thunberg's Fridays for Future movement, which should really be called Fridays for skipping school. But then again, it helps to explain why these digital and physical moves in recent years replaced each other in the condemnation of scapegoats.
As the mob fails to crush patriarchy, as it did under Me Too, it stampedes on to stop oil, or to abolish racism. Me Too, BLM, extinction, rebellion, Gaza, they are all expressions of religious worship. All are also left-wing movements. The left is collectivist.
Most of its adherents are collectivists. They are very susceptible to peer pressure and grouping. Hence, the recurring argument from Hamas's defenders on the left, that quote, the whole world is on the side of the Palestinians. Do you think everyone in the whole world is wrong?
End quote? The answer to that question, by the way, is yes. Appealing to the will of the people is not an argument. It's a fallacy.
Algamento mad populum. It doesn't matter if everyone thinks the earth is flat when it isn't. It's obviously sausage shaped and sure, we can argue about whether it's a breathful or a kabanos, as long as we at least agree on that. Children of Ismail.
Should you believe Gerard, the scapegoat mechanism should also exist within Islam because it exists in all cultures and times. In Islam, the animal sacrifice is a replacement for the human sacrifice, as it was in Judaism in the time of the temple. The Muslim holiday, Eid al-Ada, is the reminder when God first orders Abraham to sacrifice Isaac, only to replace Isaac with a ram to sacrifice instead. Something that within Judaism is interpreted, if I am correct, as a prohibition against human sacrifice.
Islam has the same interpretation or so I thought. On today's Muslim from 2019, under the heading Eid al-Ada, it only says that, quote, Muslim and Dru's celebrate this day in memory of the prophet Ibrahim and Ismail's willingness to follow God's orders. End quote. Instead of illustrating that there are sacrifices your God cannot ask of you, the moral of the story becomes that you shall always obey God's commands, and in that case, only mimetic desire would remain.
That is, the envy of the Muslim world towards the prosperity and technology of the West. A perspective that instead locks us into a perpetual cycle of violence where one party can only compete with the other superior technology through their degree of brutality. Everyone who studies anti-Semitism realizes sooner or later some variation of what Grossman formulated as an ally paraphrase, tell me what you accuse the Jews over and I'll tell you what you're guilty of. Noteworthy when speaking of those who now accuse Israel of genocide in Fanticide, rape and forced starvation.
There is an infinite need, it seems to me, to judge the Jews, in this case represented by Israel as the Jewish state, guilty of what the Israelis themselves have been subjected to. If it is due to a need to normalize genocide, Allah, what we did to the Jews was not that dangerous, everyone does it even me, or if it is the usual instinct to blame the victim, it was the Jews' own fault, look at what they were wearing, a combination of the two or something else is less relevant for the moral question. Both Muslims and Arabs have committed genocide and ethnic cleansing against other peoples and their own as I'm writing this. Arab Christians have been subjected to ethnic cleansing or living as dimmies, not to mention what ISIS, a force made up of Muslims traveling from all over the world did to the Yazidis.
At the same time as the Chinese are subjecting Muslim Uyghurs to cultural annihilation, Rohingya's are being massacred in Myanmar, the Muslim world just shrugs it off as if these people were nothing. If Israel is not involved, Muslims simply don't care. Its enemies accuse Israel of being a colonial state, but the Jews of Israel all have an idea what Israel's borders look like. Even religious scientists demand nothing more than what their god according to their religious tradition promised the Jews.
Biblical Israel is a relatively clearly defined area, unlike the Arabs who have an imperialist tradition and actually colonized Israel. Later it was occupied by other Muslims, the Ottoman Empire. Furthermore, colonies are usually satellites of a modern nation to which the colonizers can return if they fail to harvest or are displaced by the original inhabitants. But there have always been Jews in Israel and the Jews who emigrate there in the 19th and 20th century were expelled from their countries of birth.
They have nothing to return to. They are refugees. It has been said before by other and better people than myself, but it is worth mentioning again. Now they are children and grandchildren of refugees.
What are these idiots on the left imagining? Modern Israelis packing up their belongings and moving back to the masqus bughtad or Yemen. The left of the West also assumes that all Israelis are white, but white Jews, Ashkenazi make up only about 30% of Israel's population. The rest are from the Middle East and North Africa.
Israel is a country founded by refugees again. Then there is an incessant focus on how many children have been killed by Israel. A focus you don't see the media having when reporting on the war in Ukraine or Sudan or any other conflict they cover or ignore and reveals that the charge is blood-lipally in modern guise. These accusations pile on faster than anyone can debunk them.
When the arguments are lacking, the strategy is to repeat the lies so often and so loudly that you give up from exhaustion and everyone else is intimidated into silence. The mob feeds the Israelis with accusations until they personify the stereotype of the Jew that it has come to be in the Arab world. It's the process of fattening the scapegoat before slaughter. That is, to build it up into something it is not but which resembles the mimetic object.
That is, the Arabs themselves. As for the Jew, it is not difficult to take the anti-Semite's fantasies of Jewish power and politics banking and the media as a kind of fertilization. After 1967, one can add accusations of abusing military power in fantaside and now genocide, albeit symbolic and largely subconscious. Until the victim can be claimed to deserve to be subjected to what the mob accuses it of.
It has been argued that Girard's ideas should not be revealed to a wider audience. The purpose of the scapegoating mechanism is to avoid a war of all against all by replacing it with a war of all against one. Hence, the scapegoat. If true, the mere publication of this essay would trigger a war of all against all.
But should that happen, it again rules out the Palestinians' scapegoats because most of the world is on their side. Girard is right about at least one thing. The search for the scapegoat is a universal human trait. And the Muslim world is both divided and stricken with misfortune, poverty, oppression, wars between the Muslim nations, wars within the Muslim nations, and religious wars between different kinds of Islam.
If there ever was a cultural sphere in need of a scapegoat, I'd say the Muslim world in general and the Arab in particular qualifies. It would not be strange if what ex-Muslim refugee from Yemen, Luai Ahmed, told me regarding our conversation about his trip to Israel after the 7th of October is true. In the Muslim world, there are two religions. One is Islam and the other is Palestine, where Palestine is code for Jew hatred.
Moreover, he's not the first person from the Muslim world to tell me this. I've heard it before. My friend, God, saw that I had a similar story to tell about why his family had to flee Lebanon and Omar Makraman, atheist, refugee, and former devout Muslim. I have also read excellent analyses written by people from the cultures in question.
Most such essays attempt to trace the ideological currents that have contributed to contemporary, extremely virulent, jihadist, and issemitism. Everything from the Russian forgery, the protocols of the elders of Zion to Hitler's mind-comfort and philosophers such as Fanz Fanon or Judith Butler are invoked. But in the end, most of those who march for Palestine, i.e. against Israel and for Hamas, have not read any of these works or authors.
Possibly they may know of the existence of such works, but then only to be able to refer to their existence. Although these ideas might have contributed to the direction of the mob's leaders, for most of the protesters, these treaties are nothing more than a reassuring justification for an impulse that participants want to live out anyway. Their Untagang des Abenas. In all honesty, things are going badly for everyone at the moment.
The US is a superpower in decline. Pax Amrikana has fallen, although it's still support Israel supposedly. However, the pressure from the White House has become so great that it negatively affects Israel's warfare. Biden is not even demanding the surrender of Hamas.
Just the truth. When the Americans speak out, they can't avoid singing along with the curse of Hamas propagandists in the West. The Americans are also heavily in debt to the Chinese whose economy in turn no one can be sure of and whose increasing repression, lousy demographics, and aggressiveness towards some neighboring countries suggest they are preparing for conflict or collapse. China's friend, Vladimir Putin in Moscow, needs war to maintain power in Russia in addition to entering the history books and Iran's mullah's must murder their own youth to stay in power.
Europe's states are becoming increasingly poor and unstable. Ordinary people all over the world are suffering from high inflation and the whole world is on the brink of, if not world war, then at least several major regional conflicts that, if they break out, simultaneously will closely resemble one. Everyone has reasons to find a scapegoat, which might be why incitement against Israel fills everything from the world media to the graffiti on the wall of your local supermarkets. If what is going on at the moment in country after country is allowed to continue, it will complicate Jewish life in the West to a degree where a large percentage of Jews will have to emigrate to Israel, as if the world is subconsciously pushing the Jews to gather in one place ready for slaughter.
Israel, founded by Jews who escaped the extermination in Europe and programs in the Arab world in Africa, will be the place where its foes can finally finish the job. Because who in 1948 thought that a newborn country of Israel would survive the combined onslaught of five invading Arab armies? Seen from this darkest of perspectives, it looks like the whole world habitually condemns the Jews and occasionally succeeds in sacrificing some of them if they can to the god of the volcano. In Israel, where the memory of the Holocaust is vividly alive, it evokes a horror embedded in their genes.
When you know that the Holocaust began 60 years before the Germans forced Jews into gas chambers on an industrial scale, the fact that most of the world is against Israel's right to defend itself, there aren't too many other possible outcomes from our current situation. If a new world order is to come out of this, what injustice will it be founded on? This is what makes me worry about another Holocaust. Until next, have a good and productive unit of time.