It is remarkable that a world that changes at a dizzying pace remains impressively consistent when it comes to Jews. Jews are still demanded to be kind, be selfless, and do the world the favor it truly needs by just gracefully disappearing. This demand, which gradually became /1
a sort of Leftist prerogative was once made by both Marx and Hitler. The Jewish selfishness, their unkind insistence on being Jewish, was what is preventing the world from being a harmonious place. This idea was so powerful and central all in all 19th and 2oth century major /2
ideologies that it did convince many Jews who ended up becoming self-hating assimilationists felt outraged at their own Jewish identity that prevents them from being human. After the establishment of Israel this entire sentiment was transferred unto the Jewish /3
that became the biggest obstacle to world peace. Israelis are derided for their insistence on Jewish sovereignty that causes so much suffering. No peace as long as there is Israel, is the message. Activists for peace, joy, and harmony, such as @4noura ask Israelis to /4
selflessly perform their final graceful duty of making their sovereignty disappear so peace may be on earth and goodwill be to men. As for the self-hate, Isaac Deutscher's Non-Jewish Jew was replaced by the anti-Zionist Jew, as non-Judaism was replaced with anti-Zionism. /5
What is even more remarkable is how when it comes to Jews and to Israel all the salvific pretense of all ideologies, all their grandiose claims, whether left or right, liberal or Marxist, melt away. The salvation ideology promises is only of a narcotic kind that shields /6
its users from reality with the mist of delusions. It is very clear to anyone with a brain that the social role, the pariahdom, that was reserved for Jews did not end but was transferred unto Israel. All the hate, including the self-hate, was reoriented towards it. This coin /7
has another side, meaning that, and as Albert Memmi once foresaw, Israel is becoming the true and undisputable center of Jewish identity and the frame of reference to all Jews of the world that now have to define themselves in relation to Israel. This is not to say that /8
Israel is replacing Judaism the tradition, but is becoming the epitome of Jews as a people. Today, whether Jew or gentile, one's relationship to Israel is what defines one's relationship to Jews as a people and what also explains both gentile and Jewish anti-Zionism. /9
This is the crux of the modern world.
If I may add, this is the most remarkable historical correction in human history as Judaism becomes Israel and Israel becomes Judaism. The world being at home with itself.
If Jews were truly interested in the brotherhood of man, or in the feminist sisterhood of women, they have to prove it only through self-negation, by becoming anti-Zionists. They have to self-sacrifice on the altar of universal humanism.
And what is truly and devastatingly heartbreaking in the most agonizing way, is that Palestinian national identity is nothing but an epiphenomenon of all the former. Not that many Palestinians know, but they are just unwitting, yet sadly willing, conduits of the war on the Jews.
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The old left often came from children of working class families who were learned but not worldly. The New Left however came from the most affluent strata of both Western and Third World elites and this in great part explains why they cares more about psychosexual liberation, which they had the means to afford and enjoy while being a disastrous development for working class people who no longer have a family to mediate between them and the market forces.
Needless to say that the rise of such affluent New Left naturally negated any role of the working class and thus had to be replaced with identity politics, narcisstic personal narrative and brands of trauma assortments, in which these affluent kids can fit.
Even Third Worldism changed. We can in effect say there was an old Third Worldism, the Leninist fantasies of Nasser, Sukarno, Castro, etc. and a new Third Worldism of the new class of Third World elites who realized their decolonization was a catastrophe and migrated Westward.
I recently realized that Darryl Cooper is not only the most popular writer on Substack but also a widely influential figure online. Curious about his appeal, I decided to listen to him, and accidentally I fell right into his account of Jewish history and Christianity (I don't know if that's all he does). Despite approaching it with good faith, particularly when he opened with the phrase “as a Christian,” I found the experience painful and couldn't go on past 20 mins or so. Within 20 minutes, he arrived at the astonishing claim that “the central conflict in all the Gospels” was about the Jews finally accepting the Gentiles. This is simply false. I have no idea where Cooper derives his theology from, but it bears little resemblance to any serious reading of the texts. The Gospels are not structured around this all. Their central conflict concerns the identity of Jesus himself—his claim to messiahship and divine sonship—and that is what culminated in his crucifixion. If this is his approach to all topics, then the man is creating a whole alternative reality that is parasitic on this one. That's not at all different than what leftist scholars have been doing for decades.
It was only 20 mins but the whole thing was bizarre. His understanding of Christian theology is that god basically designed for himself a pedagogical journey so he might experience those little dramas of those little humans. So God basically is Faust, in it for the experience!! It's so stupid you feel its some stupid Hollywood kitsch.
What I find heartbreaking is that the man had the heart to call himself a Christian as he was quite blatantly sacrificing the very heart of Christian theology (who is Jesus?), unequivocally throwing it out, in order to replace it with what is clearly obsessive antisemitism.
This is happening in most museums I visited in the UK, Spain, and Germany. The informational plaques are often just exercises in narcissistic resentment talking about the white gaze, constructing whiteness, orientalizing, and all the cacophomisms that are clearly American in origin.
This was from the Thyssen museum in Madrid. Just read the bolded words
Currently, the Kurpfälzisches museum in Heidelberg has a special exhibition on Orientalism and the construction of whiteness. As a historical corrective, they staged portraits of a bunch of black people in European 16th-century attire to de-orientalize them. If I were black, I would have been very insulted.
There is a beautiful conflict that has been playing out between bourgeois Arabs whose path to white liberal status goes through the trauma of Western colonialism and others whose path to the same status goes through guilt over Islamic imperialism and terrorism.
Both paths ultimately involve achieving the same goal: elite liberal status, which is the contemporary form of whiteness. One strategy hinges on victimhood, the other on guilt. Still, both end up reinforcing the same liberal orthodoxy—essentially playing into the larger framework that privileges these narratives in the first place. They’re both trying to prove their worth to the same ideological gatekeepers but from different sides of the historical ledger.
Some less sophisticated ones are confused and alternate between both strategies. They don't quite get it.
I have a lot of reservations about the New Atheists, especially with their atheism as a socio-cultural and political project, but their atheism remains a thousand times more preferable and acceptable than the radical Feuerbachean atheism of Žižek and Marxist thinkers. 🧵
The former, while locked in a truly cartoonish understanding of religion and of the self, remains infinitely more honest and safer. It is very cartoonishness is indeed a testimony to its sincerity.
Its superficiality makes it much safer, like a child who thinks he built his treehouse all on his own and doesn't know that the work was actually done by his father. What the child thinks is of secondary importance to the fact that the treehouse is sturdy and safe for the child.
Israel should never concede real advantages in exchange for mere promises which their fulfillment is left to circumstance and good-will. The world of states is not determined by legal commitments or moral principles but by interest.
What determines the policy of the United States in the Middle East is not any moral or ideological considerations but how American interests in the region are conceived by Washington.
The only other considerations that historically qualified these considerations have always been the Jewish and later the Evangelical votes for the D and R respectively.