The Perfidy of the All-Too Human
The Attack on Israel and the West's Response
The following is a translation of an essay published last week by Thunder in Paradise (https://thunderinparadise.org/), a Frankfurt-based group dedicated to ideology critique. It is slightly edited for readability.
The horror of what happened in Israel on 7 October must be put into words, not only to arouse empathy for those attacked, but also to give an approximate understanding of the united front that has formed against Israel and the Jews.
Hamas recorded the gruesome details of the attack on video and made them known to the whole world. Just a few years ago, the Islamic State (IS) used the same method to publicise its atrocities. As well as spreading fear and loathing, these videos were already used back then to recruit followers who took sadistic pleasure in martially staged beheading and shooting scenes. Who knows how many people secretly enjoyed watching these videos back then. They may have shared their perfidious enjoyment of such scenes with others in school playgrounds and on sports fields, often in the knowledge that they were not only breaking a taboo that was not just official, which forbids taking pleasure in the torture of others. The minority who was prepared to openly break this taboo either made their way to the Syrian caliphate or conspired to bring jihad to Europe. But never – not even after a Western-led, international coalition declared war on IS – has a mass movement formed that backs the butchers of the Islamic State, even if it is under the pretext of solidarity with Syrian civilians.
The case of Hamas is different: protests all over the world openly testify in support of the terror mob's programme, for a Palestine “from the river to the sea”, as Hamas has declared. They were hardly disguised as peace rallies condemning the Israeli reaction, but already began on the day of the massacre of 07/10 as joyous celebrations in a frenzy of victory. The evidence of Hamas's atrocities – photos and videos of the hostages and the murdered – were openly presented on numerous occasions as a public demonstration of power and strength, accompanied by malicious laughter. The smirking faces repeated what could already be seen in the Hamas footage: as abused women's bodies were driven into Gaza on pick-ups and in car boots like spoils of war to be enslaved, passers-by did not stop in disgust and horror, but ecstatically joined the triumphal procession.
In the Islamic world, the deeds of the IS had still been met with distancing and condemnation, albeit often with contortions. This time, however, it is against the Jews, and Hamas is not a Salafist desert gang, but a warring force that has been fed by Iran, Qatar, Turkey, and the West for decades and has its advocates everywhere. The Hamas attack must indeed be seen as the prelude to a worldwide attack on Jews, their synagogues, and their state symbols. The attempted arson attack on a synagogue in Berlin, the attack on a kosher restaurant in London, and the fatal shots fired at an Israeli tour group in Alexandria are indications of the spread and intensification of Hamas's terror in the wake of the 07/10 attacks.
The Reckoning with Civilization
However, the murderers who identify as Palestinian, their sympathisers, and those who exculpate them are also concerned with the annihilation of Judaism because the history of humanity, and that is: the history of civilisation, crystallises irrefutably in the history of the Jews. Just as the annihilation of the European Jews by the National Socialist genocide irreversibly destroyed principles of the history of civilisation that had previously been understood as anthropological constants – the primacy of self-preservation, the notion of labour as a meaningful activity in which the individual connects with society, the interweaving of immanence and transcendence accessible to human knowledge – so the Palestinian barbarism of 07/10 is not simply the expression of a cultural atavism which the civilised world should have prohibited, but barbarism at the height of the times. They not only burn the bodies of their victims as if they were witches, not only desecrate the dead and perform prepotent dances of joy on the mutilated bodies, but also use 21st century means of communication to transmit the shame in real time to their “fans”, who no longer just gather around them as an analogue mob, but applaud them as a digital crowd across nations and states in the form of like thumbs and LOL emojis.
Genocidal death cult and “peaceful agitation”
Tolerance towards pro-Palestinian calls for violence has nevertheless waned, at least in Germany. In view of the acts of 07/10, many rightly draw comparisons with Himmler's Einsatzgruppen, which roamed the whole of Eastern Europe and massacred defenceless Jews, even if the Hamas terrorists do not need such historical role models. Rather, as they combed the orchards surrounding the Supernova Festival to execute survivors seeking protection, a hadith that is also quoted in Hamas' charter must have rung in their ears: "The hour will come when the Muslims fight and kill the Jews until the Jews hide behind stones and trees. But the trees and stones will say: 'O Muslim, O servant of Allah, here is a Jew hiding behind me. Come and kill him!" In this spirit of pure evil, Hamas has committed every genocidal crime that its global supporters have always blamed on Israel in the space of just 24 hours: infanticide, feminicide, rape as a weapon of war. In the pathological projection of persecuting the Jews for every abominable deed each of them has in mind, National Socialist and Islamic anti-Semitism are aligned. And the “peace” in the “religion of peace” is closely related to the deadly silence that peace protestors who demand a "ceasefire", i.e. Israel's self-submission to its mortal enemies, wish for.
Such peace basically means nothing other than the state of the inorganic, towards which, according to Freud's teachings in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, all life strives according to its own tendency. It is a tendency that should be raised to consciousness, reflected upon, and resisted in a Hegelian determinate negation, in order not to abolish death, but to finally break its power, which is identical with the powerlessness of human beings. Moral caretakers, the culturally sensitive, and hazy peacemongers resemble each other in their refusal, based on fear and contempt for freedom, to comply with this first duty of civilization: to oppose the cult of death, the most threatening manifestation of which today is Islam. The differentiation they insist on in the face of “solidarity” with Israel is an expression of the need for crude undifferentiation, the doubt they claim for themselves is a camouflage of cowardly obedience to the threat of terror.
Ghosts of the past
European politicians and journalists who pledge their solidarity to Israel in this war find it easy to say that they must now stand by the Jews out of moral responsibility for the Holocaust. Easier, at any rate, than taking political responsibility for the aid they have given to Israel's enemies for years. Suddenly seeing Hamas as a sinister revenant of the Nazis exonerates them from a policy that blindly protects the mullah regime and continues to flush humanitarian funds into the hands of terrorist gangs. It is only because official German solidarity with Israel is not guided by a realistic view of the ongoing threat to the Jewish state, but wants to banish the ghosts of the past, that the anti-semitic college students who recently chanted "Free Palestine from German Guilt!" in Berlin can expect some success.[1] In truth, they were calling for the liberation not of Palestine, but of Germany from the "cult of guilt" in order to finally be able to unrestrainedly defame the Jews as the Nazis of today. Yossi Klein Halevi recently explained that he distrusts European sympathy for Israel, which is based on the Holocaust, for precisely this reason: "That support is unstable; today it is applied to dead Jews, tomorrow to dead Palestinians."[2]
Anti-Semitism and Islamic apocalypticism
On closer inspection, the majority of the official criticism of anti-Semitism proves incapable of consistency, even where it is not merely paying lip service. The confessions fuelled by – often genuine – consternation are expressed in tried and tested phrases. Instead of naming the specific, anti-Semitic collective character of the global Islamic pogrom community, the "duty of solidarity" with bestially executed Jews is simply added to the general spectacle of moral goodness. Of course, you don't have to expect ideology critical treatises from politicians, nor do you have to expect a show of strength, for which the situation is too serious anyway. The right symbolic politics can sometimes help people who themselves show little vigour in thinking. However, the current administrative-technocratic post-politics, whose protagonists are professional euphemists for the continuation of capital accumulation, makes the necessary political task of gaining an understanding of the dimension of anti-Semitic violence in order to act accordingly more difficult. This is evidenced by the surprise demonstrated each time, but also by the endeavour to sociologically distinguish the mobs of murderers from their environment and the refusal to go into more detail about why the battle cry of the killer squads is “Allahu Akbar”.
Equidistance as propaganda
As expected, Israel’s counterstrike calls up a majority of relativisers, anti-Semitism connoisseurs and compassionate agitators. They always insist on balance and differentiation when the only thing left to do is to resolutely confront the anti-Semites in order to render them harmless. On October 18th, German weekly Zeit Online reported on the rumour spread by Hamas propaganda that Israel had bombed a hospital in Gaza: "After the tragedy at Ahli Hospital, there is no collective outcry. The same standards no longer apply to the area as they do to the rest of the world."[3] Hamas claimed that Israel had killed over 500 people in an airstrike on a hospital. There was no evidence either for an Israeli attack or for the number of victims. Nevertheless, Hamas was also parroted on public television. The incident testifies to how quickly and shamelessly the media, which are geared towards political correctness, degenerate into anti-Israeli propaganda organs. In all of this, one no longer says: the evil Jews, but mourns "the victims on both sides".
The escapism into sentiments of general humaneness, accompanied by the insufferable talk of “conflict”, which expresses that one is dealing with two equal opponents, necessarily presupposes the splitting off of the annihilationist anti-Semitic character of the Palestinian cause. Furthermore, any complaint about civilian casualties is propaganda if it ignores the fact that civilian life in the fully militarised Gaza Strip is first and foremost a thorn in the side of Hamas and the Palestinian majority that supports it. Hamas itself is blurring the line between civilians and combatants, raising even children as martyrs, abusing them as human shields, and then feigning grief over their deaths. None of this bothers the propagandists of compassion any more than the fact that the Israeli army does everything it can to avoid unarmed casualties. The brutally equidistant reporting, which does not even shy away from using Hamas as a reliable information source in an attempt to maximise sentimentality, fuels the delusions of those who adhere to the traditional historical revisionist hallucination of an Israeli war of annihilation against the Palestinians.
Resistance or self-destruction of the West
The vaguer the term “anti-Semitism” becomes, the more frequently and arbitrarily it can be used. In this vagueness, anti-Semitism becomes comparable to everything that academically educated Germans have learnt to subsume under the term "group-focused enmity". Even more than the focus on "secondary anti-Semitism", the problem of "structural anti-Semitism", which is generally attributed to dissenters, government critics, “climate deniers”, etc., is trivialised. Texts are searched for signal words such as "elite", "globalism" or "international class" and, if successful, "anti-Semitism" is shouted, only to end up diagnosing a delegitimisation of the state whose favour is being courted.
It was the West itself, and first and foremost Germany as the anti-West within the West, that successfully invited those to globalise their own hatred of whom even Germany’s Chancellor Olaf Scholz now seems to be credibly afraid – and who are now exploiting it. Only through self-reflection on this aporia of the West, which is more than a correctable mistake, could the West regain its resilience. Such reflection should begin with the realisation that, due to Israel's history, what is happening in Israel genuinely affects the concept of the West and civilisation itself. Israel's military superiority lamented by senile peace pensioners and aggressive recognition activists, its strength and supposed implacability in defence against its enemies are an index of the fact that people cannot do without courage, strength, and implacability if the concept of humanity is still to mean anything. Softness, kindness and tenderness, willingness to cooperate and accommodation are not all-human natural traits that only need to be properly nurtured in order to develop, traits allegedly threatened by the coldness, selfishness and arrogance of civilisation.
Rather, they are phenomena very late in history which cannot be achieved without the pragmatism of civilisation, without the determination to stand up for what is recognised as right. They are phenomena which cannot be achieved without resistance to barbarism. Israel will have to wage this battle in the coming months against a strengthened enemy. How isolated the Jewish state will be in this depends on how many take the attacks by Hamas personally: as an attack not only on Israel and not on the "we" of a chimerical values-based community, but as an attack on everyone who still expects something from the world and recognises in anti-Semitism the most powerful force that stands in opposition to the idea of humanity.
[1] https://twitter.com/berlinerzeitung/status/1714694235390091763
[2] https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/what-this-war-is-about/
[3] https://www.zeit.de/politik/2023-10/krankenhaus-gaza-israel-debatte-tote-verletzte