{"id":270381,"date":"2024-07-29T12:00:44","date_gmt":"2024-07-29T11:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=270381"},"modified":"2024-07-26T05:05:50","modified_gmt":"2024-07-26T04:05:50","slug":"humiliation-upon-request","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2024\/07\/humiliation-upon-request\/","title":{"rendered":"Humiliation Upon Request"},"content":{"rendered":"

Europe-Jews-Muslims<\/strong><\/p>\n

25 Jul 2024 – Europe has an obsession about Jews. For nearly 2 millennia, it shunned them, despised them and persecuted them. Now, after a respite of a few decades, it condemns and abuses Muslims in a similar way \u2013 all in the name of supporting Jews.\u00a0 Israel\u2019s inhumane treatment of the Palestinians \u2013 culminating in their massacre and mass eviction from Gaza \u2013 leaves Europeans unmoved. European political elites above all.\u00a0 Instead, they cheer on the Israelis, outdo themselves in effusive displays of solidarity, in the quick dispatch of weapons so that the IDF can better carry out their odious campaign, in providing instant validation for the most outrageous lies in the wake of the most outrageous atrocities.\u00a0 Propinquity has accentuated their moral support. Leaders scurry to Tel Aviv to get as close to the action as possible and to steal a photo of themselves embracing Bibi Netanyahu \u2013 a copy for the evening news, a copy for the next campaign brochure, a copy for the eventual memoir.<\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The West generally clearly has a big problem with matters of religion, race and ethnicity. It is multiform, it mutates, it waxes and wanes, it shifts focus and fixation \u2013 but it remains lodged in the collective psyche. While this obviously is not universal among Europe\u2019s population of 400 million, it is manifestly prevalent and deep-seated. When the stimulus is strong and acute, it flares like a gas field when the drill hits paydirt. The entire panoply of institutions \u2013 public and private \u2013 rise up as if choreographed to vent the same emotions, make the same harsh, unqualified judgments, use the same crude slogans, drape themselves in the same banners of self-righteousness and self-proclaimed moralism. Government leaders, politicos, media, pundits, make the same cacophonous noises, aggressively impose the same uniformity of opinion, and punish the few dissenters.<\/p>\n

Thus, the exaltation of the Jews of Israel \u2013 honored and cosseted \u2013 is matched by the dehumanization of Palestine\u2019s Muslims. Of course, it is not just the long-suffering Palestinians who are at once denied \u2013 in principle \u2013 the right to the privileged status of victimhood and collectively are condemned as guilty of the most heinous crimes committed by al-Qaeda, the Islamic State or Hamas. Men, women, children \u2013 without exception. It is all Muslim communities \u2013 Islamo-phobia.<\/p>\n

What are the sources of this psychopathology? Some are immediately identifiable. 1) The residual, latent desire to absolve Europe of the sins committed against the Jews ever since they were stigmatized as the killers of the Christians\u2019 Lord & Saviour. It took roughly 1,900 years for the truest Jew-haters to take the final, macabre act of revenge. Volunteers from 16 European countries formed SS divisions that participated \u2013 directly or indirectly (the largest contingents made up of Ukrainians). That holocaust had a powerful sobering effect on the contemporary soul of European Christians whether believers, practicing or nominal. The fears, wounds and pangs of conscience associated with it gradually have faded into the background and discrimination of Jews largely has gone away\u00a0 \u2013 despite the attempts in recent years to inflate every minor incident as part of an campaign to conflate criticism of Israel with old-fashioned anti-Semitism. As a consequence of the campaign\u2019s success, antipathy toward Israel aroused by its actions in Gaza, the number of those incidents has risen. The confected identity of Judaism with a rogue Israeli state is a boon for the die-hard anti-Semites.\u00a0 However, that maelstrom of tangled feelings evidently didn\u2019t dissipate entirely.<\/p>\n

The very words \u2018Jewish\u2019 and \u2018Israel\u2019 have the power to paralyze European minds and consciences. Again, most strikingly among the political class. Hence, Britain\u2019s most erudite commentator renowned for his frankness and rare skill at cutting through official cant and mendacity, declares himself unable to pronounce on who destroyed the hospital in Gaza \u2013 hiding behind the weasel words \u2018we should await the outcome of an impartial United Nations investigation.\u2019 Who did the evil deed? The people who already had dropped 1,500 bombs on Gaza City or Ali Baba & the 40 Thieves? Make your choice \u2013 personal preference. Hence, French President Emmanuel Macron bans all protests that express sympathy for the Palestinians on the grounds that they cause Jews\/Israel emotional distress. He then makes a pilgrimage to Jerusalem to urge the Israelis to pursue Hamas \u201cwithout mercy\u201d \u2013 adding, for the record, \u201cwithin the law.\u201d (His recent conversion \u2018On The Road To Damascus\/Berlaymont\/Turtle Bay\u2019 lifts the ban only on himself).\u00a0 One is reminded of Peter O\u2019Toole (aka T.E. Lawrence) shouting the command \u201cno prisoners!\u201d as he drives his Arab army to throw themselves on a retreating Turkish column. Without the hypocrisy of adding \u201cwithin the law\u201d.<\/p>\n

Hence, German authorities ruthlessly enforce their own ban on Gaza-sympathy protests and threaten criminal prosecution of participants. Foreign Minister Braebock uses a Tel Aviv platform to inform the world that \u201cIsrael cares about the welfare of Gazans.\u201d\u00a0 Hence, the Prime Minister-designate of the U.K., Keir Starmer, conducts Stalinist-style purges from the Labour ranks of anyone who utters a word critical of Israel \u2013 that includes Corbyn now obliterated from party annals.\u00a0 \u00a0No surprise that he now demands explicitly, and in a public interview, that the party\u2019s official position is to give license to the Israelis to continue their bombing; to cut off all food, water, electricity; to expel the Gazans into the Sinai desert where Qatar is pressed to finance a tent city for a million or two.<\/p>\n

Hence, this Monday November 11, the EU Foreign Ministers\u2019 issue an official statement that \u201c[the] EU condemns the use of hospitals and civilians as human shields in Gaza\u201d \u2013 in what amounts to an eerie resemblance to the holocaust deniers. Hence, Joe Biden strikes the same note in declaring that civilian casualties have been exaggerated by Hamas. This the starkest evidence to date that we have left the realm of reasoned and reasonable discourse for the nether world of psychopathology.<\/p>\n

Second, relations between Europeans and Muslim communities have become increasingly fraught. Above all, the growth of large immigrant communities, settled mainly in Western Europe, has generated a host of social problems arising from the complications of imperfect cultural assimilation and the intrusions of influences from the external Muslim world. They are all too familiar: the rapid spread of intolerant, fundamentalist Islam; the threats posed by violent jihadist groups whose tentacles have reached into European cities; the turbulent state of politics across the Middle East; the periodic oil crises that made the region a tense arena for great power politics; and \u2013 by no means least \u2013 the lingering effects of Western colonialism that never have been expunged.<\/p>\n

The two most striking features of that 450-year experience are: 1) the profound superior-inferior relationship on which it was grounded and which it entrenched in European minds; and 2) it was the \u2018whites\u2019 who were dominant and the \u2018colored\u2019 peoples who were subordinate. That too readily devolved into the racist belief that the latter were inherently inferior \u2013 somehow not quite fully human. Tho enduring psychic scars never have entirely faded \u2013 on both sides. Let\u2019s recall that it is within our lifetime that the imperial dependents liberated themselves from thralldom \u2013 with much blood-shedding \u2013 in North Africa, Indo-China, Kenya, Angola, Indonesia, Mozambique, Iraq. More recently, wars between the West and Muslim societies have been fought in several places: Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Somalia, Libya, the Sahel. All on Muslim soil. Domestic terrorists across Western Europe cite as their immediate motivation those attacks on Muslims \u2013 rather than their devotion to a Quranic jihadist creed per se.<\/p>\n

That brings our attention to the biggest external factor: the United States. More specifically, Europeans\u2019 enduring dominant\/subordinate relationship. European countries have been denatured by America, in the sense that they are shed of sovereign status and its attendant political will. That perverse trans-Atlantic bond has been cultivated by both sides.\u00a0It\u2019s significance for understanding the European attitude towards Israel\/Palestine is two-fold. One, there is an eerie inversion of roles for European polities who participate in dominant-subordinate relations with both America and Arab Muslims.\u00a0 It matches the classic profile of the \u201cAuthoritarian Personality.\u201d Toward the superior one is docile, obedient, obsequious; toward the inferior one is arrogant, demanding and patronizing.\u00a0The latter compensates for the former in terms of maintaining a positive sense of self.<\/p>\n

A variation of this psychological pattern is visible in the attitude of Western government leaders toward their own populace. In effect, they assume the dominant role in treating their citizens as subordinates from whom deference is expected on matters of state. Strikingly, today we see overwhelming and growing popular advocacy of a ceasefire in Gaza while the political elites \u2013 those holding official positions, the media and the punditry \u2013 vigorously suppress the dissent. Example: London has seen an unprecedented demonstration of half a million, a reflection of public opinion that favors the ceasefire by a 3:1 margin (roughly the same in the U.S.) That in the face of bitter, slanderous denunciation from both Prime Minister Sunak and Labour leader Keir Starmer who vies to surpass him in passionate embrace of Bibi Netanyahu and who ruthlessly purges anybody who is disobedient to his hard line. Hence, not a single Labour or Tory M.P. joined Saturday\u2019s historic march at the risk of losing access to the Members\u2019 Bar at Westminster.\u00a0 [The dramatic event was all but ignored by the Establishment print media. By Sunday, all had airbrushed the story out of existence; no photo showing the massive crowd].<\/p>\n

In more concrete ways, Europe\u2019s vassalage to the United States obliges it to follow Washington down whatever policy road the seigneur takes \u2013 however reckless, dangerous, unethical, and counter-productive. In predictable fashion, they have walked (or run) like lemmings over whatever cliff the United States chooses next under its own suicidal impulses. So it\u2019s been in Iraq, in Syria, in Afghanistan, in regard to Iran, in Ukraine, on Taiwan and on all matters involving Israel. The string of painful failures and heavy costs produces no change in loyalty or mindset. It cannot \u2013 for the Europeans have assimilated totally the habit of deference, the Americans\u2019 worldview, their skewed interpretation of outcomes, and their shamefully ficticious narratives. The Europeans no more can throw this addiction than a life-long alcoholic can go cold-turkey.<\/p>\n

That condition impels them to downplay the ominous trends in American politics and foreign policy. The choice of mentally unstable and\/or incompetent leaders, erratic actions by unhinged political forces, high risk ventures abroad, the baiting of designated rivals \u2013 none of it moves Europeans to throw off the yoke placed on their minds, their emotions, and their morals.<\/p>\n

Moreover, we should bear in mind that contemporary America has become hysteria prone. First was the Global War On Terror that for twenty-odd years had it rampaging around the globe on the hunt for jihadis from the Hindu Kush to the Sahara desert while shredding its Constitutional guarantees of individual rights and due process. Then, the manic Russo-phobia: Dostoyevski removed from literature courses, Anna Netrebko summarily cancelled in all Western opera houses on the grounds that she once accompanied Putin to a fundraiser for refugees from Donetsk who fled Ukrainian artillery strikes that killed 14,000 of their fellows, boycotts of Russian goods including sewing needles, etc. etc. Simultaneously, the conjured China \u2018menace\u2019 has been stoking our fevered imaginings. That hysteria triggered the \u2018spy\u2019 balloon psychodrama. Congruent with this psychopathological syndrome, America today is a culture where draconian measures are taken, by all manner of institutions under pressure from braying militants, to rid themselves of persons who as much as suggest that gender identity is not just a matter of personal preference.<\/p>\n

The Europeans, for their part, are no less hysteria prone. It spreads from the United States at epidemic speed. Imagine a convent circa 1623. The most emotionally flammable young woman loses it in declaiming that she is possessed by a lecherous demonic agent. Soon, the other nuns are infected and mass hysteria breaks out. Today, when a whole society is dissociated from reality, there are no Mothers Superior or exorcists around to contain the ensuing bedlam. Indeed, the universal hysteria serves the purpose of those who calculatingly promote and use that hysteria to draw a \u201cline of blood\u201d between the collectivity and responsible, humane behavior. For once one has demonized Palestinians in general as guilty, thereby justifying gruesome acts, it becomes almost impossible to retreat into a position of condemning those selfsame acts of criminal revenge that you previously blessed since that means inculpating oneself. Even those prominent public figures who simply have kept silent in the face of atrocity thereby fall into this trap.<\/p>\n

The stunning, frightening truth is that Western societies \u2013 American & European \u2013 are behaving hysterically. For the Senate in Washington to pass a near unanimous resolution condemning what it called \u201canti-Israel, pro-Hamas student groups\u201d is a clear sign of abnormality. It is unmistakable from statements by supporters that the label is applied to anyone who protests the onslaught in Gaza or expresses support for the Palestinian people. Widespread denunciations and purges of individuals who voice those sentiments confirm that. Some might question how one can describe as hysterical the actions of private institutions and governments as well as individuals of being part of an irrational mass psychosis \u2013 and on a matter that does not concern them directly.<\/p>\n

After all, these countries are composed of educated, autonomous, diverse members schooled in civic ethics \u2013 the majority secular and unattached to any dogmatic creed or movement. We are not speaking of medieval cloisters or theocracies or totalitarian societies. That is exactly the point. The observed phenomenon meets all of the criteria for a diagnosis of mass hysteria \u2013 speaking objectively.\u00a0 Manifest hysteria where you do not expect to see it at once underscores the psychopathology and raises the most profound questions as to what species of social entity we have become. The few, very rough historical analogies are not ones we want to contemplate.<\/p>\n

Collective hysteria does have predictable effects. One is that participants cease to think independently \u2013 some, including leaders, are unable to think at all. That is to say, to interpret reality in ways other than that dictated by the fixed, unqualified and simplistic narrative of what is happening, why it is happening, as well as with whom the rights and wrongs lie. Uniformity of outlook impervious to observed facts is what we have seen in the impassioned Russo-phobia, and now regarding the Palestinians. This phenomenon, orchestrated at the top by leaders who themselves are prey to dogmas and irrational emotions, stifles critical thought and judgment even when faced with the most stark, most bloody and gross sins against the very principles that we celebrate as underlying our morally superior Western societies.<\/p>\n

A related effect is that deception and self-deception blend into a homogenous mindset. It is insulated from encroachments by a mental Hepa filter which keeps out anything \u2013 even the smallest particle of truth \u2013 that could stimulate doubt or self-awareness. Consider the likes of Biden, Trudeau, Sunak\/Starmer, Schulz, Macron, von der Leyen et al. Their endorsement, and thereby encouragement, of mass murder in Gaza \u2013 once expressed becomes imprinted. Thus, if you were to probe for justification in a quiet one-on-one exchange, you would get the same canned, elusive sloganeering that marks their public statement. The mental faculty has become paralyzed. Sustaining this unnatural state is helped by the systematic suppression of dissent. Doing so serves two purposes: it keeps at bay any dissonant, reality-based idea or evidence challenging the fixed mindset, and unjust suppression\/punishment of dissenters creates an additional disincentive to critical reflection since that threatens to evoke feelings of shame for those revealed misdeeds.<\/p>\n

What this tells us is that the phenomenon that we are describing is most pronounced among Western political elites. There: hysteria, mutually reinforcing collective emotion, uniform attitudes and fixity of reference points combine to produce perverse behavior.<\/p>\n

The one aspect of the situation that shows a measure of conscious cerebration\u00a0 is the political \u2013 in particular, the electoral. It is Biden\u2019s worries about his faltering Presidential campaign that led him to the surprise declaration that Israel was at risk of exceeding its quota in killed Palestinians. That is accompanied by a cavalier rewriting of the earlier record of when Washington promoted unrestricted Israeli retaliation and lobbied neighboring governments to accept the expelled Gazan population. Accommodating media are only too happy to go along with the mendacity since it erases memory of their own cheerleading for those draconian actions.<\/p>\n

We should understand Emmanuel Macron\u2019s sudden advocacy of a ceasefire in the same vein. It is a mistake to imagine that this shift was the outcome of a somber reflection on the moral and diplomatic issues involved. Macron is another one of those self-designated messiahs without message or mission \u2013 like Barack Obama \u2013 whose sole concern is self-promotion and self-advancement. In Macron\u2019s case, he has his eye on an even bigger position than President of France \u2013 Secretary-General of the United Nations or President of the European Union. Preferably the former. So, presenting himself as a Gaza humanitarian could win him votes in the global South and also make him more palatable to Russia and China. The rest of the French political elite are still insisting that protesting crimes against humanity in Gaza is tantamount to an act of anti-Semitism.<\/p>\n

Back to Europe. In the Middle East, the net effects are 1) that Europe is burdened with the heavy baggage of interventions that inflame Muslim hostility toward the West, and 2) to create the psychological imperative to find some way to assuage their own sense of guilt by finding, and magnifying, the sins of their victims. That dubious enterprise acquires a thick veneer of contrived virtue by making a tight embrace of Jewish Israel the ultimate symbol of their good intentions and by blinding themselves to the transference of their accumulated guilt for historical abuse of the Jews into empathy for their former victims\u2019 abuse of Arab Muslims.<\/p>\n

PS: <\/strong>The internal dynamics of the United States are very similar to those of Europe \u2013 with three exceptions.<\/p>\n