I wrote this yesterday and got so depressed I couldn't finish or publish it. Today, the crazed fascists running Israel have launched a "pre-emptive" strike on Iran, so here it is.
A person on X claims there’s an “Islamic Regime” that wants to “commit a Holocaust, the likes of which the world has never seen …finishing what Hitler and the Nazi Regime started."'
If he’s referring to a global Islamic threat, his claim is as absurdly reductionist and extremist as anti-Semitic claims of a monolithic Zionist / Jewish cabal that controls the world. It ignores the many national, sectarian, linguistic-cultural differences in the two billion people who identify their religion as Islam – a religion that sprang from the root of patriarchal, monotheist Judaism, which also contains national, sectarian and linguistic-cultural differences that the establishment of the state of Israel and creation of an Israeli national identity attempts to gloss over.
But the truth of it is, he's referring to a specific country, and the “Islamic Regime” is code for Iran which right-wing Zionists claim is using Hezbollah, Hamas and the PLO as proxies to soften up Israel while it prepares to deliver the final, nuclear, holocaust.
It’s a short ideological step to the stark conclusion – “we must neutralise them before they build the capacity to kill all of us.” Israel's “final solution” to the “Palestinian problem" is justified by claiming to be defending itself against the “Islamic Regime”, the heart of which is in Iran.
In effect, this person seeks to justify Israel’s wholesale slaughter by fire, starvation and disease of Palestinian non-combatants, the on-going theft of Palestinian lands, and the erasure of Palestinian identity by placing all Palestinians within the orbit of the evil “Islamic Regime, and uses the same insane argument to justify its illegal, deadly incursions into other countries.
Claims to "self-defence" are rendered unbelievable when the majority of those they are killing are small children, women, the elderly and the infirm; and when they destroy civilian infrastructure including hospitals and sources of clean water, and when they slaughter animals, uproot ancient trees, raze fields.
Those are not defensive actions; they are the indefensible actions of an out-of-control colonising power, in which a scarily large proportion of the population are in the grip of a sort of collective psychosis.
This angry fellow not only positions ALL Jews as being at risk of imminent annihilation by the “Islamic Regime”, he ignores the historical role played by Israel itself, and more so by its main patron, the US, in the emergence of Islamic theocracies, most pertinently in Iran, and in aiding and abetting Islamist terror cells across the world.
He ignores or possibly is too ignorant to know how political Islam was used, cynically and cruelly, first to combat socialism and to break the Non-Aligned Movement, and latterly to replace the spectre of global and domestic communism, with the spectre of “Islamic Terrorism".
Like communism, Muslim terrorism is ideologically positioned as a threat that is both within and without, which is useful in justifying external wars and internal repression.
* * * *
To embed the need for a Jewish homeland in Israel into the Jewish psyche, the architects of the Zionist state first weaponised Eastern European pogroms and the wider canon of anti-Semitic tropes.
Post WW2, they weaponised the Nazi holocaust, creating a deep soil of perpetual grief, fear and anger in which their right-wing Zionist ideology would grow fast and strong.
It is surely one of history’s cruellest ironies, that the right-wingers who held sway in the creation of Israel, and whose successors still dominate the Israeli state, behaved towards the “enemies” they created much like the Nazis had towards Jews.
The Nazis didn’t start out with the aim of exterminating all Jews – they built up to it. The processes of demonisation, dispossession, ghettoisation and political oppression all preceded and laid the ideological tracks to the death camps.
What is wrong with our world, what is the root cause of all the harms being caused to people and the planet, is that right-wingers, whose thought processes are governed by their amygdala, wield immense economic, military and ideological power – and nowhere more so than in Israel.
Common sense, logic and rationality struggle to survive in the intense heat of a fear and rage-driven emotional state. The far more easily incinerated emotions of empathy and a sense of common cause don’t stand a chance.
The crucible of Zionist Israel has created a majority population that is as completely in the grip of an irrational Islamophobia as a majority of Americans were in the grip of an irrational anti-communism during the Cold War.
There is no difference between the Americans who allowed their right-wing governments to commit war crimes in North Korea and South-East Asia in the name of fighting communism, and Israelis who allow their far-right government to commit war crimes in Gaza, the West Bank, Lebanon and Syria.
This X-man’s appeal is to his counterparts in the west – those who are in their own throes of rage and revulsion against “immigrants”, be they Muslims, or the wrong sort of Catholic.
He dives deep into the stinky barrel of far-right tropes and comes up railing against liberal governments, university administrators, Jewish fellow-travellers, the woke left, the silent majority … in truth, pretty much everyone who won’t listen to him and back Israel in the war it wants to wage on Iran.
In keeping with his inflamed state of mind, he either doesn’t know or doesn’t care that such a war could well usher in a third world war and given the fragile state of the planet, it may well signal the end of humanity. I suspect far too many Israelis and their zealous supporters suffer from the Samson Psychosis – if they cannot dominate, they will bring it all crashing down.
