East-Western Apocalypse: Israel in the Secular Image Trap
By Dr. Friedrich
Hansen
Commentary by Julio Severo: Dr. Friedrich Hansen and I were in the
recent pro-family conference in Moscow, and I am very glad that as a
pro-life physician in Germany, he is also Christian who defends Israel! God has
raised strategic Germans these days to confront lies against Israel. God bless
Mr. Friedrich!
My
intention is to give an intuitive explanation by turning to history and
biblical philosophy. From there readily emerges the split between cultures of
guilt and forgiveness on the one hand and those of shame and honor on the other.
The first was historically introduced by Judaism and subsequently spread by the
other monotheisms of Christianity and Islam. It is important to note here that
the guilt culture is wedded to the audible sense and inward looking as opposed
to the shame culture wedded to the eye and outward looking. This has important
implications for the way religious Israelis and secular Palestinians conceive
of themselves.
The
West now firmly in the grip of visual media and its deceptive images allows
little patience for subtlety and reflection which is traditionally related to
the ear, the voice and language — prime medium of religion, which also banned
images. This sophisticated world is now being reduced to the 146 word Twitter
standard chatting away aside the Moloch of international TV — a media mix
seemingly by default biased toward demonization of the People of the Book a
long forgotten label for the Jews. Images of destruction, child misery and war,
arbitrarily wrought by Hamas in Gaza coalesce with the Western fancy for images
in the short-lived pop culture. Any display of Hamas fighters would obliterate
the magic of shame poured over Israel. And the alliance of liberal journalism
and Hamas somehow managed to avoid those pictures.
The
other news is that after centuries of punishment for sodomy we are now
presented with images of same sex couples in Gaza, which is ample proof of the
radical modernity of Hamas. The terror group might succeed as the tin opener
for LGBT inroads to the Arab world. Hamas has chosen to jump on the powerful
Western gender bandwagon that also happens to be prime agenda of the U.S.
Department of State. Hamas and gays are both radical avant-gardist projects at
the heart of Western liberalism aiming at obliterating religious Zionism as
perhaps the last opposition to globalized liberal secularism. It was only a
matter of time that they would close ranks and it was this what delivered to
Hamas another media victory over Israel.
The
media appeal of a Hamas-gay alliance is that it offers a re-enchantment, a mix
of sex and violence, no matter how decadent and suicidal, to an utterly
disenchanted modern West. Has anyone noticed that President Barack Obama's
embrace of same sex marriage was in perfect harmony with his posturing against
Israel? No wonder that addictive sodomites, called “bug catchers” for trying to
catch as much STDs as possible, and addictive suicidal racists finally joined
forces in the first Gay Pride Parade in the war zone of Gaza. This has been
prefigured in the combined BDS-Turkish Islamist flotilla for Gaza that
triggered the Mavi Marmara clash with the IDF. It is about to get a reboot
soon. Both avant-gardist movements are heinous death cults who are bent to
drawing many innocents with them into the abyss. Historically sexual inhibition
and unrestrained violence are closely linked transgressions, notoriously so in
the French and Nazi Revolutions.
So
what is the greater picture here with regard to the global clash between
modernity and tradition that, unlike Huntington's prediction, is not fought
between grand nations or cultures, but is fought asymmetrically informed by
different religious backgrounds between desolate factions within modernity
spilling over in the Middle East. Clearly Islamic culture is equally split
between desolate neoconservatives such as Turkey, Qatar and Iran on one side
and traditional societies such as Saudi Arabia, the Gulf Emirates, Jordan and
Egypt. This seems to be the new divide in the Middle East and America seems to
have sided with the desolate radicals. The Muslim Brotherhood, backed by Barack
Obama recently is of the same kind that once perpetrated the Pearl Harbor
assault: Japanese Kamikaze death squads. For not all cultures are equal. To
believe the opposite is just extreme liberal hypocrisy. While Israelis serve
God in life, the Palestinians claim to serve him in death, if only as a way to
terrorize Israeli civil society.
This
brings us to the link between biblical philosophy and modern science with
regard to guilt versus shame culture provided by anthropologist Ruth Benedict.
It was in Pearl Harbor at the sight of remorseless destruction that she
re-discovered the difference between shame and guilt culture. Benedict
explained why the Kamikaze pilots lacked any respect for the life of Americans.
This same feature stand out with Hamas' attitude towards Israelis. In retaliation,
American puritan culture respected life and attempted to limit the means of war
even if they eventually succumbed to the Hiroshima Bomb that amounted to a sort
of vengeance with mostly civilian casualties. Nevertheless, it saved tens of
thousands of Americans by ending the war. In this sense Pearl Harbor and its
replay at 9/11 explains why among Westerners only Americans overwhelmingly side
in polls with Israel over Hamas.
Surely,
the clash between guilt and shame culture has been actualized by Islamic
suicide bombers in Israel and by Hamas heinous warfare indiscriminately firing
Al Kassam rockets, with ever improving features, on Israeli civilians and using
their own kin as hostages to protect their fighters. In addition, the terror
group Hamas does not use its huge aid budget, supplied by the West, for the
building of civilian infrastructure and shelters for the 1.8 million people in
Gaza. Sources tell us that Palestinian civilians were not even allowed in the
tunnels during Israeli air raids because this would expose the entries to the
enemy. The crucial difference between guilt and shame culture is that the
latter is prone to revenge fuelling endless bloodshed based on stubborn
identity or honor issues. Only the former is able to achieve peace through
compromise and a mechanism of repentance, forgiveness, change of mind and
redemption. Thus the shame culture is a deprived state of the former that was
always present underneath the latter since late antiquity. For centuries in
Italy both have been close neighbors, represented by the Vatican and varieties
of the mezzogiorno Mafia.
Now
Hamas cynical exposure and sacrifice of civilians employs and manipulates the classical
feature of the shame culture that is the scapegoat. For the scapegoat is the
sacrificial transformation of guilt into shame. Hamas tactics are unprecedented
and heinous because it is secretly sacrificing its own civilians by exposing
them to Israeli fire and even hides their fighters behind them. This represents
an unheard of transgression of the rules of warfare, relinquishing all limits
between combatants and non-combatants. This means aggravating the war effect
even against the fair intentions of the enemy - rendering any damage beyond his
control. Thus Hamas invites the maximum damage on its own side abandoning
responsibility and self-protection of their families. It can be called
engineering of victim-hood which always reflects badly only on the enemy.
This
existential inversion of the role of the scapegoat resembles the mechanism that
Western liberals employed with their post WW II revisionism of the Shoah. In
order to understand Hamas removal of protective boundaries and why therefore
the German philosopher Martin Heidegger is somehow hovering over Gaza we need
to turn to the concept
of apocalypse.
Apocalypse
in Greek means taking the lid off a pot or in other words dissolute boundaries.
No doubt, transcending all limits has become the obsession of the post-modern
West. For Christians the term signifies ultimate horror facing the day of
reckoning, notoriously postponed or mediated by proxy as a the result of their
“reform” of Judaism. This postponement of reckoning opened up vast windows of
opportunity for transgression or if you wish sin, as the “holy sinner” Marquis
de Sade was the first to exploit during the French Revolution. His more recent
soul mate was the late Michel Foucault, the cardinal philosopher after
Nietzsche with liberal Western academia and famously known as “The fucking
Saint” in the gay community.
Interestingly
it was the free market economist Friedrich Hayek who immediately after the Nazi
revolution astutely observed, I think it was in his “Road to Serfdom”, that
whether the "apocalyptic lid" is taken off abruptly, as in a
revolution or whether lifted gradually in a commercial way as in a free market
society — the result could be pretty much the same: lowering the moral order
and obliterating the family. Liberals are corrupting the moral order as
efficiently as the fascists and to a lesser extent the communists did before
them. It is irritating, to say the least, that the anti-Israel demonstrations
are put up in the withering Christian West but not in orthodox Russia or in
budding Christian Asia. This would suggests that the transformation of guilt
into shame is at work more in liberal nihilism.
In
this context, we might ask why both liberals and Hamas are obsessed with
victim-hood? Well the answer is that attempts are under way with the help of
the Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) movement to expand the rainbow coalition
of minority groups on a global scale using the Israel-Hamas conflict as
leverage. It amounts to a historical revision of the civilizational collapse
still known as the Shoah. Here Martin Heidegger comes in who emphatically
welcomed the collapse of Western civilization in 1929 at Davos. It happened at
the dawn of Hitler's revolution and the “metaphysical lid” was among the
philosophical issues of the controversy at Davos between Martin Heidegger and
Ernst Cassirer. More in harmony with the Zeitgeist the soon to be Nazi
philosopher Heidegger, undisputed as an outstanding thinker of the 20th
century, won because he unreservedly voted for riddance of the repressive
“lid”.
A
few years later Hitler removed the lid and unleashed German furor into racial
pogroms not least empowered by his same sex networks in Munich and Berlin that
had cropped up during the Weimar Republic. Hitler himself, emphatically so
during his adolescence — and like many of his comrades — was an active
homosexual. This has been established by Lothar Machtan, historian at the
University of Bremen, in his book “Hitlers Geheimnis (secret)”of 2001. The late
Joachim Fest, more famous still as a historian, revealed in his voluminous
biography on the "Führer" that until his last days Hitler had his
bowels scoured by one of his many personal physicians. Sodomy and pederasty in
pagan Nazi orders was much appreciated as stimulus for enhancing valour. The
same is reported with Japanese soldiers favouring pre-combat heterosexual
intercourse or rape with a frequency perhaps rivalled only by homosexual men (http://atimes.com/atimes/Korea/KOR-01-070814.html).
Men
not moored in family life such as the SA and SS troopers, the Kamikaze or
Jihads like Hamas and gay “holy sinners” live permanently “without a lid” and
history has depicted them as extremely dangerous. Fittingly new medical
research has revealed that they have considerable higher testosterone levels
than family men (“The Future of the Family“, Tikvah Fund, New York seminary
15.7.14). Hamas terrorists, just like their Japanese predecessors, hit in their
suicidal furor only about a fifth of their targets — with Kamikaze death pilots
obliterating American ships and Hamas Kassam rockets targeting Israeli cities.
The latter are mostly neutralized thanks to the Iron Dome.
The
poor military performance of Japanese and Islamist death squads like ISIS and
Hamas got compensated back then as now by a habit of brutal executions of
traitors and decapitation of enemies in order to enhance their horrifying
public media presence. This type of ritual murder is typical for the shame
culture and is destined to become a re-import to radical pockets of desolates
in the West. The shame culture incapable of forgiveness punishes misdeeds
through bodily mutilation and exposure. Similarly, radical gay “Bug Catchers”
are heroes of self- or mutual mutilation too. All of these are denying to
themselves the blessings of human advancement toward a superior guilt culture
that is capable of separating transgression from the person that committed it
through repentance and forgiveness. Palestinian and rainbow identity politics
are employing exactly the opposite rationale of melting transgression and
personality to one inseparable identity or “honor” equally giving LGBT people
and Hamas their schizoid edge — forever damned to dangle between irreconcilable
"honor or shame”. The boastfulness of Hamas and the gay „bug catchers”
priding themselves on emphatic transgression of limits is genuinely opposed to
civil society because it knows not of remorse and atonement.
After
all for both it is the whole point of being a transgressor, gay or Jihad, to
melt a mere accidental habit into a personality trait in order to gain Hegelian
recognition or honor. After all this is what identity politics is all about.
Yet it is important not to overlook that it creates unstable personalities with
weakened self-control — crying for government assistance and liberal tyranny.
More importantly, it represents a regression from mature flexibility and
tolerance toward radical stubbornness of “frozen adolescents”. It is for this
reason that holy warriors and gender warriors tend to take offence easily and
reject all compromise. For example Italy’s most famous philosopher Gian
Vattimo, also from the Heidegger mold and openly gay, recently said on the
radio, "he would like to personally kill Israelis and thinks Europeans
should raise money “to buy Hamas some more rockets” (Haartez reported: http://www.haaretz.com/news/diplomacy-defense/.premium-1.606698).
Yet
it was not always like this, quite the opposite. For gay historiography about
fascism kept trying to separate for the past what it wants to keep inseparable
in the present: sodomy blown up as identity. Thus opportunist gay historians
insist that the nasty habit of homosexual storm troopers and SA thugs was
purely accidental and had nothing to do with politics and did not affect their
personality (Alexander Zinn “Die Konstruktion Homosexueller Nazis”, 1997). Yet
it is now completely forgotten that almost all liberal thinkers or left wing
media in the 1930ies, many exiled from Germany, turned against gays because
they blamed them for the rise of fascism. The heavy homosexual penetration of
Röhm's SA, counting four million men in 1934, was all too visible through its
open gay leadership. In addition the homosexual movement under the Nazis was
the only “victim group”, powerful enough to actually challenge the dictator —
still just another insane and failed rebellion that under normal circumstances
would not entitle anyone to making claims on the consequences of their own
stupidity. Would it have been more agreeable to have lived under a gay German
dictator called Röhm?
It
is precisely the opposite what LGBT activists want us to believe today in their
new opportunistic turn to the powers that be, namely that gay emancipation
requires maximum politicization and that to be gay matters a lot for the whole
personality, in short that habit and person are inseparable. And yet just as
binge drinking does not create a new species of human beings called alcoholics,
so sodomy does not constitute a new ontological class called gays with all
sorts of privileges. Gays and Palestinians have exactly the same human rights
as everyone else, but no extra rights whatsoever. The abuse of human rights and
the anti-discrimination industry has dried up Western cultural sensibilities
toward anti-Semitism that once provided some semblance of security to the Jews.
The
truth is however that addictive sodomy is a treatable condition just like drug
and alcohol addiction or amenable through repentance and atonement. It is
stunning that while we are living in a therapeutic society the only condition
under the sun not amenable to therapy should be homosexuality (Phillip Rieff
„The Triumph of the Therapeutic“). Among modern scholars who studied the
metaphysical void of secular modernity was the French-Jewish sociologist Emile
Durkheim who identified the result of the “removed lid”, i.e. the “yearning for
infinitude”, as the main driver of male suicides, surging during rapid
industrialization in Europe. In the 20th century, this morphed into the nihilism
of pagan death cults with the axis powers: the Kamikaze, the genocidal SS and
Turks and the Muslim Brotherhood.
The
decapitation of pro-Islamic activist James Foley by a converted British
Islamist and Hamas' celebration of same-sex marriage makes palpable a new
converging Western-Islamist shame culture to be reckoned with, a culture driven
by resentments, revenge and a lack of reason and compromise. This emerging
coalition between radical liberals and Islamic jihadists is also reflected in
the new Orwellian terms homophobe and islamophobe. They represent the seal of
the revenge culture and inversion of the scapegoat again: anti-gays are denounced
as disease stroke. For it was the removal of homosexuality as a psychiatric
disorder in the 1970ies with a gay mob intimidating leading US psychiatrists
that pushed the sexual revolution one screw further.
Fittingly
the European commission, one of the main sponsors of LGBT and Hamas alike, has
just ordered its member states to calculate their shadow economy. All
activities like Mafia businesses, the sex- and porno-industries, contraband,
people trafficking, illegal drug and weapon deals are to be reported to the EU
central committee until 2016. Do not hold your breath, yes the idea is to dress
up public depth and allow the ailing European economies to drop below the depth
ceiling of 3% of output. The Guardian reported, based on Eurostat, illegal
activities such as prostitution and drug trafficking could add about 1% to the
GDP of Poland and Romania, 1%-2% of Italy, Portugal, Ireland, Spain, Czech
Republic, 2-3% of France, Germany and Belgium, 3%-4% of Austria, the
Netherlands and the UK and as much as 5% to the GDP of Finland and Sweden (http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/09/spain-prostitution-gdp-estimate).
It seems the last resort for zero-growth Europe is to economically absorb the
spoils of the shame and honor culture in order to “sex up” its balance sheet.
Will anyone bother to register his business legally in the future? And will it
now be counterproductive to carry on the war against drugs at all? Obviously
not.
Liberal appeasement of Hamas
Hamas
is determined to annihilate Israel, whereas Israel is simply trying to defend
itself and to live. This unambiguous fact cannot be repeated often enough, as
most recently explained by British Chief Rabbi Epharim Mirvis in the London
Telegraph. Dead sure on 25th of July Hamas repeated what it has voiced many times
in the past: “We will exterminate you [Jews], until the last one, and we will
not leave even one of you.” Ephraim goes on: “In reality, one side is motivated
to maximize civilian casualties and has an exterminatory agenda. The other side
is motivated to protect its citizens from terror.” Hitler famously said with
glee: “Guilt is an invention of the Jews.” Hamas could not agree more for they
always get away without apologizing for any of their atrocities. To their merit,
the Saudis recently blamed Hamas as responsible for their own civilian
casualties. Yet this has been mostly ignored by the liberal media. They even
stay mute to the fact that journalists who try to film Hamas in action or ask
them questions get death threats. This is why we are spared pictures of Hamas
warfare on Western TV.
“Moral equivalence” extracted from Equality for Victims
To
put it bluntly: moral equivalence emerges from a sentimental competition
between victims in a shame and honor culture, not able to rise to a reasoned judgment
informed by a superior guilt culture that was once the common heritage of the
monotheist religions. The liberal commitment emerged after the Holocaust in a
peaceable but ill-conceived attempt to create the motherboard of moral
equivalence, victim “equality” between the Jews and the rest. Thus liberals
have crowded out the moral high ground in the media with an agenda of a
pantheist’ redistribution of victim claims. Liberal social engineering
allocated a privileged place for the non-Jewish segment of the Semitic people
to swerve the claim of anti-Semitism: the Palestinians represented by Hamas are
the principal liberal fig leaf for the final stroke of the Enlightenment
against religion in general and Judaism in particular. This is why the
Palestinians are not allowed ever to give up their refugee status (http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/08/31/unrwa-is-a-hostile-organization-and-israel-should-treat-it-accordingly/#).
Thus they became the great post-War exception of many millions of displaced
people and refugees after WW II, including some 800 000 Jews expelled from Arab
countries alone.
The
first Gay Pride Parade in Gaza, of all places, is a crucial piece in the
sinister propaganda war and meant to neutralize a poster child of Israel's
liberal credentials. This is a major Hamas accomplishment over Abbas and Fatah.
Clearly, Israel and the international community should ask LGBT advocates which
side they are on. Would anyone think that something as superfluous as gay
rights is what Palestinians would be yearning for in war torn Gaza? Even before
Hamas' closing ranks with the aggressive gay culture aimed at destabilizing the
secular Jewish state by denouncing Israel in typical shame-and-blame manner as
“pink washing”. Think about the logic of this for a moment: Israel embraces the
gay bandwagon in order to wash her hands and diluting guilt into shame?
The
Russian emigrant Nathan Sharansky, presently head of the Jewish Agency, said
recently: “I believe we are seeing the beginning of the end of Jewish history
in Europe… For more than 12 years, rabbis and teachers in French schools have
told Jewish children not to go out in the street wearing a kippah. That’s
something that even Moscow and Kiev rabbis don’t say to children...” What has
been pro-gay marches and Muslim youth riots in the Banlieu of Paris in recent years
are fast becoming the new pogroms against Jews as the one recently seen at the
Roquette Synagogue. Aggressive gays have meanwhile joined the anti-Israel
protests in droves, such as seen recently in Chicago and London. Has anyone
noticed that Western hate against Israel and Russia has coalesced recently.
Revealingly Jews are again under attack in the West rather than East. Nevertheless,
Benjamin Kerstein tells us: “It is a Pogrom undertaken by Muslims, Christians,
atheists, and all those in between, all across the world”(http://www.thetower.org/article/the-global-pogrom/).
Now
let us wrap up. History has taught us that if the Jews are expelled from
Europe, as we have seen before in medieval Spain, 19th century Russia and 20th
century Germany, this spells doom for the host countries. It just seems to
confirm what we knew already: that the West is in decline. Yet what we are
seeing is not only a shift of economic and cultural activity from the Atlantic
to the Pacific, but also a re-alignment in the Middle East. Caroline Glick
astutely observed that the West under its present liberal leadership, namely
President Barack Obama seems to be irresistibly attracted by Hamas, Iran and
Turkey, a predatory group, deranged by modernity, instigated by the Muslim
Brotherhood and financed by Qatar. See also Jonathan Spyer's piece about
Qatar's extraordinary rise (http://www.thetower.org/article/qatars-rise-and-americas-tortured-middle-east-policy/).
Coalitions
are volatile in the Muslim world but there seems to be emerging a moderate,
more conservative group cautiously siding with Israel, namely Egypt, Saudi
Arabia and the United Arab Emirates (http://www.jpost.com/Opinion/Column-One-Anti-Semitism-and-its-limitations-371172).
This group potentially also includes Russia which as a leader of the emerging
BRICS countries has recently aligned itself with Egypt. Now Israel is the only
country in the Western hemisphere and the Middle East too with a sustainable
demography and a healthy democracy. And it is thus perfectly poised to show
other modern democracies where to set limits to the power of Western liberal
tyranny by the way of taming the furor of the sexual revolution. And it has a
strong incentive to do so because Hamas or LGBT galvanized by the
Israel-Boycott alone cannot break the Jewish state, but if they join forces,
they might succeed. Therefore Israel could reverse its presently poor
international image by standing by religious Zionism and the Judeo-Christian
culture of guilt and forgiveness.
Dr. Friedrich
Hansen
is a physician and writer. He has
researched Islamic Enlightenment and Israeli history in Jerusalem and has
networked on behalf of the Maimonides Prize. Previous journalistic and academic
historical work in Germany, Britain published mostly online in the Brussels
Journal, Asia Times in Hong Kong, On Line Opinion in Australia and Times of
Israel. He is currently working in psychosomatic rehabilitation in Germany.
Source: Last Days Watchman
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