Sunday, September 28, 2014

East-Western Apocalypse: Israel in the Secular Image Trap


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!
What connects Hamas with LGBT is the disproportionate visibility and media coverage of both which is due to the chock qualities of sexual transgression and terrorist aggression alike. Both lend themselves perfectly to our image-mad and scandal ridden media world. The road to success in the decadent West is paved with televised brutality (ISIS) and obscenity (LGBT).  Recent examples are the beheading of an American journalist by a British Muslim and the announcement of the first ever Gay Pride Parade in Gaza City. The latter was postponed at the nick of time yet the mass same-sex wedding ceremony under Hamas authority went ahead. In my attempt to explain the extraordinary sympathy of Western mainstream media with Hamas these two events are key for they are offering a particular line of argument. Not only queers are a product of Western decadent modernity spilling over to the traditionally minted Middle East but radical jihadists such as the Muslim Brotherhood, ISIS and Hamas too. Think of the Hamburg cell that staged 9/11. The point is of Hegelian recognition for young adolescents, alienated by modernity and struggling with adulthood.
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.
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