#socialism as the secular form of christianity

[athousandgateaux]

It is reactive forces that express themselves in opposition, the will to nothingness that expresses itself in the labour of the negative. The dialectic is the natural ideology of ressentiment and bad conscience. It is thought in the perspective of nihilism and from the standpoint of reactive forces. It is a fundamentally Christian way of thinking, from one end to the other; powerless to create new ways of thinking and feeling. The death of God is a grand, noisy, dialectical event; but an event which happens in the din of reactive forces and the fumes of nihilism.

--Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, pg. 159

[kaurwreck]

for the ask game: LILAC CHARCOAL AND RASPBERRY

anon this is so sweet 😭

[ask game provided below for reference; if you'd like to play, please reblog from OP here:]

[mossadspypigeon]

someone asked me, via anon ofc and i deleted the message because it was so stupid, “what do you do for tikkun olam?”

well my good bitch…i certainly don’t advocate for the mass murder of my people on the internet just so the new nazis will like me and i’ll get followers. when you use tikkun olam against us…repairing the world isn’t starting the cultural christian “great revolution/rapture.”

it isn’t allowing evil to exist because we are too cowardly to go up against it. (that evil is hamas and hezbollah btw, not israel. for you ding dongs out there.)

nor, in its ACTUAL FORM, does it even actually mean social justice. that is appropriation.

whose social order, you asked? why thanks, i’ll answer.

the jews’.

let’s continue exploring lmao

hmmmmmm

the author of this article calls the political associations a sort of “secular messianism.” either way, it’s universalizing a concept that was created by jews for jews.

the original commentary was for us. the zionist interpretation was created by us for us. so why wxactly does judaism need to be about non jews? islam and christianity don’t so that. we can care about the world without defining ourselves by others.

so maybe stop trying to make a concept for jews about everyone on earth EXCEPT jews.

so…what do i do for tikkun olam? to continue my own society? i support my people and our right to exist and be free in our homeland, israel. i give tzedakah. i learn. i talk to my community, especially when it’s hard and people dont want to hear me. i don’t cower even when i’m uncomfortable, hated, or alone. i don’t give in to nonsense created by oppressors.

and i love the idf 😘

[tyrantisterror]

Everyone takes that one quote about the use of Christian imagery in Evangelion to form this curtains-are-just-blue ass argument about it having no deeper meaning without actually watching the show critically. Like, the creators said the show does not have a Christian message, not that it has no themes at all.

There are too many deep cut references to obscure Christian apocrypha in the show for them not to have done some research, and those references DO have significance to the show's secular themes about depression and self loathing. There is meaning in calling the monsters that want to destroy all of humanity because we weren't supposed to exist Angels. The idea that angels, servants of God, want us dead because we are a mistake, in a series that explores depression and self loathing and feelings of social isolation, is a pretty potent bit of symbolism. The world being wiped out in a Biblical flood that's caused not by God, but by one man who hates himself so much he'd rather destroy all humanity than confront his own loneliness, is a good play on the Noah story that doesn't work as well if you don't know the story it's twisting. Humanity being the offspring of Lilith, the rebellious first wife of Adam, and not Eve, is potent, adding to the idea of humanity being a self-destroying mistake. All of these are allusions to Christianity that have meaning in the story- just not for a Christian message.

[daisydisciple]

Ok thought not fully formed yet but I think everything would make a lot more sense if we thought of "sin" as more along the lines of "something that weakens your connection with God" and less "a morally bad action in the secular philosophical sense."

In modern secular philosophy, usually we only think of an action as "bad" if it causes measurable harm to society/the environment/another person etc. No victim = no crime. This makes perfect sense when we're thinking about regulating behavior with laws, rules, and, to an extent, social norms. The goal of this kind of thinking/regulating is to create a harmonious, free, and safe society in our mortal/temporal/earthly condition.

In contrast, Sin as a religious (Christian) concept is more concerned with the state of an individual soul and that soul's relationship with God. It is possible for something to be a sin and yet be a "victimless crime." (Arguably the "victim" here is actually the "perpetrator" but you know what I mean.) The goal of this kind of thinking is to help the individual be in harmony with God.

I think the problem here is when we conflate the two uncritically. Yes, there is a lot of overlap (murder, for example, would draw you further from God and also is harmful to the murder victim/their family/society.) But the two concepts are not one and the same. Just because a behavior is sinful doesn't mean it can and should be forbidden by law, rule, or even social norm. Likewise, just because enforcing or encouraging a certain behavior is beneficial to society doesn't mean that behavior is or isn't a sin.

I think this conflation is a source of miscommunication and misunderstanding. Lots of people seem to interpret calling a behavior sinful to mean "if you do this you are an bad person who is actively harming society."

I also think that's why people get so turned off by the concept of all sin being equal in the eyes of God. That isn't the same thing as all morally bad actions having equal weight or consequences in society. The point is that all sin separates us from God, and what His plan requires for us is for there to be zero separation. (That's where Jesus comes in). The point of saying all sin is the same in the eyes of God isn't to say that murder and not praying are equivalent in secular morality. The point is that someone "guilty" of not praying needs Jesus just as much as a murderer. (Because! We all need Jesus completely and equally.)

So anyway I guess my point is that Christians need to recognize that just because something is sinful (separates a soul from God) doesn't mean that that thing should be illegal or against the rules or even socially shamed.

But! Non-Christians should also understand that the concept of sin is distinct from secular morality. If I say that something is a sin, don't take it as me saying "anyone who does this is evil and depraved and deserves to be executed by firing squad." girl I sin. we all sin.

[qqueenofhades]

I love your essays; they are fascinating. Thank you for sharing your perspective! I have a follow up question, if you have the time or energy: in your last, you said, “It's a blueprint for a tiny group of extreme right-wing theocrats and fascists to get their way regardless of what the broader public says about it…”. Who ARE the tiny group of extreme right wing theocrats and fascists? Is it the politicians whom we see all over the news, like Vance and Boebert ands Haley and DeSantis? Or are they puppets whose strings are being pulled by donors behind the scenes, like…I don’t know, the Koch brothers and the Uleins (sp?)? I feel like whoever it is must have mind boggling amounts of money, to overcome the sheer number of people who don’t think like that, even people nominally republican who believe in traditional low taxes and small government, but are not completely bananapants. Or maybe that’s why they tagged trump, bc no one before him was willing to act like enough of an outright gangster to seriously move the needle…? How much more rich than disgustingly rich do they need to be?

Perhaps surprisingly, it's fairly easy to identify the Hall of Shame who are busily trying to end American democracy, not least because they have become increasingly open about it. Their motives are diverse but all terrible. The quick rundown is as follows:

First, the alt-right billionaires club such as Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, Harlan Crow, and Leonard Leo (the last two are some of the chief funnelers of dark money to SCOTUS; Crow is Clarence Thomas's sugar daddy). They have reasons ranging from grandiose delusions about "remaking" the world in their preferred image (not at all terrifying) to attaching themselves to fascist politics in order to defeat workers' rights and labor unions, who they view as a threat to their mega-wealth. Thiel is the primary sponsor of JD Vance and the alt-right cryptobros clubs that draw the young right-wing white men who also primarily form the membership of neo-Nazi and white nationalist groups. They want to end democracy in order to punish women, minorities, LGBTQ+ people, and anyone else who Nazis always hate. Crow and Leo have lavishly funded the corrupt SCOTUS in order to influence their preferred right-wing rulings, and there are undoubtedly more who we don't even know about. This is just the tip of the iceberg and I have no doubt that it's far, far worse than anything that has been publicly reported.

Next are the extremist right-wing interest groups that have cohered around and advocated for Project 2025, which is basically just the conservative-extremist wet dream put in one place and written down. They include the Heritage Foundation (the primary Project 2025 author) the Federalist Society and the John Birch Society of right-wing judges and policymakers, and Opus Dei, the secretive Catholic right-wing influence group who are straight out of a Dan Brown novel but are in fact some of the most consequential and powerful players in MAGA World. Their name means "work of God" in Latin, which is very much what they see themselves as doing, and their reach in DC is vast, particularly in the far-right evangelical and fundamentalist Christian groups that have attached themselves to Trump as a vehicle to push through their regressive-reactionary social and cultural politics, especially on abortion, women's rights, LGBTQ+ rights, and other things that they view as "unholy." These are the diehard true believers who really, truly think that it's better for the US to be a fascist theocracy espousing "Right and Moral" religious views than a flawed, pluralist, and secular democracy. Hard Yikes.

Thirdly we have the useful idiots, such as Vance, Ron DeSantis, Boebert, Greene, basically pick-a-Republican-politician-here, who are pursuing fascist politics out of careerism, opportunism, some amount of genuine belief, and exploiting the age-old fissures of American racism, nativism, xenophobia, and other original sins that have dogged the country since its founding. Of course, Trump himself is chief among these useful idiots, because he's completely willing to end American democracy and install himself as Dictator-for-Life if it exempts him from having to face the consequences for all the crimes he did last time (and frankly, his entire life, which is now catching up with him). I don't think Trump has an actual consistent or coherent policy bone in his body; witness how quickly he was willing to flip-flop on the Florida abortion issue depending on what he thought was useful (and then after the backlash he received from his base). He's a malignant narcissistic sociopath who is incapable of complex reasoning and long-term planning. His only and overriding interest is himself, he will do absolutely whatever he has to in order to save himself, and as long as he has his death grip on the GOP, everyone who wants to succeed in the party or even have a future in it has to slavishly kiss Don Corleone Trump's ring. That is why many lifelong Republicans have been breaking ranks to say they will vote for Harris, because "being a Republican's" one and only qualification is now "being utterly loyal to Trump." That's it.

These are all actors based more or less in the US, but we also can't forget the fact that basically the entire Republican Party is in deep, deep hock to Vladimir Putin and other foreign autocrats (but most especially and dangerously Putin). We just had the DOJ indictment of MAGA influencers who were taking Russian black cash by the bucketload in order to spread damaging lies about Biden/Harris and pump for Trump, and this is consistent with Russia's pattern of extensive interference in American elections going back to at least 2016. It is hard to overstate how much Putin hankers to end American democracy for many reasons. He is a former KGB agent trained in the black-and-white us-and-them logic of the Cold War where the US was the USSR's archenemy, his constant mourning for the USSR's collapse has been well documented, and it would be the absolute defining and singular achievement of all of post-imperial Russian history for Putin to effectively end American democracy with a second Trump term.

This is for the simple reason that Trump is utterly in thrall to Putin and will do whatever he asks, whether it's cutting off aid to Ukraine and forcing them to accept annexation by Russia, pulling America out of NATO and letting Putin set his invasion sights on Poland and the Baltic states, and anything else. That is genuinely terrifying but very likely if Trump was re-elected, aside from the end of American democracy and the worldwide ramifications it would have to empower fascist authoritarians everywhere. Putin is trying to achieve this through a combination of good old-fashioned Soviet-style dezinformatsiya, paying off MAGA influencers, putting the entire resources of the Russian state into defaming Harris-Walz, and recruiting useful idiots like his asset Jill Stein, who has extensive Russian ties and only pops up every four years for idiot leftists to spoil their vote and ruin Democratic electoral prospects. So. Again. Hard yikes.

So that's the quick rundown of the people who are vested in Trump and Project 2025's success and why, and as you can see, while they're all different, they're all terrible. But yes: that really is a very, very small group of people, relatively speaking. And a vote for anyone except Kamala Harris and Tim Walz is a vote to empower them and also to ensure that you will never have the chance to vote again, due to living in an authoritarian fascist regime. Choose wisely.

[omegaphilosophia]

The Philosophy of Satanism

The philosophy of Satanism, particularly in modern interpretations, is often grounded in individualism, self-empowerment, and a rejection of traditional religious dogma. There are various branches of Satanism, each with its own approach and interpretation. While early portrayals in history associated Satanism with anti-Christian and occultist ideas, contemporary movements largely emphasize philosophical, symbolic, and sometimes atheistic elements.

Core Branches of Satanism

LaVeyan Satanism: Founded by Anton LaVey in 1966, LaVeyan Satanism is one of the most well-known and structured forms. LaVey’s Satanic Bible outlines Satanism as an atheistic philosophy that emphasizes rational self-interest, individuality, and personal freedom. LaVeyan Satanism doesn’t worship a literal Satan but uses "Satan" as a symbol of rebellion against conformity, self-denial, and oppressive moral codes. Core principles include self-reliance, pursuit of pleasure, and rejection of guilt or shame for natural human desires.

Theistic Satanism: In contrast to LaVeyan Satanism, theistic Satanism involves the belief in and veneration of Satan as a deity or supernatural being. Followers may view Satan as a force representing wisdom, self-empowerment, or the spirit of rebellion against unjust authority. They typically emphasize spirituality, ritual, and a personalized relationship with their deity.

The Satanic Temple: Founded in 2013, The Satanic Temple is a non-theistic, socio-political organization that advocates for secularism, religious freedom, and separation of church and state. Its use of Satanic imagery and symbolism is often satirical, serving as a critique of authoritarianism, religious fundamentalism, and hypocrisy. The Satanic Temple’s guiding principles prioritize compassion, rational inquiry, and individual sovereignty.

Other Forms of Satanic Philosophy: Other branches, including Luciferianism, focus on the figure of Lucifer as a symbol of enlightenment, knowledge, and self-discovery. Unlike traditional Satanic archetypes, Luciferianism often associates Lucifer with wisdom, learning, and the search for truth.

Key Philosophical Concepts in Satanism

Individualism and Self-Empowerment: Many forms of Satanism prioritize the individual as the center of moral authority, encouraging followers to take personal responsibility and to live according to their own principles and desires. Self-reliance and self-empowerment are celebrated, often rejecting dependence on external authority for moral guidance.

Rebellion and Nonconformity: Satanism often embraces the symbol of Satan as a figure of rebellion against oppressive norms or restrictive moral frameworks. This aspect resonates with the desire for freedom from traditional dogmas and the encouragement to think critically and independently.

Pleasure and Self-Interest: Satanism frequently rejects asceticism and self-denial, advocating for the pursuit of pleasure, self-gratification, and enjoyment of life. This philosophy is rooted in a materialist understanding of existence, where one’s current life is seen as the primary focus rather than preparation for an afterlife.

Critical Thinking and Skepticism: Modern Satanism, especially within The Satanic Temple, emphasizes scientific skepticism and rationalism. It challenges superstitions, encourages questioning, and critiques traditional religious dogmas that demand faith without evidence.

Ethics and Morality: Satanic philosophies often propose alternative ethics rooted in individual responsibility rather than divine commands. LaVeyan Satanism’s “Nine Satanic Statements,” for instance, outline an ethos that prioritizes self-respect, personal boundaries, and retributive justice, but they reject traditional moral frameworks as rigid or unnatural.

Satanism in Cultural and Social Context

Satanism’s popularity and influence are, in part, responses to societal structures, particularly within heavily religious cultures. By challenging the norms, it presents a counterpoint to dominant religious narratives, emphasizing secularism and religious pluralism.

In modern contexts, Satanism also serves as a vehicle for social critique and protest. Organizations like The Satanic Temple advocate for political issues like freedom of expression and the separation of church and state, often using provocative imagery to challenge established social orders and protect minority rights.

Controversies and Misconceptions

Satanism often faces misunderstanding due to historical associations with evil and media portrayals of occult rituals. While some forms of Satanism are theistic, most modern movements are symbolic, emphasizing reason and autonomy rather than supernatural beliefs. Contemporary Satanists typically do not believe in or worship an actual Satan as defined in Christian theology.

Philosophical Influence and Modern Appeal

Satanism resonates with existentialist themes, particularly the focus on creating one’s own meaning in a seemingly indifferent universe. Its principles align with certain elements of Nietzschean philosophy, like the rejection of imposed moral codes and celebration of life and personal strength. It appeals to those who value self-expression, secularism, and an individual-centered approach to ethics.

Summary

Satanism, particularly in its modern forms, challenges traditional moral structures and advocates for individuality, self-empowerment, and a critical, skeptical outlook on life. It exists both as a personal philosophy and a social commentary, reshaping the symbol of Satan from a figure of evil to one of liberation, reason, and humanism.

[actualmermaid]

It's been three months since I made this post about Saints Sergius and Bacchus, John Boswell, classical Western homoeroticism, and Christian homophobia.

Since then I have read both of Boswell's books on the history of gay/queer people in premodern Christianity (Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality and Same-Sex Unions in Premodern Europe), familiarized myself more fully with the spectrum of charges against Boswell and his scholarship, and realized that he's been the subject of ideologically-motivated smear campaigns by just about every political/religious/academic faction you can imagine. My conclusion: Professor Boswell is a saint, martyr, and important queer elder who does not get the respect that he deserves, and I'm in awe of the sheer volume of the massive genius brain that was somehow crammed into his little blond head.

ANYWAY. This is an official followup to my original post, now that I've read Boswell's work.

I take back my hunch that Boswell's work was not intersectional. He was, in fact, a pioneer in the field of medieval social history, and utilized a wide range of critical lenses in his work. He was inhibited by the lack of documented evidence about some groups (for example, he was frequently criticized for not writing more about lesbians, but he was open about the difficulties of researching lesbians in history and explained what he was doing as a scholar and as a teacher to mitigate this) but he constantly called attention to issues of class, gender, and other social factors wherever they were relevant.

I was RIGHT in noticing that the slight difference in rank between Sergius and Bacchus seems to be an erastes/eromenos indicator! Boswell spoke at greater length and with greater sensitivity about erastes/eromenos dynamics in history, so if you want a deeper look into that, you should read his books.

I was also probably right in noticing that the legend of Sergius and Bacchus is seeded with various forms of Byzantine propaganda! I really wish that I could talk to him about it. :(

Both secular queer theorists and religious queer theologians seem to be most uncomfortable with the fact that Boswell was reporting on historical facts and observable social forces, not idealized concepts of queer people as somehow being more ethical or spiritual than the straight majority. He included evidence of things like abuse, prostitution, and exploitation not because he thought they were cool, but because they were part of the material reality of queer people's existence in the past, just like they were part of the material reality of his own 70s-80s gay subculture.

That was his bottom line: gay/queer people are a normal human variation, and as a historian, he could provide hard proof of their existence and what their lives might have been like. If his work seems "shallow" or "dated" to some more modern queer researchers, it's only because so many people were willing to dismiss his scholarship, reject his work, and abandon his research leads after he died. But, he was actually super smart and his scholarship was actually meticulous, so even his most dedicated critics have been unable to "debunk" him. Christianity, Social Tolerance, and Homosexuality most recently had a 35th-anniversary reprinting, and he is still being cited as an authority by more recent scholars.

Even though the full strength of the Church and the Academy were leveled against him, his work has proven its own worth. He still deserves to be read and discussed by both professional scholars and enthusiastic hobbyists. And, the Open and Affirming movement in Christianity wouldn't be as strong as it is without his confirmation that "gays and lesbians are normal," as he put it, and not simply a construct of modern society.

Rest in power, Professor Boswell. We won't forget you.

Since I made that post, I have also opened a sticker shop with a bunch of queer Christian saint icons, including Boswell and some of the queer saints he discovered/wrote about. They're pretty cool. You should buy one.

[mariacallous]

The Catholic Church in Hungary has been engulfed by a series of high-profile sex scandals and child abuse investigations. The situation isn’t just a crisis for the church, but also a challenge for Viktor Orban’s Christian-nationalist government.

“Perhaps we should not refer to these merely as ‘scandalous cases’, but rather as the painful, inhumane, traumatizing injuries suffered by minors, which go far beyond ‘scandalous news’,” read a statement on December 4 by the editors of the independent Hungarian religious affairs magazine Szemlelek, reflecting on a crisis that has recently engulfed Hungary’s Catholic Church.

Since September, a series of scandals relating to sexual misconduct, pedophilia and cover-up in the Catholic church has wrecked the public reputation of five high-profile clerics and occasioned the suspension of a rising, but as-yet unconfirmed, number of their colleagues. Some see echoes of the crisis in the US Catholic church sparked by the 2002 Boston Globe ‘Spotlight’ investigation into child abuse in the city’s archdiocese – a story (and later movie) that plunged American Catholicism into a crisis from which it’s still recovering.

The close government ties of the priests implicated heighten concerns about overlaps between political power, religious networks and child sexual abuse in Hungary. These concerns were first raised earlier this year in February, following the exposure of a successful intercession by Reformed Church bishop (and former Fidesz cabinet minister) Zoltan Balog with then-president Katalin Novak, a fellow Calvinist, to pardon a church member convicted as a pedophile accomplice. News of the pardon led to Novak’s resignation.

Attention is now turning away from the Reformed community and towards the Catholic Church.

From local to national

In early September, the storm started rumbling with the public disgrace of Father Gergo Bese, a priest of the Kalocsa-Kecskemet archdiocese and a prominent social media influencer identified with the governing Fidesz party via its satellite KDNP (Christian Democratic Peoples’ Party). In 2022, Bese conducted a ‘house blessing’ of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s office in the former Carmelite monastery beside Buda Castle.

On September 6, Hungarian outlet Valasz Online revealed that Father Bese, a vocal supporter of Fidesz’s anti-LGBTQ+ agenda, had been living a double life as a gay porn movie actor. He was also (against church law) receiving a stipend from the KDNP for communications work without permission from his bishop. He is now under disciplinary suspension.

While Father Bese’s activities involved only consenting adults, their discovery, however, prompted revelations about other forms of misconduct by Kalocsa priests, including those involving minors. Two clerics – Gabor Ronaszeki and Robert Hathazi – both with strong ties to Hungary’s ruling parties, are now being prosecuted by secular authorities for alleged child molestation.

In 2023, Ronaszeki underwent a church disciplinary process during which he admitted the offences, and was removed from the priesthood. He’s understood to have offered money and gifts in exchange for sex to underage boys attending his Religious Education group over a three-year period.

Ronaszeki is the brother-in-law of former Fidesz MP and ministerial commissioner Monika Ronaszekine Keresztes, as well as being an associate of the KDNP leader Zsolt Semjen, who is currently serving as the deputy prime minister and minister for church affairs in the Orban government.

Hungarian media reported that Semjen had been a personal guest at Ronaszeki’s remote “recreational farm” near the small town of Janoshalma in Southern Hungary. Responding to the reports, Semjen claimed that “to the best of my recollection” he has not “visited the place in question”.

Handing matters over swiftly to police and prosecutors reflects improvements in practice following recent reforms across the Catholic world. Even so, the scandal has continued to grow numerically and geographically.

In a November 15 interview with Valasz Online, the archbishop of Kalocsa-Kecskemet, Balazs Babel, said public awareness of the two court cases had led to more complainants bringing allegations against other clerics.

“In recent months, the Archbishop’s Office has received many more reports than before,” he admitted, adding that several other Kalocsa priests have now been suspended pending investigation.

Major Pajor problem

The issue has morphed from a diocesan scandal into a national crisis. That’s partly because the outcry about Kalocsa was heard from early on in the national media, and partly because first central church institutions and then other dioceses became implicated in related misconduct stories.

First came the resignation on October 25 of the national Bishops’ Conference Secretary Father Tamas Toth, amid allegations of serious impropriety in mishandling communications relating to Kalocsa.

And then on December 5 the scandal reached the archdiocese of Esztergom-Budapest, led by Hungary’s primate, Cardinal Peter Erdo.

On that day, news broke of canonical and police investigations into Budapest priest Father Andras Pajor, a prominent face of Fidesz’s ‘political Christianity’. In 2023, Father Pajor received Hungary’s Knight’s Cross of the Order of Merit from Deputy Prime Minister Semjen for his “role in youth education”.

Father Pajor has repeatedly urged Christians to vote for Orban. He has also, latterly, become notable as a spreader of Russian propaganda, claiming in a YouTube video about the Ukraine war that, since 2022, some 35,000 Russian children had been kidnapped “for pedophiles in the West”.

Former altar boys from his parish, speaking anonymously to Valasz Online, tell a rather different story, however. They claim Father Pajor himself frequently made them strip naked, inspected their genitals intimately with his hands, and gave them full body massages.

Anticipating the next day’s announcement concerning Father Pajor, on December 4 the Bishops’ Conference finally acknowledged the pedophilia issue as a national problem in a statement: “The scandalous news concerning our Church in recent months has caused many to feel uneasy and disappointed… for sins committed, we must pray, fast and make atonement.”

The text continued: “The Catholic Church stands with the victims and communities affected. We pray for them and support their healing.”

Political reverberations

In a letter to fellow bishops obtained by the independent news outlet Telex, Archbishop Babel observed that the impact of the successive scandals was greater “because they are interwoven with politics”.

The political dimension magnifies the spotlight on the church, but the connection of religion and pedophilia is a huge challenge for Fidesz – a party that portrays itself at home and abroad as a protector of family values.

The party’s domestic alliance with historic churches long predates its international communication about Hungary as a bulwark of Christian civilisation against Muslim migration and rising woke-secularism.

Churches have vigorously supported government messaging regarding the supposed dangers that, Fidesz alleges, the LGBTQ+ community poses to children, especially ahead of 2022’s ‘child protection’ referendum, which was timed to boost turnout at that year’s general election. Around 75 per cent of Hungary’s state-funded children’s homes are run by churches.

“Orban’s government constantly seeks endorsement from the churches for its Christian credentials,” religious affairs commentator Janos Reichert tells BIRN. This is because, Reichert continues, there are three overlapping themes closely connected in the minds of many Hungarians: “Hungarian nationalism, anti-Communism and Christianity”.

These three motifs organically support each other such that, Reichert says, “criticism of any one of them cannot be tolerated by Fidesz for fear of danger to the other two”.

Thus, anyone who criticises even one of them is “attacking the ideological basis of the regime”, he adds.

Reichert’s take is shared by political journalist Balazs Gulyas. The government’s flagging support amid economic turbulence and the rise of opposition challenger Peter Magyar means that, in his view, Fidesz is paradoxically more, not less likely to double down reflexively on its traditional talking points, including political Christianity.

“Hungary’s governing parties are grappling with a sharp decline in popularity, making it politically expedient for them to cling to their (overstated) role as the primary political patrons of the churches,” Gulyas tells BIRN. “I find it highly unlikely that they’d abandon the program of political Christianity.”

Such views seem to be borne out by the government’s responses to the crisis to date. Far from distancing itself from the churches, Fidesz has rushed to their defence.

In November, the left-wing opposition party DK proposed a parliamentary motion calling for Hungary to follow the example of Ireland and Australia in establishing an independent enquiry into child sexual abuse in the church. The government used its parliamentary super-majority to defeat the proposal.

And addressing parliament’s justice committee on November 14, Deputy Prime Minister Semjen, speaking in his capacity as minister for church affairs, dismissed suggestions that the situation in the churches represented a particular concern. “The number of church cases is a hundredth of the number of secular cases, there is no reason to single out the church world,” he declared.

[probablyasocialecologist]

From the 1950s through Goldwater to Romney, the modern American right has had three major legs: anti-New Deal and welfarist libertarians, white social conservatives, and anti-Communist or pro-interventionist Hawks. Conservative politicians like Ronald Reagan deployed the metaphor of a three-legged stool to describe the intellectual and popular coalition of the modern American right. This coalition assumed hegemonic status in the 1970s and 80s through Nixon and Reagan. They agitated for and achieved many long-standing conservative objectives: rolling back the welfare state, implementing tough-on-crime policies, and remaking the judiciary to advance social conservative policies.  From this old-three legged stool, a new coalition has emerged. This new coalition consists of national conservatives, committed to the idea that America should abandon liberalism for a kind of ethno-religious nationalism. There are also post-liberals, who argue instead for a commitment to a right-wing communitarian universalism bordering on theocratic integralism (or sometimes just slipping over). They overlap with national conservatives in many respects, but reject the ethno-nationalist framing for a more universalistic perspective-often centered around Catholicism. Its possible this might wind up being a largely theoretical dispute, but it could become more in the event that the post-liberals aren’t capable of appealing to non-Catholic, let alone non-Christian, ethno-nationalists. The third leg of this stool is what I’ve called the Nietzschean right. The Nietzschean right, as exemplified by figures like BAP and Richard Hanania, is more secular and appeals to pseudo-scientific arguments about the need for a typically male and white (though there are some exceptions) elite to gain greater power in America. In BAP’s case this takes the form of arguing for fascism or, as he puts it, “something worse,” in a rather trollish way. Hanania is a bit closer to the mainstream. He argues for a capitalist Nietzscheanism where entrepreneurs aren’t subjected to democratic constraints in their pursuit of the kind of “greatness” that has taken Elon Musk’s X to new heights. They conflate the idea of Nietzsche’s superman with the idea of the entrepreneur. Never mind that Nietzsche himself (1844–1900) posited the artist-philosopher as the ideal superman and was largely contemptuous of businessmen.

[justforbooks]

Elias Khoury

Lebanese novelist best known for his 1998 book Gate of the Sun, which he said was an act of love for the Palestinian people

Throughout his life and in his 14 novels, the Lebanese writer Elias Khoury, who has died aged 76 after a long illness, explored his region’s contemporary history, whether it was identity politics, social inequality and injustice, or the expulsion and dispossession of Palestinians that he witnessed first-hand.

His best-known work, Gate of the Sun (1998), translated into English by Humphrey Davies, is both an epic love story between a husband and wife, and one of the first novels to describe the 1948 Palestinian Nakba, giving faces, names and histories to the voiceless.

Khoury used stories that he had collected over seven years from Palestinian refugees in Lebanon, and testimonials from Palestinians who remained in the Galilee region, today part of Israel. Gate of the Sun was an act of love for the Palestinian people, Khoury said, and in it he wove those stories together to give the full sweep of Palestinian history. The novel has been translated into 14 languages and in 2004 was made into a film by the Egyptian director Yousry Nasrallah.

Khoury was part of what is known as the civil war generation of Lebanon (1975-90), which includes writers such as Hanan al-Shaykh, Hoda Barakat, and Jabbour Douaihy, all of whose works were a significant departure from earlier Lebanese authors through their modern style and content. Khoury experimented with narration and form, as well as the way he wrote in fus’ha, or classical Arabic, bringing the language as close as possible to the spoken word, increasing its fluidity.

His first novel, On the Relations of the Circle (1975), was published the year the civil war began. He participated in the war with a leftist alliance, and was injured, losing his sight temporarily. In between fighting he wrote his second book, Little Mountain (1977), which describes the early years of the war through the eyes of three characters. In White Masks (1981), Khoury wrote about the social fragmentation and disintegration of Lebanese society undergoing the complexities of a civil war.

Born in Beirut, into a Christian middle-class family, he was the son of Adèle Abdelnour and Iskandar Khoury, who worked for Mobil Oil. He came of age in the 1960s and early 70s, when the city had become a flourishing intellectual and artistic regional capital. However, this was against a backdrop of sectarianism and profound economic inequality, deeply influenced by regional tensions.

While studying history at the Lebanese University in Beirut, in 1967 Khoury travelled to Jordan to work in a Palestinian refugee camp, then joined the Palestinian Liberation Organisation. In an interview with the Paris Review in 2017, Khoury said: “We trained in Syria, in the camps at Hama and Maysaloun, just off the Beirut- Damascus highway … Later on, we worked in the south of Lebanon as well as around Beirut.”

However, Khoury decided he wanted to become an “intellectual”, leaving for Paris in 1970 to study social history at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. There, he worked on a thesis about the 1840-60 Mount Lebanon war between the Druze and Maronite communities that provided a base for his subsequent writings on the civil war.

Two years later he returned to Lebanon where he worked at the Palestine Research Center and for its journal, Palestinian Affairs, where he became editor-in-chief in 1975. He was culture editor of the Lebanese daily As-Safir from 1983 to 1990 then, once the civil war ended, he ran the cultural supplement of the An-Nahar newspaper.

Khoury was actively involved in the region’s secular, leftwing intellectual scene, working with the poets Mahmoud Darwish and Adonis, and the writer and critic Edward Said in New York, where Khoury taught Arabic literature at Columbia University (1980-81), then held the title of global distinguished professor at New York University (2000-14). He also taught at the University of London, and universities in Switzerland and Lebanon.

According to his French-language translator, Rania Samara, who worked with him for 25 years, Khoury was “someone who lived his Arab society to the fullest with his political positions and commitments. He was courageous and frank about everything he thought, and all this was reflected in his work. There was no dissociation between life and the man.”

Although he always supported the Palestinian people, Khoury never hesitated to criticise Arab leaders, including the PLO, and he sought to understand Israel, teaching himself Hebrew and reading Israeli novelists. Indeed, his Children of the Ghetto trilogy (2016-23) is set in Lydda, Palestine, which becomes Lod, Israel, where his Palestinian characters speak Hebrew, but also in New York and Warsaw, where Jewish and Israeli histories are explored.

The trilogy characteristically follows a form of circuitous storytelling – Khoury spoke of his love for the One Thousand and One Nights, and the infinity and continuity of Scheherazade’s stories. His own stories often feel as if each narrator is passing a baton to the next. The protagonist of the three books in the trilogy, My Name Is Adam (2016), Star of the Sea (2019) and A Man Like Me (2023), Adam Dannoun, is a complex character whom Samara thought that Khoury most resembled, saying: “He didn’t know if the character resembled him or if he was the character. We no longer know who the author is and who the reader is. The reader is the author’s mirror. He loved this dizzying kind of game.”

In A Man Like Me, the character of Khalil, who originally appeared in Gate of the Sun attempting to revive a comatose leader of the Palestinian resistance by telling him stories, resurfaces, circling back to Khoury’s previous work.

As well as his novels and articles, Khoury wrote a collection of short stories, three plays and a number of literary studies.

Throughout his recent illness and nearly year-long hospitalisation suffering from ischaemia, Khoury wrote articles for the London-based Al-Quds al-Arabi newspaper. He was also the editor of the Arabic Journal of Palestine Studies and was working on a novel set in contemporary Beirut.

Two months before his death, Khoury wrote in Al-Quds al-Arabi: “Can he whose ordeal has been rooted in the land since the beginning of the Palestinian resistance lose heart? Gaza and Palestine have been savagely attacked for nearly a year, yet they continue to resist, unwavering. A model from which I have learned to love life every day.”

He is survived by his wife, Najla Jraissati Khoury, a writer and researcher whom he married in 1971, his daughter, Abla, his son, Talal, a grandson, Yamen, and three siblings, Samira, Souad and Michel.

🔔 Elias Khoury, author, editor and journalist, born 12 July 1948; died 15 September 2024

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[bimboficationblues]

what is the connection you see between liberalism and "prevent suicide at any cost"? i get the other two but not liberalism

oh I'm so glad you asked, this is a super fascinating topic imo.

One of the interesting shifts that goes on in the philosophical conversation around suicide in early modernity is that while religious objections to suicide were being undermined, this didn't necessarily stop objections. (Hume is one of the few bigger names that doesn't seek an alternative secular grounding for opposition to suicide and instead just rebukes the religious argument.) Instead the anti-suicide attitude became sociopolitically driven. On the ideological level, anti-suicide thought assumed a particular kind of social and political subject and image of society that would have been alien to earlier Christian writers like Aquinas. On the more material level we see the modern state developing an increased interest in the health of their populations (though only on an abstract, utilitarian level, for the purposes of maintaining security and control) via the disciplinary institutions of law and medicine.

A really good example: while John Stuart Mill, Boy Genius, never explicitly addresses suicide in On Liberty, he does indirectly discuss it when carving out exceptions to his "harm principle." While generally intervening in the behavior of others for "their own good" is politically and socially undesirable for Mill, there are some exceptions. He uses the example of selling yourself into slavery as an "extreme example" of how one should not be permitted to give up their own liberty and ability to make reasoned decisions about their life. Personally, I think this passage might cut either way on the question of suicide; Mill's primarily interested in social and political liberty and so the idea of removing one's own "metaphysical" liberty through self-annihilation seems outside his scope.

But he also argues that, despite the harm principle, society can intervene if someone is putting themselves at risk or going to harm themselves if they are a "child, or delirious, or in some state of excitement or absorption incompatible with the full use of the reflecting faculty" - i.e. a non-rational agent in some way. Even if it's not what Mill is directly addressing, there's a clear line to be drawn between his ideas about the ability to exercise reason as a foundation for autonomy and modern, non-religious anti-suicide sentiment. This is a recurring theme of modern liberal attitudes towards suicide, which regard it as a fundamentally anti-rational act and therefore grants society permission to override, restrain, and act upon you in ways contrary to your individual desires. (For the record, this same supposed lack of ability to govern oneself effectively is also Mill's self-absolving justification for authoritarianism and colonialism: "Despotism is a legitimate mode of government in dealing with barbarians.") You and I might conceive of suicidal ideation as a rational or at least quasi-rational response, but that's not typically, or at least consistently, something that liberal thought grants.

You can find similar views (if unique to their own frameworks) in Hobbes (natural right), Kant (deontology), even Spinoza to some extent (egoism), even as each of them is (in some form or another) trying to resist a religious justification for their opposition.

Contemporarily, in response to Washington v. Glucksberg (an assisted suicide SCOTUS case), Rawls, Nozick, Judith Jarvis Thomson, Ron Dworkin, and a couple other schmucks filed an amicus curiae brief arguing in defense of assisted suicide. That might seem to cut against my claim - maybe this is a change in the shape of liberal thought? But! I think what's noteworthy is that 1) their argument still takes place entirely on the terrain of rights, i.e. what the state is willing to grant and enforce (which is appropriate considering the venue, but still relevant), and 2) assisted suicide has been the main contemporary avenue of discussion in philosophy and policy regarding suicide. You don't see a generalized defense of suicide too often these days. it's taken as something of a given that while it may or may not be okay to end your life because of physical illness or debilitation, and this is an acceptable debate for public policy, it is definitely NOT okay to end your life because of mental illness or because you want to.

I'm pointing to political philosophers because it comes immediately to me, but I think they serve as good representatives of how the anti-suicide perspective can have a political "liberal" shape beyond just religiosity or psychiatric intervention, and how it's changed over time. sadly don't have the time to do a full historical genealogy effortpost on this subject, but to put on the Foucault hat for a very brief moment: suicide is decreasingly arbitrated by religious institutions. Instead we find it governed by secular law and judges (e.g. Washington v. Glucksberg), and by health regimes of psychiatry and medicine, all of these forces that developed and intensified their discipline over large populations as part of the contemporary science of statecraft.

Anyway, so when I say that anti-suicide attitudes are rooted in bad values and institutions like liberalism, that's what I mean - the idea that suicide is an irrational act that needs to be suppressed by state power, in the process producing a "suicidal subject" that needs to be contained by law and medicine.

An interesting article on some of this stuff, by way of Hobbes, Foucault, and ideas around the legality and social convention of suicide.

[femsolid]

Every time I see a christian woman on this app giving lectures about this and that but especially about her cult and how her fellow cultists should behave I keep thinking about that bible line "I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence." Your very actions are contradicting your faith. The only reason you're allowed to speak your mind at all is because of secularism. And these women are typically very confrontational, just like the so-called traditional housewives out here. They're typically very opinionated, smart albeit deluded, and confrontational women. So it's a curious thing to see them fight to lose their humanity, since fighting only makes them more human. You can try to teach me about how abortion is wrong or that Jesus is a feminist or that patriarchy is natural but I know you're not even supposed to think about such things. "And if they will learn any thing, let them ask their husbands at home" also says the bible. Yet the most agressively traditionalist and christian women out there are exactly that: agressive. Pontifical. Assertive. So I never worry too much about them. Whatever dogma they follow, it's obviously not working very well. They debate in favour of not being allowed to debate. That's bound to fail. It's the quiet ones, the isolated women with no self confidence, no political knowledge and therefore no ability to form an opinion, the women who simply don't have any time for themselves, let alone social medias and debates, they're the real "traditional christian housewives" even when they don't know they are. My mother lived like that for 17 years before mustering up the courage to divorce my father. She was an atheist yet lived her life as close as possible to the christian ideal without realizing it. In fact, it was when she started using social medias and talking to people of all walks of life in chatrooms that she started getting back her personality, her character, her backbone, dreams and ambitions. I'm proud of her for that. So don't waste your time trying to reason women online or at protest rallies. Find the real isolated ones and befriend them. Sometimes all it takes is them seeing that there are other ways to live, other perspectives and that her tyrant isn't all that.

[numbers-31-blog]

The real lie is that Christianity is a religion. Christianity is a totalitarian movement meant to overturn democracy and secularism. Its goal is to create a theocratic society where freedom of (and from) religion is no longer a right. Thus, granting Christianity the protected status of a religion undermines, rather than strengthens, religious freedom by attacking its very foundation: the 1st amendment of the Bill of Rights.

THE CHRISTIAN AGENDA FOR AMERICA

1. Educational Reform: Getting 'intelligent design' (creationism) taught in public schools and eventually banning evolution from being taught. Reinstituting mandatory Christian prayer. Eliminating all sex education other than 'abstinence only'. Teaching a revisionist form of U.S. history that, among other inaccuracies, frames the founders as fundamentalist Christians and the enslavement of blacks as voluntary servitude. Of course, the Christian's long term goal is to eliminate public education entirely.

2. Economic Reform: Most American Christians believe in laissez-faire capitalism which means they want to abolish ALL regulations upon business. This would mean eliminating the EPA, FDA, SEC, and countless other government regulatory agencies. The wealthy corporations, who already pay little or no tax in many cases, would pay zero taxes under a Christian regime. This entails canceling all social programs too, so say goodbye to food stamps, social security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Oh, and they also want to privatize EVERYTHING including the schools, fire dept., water, sewage, roads, libraries -- all of it except the police and military.

3. Constitution Reform: Even though they insist that the founding fathers were fundy Christians like them, they want to 'reassess' the U.S. Constitution because it obviously does no cater to their religious beliefs. There are already Christians who are attempting to organize and convene a '2nd constitutional convention' towards this end. If they succeed, Americans, in the BEST scenario, can kiss goodbye to their 1st amendment rights to free speech and gays will of course lose their right to marry.

4. Social Reform: Homosexuality will outlawed. Abortion will be outlawed. Women will become 2nd class citizens whose only respectable option in life will be to become housewives and homemakers. Non-white immigrants will be deported to their countries of origin. I would doubt that they would re-enslave blacks, but experience has taught me to NEVER give Christians the benefit of a doubt.

THIS is why I am a Satanist. I will not allow Christians to ruin my country. I used to believe that all people could learn to live in harmony, but now I see the error in my thinking. It is either them or us. Of course, I am not advocating violence --yet. Satanists should follow the example of the The Satanic Temple and use every legal, nonviolent means to prevent the Christians from insinuating their religious beliefs into our government. But if this fails and the Christians succeed in taking over, then it will be WAR. I would rather die than live under Christian totalitarianism. If they want me to bend a knee to Christ, they will have to break my legs first. F*** Jesus and Hail Satan!

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Sam Harris

Published: April/May 2024

This article was adapted from a transcript of the November 7, 2023, episode of the author’s podcast, Making Sense.

We have witnessed extreme moral confusion since Hamas attacked Israel on October 7, 2023, killing approximately 1,200 people and taking over 200 hostages. Some of it has been just frank anti-Semitism, but much is actual confusion. Most people in the West still don’t understand the problem of jihadism. We often speak about “terrorism” and “violent extremism” generically. And we are told that any link between these evils and the doctrine of Islam is spurious and nothing more than an expression of “Islamophobia.” Incidentally, the term Islamophobia was invented in the 1970s by Iranian theocrats to do just this: prevent any criticism of Islam and to cast secularism itself as a form of bigotry. Islam is a system of ideas, subscribed to by people of every race and ethnicity. It’s just like Christianity in that regard. Unlike Judaism, Christianity and Islam are both aggressively missionary faiths, and they win converts from everywhere. People criticize the doctrines of Christianity all the time and worry about their political and social influences—but no one confuses this for bigotry against Christians as people, much less racism. There’s no such thing as “Christophobia.” As someone once said (it was not Christopher Hitchens, but it sure sounds like him): “Islamophobia is a term created by fascists, and used by cowards, to manipulate morons.”

In any case, fundamentalist Christians and Orthodox Jews don’t tend to be confused about the problem of jihadism because they understand the power of religious beliefs, however secular people generally are. We imagine that people everywhere, at bottom, want the same things: They want to live safe and prosperous lives. They want clean drinking water and good schools for their kids. And we imagine that if whole groups of people start behaving in extraordinarily destructive ways—practicing suicidal terrorism against noncombatants, for instance—they must have been pushed into extremis by others. What could turn ordinary human beings into suicide bombers, and what could get vast numbers of their neighbors to celebrate them as martyrs, other than their entire society being oppressed and humiliated to the point of madness by some malign power? So, in the case of Israel, many people imagine that the ghoulish history Palestinian terrorism simply indicates how profound the injustice has been on the Israeli side.

Now, there are many things to be said in criticism of Israel, particularly its expansion of settlements on contested land. But Israel’s behavior is not what explains the suicidal and genocidal inclinations of a group like Hamas. The Islamic doctrines of martyrdom and jihad do.

These are religious beliefs, sincerely held. They are beliefs about the moral structure of the universe. And they explain how normal people—even good ones—can commit horrific acts of violence against innocent civilians on purpose, not as collateral damage, and still consider themselves good. When you believe that life in this world has no value, apart from deciding who goes to Hell and who goes to Paradise, it becomes possible to feel perfectly at ease killing noncombatants, or even using your own women and children as human shields, because you know that any Muslims who get killed will go to Paradise for eternity.

If you don’t understand that jihadists sincerely believe these things, you don’t understand the problem Israel faces. The problem isn’t merely Palestinian nationalism, resource competition, or any other normal terrestrial grievance. In fact, the problem isn’t even hatred, though there is enough of that to go around. The problem is religious certainty.

It really is possible to be critical of Israel, and to be committed to the political rights of the Palestinian people, without being confused about the reality of Islamic religious fanaticism—or the threat that it poses not just to Israel but to open societies everywhere. My friend Christopher Hitchens was extremely critical of Israel and openly supportive of Palestinian statehood. But he wasn’t even slightly confused about the problem of jihad.

There have been nearly 50,000 acts of Islamic terrorism in the past forty years—and the French group that maintains a database of these attacks considers that an undercount.1 Ninety percent of them have occurred in Muslim countries. Most have nothing to do with Israel or the Jews. There have been eighty-two attacks in France and over 2,000 in Pakistan during this period. Want France to be more like Pakistan? You just need more jihadists. You just need more people susceptible to becoming jihadists, which is a transformation that can happen very quickly—just as quickly as new beliefs can take root in a person’s mind. You just need a wider Muslim community that doesn’t condemn jihadism but tacitly admits the theology that inspires it will be true and perfect until the end of the world. You just need millions of people who will protest Israel for defending itself, or call for the deaths of cartoonists for depicting the prophet Muhammad, and yet not make a peep about the jihadist atrocities that occur daily, all over the world, in the name of their religion.

In the West, there is now a large industry of apology and obfuscation designed to protect Muslims from having to grapple with these facts. The humanities and social science departments of every university are filled with scholars and pseudo-scholars—deemed experts in terrorism, religion, Islamic jurisprudence, anthropology, political science, and other fields—who claim that Muslim extremism is never what it seems. These experts insist that we can never take jihadists at their word and that none of their declarations about God, Paradise, martyrdom, and the evils of apostasy have anything to do with their real motivations.

When one asks what the motivations of jihadists actually are, one encounters a tsunami of liberal delusion. Needless to say, the West is to blame for all the mayhem we see in Muslim societies. After all, how would we feel if outside powers and their mapmakers had divided our lands and stolen our oil? These beleaguered people just want what everyone else wants out of life. They want economic and political security. They want to be free to flourish in ways that would be fully compatible with a global civil society, if only they were given the chance. Secular liberals imagine that jihadists are acting as anyone else would given a similar history of unhappy encounters with the West. And they totally discount the role that religious beliefs play in inspiring groups such as Hamas and al-Qaeda, or even the Islamic State—to the point where it would be impossible for a jihadist to prove he was doing anything for religious reasons.

Apparently, it’s not enough for an educated person with economic opportunities to devote himself to the most extreme and austere version of Islam, to articulate his religious reasons for doing so ad nauseam, and even to go so far as to confess his certainty about martyrdom on video before blowing himself up in a crowd. Such demonstrations of religious fanaticism are somehow considered rhetorically insufficient to prove that he really believed what he said he believed. Of course, if a white supremacist goes on a killing spree in a Black church and says he did this because he hates Black people and thinks the White race is under attack, this motive is accepted at face value without the slightest hesitation. This double standard is guaranteed to exonerate Islam every time. The game is rigged.

Do not mistake what I’m saying now for anti-Muslim bigotry. I’m talking about the consequences of ideas, not the ethnic origins of people. Not a word I’ve said, or will ever say on this topic, has anything to do with race. And the truth is, I’m not remotely xenophobic. I’m a xenophile. The Middle East has produced some of my favorite parts of culture—some of my favorite foods, music, and architecture. Despite my better judgment, I absolutely love the sound of the Muslim call to prayer. Everything I’m saying about the problem of jihadism is about the problem of jihadism—the triumphal belief by some percentage of the world’s Muslims that they must conquer the world for the one true faith through force and that Paradise awaits anyone who would sacrifice his or her life to that end.

Of course, many religions produce a fair amount of needless suffering. Consider the pedophile-priest scandal in the Catholic Church, which is something I’ve written and spoken about before, I hope with sufficient outrage. One can certainly argue, as I have, that Catholic teaching is partly to blame for these crimes against children. By making contraception and abortion taboo, the Church ensured there would be many out-of-wedlock births among its faithful; by stigmatizing unwed mothers, it further guaranteed that many children would be abandoned to Church-run orphanages, where they could be preyed upon by sexually unhealthy men. I don’t think any of this was consciously planned; it’s just a grotesque consequence of some very bad ideas. And yet the truth is that there is no direct link between Christian scripture and child rape. However, imagine if there were. Just imagine if the New Testament contained multiple passages promising Heaven to any priest who raped a child. And then imagine that in the aftermath of an endless series of child rapes within the Church, more or less every journalist, politician, and academic denied that they had anything whatsoever to do with the “true” teachings of Catholicism. That is the uncanny situation we find ourselves in with respect to Islam.

The problem that we must grapple with—and by “we” I mean Muslims and non-Muslims alike—is that the doctrines that directly support jihadist violence are very easy to find in the Qur’an, in the hadith, and in the biography of Muhammad. For Muslims, Muhammad is the greatest person who has ever lived. Unfortunately, he did not behave like Jesus or Buddha—at all. It sort of matters that he tortured people and cut their heads off and took sex slaves, because his example is meant to inspire his followers for all time.

There are many, many verses in the Qur’an that urge Muslims to wage jihad—jihad as holy war against apostates and unbelievers—and the most violent of these are thought to supersede any that seem more benign. But the truth is, there isn’t much that is benign in the Qur’an; there is certainly no Jesus as we find him in Matthew urging people to love their enemies and turn the other cheek. All the decapitation we see being practiced by jihadists isn’t an accident; it’s in the Qur’an and in the larger record of the life of the Prophet.

Worse, in my view, is the moral logic one gets from the doctrine of martyrdom and Paradise. If you take martyrdom and Paradise seriously, it becomes impossible to make moral errors. If you blow yourself up in a crowd, your fellow Muslims will go straight to Paradise. You’ve actually done them a favor. Unbelievers will go to Hell, where they belong. However many lives you destroy, it’s all good.

Again, most of this horror has nothing to do with Israel or the West. In 2014, six jihadis affiliated with the Pakistani Taliban attacked a school in Peshawar. These jihadis came from outside of Pakistan; there was a Chechen, two Afghans, and three Arabs. They murdered 145 people, 132 of whom were children. They burned a teacher alive in front of her students and then killed all the children they could get their hands on. They didn’t take any hostages. They had no list of demands. They intended to die to achieve martyrdom. And they did die, so they got at least half of what they wanted. It is very difficult for secular people to understand how this behavior could be possible. They assume only madmen would do this sort of thing.

But that’s the horror of it—you don’t have to be mad to be a jihadist. You don’t even have to be a bad person. You just have to be a true believer. You just have to know, for sure, that you and all the good people will get everything you want after you die and that the Creator of the Universe wants nothing more than for you to kill unbelievers. Here is what a supporter of the Pakistani Taliban said when interviewed about the school massacre:

Human life only has value among you worldly materialist thinkers. For us, this human life is only a tiny, meaningless fragment of our existence. Our real destination is the Hereafter. We don’t just believe it exists, we know it does. Death is not the end of life. It is the beginning of existence in a world much more beautiful than this. As you know, the [Urdu] word for death is “intiqaal.” It means “transfer,” not “end.” Paradise is for those of pure hearts. All children have pure hearts. They have not sinned yet … They have not yet been corrupted by [their kafir parents]. We did not end their lives. We gave them new ones in Paradise, where they will be loved more than you can imagine. They will be rewarded for their martyrdom. After all, we also martyr ourselves with them. The last words they heard were the slogan of Takbeer [“Allah u Akbar”]. Allah Almighty says Himself in Surhah Al-Imran [3:169–170] that they are not dead. You will never understand this. If your faith is pure, you will not mourn them, but celebrate their birth into Paradise.

My point is that we have to take declarations of this kind at face value, because they are honest confessions of a worldview—and it is a worldview that is totally antithetical to everything that civilized people value in the twenty-first century. This problem is much bigger than the ongoing crisis between Israel and the Palestinians.

Taking Anti-Semitism Seriously

I’ve always had a paradoxical position on Israel. I’ve said that I don’t think it should exist as a Jewish state—because, in my view, organizing a state around a religion is irrational and divisive. This follows directly from my views about organized religion in general. So, obviously, I don’t think there should be Muslim states either—or Christian ones, for that matter. However, there are over twenty countries in which Islam is the official state religion and over fifty in which Muslims are the majority—and there is exactly one Jewish state. Given the history of genocidal anti-Semitism, which persists even now, mostly in the Muslim world, given that the Jews have been run out of every other country in the Middle East and North Africa where they lived for centuries, if any people deserve a state of their own, organized on any premise they want, it’s the Jews.

In 1939, the S.S. St. Louis, a ship carrying over 900 Jews seeking to escape the Holocaust, was denied entry into Cuba, the United States, and Canada and then forced to return to Europe, where many of those Jews ended up in the ovens of Auschwitz. In my view, that’s all the justification for Israel one needs. Never again should Jews have to beg to stand on some dry patch of earth, only to be denied one, and then systematically murdered.

I’ve never taken modern anti-Semitism very seriously. I think I’ve done exactly one episode of my podcast on the topic. I’ve studied it. I understand its roots in Christian theology—despite the fact that Jesus, his apostles, and the Virgin Mary were all Jews. I’m a student of the Holocaust. And I’m well aware of the anti-Semitism that existed in Europe and the United States at the time. Read David Wyman’s book The Abandonment of the Jews to understand how widespread anti-Semitism was in America, even as Jews were being killed by the millions in Europe. And, of course, I’m all too aware of the anti-Semitism that is endemic to Islam—and of the way it has been compressed into a diamond of intolerance and hatred throughout the Muslim world by the modern influence of Nazism. There’s some very depressing history there for anyone who wants to read it.

And I’ve been aware that year after year in the United States, no group has been targeted with more hate, and hate crime, than Jews. This is something that many Americans aren’t aware of. As I said, the American Left would have you believe that “Islamophobia” is a major concern. Vice President Kamala Harris is now heading a commission on “Islamophobia” in America, as though that’s the problem we’ve been seeing recently—just a massive outpouring of hatred for Muslims in America by non-Muslims. Has that ever happened?

Even in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, Jews were targeted far more than Muslims. And that has been true every year since. According to FBI statistics, though Jews are just over 2 percent of the population, they receive over half the hate in America and five times the level that Muslims do (and I think it’s safe to say that much of this hate comes from Muslims themselves). Jewish schools and synagogues have always incurred greater security costs than non-Jewish institutions, and for good reason, because the threat to them is greatest.

While this status quo has been despicable, I have always believed that it was tolerable. And I say this as someone who has received death threats for two decades, and many of these threats are often explicitly anti-Semitic. Even given all this, I have felt that anti-Semitism, as a real threat to Jews, certainly in the West, was behind us. I can’t say that now. In the past few weeks, with Jews being openly reviled and threatened all over the world, in the immediate aftermath of the most shocking atrocities committed against them since the Holocaust, I’ve begun to think that anything is possible.

Incidentally, if you ever wondered how you might have behaved had you been a German on the morning after Kristallnacht—if you’ve ever wondered whether you would have just gone about your business or done something to resist the slide of your society into absolute depravity—more or less everyone on Earth is now getting the chance to see just that. There was a mob chanting “Gas the Jews” in front of the Sydney Opera House. We have Jewish students in Ivy League universities cowering behind locked doors in fear for their physical safety. All university administrators, Diversity Equity and Inclusion geniuses, and Hollywood celebrities who rushed to sign open letters in support of the Palestinian cause—without taking a moment to understand what actually happened on October 7, or understanding it and not caring—you are all now part of history.

The outpouring of anti-Semitism that we have witnessed since October 7 really seems to mark a new moment, both in the United States and globally. And for the first time, I now worry that my daughters will live in a world where their Jewishness will matter to people who do not wish them well, and they will be forced to make certain life choices on that basis, choices that I never had to make. Apart from being a public figure and having to deal with disordered people of every description, I have never been concerned about anti-Semitism for even five minutes in my life. I now feel that I have been quite naive. That’s putting it charitably. I’ve been utterly ignorant of what has been going on beneath the surface.

Of course, the boundary between anti-Semitism and generic moral stupidity is a little hard to discern—and I’m not sure that it is always important to find it. I’m not sure it matters why a person can’t distinguish between collateral damage in a necessary war and conscious acts of genocidal sadism that are celebrated as a religious sacrament by a death cult. Our streets have been filled with people literally tripping over themselves in their eagerness to demonstrate that they cannot distinguish between those who intentionally kill babies and those who inadvertently kill them, having taken great pains to avoid killing them, while defending themselves against the very people who have just intentionally tortured and killed innocent men, women, and, yes … babies; and who are committed to doing this again at any opportunity, and who are using their own innocent noncombatants as human shields; who are killing parents in front of their children and children in front of their parents; who burned people alive at a music festival devoted to “peace,” decapitated others, and dragged their dismembered bodies through the streets, all to shouts of “God is great.”

If you are recognizing the humanity of actual barbarians, while demonizing the people who actually worry about war crimes and who drop leaflets and call cell phones for days in an effort to get noncombatants to leave specific buildings before they are bombed, because those buildings sit on top of tunnels filled with genocidal lunatics who, again, have just sedulously tortured and murdered families as a religious sacrament; if you have landed, proudly and sanctimoniously, on the wrong side of this asymmetry—this vast gulf between savagery and civilization—while marching through the quad of an Ivy League institution wearing yoga pants, I’m not sure it matters that your moral confusion is due to the fact that you just happen to hate Jews. Whether you’re an anti-Semite or just an apologist for atrocity is probably immaterial. The crucial point is that you are dangerously confused about the moral norms and political sympathies that make life in this world worth living.

What is more, you don’t even care about what you think you care about, because you have failed to see that Hamas, and jihadists generally, are the principal cause of all the misery and dysfunction we see—not just in Gaza but throughout the Muslim world. Gaza is only an “open air prison” because its democratically elected government is a jihadist organization that is eager to martyr all Palestinians for the pleasure of killing Jews. A rational government in Gaza that cared about the fate of its citizens could have made something beautiful—or at least not awful—out of that strip of land on the Mediterranean. But Hamas has spent billions of dollars on terrorism. The suffering of Gaza is due to the fact that it has been run by a death cult, against which Israel has had to defend itself continuously. The line you keep hearing from defenders of Israel—that “if the Palestinians put down their weapons, there would be peace; if the Israelis put down their weapons, there would be a genocide”—happens to be true.

But now we have college students at our best universities tearing down posters of hostages held by Hamas—some of whom are Americans, and some of whom are children—imagining that they are supporting the Palestinian cause. It boggles the mind. We have LGBTQ activists supporting Hamas—when they wouldn’t survive a day in Gaza because Hamas throws anyone suspected of being gay off of rooftops. They’re directly supported by Iran, where gay people are regularly hanged.

We’ve got feminist organizations such as CodePink going all in for Hamas and accusing the Israelis of genocide. Do they understand how Hamas treats women? Did CodePink support the women of Iran who were thrown in prison and even killed for daring to show their hair in public? Do they realize that women are treated like property throughout the Muslim world and that this is not an accident? Under Islam, the central message about women is that they are second-class citizens and the property of the men in their lives. Rather than support the rights of women and girls to not live as slaves, Western liberals support the right of theocrats to treat their wives and daughters however they want as long as these theocrats are Muslim.

If anything good comes from this outpouring of hate and moral confusion, it will be the end of identitarian politics of the Left. A friend of mine was just at an art opening, where they were passing hors d’oeuvres, and someone she knew came up to her and asked if she had any food in her teeth. And my friend said, “No, your teeth are perfectly white and beautiful.” Unfortunately, the woman herself was Black and considered the association of the terms white and beautiful a microaggression. She got greatly offended and stormed off. What, did she want brown teeth? I know nothing about this person apart from this anecdote, but I guarantee you that this prodigy of social justice is completely confused about Israel and Hamas and jihadism. This is the sort of person for whom words are violence but massacring women and children with knives, or burning them alive, is a completely defensible response to “oppression.” Most elite circles in the West—academia, Hollywood, the media, nonprofits—have been poisoned, to one degree or another, by this social justice psychosis where imaginary harms are seized upon as though they were existential concerns, and pure evil is easily shrugged off or even celebrated as a moral victory.

What Jihadists Want

The bright line, ethically, between Israel and her enemies can be seen on the question of human shields. There are people who use them, and there are people who are deterred by them, however imperfectly. Hamas put its headquarters in Gaza under a hospital. Let me say that again: Hamas put its headquarters in Gaza under a hospital. Again, imagine the Jews of Israel doing that, and imagine how little it would matter to Hamas if they did. Hamas is telling people to stay in Gaza and has even physically prevented them from leaving so that they will be killed by Israeli bombs. They are using their own people as human shields—in addition to more than 200 hostages they took for this purpose. No one cares less about Palestinian women and children than Hamas does. However horrible the images coming out of Gaza, it is Hamas who should be blamed for the loss of life there. You’re calling for a ceasefire now? There was a ceasefire on October 6. Hamas broke it by deliberately murdering more than 1,400 innocent people.

Of course, Israel should hold itself to the highest ethical standards for waging war. For two reasons: One, because it should. It is right for the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) to do whatever it can to minimize the loss of innocent life. And, two, they should hold themselves to the highest ethical standards because the rest of the world will hold them to impossible ones.

Look at these protests we’re seeing all over the world, which began before Israel had dropped a single bomb. Now that there have been several thousand Palestinian casualties, cities across the globe are seething with rage. But Assad has killed hundreds of thousands of his fellow Muslims in Syria. The Saudis have killed well over 100,000 Muslims in Yemen. Where are the protests? No one cares, least of all Muslims. They only care when non-Muslims produce these casualties—and they especially care when Jews do it. Israel is routinely condemned by the United Nations, and the U.N. could not pass a condemnation of Hamas for the atrocities it committed on October 7.

As I said, I don’t know whether a ground invasion is the right approach. But there is no question that Israel had to act; they have to destroy Hamas, and, whatever they do, noncombatants will get killed in the process. Again, this is Hamas’s fault.

But the problem is much bigger than Hamas. Civilized people everywhere—both non-Muslim and Muslim—have no choice but to combat jihadism. This has been glaringly obvious since September 11, 2001, but it should be much more obvious now. For Israel, October 7 was much worse than 9/11 was for America. There’s almost no comparison. The revealed threat to Israel really is existential. However, in the long term, I think the threat of jihadism is existential for the West too.

This demands a much longer conversation about what to do about jihadism. I happen to think that most of our response to it should be covert. I don’t know why the Israelis, the Americans, the British, or anyone else has to take credit for anything. However long it takes, members of Hamas, Hezbollah, al-Qaeda, the Islamic State, al-Shebab, Boko Haram, Pakistani Taliban, and every other jihadist organization on Earth should be made to understand, every day of their lives, that the martyrdom they seek will be granted to them. Jihadism must be destroyed in every way it can be destroyed—logistically, economically, informationally, but also in the most material sense, which means killing a lot of jihadists. We can argue with their sympathizers. And we can hope to de-radicalize them. But we also have to kill committed jihadists. These are not normal antagonists with rational demands. These are not people who want what we want. This is not politics, and it will never be politics. It is a very long war.

Back in 2016, I released an episode of my podcast titled “What Do Jihadists Really Want?,” based on an issue of the magazine Dabiq, put out by the Islamic State. You can listen to that for more detail.2 You can also read the book I wrote with Maajid Nawaz, Islam and the Future of Tolerance, to understand more of my thinking on this topic. Jihadist ideology has nothing to do with Israel, American foreign policy, colonialism, or any other rational grievance, and there is no concession that any civilized society can make to appease it.

We’ve forgotten about jihadism in recent years. But it hasn’t gone away. Whatever one thinks about our withdrawal from Afghanistan, it was surely perceived as a victory by jihadists everywhere—and the implications of that have yet to be felt. In the West, we tend to remain blissfully unaware of Islamic terrorism (which is just another name for jihadism) unless it happens in the United States or Europe. We don’t tend to notice jihadist atrocities committed in Afghanistan, Pakistan, or India, much less in the dozen or so countries in Africa that suffer them more or less continuously. And we are totally unaware of foiled plots, of which there have been many.

As I said, we also tend to think in terms of “terrorism” or “violent extremism,” and while I use those words myself, we have to focus on jihadism, because that is the underlying ideological commitment.

Now, jihadists themselves are not a unified front. There is a very deep schism between Sunni and Shia—despite the fact that some groups will collaborate across it, as we see with Hamas and the Iranian regime. And there are internecine divisions even among jihadists of the same faith. The Afghan and Pakistani Taliban don’t even get along at this point. And that’s a very good thing. Hopefully, we have an army of smart people with the necessary language skills, sowing hatred and confusion among jihadist groups twenty-four hours a day. But jihadists are all united in their hatred of liberal Western values, in their certainty of Paradise, and in their willingness to turn this world into an abattoir for the glory of God.

We cannot tolerate jihadists. We cannot let them immigrate into our open societies. And by we, I mean not just non-Muslims; I mean all Muslims who want to live sane lives in the twenty-first century. In the case of Israel and Palestine, the Palestinians have to rid themselves of their jihadists. And if that’s not possible, a stable peace with the Palestinians is not possible.

But this problem is so much bigger than Israel, or even global anti-Semitism. Spend some time reading about how the Islamic State treats Shiites. Look at the history of terrorism in Pakistan or India. If you want a totally painless way to do this, watch Hotel Mumbai—it’s a great film that depicts the terrorist attacks in Mumbai in 2008 by the Pakistani group Lashkar-e-Taiba. If you’ve forgotten, around a dozen jihadists killed over 160 people in Mumbai, many at the Taj Hotel, and the film shows this with brutal realism. And while they killed some Jews too, at a Jewish center, this attack had nothing to do with Israel, America, race, so-called “settler colonialism,” or any of the other factors that Leftist fellow travelers have been fixated on since October 7. Really, this is the least boring piece of homework you will ever be given. Go watch Hotel Mumbai, and once the killing starts, ask yourself how anyone, East or West, Muslim or non-Muslim, can live with these people.

There is an intuition out there that to solve the problems in the Middle East, we must understand them in all their depth and complexity. And for this, the most important thing to grapple with is the so-called “historical context.” But for the purpose of really understanding this conflict and why it is so intractable, historical context is a distraction—every moment spent talking about something other than jihadism is a moment when the oxygen of moral sanity is leaving the room.

There’s no sorting this out by reference to history, because any group can arbitrarily decide where to set the dial on its time machine. In any case, the Jews in Israel are “indigenous people.” The British were colonialists. Colonialists have some place to go back to. Where could the Jews go back to? There has been a continuous presence of Jews in what is now Israel for thousands of years. Most of the recent immigrants—Jews from Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Libya, and other Muslim-majority countries—were driven from their homes by their Muslim neighbors after 1948, in collective punishment for the founding of Israel. Is anyone talking about their right of return? There are displaced people everywhere on Earth, but only the Palestinians have been turned into a global fetish for their right of return.

Incidentally, if a history of land theft and oppression were sufficient to produce genocidal terrorism, where are the Native American suicide bombers? Where are the Tibetan Buddhist suicide bombers? Do you realize how much oppression they have experienced at the hands of the Chinese? Where are the Palestinian Christian suicide bombers? (I think there has been one.) The truth is ideas matter. It absolutely matters what people believe. Certainty about Paradise, and about martyrdom as a way of getting there, is one of the most potent memetic poisons the human mind has ever produced. Whatever historical, political, or economic context you want to apply to Israel and Palestine, jihadism is real; its intentions toward the Jews, infidels, and apostates are genocidal; and this is a global problem, because jihadism enjoys an appalling level of support throughout the Muslim world despite the fact that it is responsible for far more death and destruction among Muslims than Israel’s acts of self-defense have ever been.

Now, obviously, there are whole populations throughout the Muslim world that are effectively hostages to the religious fanatics who control them—and certainly a large percentage of the Palestinians fit that description, as does much of Iran. But it is very easy to underestimate how much sympathy there is for the jihadist project among Muslims who are not themselves actively waging jihad. And this is a terrible thing to contemplate. When 100,000 people show up in the center of London in support of Hamas, we have a problem. Of course, it’s an open question how many of those people really support jihad. But imagining that very few of them do is pure delusion. We have to win a war of ideas with these people. Because if the future is going to be remotely tolerable, the vast majority of Muslims have to disavow jihadism and unite with non-Muslims in fighting it. When hundreds of thousands of people show up in London to condemn Hamas, the Islamic State, or any specific instance of jihadist savagery, without both-sides-ing anything, then we will know that we’ve made a modicum of progress. When Muslims by the millions pour into the streets in protest, not over cartoons depicting the Prophet Muhammad but over the murder of cartoonists by their own religious fanatics, we will know that an open-ended future of pluralistic tolerance might be possible.

Yes, there are many other problems in the world at the moment. There’s the war in Ukraine and the looming possibility of conflict between the United States and China. Some of these problems appear much bigger than jihadism, but they all admit of some rational basis for negotiation and compromise. However bad things get with the Russians or the Chinese, they are not chanting “We love death more than the Americans and the Europeans love life.” Only jihadism has the power to turn our future into a zombie movie. Jihadists are the enemy with whom there is no rational or pragmatic compromise to make—ever.

As I’ve said many times before, the Muslim world needs to win a war of ideas with itself, and perhaps several civil wars. It has to de-radicalize itself. It has to transform the doctrine of jihad into something far more benign than it is, and it has to stop supporting its religious fanatics when they come into conflict with non-Muslims. This is what’s so toxic: Muslims supporting other Muslims no matter how sociopathic and insane their behavior. And if the Muslim world and the political Left can’t stand against jihadism, it is only a matter of time before their moral blindness fully empowers rightwing authoritarianism in the West. If secular liberals won’t create secure borders, Christian fascists will.

There may be two sides to the past, but there really aren’t two sides to the present. There are two sides to the story of how the Palestinians and Jews came to fight over land in the Middle East. Understanding all that is important—and I think it is important to understand the cynical game the Arab world has played with the plight of the Palestinians for the past fifty years. If there is a stable political settlement to ever be reached between Israel and the Palestinians, it will entail a full untangling of the facts from all the propaganda that obscures them, while keeping the problem of jihadism in view. It will also entail that the religious lunatics on the Jewish side get sidelined. As I said, the building of settlements has been a continuous provocation. But even on the point of religious fanaticism, there really aren’t two sides worth talking about now. Whatever terrible things Israeli settlers occasionally do—and these are crimes for which they should be prosecuted—generally speaking, the world does not have a problem with Jewish religious fanatics targeting Muslims in their mosques and schools. You literally can’t open a Jewish school in Paris because no one will insure it. Yes, there are lunatics on both sides, but the consequences of their lunacy are not equivalent—not even remotely equivalent. We haven’t spent the past twenty years taking our shoes off at the airport because there are so many fanatical Jews eager to blow themselves up on airplanes.

There is a bright line between good and a very specific form of evil that we must keep in view. It is the evil of bad ideas—ideas so bad they can make even ordinary human beings impossible to live with.

There’s a piece of audio from October 7 that many people have commented on. It’s a recording of a cell phone call that a member of Hamas made to his family, while he was in the process of massacring innocent men, women, and children. The man is ecstatic, telling his father and mother, and I think brother, that he has just killed ten Jews with his own hands. He had just murdered a husband and wife and was now calling his family from the dead woman’s phone.

Here’s a partial transcript of what he said:

“Hi, Dad. Open my ‎WhatsApp now, and you’ll see all those killed. Look how many I killed with my own hands! Your son killed Jews!” And his dad says, “May God protect you.” “Dad, I’m talking to you from a Jewish woman’s phone. I killed her, and I killed her husband. I killed ten with my own hands! Dad, ten with my own hands! Dad, open WhatsApp and see how many I killed, Dad. Open the phone, Dad. I’m calling you on WhatsApp. Open the phone, go. Dad, I killed ten. Ten with my own hands. Their blood is on their hands. [I believe that is a reference to the Quran.] Put Mom on.” And the father says, “Oh my son. God bless you!” “I swear ten with my own hands. Mother, I killed ten with my own hands!” And his father says, “May God bring you home safely.” “Dad, go back to WhatsApp now. Dad, I want to do a live broadcast.” And the mother now says, “I wish I was with you.” “Mom, your son is a hero!” And then, apparently talking to his comrades he yells, “Kill, kill, kill, kill them.” And then his brother gets on the line, asking where he is. And he tells his brother the name of the town and then he says “I killed ten! Ten with my own hands! I’m talking to you from a Jew’s phone!” And the brother says, “You killed ten?” “Yes, I killed ten. I swear!” Then he says, “I am the first to enter on the protection and help of Allah! [Surely that’s another scriptural reference.] Hold your head up, Father. Hold your head up! See on WhatsApp those that I killed. Open my WhatsApp.” And his brother says, “Come back. Come back.” And he says, “What do you mean come back? There’s no going back. It is either death or victory! My mother gave birth to me for the religion. What’s with you? How would I return? Open WhatsApp. See the dead. Open it.” And the mother sounds like she is trying to figure out how to open WhatsApp … “Open WhatsApp on your phone and see the dead, how I killed them with my own hands.” And she says, “Well, promise to come back.”

I would submit to you that this piece of audio is more than just the worst WhatsApp commercial ever conceived. It is a window into a culture. This is not the type of call that would have been placed from Vietnam by an American who just participated in the My Lai massacre. Nor is it the parental reaction one would expect from an American family had their beloved son just called them from a killing field. As terrible as Vietnam was, can you imagine a call back to Nebraska: “Mom, I killed ten with my own hands! I killed a woman and her husband, and I’m calling from the dead woman’s phone. Mom, your son is a hero!” Do you see what a total aberration that would have been, even in extremis?

This call wasn’t a total aberration. This wasn’t Ted Bundy calling his mom. This was an ordinary member of Hamas, a group that might still win an election today, especially in the West Bank, calling an ordinary Palestinian family, and the mere existence of that call, to say nothing of its contents, reveals something about the wider culture among the Palestinians.

It’s important to point out that not only members of Hamas but also ordinary Gazans appear to have taken part in the torture and murder of innocent Israelis and the taking of hostages. How many did this? And how many ordinary Gazans were dancing in the streets and spitting on the captured women and girls who were paraded before them after having been raped and tortured? What percentage of Palestinians in Gaza, or the West Bank, many of whom are said to hate Hamas for their corruption and incompetence and brutality, nevertheless support what they did on October 7 with a clear conscience, based on what they believe about Jews and the ethics of jihad? I don’t know, but I’m sure that the answers to these questions would be quite alarming. We’re talking about a culture that teaches Jew hatred and the love of martyrdom in its elementary schools, many of which are funded by the United Nations.

Of course, all this horror is compounded by the irony that the Jews who were killed on October 7 were, for the most part, committed liberals and peace activists. Hamas killed the sorts of people who volunteer to drive sick Palestinians into Israel for medical treatments. They murdered the most idealistic people in Israel. They raped, tortured, and killed young people at a trance-dance music festival devoted to peace, half of whom were probably on MDMA feeling nothing but love for all humanity when the jihadists arrived. In terms of a cultural and moral distance, it’s like the Vikings showed up at Burning Man and butchered everyone in sight.

Just think about what happened at the Supernova music festival: At least 260 people were murdered in the most sadistically gruesome ways possible. Decapitated, burned alive, blown up with grenades … and from the jihadist side this wasn’t an error. It’s not that if they could have known what was in the hearts of those beautiful young people, they would have thought, “Oh my God, we’re killing the wrong people. These people aren’t our enemies. These people are filled with love and compassion and want nothing more than to live in peace with us.” No, the true horror is that, given what jihadists believe, those were precisely the sorts of people any good Muslim should kill and send to Hell where they can be tortured in fire for eternity. From the jihadist point of view, there is no mistake here. And there is no basis for remorse. Please absorb this fact: for the jihadist, all this sadism—the torture and murder of helpless, terrified people—is an act of worship. This is the sacrament. This isn’t some nauseating departure from the path to God. This isn’t stalled spiritual progress, much less sin. This is what you do for the glory of God. This is what Muhammad himself did.

There is no substitute for understanding what our enemies actually want and believe. I’m pretty sure that many of you reading this aren’t even comfortable with my use of the term enemy, because you don’t want to believe that you have any. I understand that. But you have to understand that the people who butchered over 1,400 innocent men, women, and children in Israel on October 7 were practicing their religion sincerely. They were being every bit as spiritual, from their point of view, as the trance dancers at the Supernova festival were being from theirs. They were equally devoted to their highest values. Equally uplifted. Ecstatic. Amazed at their good fortune. They wouldn’t want to trade places with anyone. Let this image land in your brain: They were shouting “Allahu Akbar” (“God is great”) all day long as they murdered women and children. And these people are now being celebrated the world over by those who understand exactly what they did. Yes, many of those college kids at Harvard, Stanford, and Cornell are just idiots who have a lot to learn about the world. But in the Muslim community, and that includes the crowds in London, Sydney, and Brooklyn, Hamas is being celebrated by people who understand exactly what motivates them.

Again, watch Hotel Mumbai or read a book about the Islamic State so you can see jihadism in another context—where literally not one of the variables that people imagine are important here is present. There are no settlers, blockades, daily humiliations at check points, or differing interpretations of history—and yet we have the same grotesque distortion of the spiritual impulse, the same otherworldliness framed by murder, the same absolute evil that doesn’t require the presence of evil people, just confused ones—just true believers.

Of course, we can do our best to turn the temperature down now. And we can trust that the news cycle will get captured by another story. We can direct our attention again to Russia, China, climate change, or AI alignment, and I will do that in my work, but the problem of jihadism and the much wider problem of sympathy for it isn’t going away. And civilized people—non-Muslim and Muslim alike—have to deal with it. As I said in a previous episode of my podcast on this topic: We all live in Israel now. It’s just that most of us haven’t realized it yet.

[intheholler]

I’m riding the train of offering my anon thoughts to Appalachia. It’s only fitting after all, as we are often faceless in the national narrative.

Lost are our stories of self preservation in desolation, our stories of normal working class people struggling and celebrating, our working class history of laborers being exploited and killed in many forms of striking for our labor rights, the gorgeous tapestry of culture and heritage that despite a long enduring battle of fighting hatred in this country..produced families friends and comrades of all backgrounds.

But I’m old enough to remember this recent surge in the misrepresentations of what being “country” and or Appalachian is isn’t the first time this has happened in media or social circles en masse.

The “war on poverty” painted us as helpless pathetic creatures who needed to be gawked at and helped to be pushed forward in society.

Country singers constantly use the culture and twist it to make it hateful, or more patriotic, or whatever to incite reactions and make money from people who think country means driving drunk, or shooting bud light cans, and or being a Christian nationalist. (Hint it’s a lie)

it once again cannot be re-iterated enough that country is many things including but not limited to

Resourceful

Resilient

Not afraid to jump in and help

Sharing what you have

Loving thy neighbor( whether in a religion context or secular )

Welcoming immigrants

Accepting queer identity(ies)

Fighting for labor rights for ALL

Believing if the person next to you ain’t hurtin nobody you mind your fuckin business

Thanks for accepting my anonymous vent and thoughts keep chuggin neighbor your blog is amazing

CAN I GET AN AMEN