Do they Make Mirrors in Israel? Genocide, Jews and the Christian West
A Four-Part Deep-dive Into the Pathology of Western-backed Jewish Genocide and What We Must Do to Cure the Patient(s)
Part One: Mirrors
“We are the mirror, as well as the face in it,” says Mevalana Rumi—the 13th century Muslim mystic scholar, and still the bestselling poet in America. But the mirror that he speaks of is the well-polished heart that feels, senses and reflects the Divine:
“We are the mirror, as well as the face in it. We are tasting the taste of eternity this minute.” ( — Rumi)
But just this minute, as I write these words, innocent men, women and children in Gaza continue to die in the most horrific ways possible. Because tragically there are many warped mirrors too. Warped hearts that no longer reflect reality—let alone reflect the Divine. Rather they distort the ‘better angels of our nature’ and twist reality out of shape, size and recognition. In the spiritual teachings of the Islamic sacred tradition, remembrance of God—the Beloved—feeds the soul. It is the well nourished, spiritually healthy heart that reflects the Divine Beauty and Majesty apparent in creation. But those men and women who feast themselves on greed for this world, and nourish their fear, lust, hatred, and envy of others in its pursuit, are poor reflectors of light. What those emaciated souls reflect is a delusion—not a true reflection except in the most feeblest of forms. Like warped mirrors in a sinister circus they disfigure the teachings of even their own sacred traditions in order to pursue their wicked ends. Making a mockery of the international system, of the rules based order, of long-standing, painfully realised conventions and treatises for the protection of civilians; running amuck in their own so called ‘democracies’ at home, and speaking with forked tongues in international assemblies like the United Nations and its ‘International Court of Justice’, they have brought themselves and their entire nations into disrepute. In truth they have no sense of the sacred or the inviolable. For them, ancient biblical prophecies and prophets, modern pundits and preachers, and the peoples and populations over which they reign are all alike — tools in the service of their own agendas.
God in the Qur’an admonishes us to live up to the best of forms in which He created us. Taking an oath by the the archetypal sacred places of the Abrahamic traditions — and their Prophets — He says:
As if to say to humankind — but especially to those who claim to follow the the Abrahamic Prophets — it is not enough that you were created in the best of forms, nor is it enough that you merely believe, rather you must work deeds of righteousness or fall far from the perfected spiritual state that is the potential of all human beings. Instead, most people — the Qur’an warns us in Surah At-Takathur— are in a lifelong pursuit of the paltry things of this world:
Muhammad Asad’s footnotes to his translation of these verses is particularly telling in our times. He was himself a Jewish revert to Islam whose family perished in the Holocaust. A man who lived for almost a century (1900-1992) and met many of the most important figures involved in the shaping of the modern middle-east. Witnessing and participating in various adventures across the breadth of the middle-east and beyond he experienced the modern world take shape within his lifetime and finally ended up in the United Nations as Ambassador for the newly inaugurated state of Pakistan.
Asad first encountered the Muslim world in 1922 when he travelled to Palestine on the invitation of his uncle, Dorian, a psychiatrist and one of Freud’s disciples.
That was a time of political upheaval and strife in Palestine. Zionists were lobbying for a Jewish nation — sometimes violently. Tens of thousands of Jews were migrating to Palestine from Russia and elsewhere, altering the demography.
But to Asad it appeared that the local Muslim Arab bedouin with his honesty, simplicity and his camels and camps was closer to the Hebrew characters he had studied as a boy in the Old Testament than a modern European Jew.
On several occasions, Asad confronted Zionist leaders such as Dr Chaim Weizmann, pushing them to explain how Jews can claim to have more rights than Palestinian Arabs who had lived in the region for two thousands years.
“Asad’s anti-Zionism was deeply rooted. It wasn’t something he adopted to become more acceptable to Muslims,” says Kramer.
One of Asad’s closest friends in Palestine, Jacob de Haan, a Jewish Dutch journalist, was killed by Zionist extremists because of his persistent opposition to how the Arabs were being treated.
Asad wondered how the Jews coming to Palestine from Europe in the early 20th century can have more right over the holy land than the local Arabs.
Years later when Israelis tried to lay claim to all of Jerusalem, Asad would continue to defend the rights of Palestinians.
The Zionists want to keep Jerusalem as Israel’s capital for forever, he wrote in an article The Vision of Jerusalem published in 1982. But “eternity is an attribute of God alone.”
He spoke and wrote about how Islam views Jerusalem as a “Holy City” for all the religions and not real-estate given in patrimony to the Jewish people alone.
“Asad was probably the first person to articulate the idea of Zionist colonialism before the Marxist thinkers made it vogue in the 1960s and 70s,” says Goldman.
[Source: Muhammad Asad, a Jewish Convert Who Devoted His Life to Serve Islam]
Asad was not only an adventurer. Well versed in Arabic, Hebrew and Aramaic, he was a mirror into many worlds: the Islamic and Jewish sacred traditions, the secular west, the making of the modern middle-east and the forging of post-war Europe, the life and ways of the desert and its people, the social-norms and decadence of the city and its inmates. He knew the sacred and the profane. The east and the west. He knew the peoples of the Islamic world and of Christendom, he knew the orient and the occident. He was friend, colleague and companion to diplomats, princes, journalists, artists, nomads and kings. The footnotes he adds to his Qur’an translation were designed to help western audiences understand the message of the Qur’an based on classical commentaries and his own breadth of learning and lived experience. His comments on the above verses are worth repeating as they relate directly to the motives of the warped souls engaged in the current mass murder in the Holy Land:
The term takathur bears the connotation of “greedily striving for an increase”, i.e. in benefits be they tangible or intangible, real or illusory. In the above context it denotes man’s obsessive striving for more and more comforts, more material goods, greater power over his fellow-men or over nature, and increasing technological progress.
Where does this unending greed take us? For Asad reflecting on these verses of the Qur’an the end is clear:
A passionate pursuit of such endeavours, to the exclusion of everything else, bars man from all spiritual insight and, hence, from the acceptance of any restrictions and inhibitions based on purely moral values — with the result that not only individulas but whole societies gradullay lose all inner stability, and thus, all chance of happiness.
Writing in 1922 (the very same year Asad first travelled to Palestine), German polymath Oswald Spengler in his Der Untergang des Abendlandes (the Decline of the West), considered this ‘loss of all inner stability’ to be the inevitable fate of Western civilisation. A civilisation that belongs to what he called the ‘faustian culture form’. For just as Goethe’s Faust sold his soul to the devil, Western man in his relentless greed for power would sell his very soul to technology and machinery (‘technics’). As Western manufactured AI drones precisely kill Palestinian academics, poets and professors, and wipe out entire families in one fell swoop, Spengler’s words take on a terribly sinister reality. From gas exploitation off the coast of Gaza, to billion dollar contracts in weapons, AI technology, and the plant and machinery required to occupy a people’s land against their will, there are plenty of resource predators that smell an opportunity. And they don’t care how many people have to die for them to get what they want. If there is wealth to be made from exploiting Gaza’s rich gas reserves (see Is natural gas the real reason for the genocide in Gaza?), from selling weapons, plant, machinery, AI and other ‘technics’ then so be it:
In June, Israel approved the development of Gaza Marine, the strip of water off the Gazan coast containing an estimated 1tn cubic feet of natural gas. Offshore Technology said the field would produce about 2.4bn dollars in royalties and profits for Palestine during its lifetime. As the website also noted, Gaza Marine is closer to shore than Israel’s existing oil and gas fields, making it cheaper to develop.
Meanwhile, after Europe cut off Russian oil and gas supplies in 2022, Israel signed a deal with the EU to become a keystone supplier.
Joseph Dana, a market analyst and journalist, wrote at the time that the planswould “radically transform” Israel’s relationship with the rest of the world over its occupation of Palestine. In particular, Dana highlighted how new Israeli oil and gas prospects could make pro-Palestinian campaigns in Europe effectively “meaningless”.
The American Friend’s Service Committe has a growing database of The Companies Profiting from Israel’s 2023–2024 Attacks on Gaza, while property devleopers like Jared Kushner (Netanyahu’s nephew and Trump’s son-in-law) publicly talk about the “waterfront opportnities” coming up after Gaza is ethnically cleansed and Palestinians are pushed into the Egyptian desert. It was just the same following the September 2001 attacks in New York. “The purse is now open…” said Harry Stonecipher, who at that time was vice president of Boeing [Corporate America Cashed In on 9/11: The Pentagon’s spending surge made corporations a windfall.] With the ongoing genocide in Gaza the purse opens wider still, and the predators remain just the same.
In fact the history of what Westerners call ‘western civilisaton’, when viewed broadly since 1492, seems to be motivated by profit at all costs. It is a tale of Europeans taking to the oceans to subjugate, decimate, colonise and exploit the rest of the world. In the West ‘Fair-trade’ is at best a not-for profit — it’s not the normal way to do business with others, and it never has been.
Spengler sensed how it might end for a culture given to greed and global dominance. Faust’s greed for power makes him pursue it at all costs, until he can no longer recognise his own self. And so it is with the leaders of our faustian democracies. Aided and abetted by the corporate media, they are committing mass murder at full tilt. Gleefully engaged in a killing spree in Gaza while still trying to present a narrative of being interested in peace.
11. And whenever they are told, ‘Work not corruption across the earth,’ they say, ‘We are but putting things right.’
12. Verily are they the corrupters but are not even aware.” (Qur’an 2:11–12)
Without journalists free to report to the masses unmolested, without a population educated to think critically, and law-makers free from wealthy paymasters, who remains to report the truth to the electorate? When the men and women working in academia, political institutions and the media are all afraid of losing their positions, or have simply sold themselves in their greed “for more and more” there are no mirrors to look into. There are no places for the masses to see what is being done in their name; except into warped mirrors that present an opposite view of the facts.
“The one who knows his self, knows his Lord,” goes a popular tradition attributed to the Prophet Muhammad. But in order to know one’s self we need mirrors that allow us to see clearly, and eyes unclouded by hate so that we can judge what we see without prejudice. In the Faustian world of the modern-West the old looking glasses of tradition, of the Great Books, of a free academia and a free press, of populations taught to read and think critically have been smashed to pieces. The wisdom of the sages is despised. The elderly are mocked, the sacred is reviled. All is the pursuit of wealth and power.
“Today we live so cowed under the bombardment of this intellectual artillery(the media), that hardly anyone can attain to the inward detachment that is required for a clear view of the monstrous drama. The will-to-power operating under a pure democratic disguise has finished off its masterpiece so well that the object’s sense of freedom is actually flattered by the most thorough-going enslavement that has ever existed” (Spengler, The Decline of the West, Vol 2: Perspectives of World History).
Part Two: Doppelgängers
At the same time yet other looking glasses have become our echo chambers of reality. Not the heart and soul mirrors of Rumi, but the ‘Mirror Worlds’ seen in the images of screens hanging on our walls at home, and nestled in our palms wherever we go. Images painted by corporate media that appear to teach us what to think, what to love and what to fear. As real friends are replaced by online ones, and the real world gives way to the virtual, we are becoming avatars of ourselves. Real journalists (like Chris Hedges) fade into obscurity, real artists (like Banksy) into anonymity. Different personas take the stage in our names. The kind that author Naomi Klein speaks of in her latest and most unusual masterpiece: Doppelgänger.
For onlookers that might stare into that mirror world of people with (what the Qur’an describes as) hearts ‘sealed over’, there is a danger that they will be drawn into it. The closer they come to it, the more enticing it appears. Until finally, caught in its Medusa-like gaze, their hearts also turn to stone. This is what Klein guesses happened to Naomi Wolf. A once celebrated feminist writer and activist whose The End of America: Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot, sets out ten steps that transform a democracy into a fascist dictatorship. Steps that, it must be said, are progressing at speed in the US and other western nations. And yet, it seems, Naomi Wolf herself has fallen into the mirror world of the right-wing fascists: hanging out with Trump master-mind Steve Bannon whilst co-opting the language and symbols of those resisting oppression, to stir-up storms of conspiracy theories and sell merchandise. The problem for Klein is that people keep confusing her for Wolf. Both Naomis are Jewish women, both are successful writers, oustpoken critics and analysts of important issues in our age. Both are, in this sense, authors of works, which like mirrors, help us to see and make sense of our world. But for Naomi Klein, ‘the other Naomi’ has become a sort of sinister doppelganger. People on social media, in public appearances, lectures and demonstrations confuse their respective views, writings and even their faces. “The first time it happened,” recalls Klein, “I was in a stall in a public bathroom just off Wall Street in Manhattan. I was about to open the door when I heard two women talking about me.”
“Did you see what Naomi Klein said?”
I froze, flashing back to every mean girl in high school, pre-humiliated. What had I said?
“Something about how the march today is a bad idea.”
“Who asked her? I really don’t think she understands our demands.”
Wait. I hadn’t said anything about the march — or the demands. Then it hit me: I knew who had. I casually strolled to the sink, made eye contact with one of the women in the mirror, and said words I would repeat too many times in the months and years to come.
“I think you are talking about Naomi Wolf.” [Klein, 2023, 17]
In her 2007 work, Shock Doctrine, Klein “delved deeply into how post-shock states of discombobulation have been opportunistically exploited in many different contexts: 9/11, the collapse of the Soviet Union, the invasion of Iraq, Hurricane Katrina, and events significantly further back in time.” [Klein (2023, 7)]. “With the public terrified and distracted,” she explains, “power-hungry players were able to move in and ram through policies that benefited corporate elites without debate or consent — not unlike the brutal methods deployed by torturers who use isolation and stress to soften up and break their prisoners.” [(2023,7)].
But ‘isolation and stress’ is not only used by Western governments on eastern prisoners. It is also being used by Western governments on their own ‘freedom loving’ people. Most notably, in our moment, Julian Assange, who has (among other outrages) been “held in ‘sordid’ solitary confinement for up to 23 hours a day,” according to his father. What was Assange’s crime? Providing a window for the truth to be seen.
On June 17, 2022, the United Kingdom approved Julian Assange’s extradition to the United States to face charges, primarily under the nation’s Espionage Act, for releasing US government records that revealed the US military committed war crimes against civilians in Afghanistan and Iraq, including the killing of two Reuters journalists. If found guilty, Assange faces a jail term of up to 175 years.
The IFJ is gravely concerned about the impact of Assange’s continued detention on media freedom and the rights of all journalists globally. The US pursuit of Assange against the public’s right to know poses a grave threat to the fundamental tenets of democracy, which are becoming increasingly fragile worldwide. Irrespective of personal views on Assange, his extradition will have a chilling effect, with all journalists and media workers at risk.
Naomi Wolf argues that Covid was part of a conspiracy to steal our freedoms through ‘isolation and stress.’ It was not a genuine attempt to contain a pandemic. And Wolf uses social media — well suspected of making people feel more lonely and isolated — to argue her case. And this is the problem with doppelgängers and their arguments: they look and sound like something familiar, they are based on some truths. But there is some warping of reality, something not quite right. Assange provided us a window through which we could see the workings of power. Wolf provides us with an image through which we can only feel more isolated, afraid and outraged.
But Wolf is still a relatively harmless, accidental, doppelganger. And although of immeasurable annoyance to Klein, Wolf’s mirror world is comparatively benign. There are far more dangerous doppelgangers out there. Deliberate impersonators of identities not their own. The kind that call genocide ‘self-defence’ and mass murder a God-given duty.
Part Three: Just Enough Religion to Hate
For almost 200 days and with no end in sight, the peoples of the world have been witnessing, in real time, the massacre of over 40,000 men, women and children. They are being murdered in cold blood. By bombs missiles, munitions. By starvation, mayhem and massacre. By rape, torture, and depravation. They are being murdered by Israelis who self-identify as Jews, who act in the name of Judaism and quote biblical passages to justify their actions. They are being murdered by leaders of Western nations who self-identify as Christians and portray themselves as good faith actors in the name of democracy and ‘freedom’. They work in concert: The western nations supply the weapons, the intelligence, the funds and the diplomatic cover. The Israelis do the dirty work on the ground — pulling the triggers, blowing up the houses, schools, mosques, churches; even the living who they throw into pits before bullzdozing; and the dead whose graves lying in cemetries they dig up. And of course shooting up hospitals, raping women, sexually abusing children, degrading the men. All of this has been, and is being documented in real time. The evidence is overwhelming, incontrovertible, painfully clear as day, and unbearable to watch, read or hear. Curiously it is social media itself that has allowed us to access this information despite powerful attempts to censor it — images, first hand accounts, videos and testimonies of a people broadcasting their own extermination in real time, and appealing to the world — is anyone seeing this? Is anyone listening? Will anyone tell our stories?
In the meantime, just outside the prison walls that surround Gaza, as the people inside die of premeditated starvation, disease and displacement; groups of Israelis gather at the Kerem-Shalom (‘Vineyard of Peace’) crossing to prevent humanitarian aid trucks reaching them. They chant, dance and sing with joy. They invite fellow Israelis to bring their children to the party — enticing them with the promise of bouncy castles and picnics. They believe in their own righteousness. As their children enjoy themselves, the parents attack the humantiarian aid trucks and their drivers; making their intentions absolutely clear. “I am the owner here,” says one Jewish Israeli to an Arab driver. “You are the slave.” In an episode entitled: These Israeli Protestors Are Blocking Aid to STARVE Gaza — where you can peer into the mirror world and see some of the footage for yourself — journalist, academic and political commentator Owen Jones says: “It may be difficult to understand this kind of evil, but we are going to try.”
So let’s try.
Jonathan Swift understood it well. The 17th century Anglo-Irish satirist and ‘champion of liberty’, famous for his Gulliver’s Travels, wrote: “We have just enough religion to make us hate, and not enough to make us love another.”Throughout their history Jews have been victims of pogroms, mass murder and ethnic cleansing. But this murderous hatred of Jews has been, for the most part, a Roman, Christian and European phenomenon.
Though persecution of Jews has a history of at least two millennia, the late-19th and early-20th century witnessed a high-water mark in hatred against Jews, especially in western Christian societies ( Anti-Semitism in Europe Before the Holocaust)
1920’s German society was supposed to be a paragon of modern western values. Germans were spohisticated, cultured. They patronised the arts, loved opera, and waxed lyrical on all sorts of sophistocated subjects. Arguably it was at the height of their western culture when Germans turned on their own Jewish and other minority populations, in an attempt to exterminate them. Although not widely acknowledged now, Jews also faced discrimination from the Allies fighting against Germany. World War II was not, by any measure, fought to protect Jews. Western, Christian nations, fought a bloody, brutal war that plunged the entire world into death, destruction and mayhem. European Christians battled each other as they always had done in countless brutal wars before. Except now they did it on an industrial scale: bombing each others’ cities, murdering each other’s civilians en masse — and for the Germans — attempting a whole scale genocide of undesirable lesser humans.
High culture played an important political role in Hitler’s Germany. References to music, history, philosophy, and art formed a key part of the Nazi strategy to reverse the symptoms of decline perceived after World War I. Allusions to great creators and their works were used as propaganda to remind the Volk to love and worship their nation. In the words of the French scholar Eric Michaud, author of The Cult of Art in Nazi Germany, the Nazis used culture “to make the genius of the race visible to that race.” (Culture War How the Nazi Party Recast Nietzsche David B. Dennis HUMANITIES, January/February 2014, Volume 35, Number1)
The truth about the Holocaust is not the one we often hear — the story oft told to make us think it was some sort of an atypical European madness perpetrated by a weird distortion of German values by a group we call Nazis. And yet it is, nevertheless, a kind of doppelganger story — as Klein discovered when watching Haitain filmmaker Raoul Peck’s Exterminate all the Brutes. “His thesis is that the dominant story we tell about Hitler and the Holocaust — which treats that frenzy of death as so extreme that it is without historical precedents or antecedents — is flat wrong,” she says.
Peck argues instead that the Holocaust was an intensified and compacted expression of the very same violent colonial ideology that ravaged other continents at other times. The Nazis then applied that ideology within Europe itself…. Hitler — the twentieth century’s most despised villain, and rightly so — was not the civilised, democratic West’s evil “other”, but its shadow, its doppelganger. [Klein, 269]
“Exterminate All the Brutes” was also the title of Swedish writer Sven Lindqvist’s 1992 book in which he argues that the exterminatory mindset lies “‘at the core of European thought… summing up the history of our continent, our humanity, our biosphere, from Holocene to Holocaust.” (Klein, 269).
The story Peck and Lindqvist tell begins not in the Americas, but in Europe in the centuries leading up to the Spanish Inquistion and the burning at the stake and the bloody expulsion of Jews and Muslims. Then it crosses the Atlantic and plays out on a vastly larger scale in the genocide of Native Americans, as well as the so-called Scramble for Africa, before looping back to Europe during the Holocaust. This challenges how the story of the Second World War is so often told: as one of heroic anti-fascist Allies united against the monstrous Nazis. Certainly, defeating Hitler and freeing the camps, however belatedly, was the most righteous victory of the modern age. Complicating this story is the fact that Hitler spoke and wrote extensively about the many ways in which he drew inspiration for his genocidal regime from British colonialism and from the various structures of racial hierarchy pioneered inside North America. [Klein 269]
But if a doppelganger — like Klein’s ‘the Other Naomi’ — is someone that resembles you outwardly but is not actually you, it would be a mistake to think of the Nazis as doppelgangers of Europeans. A doppelganger is someone that people mistake for you because they look like you on the outside whilst inwardly they are quite different. That the Germans under Hitler drew inspiration from British colonialism and European genocides in North America, Africa and elsewhere — that the Nazis were Europeans, doing what Europeans do — means it would be a mistake to think of them as somehow a warped version of Europeans. The only thing that stood them apart in this regard, was that they set out to do in Europe, what the British and others had done, and were doing, elsewhere.
“Before Hitler began casting the mass murder of genetic ‘inferiors’ as an act of health care for the race, the British Royal Navy Commander Bedford Pim explained to the Anthropological Society of London in 1866 that, when it comes to killing Indigenous peoples, there was ‘mercy in massacre.’” (Klein 269).
Klein also reflects on Hitler’s remark that: “Concentration camps were not invented in Germany. It is the English who are their inventors, using this institution to gradually break the backs of other nations.”
He was speaking for propaganda purposes, but with an element of truth. Concentration camps had, in fact been used in many colonial conetxts — by the Spanish in Cuba; by German colonists in Southwest Africa, against the Herero and Nama people; by the British in what is now South Africa, during the Anglo-Boer War, with tens of thousands of captives dying in the disease-ridden enclosures.” [Klein, 269]
More damning still is American Law Professor James Whitman’s 2017 publication, Hitler’s American Model: The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law, also cited by Klein:
Whitman makes the case that the legal contortions the United States had developed to deny full citizenship rights based on race helped inspire the 1935 Nuremberg Laws, which would legalize stripping German Jews of their citizenship and denying them political rights, while banning sex, marriage, and reproduction between Aryan and Jews (the Reich Citizenship Law and the Law on the Protection of German Blood and German Honor). They found templates for the new Jewish ghettos they created partly by studying the systems of legalised segregation developed under Jim Crow laws and for Native reservations; South Africa’s apartheid system also provided key inspiration. [Klein, 270]
But if their own sacred texts are anything to go by, the Jews have also been perpetrators of the very same evils. Except that those texts — the Herem or Cherem (Hebrew: חרם, ḥērem) passages in the Book of Joshua — and other parts of the Old Testament, not only condone, but actually demand the mass slaughter of others, in order to take by force their lands and utterly eradicate their peoples. Moreover they portray these heinous acts as divine commands of sacred import that please the God of a people who has chosen them above all others as some sort of superior race. Although we are only scratching the surface here, it is not difficult to see the parallels between these biblical exhortations, European colonialism, and the Nazi-Germans’ self-image of a ‘master-race.’
Following South Africa’s historic appeal to the International Court of Justice at the Hague, asking for the UN’s highest court to rule on provisional measures against Israel’s on-going genocide, most people are aware of Netanyahu’s direct comparison of the people of Gaza to the Amalekites. A clear call to Israeli soldiers to annihilate every man, woman, child and animal. To kill all Palestinian life. The Bible says:
“Now go and attack Amalek, and utterly destroy all that they have, and do not spare them. But kill both man and woman, infant and nursing child, ox and sheep, camel and donkey.’ ” [1:Samuel:15:3 New King James Version]
And so Israeli Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, citing this passage and other scriptural references addressed his people thus:
“You must remember what Amalek has done to you says our Holy Bible and we do remember and we are fighting. Our brave troops and combatants who are now in Gaza or around Gaza and in all other regions in Israel are joining this chain of Jewish Heroes a chain that has started 3,000 years ago from Joshua Ben Noon [Judah Macabee and Bar Kochba] until the heroes of 1948 the 6 day war the 73 October war and all other Wars in this country. Our hero troops they have one supreme main goal: to completely defeat the murderous enemy and to guarantee our existence in this country.” [—Benjamin Netanyahu, see Netanyahu's Disturbing Analogy: Palestinians as Amalek]
That this is a Judaeo-Christian teaching enshrined in the Old Testament, and the normative understanding, in the Christian tradition at least, cannot be denied:
According to Christian Hofreiter, historically almost all Christian authorities and theologians have interpreted the herem passages as referring to real, historical events when God commanded the Israelites to exterminate all the members of particular nations. He states that “there is practically no historical evidence that anyone in the Great Church” viewed them as being purely an allegory. In particular, Augustine, Thomas Aquinas and John Calvin have defended a literal reading of these passages at length. Origen of Alexandria is sometimes cited as having viewed the herem passages allegorically; Hofreiter argues that although Origen viewed a spiritual interpretation as having primary importance to Christians, he did not deny that the herem passages described historical events.[48]
These biblical passages have also been used by Jewish Zionists to justify their pogroms against Palestinians and, according to some scholars, by Europeans to justify their pogroms against Jews and Native Americans:
According to Ian Lustick, in the 1980s, leaders of the now defunct Israeli messianic and political movement Gush Emunim, such as Hanan Porat, considered the Palestinians to be like Canaanites or Amalekites, and suggested that implied a duty to make merciless war against Arabs who reject Jewish sovereignty.[38]
Biblical scholar Niels Peter Lemche asserts that European colonialism in the nineteenth century was ideologically based on the biblical narratives of conquest and extermination. He also states that European Jews who migrated to Palestine relied on the biblical ideology of conquest and extermination, and considered the Arabs to be Canaanites.[39] Scholar Arthur Grenke claims that the view of war expressed in Deuteronomy contributed to the destruction of Native Americans and to the destruction of European Jewry.[40]
Nur Masalha, a Palestinian writer and academic, writes that the genocide of the extermination commandments has been “kept before subsequent generations” and served as inspirational examples of divine support for slaughtering enemies.[41]Ra’anan S. Boustan, an associate professor of ancient Mediterranean religions at UCLA, has said that militant Zionists have identified modern Palestinians with Canaanites, and hence as targets of violence mandated in Deut 20:15–18.[42]Scholar Leonard B. Glick states that Jewish fundamentalists in Israel, such as Shlomo Aviner, consider the Palestinians to be like biblical Canaanites, and that some fundamentalist leaders suggest that they “must be prepared to destroy” the Palestinians if the Palestinians do not leave the land.[43] Keith Whitelam, Professor Emeritus of Biblical Studies in the University of Sheffield, asserts that the Zionist movement has drawn inspiration from the biblical conquest tradition, and Whitelam draws parallels between the “genocidal Israelites” of Joshua and modern Zionists.[44]
In the imagination of the right-wing evangleical Christian Zionists in America and the fundamentalist-racist religious Jews in Israel this is divinely sanctioned, biblically ordained, righteous, mass-murder: God has given us this land. It is ours. If you do not leave, we have to enslave you or kill you all. That is the biblical ‘reasoning’ of the genocidal Jews.
God has promised us that when the Children of Israel return to the Holy Land, and the Temple is rebuilt, the end times will come. Jesus will return. The Jews and all heathens will be forced to accept him as saviour. That is the biblical ‘reasoning’ of the genocidal Christian zionists.
A video posted on X, formerly Twitter, by Israeli journalist Yinon Magal, shows Israeli soldiers singing and chanting for the occupation of Gaza and to “wipe off the seed of Amalek”, saying there are no “innocent civilians” in Gaza.
Victoria Clark, in her book Allies for Armageddon, explains how these religious extremists are ready to hasten on the end of the world because in their minds that will bring them the return of their respective Messiahs and the victory promised in Biblical scripture. That both parties in this unholy alliance care nothing for each other is a minor detail. Just like the European crusaders, colonialists and slave traders; the American frontiersmen, settlers, and conquistadors; the British and French imperialists, Italian fascists and Nazi Germans before them; they are joined together in their hatred for Muslims, their greed for land and their belief in their own superiority. And of course, their reading of the same scripture. It is this enthusiasm to bring about the end of the world (among the evangelical right), and the once-and-for-all ethnic cleansing of what they call eretz israel (among Jewish extremists) that brings them together in their support of America’s wars in the so called ‘middle-east’; and Zionism’s nearly one-hundred year pogrom against the Palestinians.
Millions of Christian Zionists in America believe that God requires them to offer Israel unconditional support — moral, financial, political, and military
Guided by a literal reading of the prophetic sections of the Bible, Christian Zionists are convinced that the world is hurtling toward a final Battle of Armageddon. They believe that war in the Middle East is God’s will for the region. In this timely book, Victoria Clark first explores the 400-year history of this powerful political ideology, laying to rest the idea that Christian Zionism is a passing craze or the province of a lunatic fringe. Then Clark surveys the contemporary Christian Zionist scene in Israel and in the United States, where the influence of the religious fundamentalists has never been greater.
Clark engages with Christian Zionism directly, interviewing leaders, attending events, and traveling with Christian Zionists in the Holy Land. She also investigates the Christian Zionist presence in Israel. She finds that the view through the Christian Zionist lens is dangerously simple: President Bush’s War on Terror is a mythic battle between good and evil, and Syria and Iran represent the powers of darkness. Such views are far from rare — an estimated fifteen to twenty million Americans share them. Almost one in three Americans believes Israel was given to the Jews by God as a prelude to the Battle of Armageddon and Jesus’ Second Coming. (Source: Yale Univeristy Press)
Violent biblical texts can be manipulated by Christians and Jews alike to justify all kinds of brutality even on their own people. “Think of the hero Samson,” writes Philip Jenkins, “blinded and enslaved in Gaza, but still prepared to pull down the temple upon thousands of his persecutors:
And Samson said, Let me die with the Philistines. And he bowed himself with all his might; and the house fell upon the lords, and upon all the people that were therein. So the dead which he slew at his death were more than they which he slew in his life. [Judg. 16:30]” (Jenkins, Laying Down the Sword: Why We Can’t Ignore the Bible’s Violent Verses, Harper Collins 2012, p.7)
It is not by any means far-fetched to imagine Netanyahu’s far-right religious cronies; the settlers who quote Biblical passages to justify brutalising Palestinians; the Israeli war cabinet and other Israelis — like those at Kerem-Shalom — justifying imperilling the lives of Israeli hostages in Gaza as they recklessly destroy all forms and signs of life among the Palestinians. In their twisted minds, no doubt, there is a good chance they are thinking of themselves as heroic defenders of their people: like Samson ready to kill the enemy at all costs. Even if that means killing their own number. But of course, these Israeli leaders don’t put themselves in harm’s way. Only other Israelis are given that sacred task.
Meanwhile the family members of those hostages, whose loved ones remain inside Gaza as it is bombed to death by the would-be armchair heirs of Samson’s teaching, look on with horror. There can be little doubt that the so called ‘Hannibal Directive’ developed by the Israeli military after its humiliation in a previous episode of hostage taking, was consciously or unconsciously inspired by this very same mentality. As Max Blumenthal’s reporting for the Grayzone — citing Israeli military, civillian and eye witness accounts — clearly shows, the Israeli military will sacrifice its own if it helps further the destruction of its enemies. Just as Samson in the bible was ready to let himself die to “slay so many more” than he managed when he was alive; the Hannibal Doctrine ensures that for every one Israeli captive taken, be it a soldier or a civillian, thousands of Palestinians will die — so many more than one soldier or settler could kill by himself.
Hannibal Directive Archives — The Grayzone
And that brings us to the horrific deaths of Israelis on October 7th. There is now plenty of evidence that many Israeli deaths on that day were due to indiscriminate Israeli tank shelling, Apache Helicopter ‘Hell-fire’ missile attacks and wild shooting — a combination of panic, inexperience, poor coordination and deliberate invocation of the Hannibal Directive:
October 7 testimonies reveal Israel’s military ‘shelling’ Israeli citizens with tanks, missiles …
Israel’s military received orders to shell Israeli homes and even their own bases as they were overwhelmed by Hamas…
Meanwhile, an Orthodox religious group, headed by a corrupt religious leader known for his sexual abuses of boys and girls was behind some of the most outrageous accusations of Hamas atrocities on October 7th. Allegations that were then used by Israel to whip up a frenzy of fear and vengeance in Israel and dehumanise Palestinians abroad, so as to justify the genocide. Here is the headline from another Grayzone piece: Scandal-stained Israeli ‘rescue’ group fuels October 7 fabrications.
Founded by a serial rapist known as the “Haredi Jeffrey Epstein,” Israeli ultra-Orthodox rescue group ZAKA is responsible for some of the most obscene post-October 7 atrocity fabrications, from beheaded babies to “mass rape” to a fetus cut from its mother.
Secretary of State Tony Blinken and President Joseph Biden have each echoed demonstrably false ZAKA testimonies about Hamas atrocities.
Marred by allegations of financial fraud, ZAKA is leveraging October 7 publicity to raise unprecedented sums of cash.
Its rival, United Hatzalah, has spun out bogus tales of babies baked in ovens as it closes in on a $50 million fundraising goal. (Source: Scandal-stained Israeli ‘rescue’ group fuels October 7 fabrications.)
And more recently, as reported by the Intercept, the New York Times has been exposed in its participation in Israeli propaganda (hasbara) to spin a story about Hamas’s sexual crimes that lacks any evidence or credibilty whatsoever. (See Democracy Now’s piece: The Intercept: New York Times Exposé Lacks Evidence to Claim Hamas Weaponized Sexual Violence Oct. 7).
Let us be clear: the actual loss of innocent life before, on and after October 7th — be it Palestinian or Israeli, Jewish, Christian, Muslim or other, is disgusting, condemnable and outrageous. The deliberate killing of innocent people can never be justified. We owe at least this much to all of these innocent souls murdered and being murdered — to speak courageously the questions that must be voiced: who is killing them? why are they killing them? and how are they killing them?
Zionists in and outside of Israel, not besieged Palestinians in Gaza, bear the real responsibility for the innocent lives lost on October 7th. And the lives lost before and since — all lives lost in pursuit of the Zionist ambition to steal Palestine from the Palestinians. So does the UK, the US and Europe. The preachers, pundits and politicians justifying murder by citing biblical passages; conjuring up fantasies of heroism to groom young footsoldiers into a frenzied demonic rampage; fuelling wickedness, inciting hatred, killing and terrorising: all in the name of their Jewish or Christian values. These have blood on their hands. The cosmos will not forget them. The God who they call upon — the Lord of Abraham — will surely disown them.
It is telling that the Qur’an addresses the Jewish people when it seeks to remind Muslims (and Jews) about the sanctity of life:
For that cause We decreed for the Children of Israel that whosoever killeth a human being for other than manslaughter or corruption in the earth, it shall be as if he had killed all mankind, and whoso saveth the life of one, it shall be as if he had saved the life of all mankind. Our messengers came unto them of old with clear proofs (of Allah’s Sovereignty), but afterwards lo! many of them became prodigals in the earth. (Qur’an 5:32)
Muslims recognise, because the Qur’an tells them, that the real teachings of the Prophets of Israel — and of Christ — were not the teachings contained in the violent passages of the Bible cited by the genocidal Zionists, Israelists and Christian evangelicals of today. These people are not heirs of the sacred traditions of the Hebrew prophets but rather warped doppelgängers of what Judaism and Christianity is supposed to mean.
And of course there are plenty of Jews and Christians who know this very well. Such people won’t fall for the rhetoric of the war mongers. Jewish Historian and Tel Aviv University professor Shlomo Sand, in his The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland, writes:
Devotees of the Zionist idea that began to take shape toward the end of the nineteenth century appear to have been faced with a thorny issue. Because they employed the Bible as a title deed to Palestine, which would quickly become the “Land of Israel,” they needed to use all means necessary to effect its transformation from an imagined foreign land from which all Jews were supposedly exiled into an ancient homeland once owned by their mythological ancestors. To fulfill this purpose, the Bible now began to take on the character of a nationalist book. From a collection of theological texts incorporating historical plots and divine miracles aimed at inculcating faith in its readers, it became a compilation of historiographic texts that bore only a smattering of optional religious meaning. In this context, it was necessary to obscure the metaphysical entity of God to the greatest extent possible and to distill from it a complete patriotic personality. The Zionist intellectuals all tended to be at least somewhat secular and were therefore uninterested in deep theological discussion. From their perspective, God, whose existence had been undermined, promised a land to his “chosen people” as a reward for devotedly maintaining their faith in him. In this way, he was converted into a sort of voice-over in a historical movie guiding a nation to strive for a homeland and to immigrate there.
It was no simple endeavor to persist in using the term “Promised Land” when the force that had done the promising was dying or, according to many, was already deceased. It could not have been easy to plant an imagined sense of patriotism in theological works that were completely foreign to the nationalist spirit.” (Sand, Geremy Forman trans., (2014), 68)
If there are Allies for Armageddon amongst the Jews and Christians of today, there are also Allies for Peace among the people of Abraham too. There are Israeli academics like Shlomo Sand, there is Jewish Voices for Peace, there is Breaking the Silence, there are rabbis and Talmudic scholars, even retired Israelis soldiers from heroic families (like Miko Peled), and American Jews — like the makers of the documentary Israelism — once raised under the Zionist spell who broke through and saw the mask. And of course there are the longstanding orthodox and other religious Jews who have been opposed to Zionism from its inception.
The documentary Israelism exposes how Zionists seek to indoctrinate young American Jews and how many of them are breaking free from the illusion that Israel represents them
And moreover these Allies for Peace are not confined to Christians, Muslims and Jews. Rather the movement for peace and justice for Palestinians has become global and universal. All the nations of the Children of Adam are speaking up against Zionism because they recognise it for what it actually is: antithetical to basic human values. Like a sinister doppelganger Zionism appears to be Jewish. It works very hard to appropriate Jewish identity, even as it works very hard to appropriate Palestinian land. But its roots lie in Nazism — itself a twisted Double of Europe’s propensity to massacre and murder for land and profit.
‘A person who can justify genocide, a person who can commit genocide, I can’t count him as a Jew. People (who) justify genocide, they are more Nazis than Jews,’
Reflecting on her childhood education at a Hebrew day school in Montreal, Klein eventually realised how Zionists had been exploiting the trauma of the Holocaust to instil fear into young Jews like her in order to control them:
…as in so many schools like it, the facts of the Nazi genocide were drummed into us like arithmetic tables: the numbers of dead, the twisted forms of torture, the gas chambers, the cruelly closed borders. This was the late 1970s and early ‘80s — before the immersive Holocaust museums with walk-in cattle cars were constructed, before the March of the Living tours took hundreds of thousands of young Jews on trips to Auschwitz — but we received lo-fi versions of the same experiences, and our terrified imaginations filled in the blanks.
Looking back as the parent of a child older then we were then, I am struck by what wasn’t a part of these strangely mechanical retellings. There was space for the surface-level emotions: horror at the atrocities, rage at the Nazis, a desire for revenge. But not for the more complex and troubling emotions of shame or guilt, or for reflection on what duties the survivors of genocide may have to oppose genocidal logics in all of their forms. I am struck that we never actually grieved, nor were we invited to seize our anger and turin it into an instrument for solidarity.
Many years later, my friend Cecilie Surasky, then one of the leaders of Jewish Voice for Peace, observed of these kind of educational methods: “It’s re-traumatisation, not remembering. There is a difference.” When she said it, I knew it was true. Remembering puts the shattered pieces of our selves back together again (re-member-ing); it is a quest for wholeness. At its best, it allows us to be changed and transmuted by grief and loss. But re-traumatisation is about freezing us in a shattered state; it’s a regime of ritualistic reenactments designed to keep the losses as fresh and painful as possible. Our education did not ask us to probe the parts of ourselves that might be capable of inflicting great harm on others, and to figure out how to resist them. It asked us to be as outraged and indignant at what happened to our ancestors as if it had happened to us — and to stay in that state.
The reason for this frozen quality to our education, I now see, was that the Holocaust was a plot point in a larger, prewritten story we not only were being told but also were trapped inside: a phoenix-from-the-flames narrative that began in the gas chambers of Nazi-controlled Europe and ended on the hilltops of Jerusalem. Though there were certainly exceptions, for the most part, the goal of this teaching was not to turn us into people who would fight the next genocide wherever it occurred. The goal was to turn us into Zionists.
[Klein (2023), 297–298]
In the end, Klein concludes that Israel “became a doppelganger of the colonial project, specifically settler colonialism.” But doppelgangers are not identical twins. Israel’s settler colonialsm differed from its predecessors.
Where European powers colonised from a position of strength and a claim to God-given superiority, the post-Holocaust Zionist claim to Palestine was based on the reverse: on Jewish vicitimisation and vulnerability. The tacit argument many Zionists were making at the time was that Jews had earned the right to an exception from the decolonial consensus — an exception born of their very recent near extermination. The Zionist version of justice said to Western powers: If you could establish your empires and you settler colonial nations through ethnic cleansing, massacres, and land theft, then it is discrimination to say that we cannot.
[Klein (2023), 301]
Reading Klein’s last sentence brings us to a shocking insight into the pathology of genocide-celebrating Israeli’s at Kerem-Shalom. Perhaps in their warped mirror world it is discrimination — i.e. anti-semitism — for Westerners to deny them the opportunity to ethnically cleanse, massacre, pillage and colonise Palestine; just as the Westerners themselves have done to so many countless others throughout the world.
Part Four: Dajjaal
If you have been following recent parliamentary events in the UK you will know that long standing conventions and practices in the British democratic system have been eroded, twisted and manipulated, in order to prevent elected Members of Parliament from voting with a free conscience on ending Israel’s ongoing murder of Palestinians. Similar things are happening throughout Western Europe and the US as these regimes get more and more desperate to defend the indefensible.
There is a well known children’s story that speaks to our times:
Many years ago, there was an Emperor, who was so excessively fond of new clothes, that he spent all his money in dress. He had a different suit for each hour of the day; and as of any other king or emperor, one is accustomed to say, “he is sitting in council,” it was always said of him, “The Emperor is sitting in his wardrobe.”
One day, two rogues, calling themselves weavers, made their appearance.
They gave out that they knew how to weave stuffs of the most beautiful colors and elaborate patterns, the clothes manufactured from which should have the wonderful property of remaining invisible to everyone who was unfit for the office he held, or who was extraordinarily simple in character.
“These must, indeed, be splendid clothes!” thought the Emperor. “Had I such a suit, I might at once find out what men in my realms are unfit for their office, and also be able to distinguish the wise from the foolish! This stuff must be woven for me immediately.” And he caused large sums of money to be given to both the weavers in order that they might begin their work directly.
So the two pretended weavers set up two looms, and affected to work very busily, though in reality they did nothing at all. They asked for the most delicate silk and the purest gold thread; put both into their own knapsacks; and then continued their pretended work at the empty looms until late at night.
The whole city was talking of the splendid cloth which the Emperor had ordered to be woven at his own expense. And now the Emperor himself wished to see the costly manufacture, while it was still in the loom. Accompanied by a select number of officers of the court, he went to the crafty impostors, who, as soon as they were aware of the Emperor’s approach, went on working more diligently than ever; although they still did not pass a single thread through the looms.
“How is this?” said the Emperor to himself. “I can see nothing! This is indeed a terrible affair! Am I a simpleton, or am I unfit to be an Emperor? That would be the worst thing that could happen — Oh! the cloth is charming,” said he, aloud. And he smiled most graciously, and looked closely at the empty looms; for on no account would he say that he could not see. All his retinue now strained their eyes, hoping to discover something on the looms, but they could see no more than the others; nevertheless, they all exclaimed, “Oh, how beautiful!” and advised his majesty to have some new clothes made from this splendid material, for the approaching procession.
The rogues sat up the whole of the night before the day on which the procession was to take place, and had sixteen lights burning, so that everyone might see how anxious they were to finish the Emperor’s new suit. They pretended to roll the cloth off the looms; cut the air with their scissors; and sewed with needles without any thread in them. “See!” cried they, at last. “The Emperor’s new clothes are ready!”
And now the Emperor, with all the grandees of his court, came to the weavers; and the rogues raised their arms, as if in the act of holding something up, saying, “Here are your Majesty’s trousers! Here is the scarf! Here is the mantle! The whole suit is as light as a cobweb; one might fancy one has nothing at all on, when dressed in it; that, however, is the great virtue of this delicate cloth.”
“Yes indeed!” said all the courtiers, although not one of them could see anything of this exquisite manufacture.
“If your Imperial Majesty will be graciously pleased to take off your clothes, we will fit on the new suit, in front of the looking glass.”
The Emperor was accordingly undressed, and the rogues pretended to array him in his new suit; the Emperor turning round, from side to side, before the looking glass. The lords of the bedchamber, who were to carry his Majesty’s train felt about on the ground, as if they were lifting up the ends of the mantle; and pretended to be carrying something; for they would by no means betray anything like simplicity, or unfitness for their office.
So now the Emperor walked under his high canopy in the midst of the procession, through the streets of his capital; and all the people standing by, and those at the windows, cried out, “Oh! How beautiful are our Emperor’s new clothes! What a magnificent train there is to the mantle; and how gracefully the scarf hangs!” In short, no one would allow that he could not see these much admired clothes; because, in doing so, he would have declared himself either a simpleton or unfit for his office.
“But the Emperor has nothing at all on!” said a little child.
“Listen to the voice of innocence!” exclaimed his father; and what the child had said was whispered from one to another.
“But he has nothing at all on!” at last cried out all the people. The Emperor was vexed, for he knew that the people were right; but he thought the procession must go on now!
(Adapted from The Emperor’s New Clothes — by Hans Christian Andersen. Copyright © Peace Hill Press.)
The Western leaders supporting the genocide of Palestinians know that the game is up. That their masks have slipped. That their naked greed, narcissism, racism, Islamophobia and even anti-semitism — their brazen lies and complete disregard for human life, democracy and the rule of law — have exposed their demonic faces. And the evidence against them is absurdly ubiquitous. But just like the emperor in the story, they think ‘the procession must go on now!’ They must complete the foul deed. Like the witches in Shakespeare’s Macbeth their inner voices chant the creed of twisted souls:
“Fair is foul and foul is fair: Hover through the fog and filthy air.”
In the teachings of the Prophet Muhammad this inversion of reality is the modus operandi of the dajjaal—or rather, the masih-ud-Dajjaal — ‘the False Messiah’ or anti-Christ—a character whose ‘fire’ is paradise and whose ‘paradise’ is fire. Who claims for himself godhood and portrays himself as the giver of life and death. The Arabic word dajjaal is related to the root da-ja-la which in Lane’s Arabic lexicon is defined as follows:
دَجَلَI: فعل , Present.T ـُ Verbal.Noun دَجْلٌ, He smeared a camel with tar; as also دجّل ↓ : or he smeared him over his whole body with tar: or دَجْلٌ signifies the smearing in the part that is mangy, or scabby, with tar: and تَدْجِيلٌ ↓ , […]
In our age, increasingly there is a slandering of truth, a smearing of people who speak out, an attempt to hide the ugliness of wicked people by painting over their deeds and wretched faces with words and images designed to deflect, distract and perplex. In this age, the beloved final Prophet of the Islamic sacred tradition—who Karen Armstrong calls a “prophet for our time”—reminds the faithful to never seize mentioning the reality of the dajjaal, and to seek protection and help from God, by reciting the Surah al-Kahf—or Chapter of the Cave—from the Qur’an every Friday.
But the Surah al-Kahf makes no direct mention of the Dajjaal. And although Christ is mentioned many times elsewhere in the Qur’an, this Chapter contains no direct mention of him either. Instead it opens with mention of a band of young believers (who may have been followers of Christ or of an earlier Jewish Prophet) persecuted for their beliefs who seek refuge in a cave. Whey they wake up hundreds of years later the world has changed and their faith is no longer persecuted. And it tells of a seldom known episode in the life of Moses where he meets a chosen servant of God, given direct knowledge from the Divine that Moses himself is not privy too. A servant who teaches Moses the limits of his knowledge and why sometimes bad things appear to happen to good people.
The fact is that the dajjaal is the ultimate doppelganger. A creature that tries to impersonate the Messiah and convince people that he is divine. In the Islamic tradition the very same servant of God who teaches Moses in the Surah al-Kahf will confront Dajjaal at the end of times. Known as Khidr in Arabic — the ‘Green One’ — and celebrated as the patron Saint of England in the form of St. George; Khidr will not be afraid to directly confront Dajjaaland declare openly that he is an imposter. The Dajjaal will have him killed and restored to life. But this will only strengthen Khidr’s resolve who will once again declare the Dajjaal to be an imposter. The Dajjaal will have him killed again, but will not be able to restore him a second time. In a Sacred Tradition (Hadith), the Prophet Muhammad described this fearless individual who speaks truth to power as being “the greatest martyr of his age.”
In fact speaking truth to power is a theme oft repeated in the Qur’an. A motif which may well be seen in one way or another in almost every page of the Sacred Book. In our moment in history where imposters reign over us, and like the Dajjaal, seek to present themselves to us as upholders of our sacred traditions, of our democratic institutions, of our simplest, most universal human values; while all the while behaving with demonic rampage murdering babies, women, men, the elderly and the young, and eradicating all forms of life in pursuit of their greed; in this moment in history, we are all called upon to take up the mantle of Khidr and speak truth to power. As Christians, as Jews, as Muslims, as Europeans, as Americans, as human beings of the east and the west — regardless of faith, colour, race or creed — we have to confront the demonic doppelgangers masquerading in public as defenders of our interests. We have to become, if not Khidr-like, then at the very least like the boy in Hans Christian Andersen’s story — and call out the charade for what it is. In the Islamic tradition Khidr cannot destroy Dajjaal — that is a task reserved for Christ himself. But in confronting this ultimate imposter with words of truth, Khidr exposes Dajjaal for the fraud he is, and thus allows people to break away from his spell.
The spell of Israelism has been well and truly broken. The illusion of American democracy, the myth of Western nations as somehow champions of free-speech and liberty, the mirage of the white-man as saviour and defender of human values, the mask of Arab leaders as benevolent dictators caring for their people — all of it has vanished — smashed to pieces with the Western-backed Zionist rush to “finish the job.” People of conscience are speaking out, unafraid of the consquences. From State Department Officials, US Servicemen and women, British Parliamentarians, American law makers, UN Officials, Jews, Christians, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists; journalists, law makers, academics; medics, mothers, activists; the young and the old —the world is rallying against the demonic doppelgangers. They confront Germany’s unwavering support of its exported version of Nazism, they expose US Lawmakers’ shameless selling-out to the Israel lobby, the hypocrisy of Western leaders as they help Israel continue its genocide, and the duplicitous doublespeak of the corporate media covering up the crimes.
But the Palestinians — the real indigenous people of the Holy Land — more than any others in our moment, are making the ultimate sacrifice. Like Khidr confronting Dajjaal— they stand fearlessly before the might of Western civilisation’s technics of death. As mentioned by UN Special Rapporteur, Francesca Albanese, 25,000 tonnes of explosives — equivalent to two nuclear bombs — were droppped on them in just the first months of the campaign. As if Hirsohima and Nagasaki had been rolled into one for the people of Gaza. And yet they stand — praying amidst the rubble of their homes. As Zionists spew out words of hatred against them; they write, speak and sing poetry. As Israel flies sorties of American built, British guided fighter jets over the graves of their loved ones; their children fly kites into the hate-filled skies. The people of Gaza have helped open our eyes, and allowed us to see our leaders for what they really are. More than anything there unwavering faith against all the odds, their impregnable patience in the face of unimaginable suffering, their eternal hope unbreakable despite all the killing — speaks to our humanity, teaches us what it means to be human. A real human being.
In the Islamic tradition the Dajjaal in the end is defeated quite simply — when he comes face to face with the real Christ, the false-Messiah melts away. And so it is with the demonic doppelgangers posing before us. Their mask of lies has already fallen. It is up to all of us, now, to relentlessly confront them with the Truth until they are vanquished once and for all.
Because Zionism, like Dajjaal, is a doppelganger composed entirely of lies. With its lies it has built a racist enterprise systematically destroying not one but two peoples, and embroiling the entire world into destruction. By hook and by crook it has even brought generations of well-intentioned Jews into its deception. But when Israelis have fellow Jews to show them a mirror into the truth, then things begin to change. And they are changing. We all have to become these well polished mirrors if we are to have any hope of restoring the world, and the Holy Land, to Peace. We have to look into mirrors that show us what we have really become. We have to become mirrors for those that have lost all sense of themselves. We have to polish our hearts and bring each other back from the brink. Because when all is said and done, it is just as Rumi wrote:
“We are the mirror, as well as the face in it.
We are tasting the taste of eternity this minute.
We are pain and what cures pain.
We are the sweet cold water and the jar that pours. Soul of the world, no life, nor world remain,
no beautiful women and men longing.
Only this ancient love circling the holy black stone of nothing.
Where the lover is the loved, the horizon and everything within it.” ― RumiPen and Sword is currently free to read. Tell them that you value their writing by pledging a future subscription, sharing this post or leaving a comment.
Hello, Munawar, I concur with you a great deal in pt. III that Zionism masquerades itself as Jewish and that its origins lie in Nazism. If I may, there's a slight "extra" to the story of Zionism: it is the product of Kabbalistic (NOT Talmudic, as many incorrectly believe) esoteric occultism especially as represented in the Sabbatean/Frankist "tradition," and employed by the Jesuit Order to pseudo-fulfill its own fake "dispensationalist"/"Christian Zionist" interpretation of the Book of Daniel then passed down to its British geopolitical subsidiaries, themselves held in control via a "British Israelite" Masonic cult proxy. Nazism was to serve as a dialectical mirror to Zionism, "validating" and catalyzing it into "fulfillment" by Holocausting Europe's Jewish population until the surviving remainder were desperate enough to accept Zionist emigration demands. (on a side note, neo-Nazism also serves as an inverted dialectical "validation" of Zionist propaganda in a cynical propaganda process I call "dialectical cycling")
BTW, "Jewish Voice for Peace" (JVP) and IfNotNow are almost certainly duplicitous/faux "anti-Zionists" in sincerity; I did a post explaining this some time ago if you might be interested (also, I recently finished my analysis on Syria you were waiting for; not sure if you may have noticed): https://adversusbabylon.substack.com/p/jewish-voice-for-peace-jvp-zionazi