Today, we have grown used to seeing Palestinian and Hamas supporters goose-step, Nazi-style, shoot out their arms as they deliver the Hitlerian “Sieg Heil” salute. They also chant and scream: “Jews to the ovens,” “Hitler did not kill enough of you,” “Jews to the gas chambers.”
This is raw, rank, Jew-hatred or anti-Semitism; that much is clear. But we are also faced with a major paradox. These same Palestinian and Hamas supporters routinely hold signs that accuse Israel of being a “Nazi” state. To them, Gaza is “Auschwitz,” and the Israelis have “occupied” it with “genocidal” intentions.
Of course this is not factually true. According to my colleague, Dr. Barry Rubin: “In 1939, there were seven million Jews in continental Europe. At the end of the Holocaust, only one million Jews survived. There are currently 1.2 million Palestinians in Gaza. At the end of the 2009 war, 1,199,000 Palestinians are still there. The percentage of Jewish civilians killed by Germans and their allies was 86 percent. The percentage of Gazan Palestinians killed by Israelis is 0.1 percent. The number of Jewish civilians deliberately killed by Nazis and their allies is 6,000,000. The number of Palestinian civilians deliberately killed by Israelis=0.” (Please see below for his additional comparisons).
But the truth no longer matters. People, both Westerners, Arabs, and Muslims, (this includes the media), have all piled onto such metaphoric overkill. It is as if thoughtful and moderate voices can no longer be “heard,” only shouting, shocking, attacks seem to “register.” And, once someone says something, no matter how outlandish, it is deemed to be true–even if it obliterates both reason and reality.
The true truth is that Hamas and Hezbollah, backed by Iran, are engaged in a serious attempt to exterminate the Jews and to wage jihad against both Jews and other infidels. The Muslims/Islamists have projected their own obvious and evil design onto their intended victims whom they portray as Christian Crusaders or Elders of Zion. This would be laughable, or only of psychiatric interest, if it were not so omnipresent and dangerous due to its widespread acceptance.
In a sense, those Europeans and North Americans who support such a false Nazification of Jews, are merely continuing the Holocaust-era determination to genocidally exterminate Jews. This time, they hope that by doing so, the Islamist hordes will spare them, allow them to live as dhimmis, as inferior and subordinate citizens, in an Islamified Europe.
I asked my friend, Dr. Nancy H. Kobrin, the psycho-analyst and Arabist, what she thinks is going on. She said: “If we (the Jews) exist, the Muslims might have to acknowledge their own Jewish roots. They can’t do that. Therefore, they must destroy us.”
“So, they’re trying to destroy the evidence, the living witnesses?” I replied.
“Well, they are pandering to people who like Nazi insignia and the Nazi ideology. But they are also trying to drive the Jews crazy. They must know how seeing Nazi insignia makes us feel. This is very primitive, non-verbal behavior.”
Talk about primitive behavior! Just as certain primitive tribes have been described as literally eating their enemies hearts or other organs in order to incorporate their magical power–similarly, psychologically, the Nazi insignia-loving Jew-haters want to inherit or subsume the Jewish status as “victim” by destroying the Jews and presenting themselves, (the persecuted Muslims), as the noble “victims” of vicious Nazi Jews.
Dr. Kobrin calls this “psychological splitting. They want to have it both ways.” What she means is that the Palestinian propagandists and Muslim jihadists want to both identify with the Nazis as triumphant, death-cult destroyers–and also with the (past) and preferred sacred status accorded to dead Jewish victims. The Palestinians and other Islamists offer up their own babies, women, elderly, and civilian populations as human shields, human sacrifices, in order to obtain this grisly goal. They also engage in faked staged photos to approximate such Jewish-style deaths as well.
Elsewhere, in a Frontpage Symposium about the resurfacing of Nazi cartoons, Dr. Kobrin reminds us that “paranoids” are obsessed with “purity” and therefore with “cleansing.” This is accomplished by having a “scapegoat” upon whom one projects all the “dirty” components of oneself or of one’s group-self.
The use of Nazi images are meant to terrify and intimidate all who view them–especially those who have, in the past, been jailed, tortured, exiled, and wounded by those who display just such symbols. These images are forms of visual hate speech. They are meant to re-traumatize real victims and their second- and third-generation descendants and to intimidate bystanders.
But those Muslims/Islamists who display Nazi imagery also feel that they are the wounded ones. They seek public redress for their real and imagined wounds. What wounds could that be? For starters: Painful, shameful, anal penetration by trusted relatives in childhood; beatings in childhood; painful, public male circumcision between the ages of 5-12; cruel parents, cruel teachers, cruel religious leaders, equally cruel peers–and a culture which takes cruelty as a given; poor nutrition, illiteracy, and/or no productive future–mainly due to Muslim and Palestinian leaders who demand reverence and obedience even as they hoard the wealth meant to alleviate their people’s suffering; street theatre/political protest/mob merging as the only approved form of social life or group “orgasmic” activity.
According to Lloyd DeMause, there is a “paranoid” underside to anti-Semitism. It is caused by “child abuse, paedophilia and incest.” He writes:
“For instance, I would like to refer to a careful survey in the journal,” Child Abuse & Neglect “that showed that when questioned 652 Palestinian undergraduates concluded that 19% were sexually assaulted by a family member, 36% by a relative and 46% by a stranger. Since this adds up to more than 100%, obviously many were abused by more than one person, but the overall conclusion I detailed in my Journal of Psychohistory article entitled “If I Blow Myself Up and Become a Martyr, I’ll Finally Be Loved” (Spring 2006) was that most Palestinians are sexually abused, that men routinely have young boys they rape and that this is not mainly because of poverty because the college students reporting such horrible memories have upper-class families.”
This explains the Arab street. The Westerners who support them–ah, that is a more painful and a more curious matter. Are Westerners trying to both hide and atone for their racism by cleverly masquerading as staunch anti-colonialists and by “slumming,” dressing as impoverished Arabs, marching right alongside the presumably “wretched of the earth,” all fitted out in high jihadic gear? Or, is this a symbol of a Western wish to (psychologically) die, to be done with the demands of freedom, to be cleansed of all our filth–our greed and lust, our many choices?
There is something else. The jihadic use of European Nazi images is essentially a total “fakeout.” The jihadists are projecting all the sins of Islam towards Jews onto Christian Europe. In their use of Holocaust era imagery, the jihadists are trying to pretend that there is no long and genocidal history of Muslims towards Jews, Christians, and other infidels; they presume to deny that there is a 1400 year history of Islamic Jew hatred and genocide towards infidels–one that is still very much alive today; one that is supported by Muslim religious sources.
Despite individual exceptions and moments of respite, historically, Jews were routinely and relentlessly subjected to pogroms in the Muslim world and were ultimately driven out of the Muslim Middle East. The Jewish refugee story is the larger and more hidden story of 1948-1956. The Christian Crusades took place because crusading, imperialist, and genocidal Arab Muslims were slaughtering Christians throughout the Middle East and central Asia in what was once known as Byzantium; Zoroastrians in Persia too. Christians are still persecuted by Muslims today; many have been forced to flee Muslim lands. Read the important works of Bat Ye’or and of Dr. Andrew Bostom on this subject. Matthias Kunzel focuses more closely on the Nazi-era relationship between Arabs and Nazis in his book, Jihad and Jew-Hatred: Islamism, Nazism and the Roots of 9/11.
The use of Nazi images in pro-Palestinian, anti-Israeli demonstrations cannot be countered with sweet reason, fact, or truth. The hoarse demonstrators who scream hate speech slogans, who seem hypnotically in thrall to hate, are not capable of rational conversations in which any truth other than their own prevails. If one presents a jihadi True Believer with objective facts which challenge their version of reality, they will either physically and verbally threaten to attack you, actually attack you, or they will walk away.
Bullies, including terrorists, must be defeated militarily. They will comprehend absolutely no other language.
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