The mystical Orient.
On my self imposed break from SM I spent most of the time reading. I used to read a lot more than I do but I was never one for novels or romances, although poetry and poetic writings are still favorites. History and sociology, anthropology, those were my books. So I picked one of them.I was not ready for the result. When you are confronted with truths you lived yourself as witness on the ground they took place, and that happens many years passed, hindsight becomes judgement. The book was “Can ‘the whole world’ be wrong?”, by Richard Landes. I found myself reading my own writings, contemporary to those truths, and was quite disturbed by them. You see, I didn’t realize how much I was oblivious of betrayal.
I was saved from complete collapse by my subconscious, that never surrendered to the prevailing sentiment of Western shame towards the Orient we, Europeans, became masters of when we centered all geography on our soil and in our souls. To the point where, in our ashamed hubris, we determined Europe would become the next superpower. In an enlightened era of revived Renaissance.
The irony is, supreme, it was the Orientals once among ourselves who provided the spark to the secularism without which the original Renaissance would never have existed in the first place. The supreme aspect of such irony is we recognized this while failing to understand how the Orient had since obliterated that spark in its own midst. We projected our core values onto those who despise them.
In doing so we deny reality in favor of a dream we dreamed half consciously, as if afraid to wake up and realize it was but a dream while its fragments inevitably slip into oblivion. As they almost always do. In my case, back in the early 2000s, it was the poet in me reaching for the stars as I walked on the remnants of an advanced civilization that lived on “my soil” for nearly seven centuries.
A civilization with urban lighting and centers of knowledge, with mathematics and astronomy, and philosophy. Ibn Rushd, known to us as Averroes, lived among us then and planted the seed of secularism in Andalusian soil. A seed the Christian crusaders tried to crush as much as they did the Muslim presence in Europe.
Luckily for our yet to be born Renaissance, they succeeded the latter and failed the former. The pen remained mightier than the sword. As a romantic I dreamed the dreams of the lost gardens of Cordova for the expelled, but through the eyes of an imagined Salah ad-Din in all his tolerance and magnanimous deeds, allowing all faiths to worship within the walls of Jerusalem.
Later on I realized such romantic notions could be found in men born to other faiths who held on to Averroes spark and were not as religious as one would expect, such as Theodor Herzl and his dream of yet another cosmopolitan Jerusalem, open to all in peace. Always Jerusalem. The inexorable center of the universe, the ultimate conquest.
Later on I realized such romantic notions could be found in men born to other faiths who held on to Averroes spark and were not as religious as one would expect, such as Theodor Herzl and his dream of yet another cosmopolitan Jerusalem, open to all in peace. Always Jerusalem. The inexorable center of the universe, the ultimate conquest.
My deep rooted love for Israel and my subconscious admiration for the only religion “that is not a religion”, Judaism, and for the Jewish people, balanced my feelings for this unnatural positive sum game we played with Islam in the early 2000s. Unlike most Europeans on the streets back then, I was not protesting Western culture when I joined their protests. I was defending it.
As I rallied against the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, disturbed by the nonsense it was to wage “war on terror”, I didn’t realize my fellow secular protestors were acting as defenders of a faith they did not understand, confusing it with the culture that once sparked their precious secularism but had since crushed it. Dreamers. Dangerous ones.
As an European living these events in Europe I was attracted to the romanticism of the children throwing rocks at tanks but my eyes clearly saw they were really grown men blowing up buses full of children. That had already been my impression before, in the three years of the first intifada, ending in 1990, and so it was in 2000.
While many others allowed the image of Muhammad al Durah, the Palestinian 12 year old shot in the arms of his father, to erase the little Jewish boy in the Warsaw ghetto from their minds, I found that very thought abhorrent and repulsive. The narrative of that incident (al Durah) was exacerbated by the European press and media. I was there.
I remember feeling anguished by it, but still in my subconscious the little Jewish boy’s arms held up at the Warsaw ghetto were like waving me off the cliff. The press I trusted was revealing its nature, betraying me. And then the prophet’s cartoons happened. Again those who I had protested with were out on the streets, defending Sharia Law with all their secular might. I was not.
The perfidious Da’Wah was nothing but Jihad’s sister and its true motives became clear. We played the positive sum game for too long with a zero sum player. We were on negative sum territory. And we were losing badly. Personally, the result was defeatist and I let the Kahanist portrait of Israel lead me to believe Israel was doomed to demographic induced collapse.
The fear of that very possibility consumed me and I couldn’t understand why Israelis and their diaspora couldn’t see it as such. To this day it is that fear that still convinces me a two state solution is the only alternative for the enduring existence of a democratic Jewish State in Israel. Many believed this in Israel herself until October 7, 2023.
The Am Yisrael Herzl dreamed of was a manifestation of a people engaged in a positive sum game living in peace with its neighbors, close and far. The more realistic Zionists of his time were neither secular nor detached from the zero sum game humans had naturally played for thousands of years. The human nature secular values wish to tame and transform.
That is the very essence of democracy: the constant restraint of human nature in a world where it is no longer possible to sustain a zero sum game without going mad. Without mutually assured destruction. There’s just too many of us with too little room to indulge in our destructive nature without a negative sum outcome.
Our only hope remains to ensure a positive sum environment where we all thrive before we are destroyed. The problem with that is we cannot go from our current state to such a solution directly. Our first step must be to reach zero. In order to do that we must admit we are deep into negative territory and why. We can only do this by recognizing the nature of our opponents.
If we are to prevail in our aspirations for a better world where our secular values are the norm and the guarantee of true freedom, including religious freedom, we must apply the same fervor against ALL those whose objective is to impose their beliefs on us. We no longer tolerate a Christian based totalitarianism. We must extend that intolerance to the one Islam seeks to impose.
Our colonial guilt, as Westerners, must not result in such shame that prevents us from recognizing our enemy, or projecting that guilt on the innocent that play no part in it, such as the Jewish people, while ignoring it in the design of a global caliphate, as if doing so would make us xenophobic. The same way being intolerant of Nazism is not a sign of xenophobia towards Aryans.
The West is playing the same game Israel has been playing since 1948. Siding with her enemies is no longer a safe exercise in self righteousness to quell our colonial guilt but a suicidal surrender to shame that prevents us from successfully engaging those very enemies within our borders. Failing to recognize this will eventually lead to a new holy war, in which secular people have no part to play.
The opposition to Islamic fundamentalism in our societies cannot be left to Christian nationalists, no matter how successful their XXI century crusaders may be. It must be embraced by those of us who believe in a secular future without room for the intolerant. Before we can successfully play a positive sum game we must engage and win a zero sum one.
All we hold dear, the little things and the big ones, from a simple gathering with friends around a drink to the right to love whoever we like, is being lost as a result of the negative sum our delusions of positivity and inclusivity produced. We better open our eyes and stand our ground. While we still can.
As I rallied against the war in Iraq and Afghanistan, disturbed by the nonsense it was to wage “war on terror”, I didn’t realize my fellow secular protestors were acting as defenders of a faith they did not understand, confusing it with the culture that once sparked their precious secularism but had since crushed it. Dreamers. Dangerous ones.
As an European living these events in Europe I was attracted to the romanticism of the children throwing rocks at tanks but my eyes clearly saw they were really grown men blowing up buses full of children. That had already been my impression before, in the three years of the first intifada, ending in 1990, and so it was in 2000.
While many others allowed the image of Muhammad al Durah, the Palestinian 12 year old shot in the arms of his father, to erase the little Jewish boy in the Warsaw ghetto from their minds, I found that very thought abhorrent and repulsive. The narrative of that incident (al Durah) was exacerbated by the European press and media. I was there.
I remember feeling anguished by it, but still in my subconscious the little Jewish boy’s arms held up at the Warsaw ghetto were like waving me off the cliff. The press I trusted was revealing its nature, betraying me. And then the prophet’s cartoons happened. Again those who I had protested with were out on the streets, defending Sharia Law with all their secular might. I was not.
The perfidious Da’Wah was nothing but Jihad’s sister and its true motives became clear. We played the positive sum game for too long with a zero sum player. We were on negative sum territory. And we were losing badly. Personally, the result was defeatist and I let the Kahanist portrait of Israel lead me to believe Israel was doomed to demographic induced collapse.
The fear of that very possibility consumed me and I couldn’t understand why Israelis and their diaspora couldn’t see it as such. To this day it is that fear that still convinces me a two state solution is the only alternative for the enduring existence of a democratic Jewish State in Israel. Many believed this in Israel herself until October 7, 2023.
The Am Yisrael Herzl dreamed of was a manifestation of a people engaged in a positive sum game living in peace with its neighbors, close and far. The more realistic Zionists of his time were neither secular nor detached from the zero sum game humans had naturally played for thousands of years. The human nature secular values wish to tame and transform.
That is the very essence of democracy: the constant restraint of human nature in a world where it is no longer possible to sustain a zero sum game without going mad. Without mutually assured destruction. There’s just too many of us with too little room to indulge in our destructive nature without a negative sum outcome.
Our only hope remains to ensure a positive sum environment where we all thrive before we are destroyed. The problem with that is we cannot go from our current state to such a solution directly. Our first step must be to reach zero. In order to do that we must admit we are deep into negative territory and why. We can only do this by recognizing the nature of our opponents.
If we are to prevail in our aspirations for a better world where our secular values are the norm and the guarantee of true freedom, including religious freedom, we must apply the same fervor against ALL those whose objective is to impose their beliefs on us. We no longer tolerate a Christian based totalitarianism. We must extend that intolerance to the one Islam seeks to impose.
Our colonial guilt, as Westerners, must not result in such shame that prevents us from recognizing our enemy, or projecting that guilt on the innocent that play no part in it, such as the Jewish people, while ignoring it in the design of a global caliphate, as if doing so would make us xenophobic. The same way being intolerant of Nazism is not a sign of xenophobia towards Aryans.
The West is playing the same game Israel has been playing since 1948. Siding with her enemies is no longer a safe exercise in self righteousness to quell our colonial guilt but a suicidal surrender to shame that prevents us from successfully engaging those very enemies within our borders. Failing to recognize this will eventually lead to a new holy war, in which secular people have no part to play.
The opposition to Islamic fundamentalism in our societies cannot be left to Christian nationalists, no matter how successful their XXI century crusaders may be. It must be embraced by those of us who believe in a secular future without room for the intolerant. Before we can successfully play a positive sum game we must engage and win a zero sum one.
All we hold dear, the little things and the big ones, from a simple gathering with friends around a drink to the right to love whoever we like, is being lost as a result of the negative sum our delusions of positivity and inclusivity produced. We better open our eyes and stand our ground. While we still can.
