Baseless, Murderous Hatred:
The Scapegoater’s Projection
In the beginning was the first human sin. And it was not the eating of the forbidden fruit. God, wishing humans to be autonomous moral agents free to choose between good and evil, wanted us to know the difference. We were supposed to eat that fruit, at least at some point. The first sin, then, was responding to being in the wrong by pointing the finger, using knowledge of good and evil badly. (In which case, counter to many teachings, Adam was the first to sin, not Eve; indeed, the simple meaning of the text is that Eve introduced moral discourse to humanity.) One can understand why God kicked the couple out before they ate of the tree of life: there’s nothing worse than having to live forever with whining scapegoaters who blame everyone else for their mistakes and misfortune. No huis clos in the Garden of Eden.
No, the inability to take responsibility for one’s own shortcomings, one’s own bad choices, one’s own failures, is, as Erich Fromm put it almost a century ago, an escape from freedom that can rush headlong into tyranny. Democracies dedicated to the proposition that all citizens should be free, must ask of those citizens, those electing and those elected, to engage in ongoing self-criticism, even in public. The principle lies at the heart of western academic success, or at least it did. A society is only free when public criticism is legitimate; its free press, a pillar of that founding freedom. Citizens respond to criticism with words and reasoning, and not violence. The resilience and creativity of democracy corresponds to the ability to learn from these mistakes, often painful to admit. Honest self-criticism, foundation of free societies.
It is, however, a key dimension of shame-honor cultures that such self-criticism, especially public, is anathema. In such political cultures, to publicly admit error, fault, transgression, is a death sentence. It’s like bleeding in a shark tank in which many compete ruthlessly for the great renown of being “the strong horse.” As Anne-Elizabeth Moutet put it about France, in the context of the al-Durah affair (which launched this current, widespread madness):
To understand the al-Dura affair, it helps to keep one thing in mind: In France, you can’t own up to a mistake. This is a country where the law of the Circus Maximus still applies: Vae victis, Woe to the vanquished. Slip, and it’s thumbs-down… modern French… don’t do apologies well, or at all if they can possibly help it. Why should they? That would be an admission of weakness. Blink, and you become the fall guy.
That’s why, in response to criticism from citizens, Charles Enderlin tried to use the courts to protect his honor. In Western democracies (at least so far), acknowledging criticism – in this case terrible error – just means losing prestige and respect, maybe one’s current job. Now multiply that a thousand-fold in real shame-honor cultures where one’s very existence as a(n all-important) “man of honor” is on the line, and the critic, by his very criticism, has declared himself a mortal enemy.
Where powerful men, men of honor, can silence criticism through threats and violence, a free press cannot exist.
The significance of the presence of a person is highly relevant to his honour. That which is an affront if said to his face may not dishonour if said behind his back. That which, if done in his presence, is offensive may not be so if he is not there to resent it. What is offensive is not the action in itself but the act of obliging the offended one to witness it. (Pitt-Rivers, “Honour and Social Status,” in Peristiany, Honour and Shame, 25f.)
Face-to-face criticism is automatically a matter of honor. No one dared say Lancelot was having an affair with Queen Guinevere in public, because he would face single combat with Lancelot. And in the early years of modern journalism, print was public speech. During the Dreyfus affair, a dozen journalists fought duels with men of honor whom they had criticized.
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Hebrew has an expression: sinat chinam, gratuitous or baseless hatred. Mostly Jews use it to self-criticize. Most famously, in a move Harari considers infantile projection, the Gemorrah blames the loss of the Second Temple on that sinat chinam. In a separate tale illustrating that assertion, a humiliated wedding guest takes vengeance by inciting the Romans against the Jews.
Of course, that somewhat banal tale of deliberate humiliation sidesteps what we know about the time: it was full of apocalyptic hatreds between factions, all convinced they were God’s agents in the imminent Great Redemption. Seen in terms of these apocalyptic dynamics, the explanation of sinat chinam arises from a retrospective realization that those world-salvific hatreds which seemed cosmically significant before, look dramatically different after the failure of that Redemption to materialize. The fallen world continues, and now, ex post defectu, from the retrospective view after the failure, those passionate hatreds look a lot like wildly inflated vanities.
Perhaps the best example of sinat chinam, however, is found in that biblical “children’s story” of Balaam and his donkey. In his shame at losing control in front of all these court dignitaries, in a rage Balaam beats his donkey forward into the angel of destruction whom he does not see. The donkey asks: “Why are you beating me?” Balaam answers, “because you mocked me, and if I had a sword in my hand, I’d kill you.” Note the key dimension of baseless (inflated) hatred here: the humiliation Balaam feels, he attributes to the donkey’s deliberate insult. ‘You did this to me to humiliate me. And since you did it with malice aforethought, in my rage, I want to, I have the right to, kill you.’ The greater and more unbearable the humiliation, the more murderous the projected hatred. When, in the 14th century, Christian theologians in the West accused Jews of killing Christ (i.e., God), not out of blindness but deliberately, they fed this baseless rage.
The instinct to point the finger, according to the biblical myth, is fundamental and universal, a fortiori when public shame is at stake. Get angry. Anger averts and transforms passive shame into action, targeting another to deflect the attention of those in whose eyes one would be a failure. And since it’s a dishonest ploy, one must insist loudly. The more the potential shame, the more loud and malevolent the projection – “‘they’ (the donkey) did it on purpose! If I had a weapon…”
The Arab relationship to Israel, an unprecedented tale of global humiliation, follows precisely this projective scapegoating. The honor problem of the Arab world originates in the triumphalist belief that Muslims must have visible superiority over infidels. Dhimmi are “protected” from Muslim violence by their acceptance of their legal inferiority (religious apartheid), and their refraining from criticizing Islam, the Prophet, even Muslims. Hence, Arab irredentism about Israel: an infidel state in (what should be) Dar al Islam shames Arab triumphalists; indeed the very existence of such a state is a blasphemy. It is an existential threat to supremacist Islam. Hamas spokesman Ghazi Hamad put it bluntly:
The existence of Israel is what causes all that pain, blood, and tears. It is Israel, not us. We are the victims of the occupation [by which he means from 1948]. Period. Therefore, nobody should blame us for the things we do. On October 7, October 10, October 1,000,000 – everything we do is justified.
When the partition was announced in 1947, and again in 1967, the genocidal chant arose in the Arab Street: “Drive the Jews into the sea!” With their vastly greater numbers, fighting against al-Yahood, the most cowardly of the dhimmi, a people without army for 2000 years, the Arab leaders who declared the war anticipated, bragged about, a great and bloody victory. Instead, before the whole world, they suffered repeated and stunning defeats at the hands of a handful of million Jews. Their losses brought global shame upon them and the Arab world. And every time, the Arab elites responsible for the humiliating failure, dealt with their unbearable shame by denying the loss (not recognizing Israel, not letting the refugees settle where they fled, not making peace and leaving millions under Israeli sovereignty), and continuing the struggle to eliminate the offending, the humiliating presence.
Indeed, they projected their own guilty but frustrated desires onto the Jews. The leaders of the “Palestinian” resistance were not a secular arm of Islamic imperialism, they were the freedom fighters opposing Israeli imperialism; they were not terrorists, the Israelis were; they did not want to commit genocide, Israel commits it all the time. In the summer of 2000, between Arafat’s “No.” at Camp David, and the launch of the Oslo Jihad, the PA produced a war video in the summer of 2000 portraying Israeli raping and slaughtering Palestinians. On 7/10, Palestinians (not just Hamas) did precisely those deeds – and worse – they had previously and continue to accuse Israel of committing. The projection reveals itself and its rage for what it was: stoking a baseless hatred.
And yet, for reasons well worth pondering, however destructive to everyone in the world that narrative of ardent, projected hatred might be, it spread its poison to “progressive” circles in the West at the dawn of the 21st century. Already by 2003, at the height of a Hamas-led suicide terror war against Israel, it became “a litmus test of liberal credentials to support the Palestinians.” How could liberals adopt so violent a movement, one that had sheer contempt for liberal values? Paul Berman explained:
Each new act of murder and suicide testified to how oppressive were the Israelis. Palestinian terror, in the view, was the measure of Israeli guilt. The more grotesque the terror, the deeper the guilt.” (Berman, Liberalism and Terror, 154)
How mighty a cloak for the Projection and its nursed hatreds: ‘it’s all the fault of the targets of my projected resentments.’ Such “thinking” made holocaust inversion not only possible, but imperative, even delicious: Israeli Jews are not just a bully Goliath, they are the genocidal Nazis reborn, and the Palestinian people are the victim of their (very slow) genocide. So what if the Palestinians are better off than any other non-oil possessing Arabs, so what if their population has and continues to grow vigorously, so what if thinking like this denied the Palestinians any agency?
For the longest time (too long) those of us who saw this train-wreck coming comforted ourselves with the quiet confidence that when people actually saw how deranged this hatred of Israel, the shingles would fall from their eyes, and they would see what anyone paying attention can see: that these accusations against Israel for its genocidal, racist hatreds, actually describe angry, bitter, Arab strong-men, incapable of admitting to themselves (much less others) that they are the primary authors of their misfortune, that the Arab strong horse hobbles before Israel. And if not that realization, at least, we thought, liberals and progressives would see how much these hatreds advanced the cause of Caliphators’s war on their own democracies. Surely then they would begin to put together the pieces and defend their values and their culture.
But if 7/10 has shown us the depths of Palestinian hatred and violence which, in a just world, no grievance can justify, subsequent developments show us something even more troubling, namely the support this inhumane hatred finds among Western youth, half of whom say they think that the Hamas attack “can be justified by Palestinian grievance”. Apparently responsible adults have waited too long to address the anti-intellectual arguments of BDS, too long have they allowed the hijacking of progressive causes, like feminism, by the misogynist Palestinians and their Grievance Narrative, echoed by sockpuppets like Jewish Voice for “Peace.” And so, rather than react with humane horror, those who claim to be the most progressive in our own society, embrace the projected hatred.
For more than 20 years, it’s been common for the West to accede to this poisonous discourse in the hopes of stilling the roiled waters. People of good will and compassion told ourselves the “moderate” Palestinian leadership really believed in the human rights they invoked, that the only solution was two states living side by side, that Palestinian leaders cherished a state of Palestine where the inhabitants could live lives of dignity and freedom. That our “Human Rights” NGOs who supported them wholeheartedly were worthy of their halo. That the media that wove this Grievance Narrative into news for two decades, were if not entirely reliable, at least in the case of the conflict over the land twixt river and sea, they were reasonably accurate. Certainly not inverting reality.
Liberals would not listen to the voice of the “Islamophobes” warning that these spokesmen were enacting a well-known strategy of invoking democratic values to destroy democracy (what the Greeks called demagoguery). As Frank Herbert formulated it in Children of Dune:
When I am weaker than you, I ask you for freedom because that is according to your principles; when I am stronger than you, I take away your freedom because that is according to my principles.
For decades, Western progressives have been principled dupes to this demopathy.
Now that we see it before us in all its savagery, some realize that while we appeased, they roiled the waters, while our journalists sympathetically told their story, they used it to spread the Jihadi message: the West wants to exterminate Islam; Israel delenda est. Most Westerners have difficulty understanding that this alleged “conspiracy of the West to exterminate Islam” that Clinton and Kerry and Obama wanted to dispel so urgently that they tried to eliminate the use of the term “radical Islam,” is yet another projection of Muslim supremacism. Those triumphalist Muslims, for whom it’s a zero-sum clash of civilizations and western infidels are the designated targets for subjection, accuse the West of wanting to destroy Islam. Another malevolent, triumphalist projection.
Scapegoating can become a mindset. Especially when sustained for generations, scapegoating narratives involve imagining an enemy, an “other,” who deserves hatred because of what “we” have attributed to them, our own unacknowledged motives. A kind of dualistic thinking fills the gap: ‘My enemy is bad, evil; he must be decisively defeated.’ The greater the struggle, the more absolute the difference between us (good) and them (bad). The stakes are no longer just tribal (‘my side or wrong’), nor egalitarian (whoever is right my side or not), they’re cosmic (‘the universe depends on my winning’). Projecting global conspiracy onto a group – i.e., onto the Jews, as in the Protocols in the hands of the Nazis, becomes a warrant for genocide.
And if the Arab-Muslim public sphere is deeply embedded in this projective tribalization of politics, it has had notable effect on the West, where we see advanced signs of the spread of this mentality. ‘We’re the good guys; their party, the bad.’ Trump rode to the presidency on a tide of discontent created, on the one hand, by an intellectual elite that viewed commoners who didn’t “get it,” as deplorable, and on the other, the “deplorables” who viewed those same elites as both untrustworthy and working for the ruin of the nation. Today, many Americans consider a victory of the other national party in the presidential elections of 2024 as an irreversible catastrophe for democracy and maybe (especially now!) the onset of World War III. A classic example of the potentially true, self-fulfilling prophecies of projected hatreds.
And, alas, much of that zero-sum universe draws from the importation of the Palestinian Grievance Narrative. For 75 years the Arab public sphere has welcomed and nursed this scapegoating: ‘They want to ethnically cleanse us, to commit genocide; they deliberately shame and humiliate us.’ After decades of the “secular” failure of “Arab Nationalism,” the imperative shifted to a full-fledged apocalyptic narrative, the battle between good and cosmic evil. ‘They stand in the way of the very “Day of Judgment,” and only by exterminating them can we, the good, triumph.’ And both the “moderate” seculars and the apocalyptic fanatics could agree: ‘In our raging, frustrated hatred, we want our revenge to match our humiliation. Only wiping them out entirely will shed enough blood to bleach our blackened face.’
Anyone who knows Israelis, knows to what degree this Palestinian Grievance Narrative, especially in its 21st century version (Israel=Nazis), constitutes wild projections, only rendered plausible by hyper-rhetorical Jewish self-criticism. All the key accusations – ethnic cleansing, land stealing, massacres of civilians, genocide, deliberate humiliation, apartheid – represent common acts features of Arab political culture over centuries and more, and certainly, in their most noxious form, every time Palestinian “leaders” have held power (Lebanon 1970s, West Bank Area A 1994-, Gaza 2006).
One of the debates that arose in Arabic as a result of 7/10, concerned the Islamic nature of Hamas’ behavior. Granted many Muslims celebrated, but did everyone in the Umma think Islam held this kind of behavior legitimate? Certainly among Arabic speakers in Israel, the cry arose those who interacted with Muslims:
Do you think Allah will be on your side after you slaughtered children, after you raped women you think Allah is now with you? Are you insane? You’re just infidels.
The sentiment was taken up by a Muslim speaking from Tel Aviv, speaking with a BBC Arabic anchor, who, along with his previous guests and colleagues, approved of 7/10.
Muhammad Kabiya: “Is this the Islamic religion, which Hamas is wearing as a cloak? The Islamic religion is innocent of Hamas. Innocent of these shameful acts against the Islamic religion and against everyone who claims to be Muslim.”
BBC anchor interrupts: “This is what you say, but Hamas has another point of view.”
MK: “In every country and every region where the Iranian groups have influence… Syria, destroyed; Iraq, destroyed; Gaza, destroyed. While the countries that have peace with Israel… we see them thriving more and more.”
Muslims who are genuine members of civil society (what we think we mean when we say “the vast majority, 99.9%, of Muslims are moderate”) vs. those who think Jihadi terror is an integral part of Islam. We tend to think are the tiny minority who hijack true Islam, the Religion of Peace, and, given that they shout Islamophobia at anyone who suggests otherwise, best to leave it alone.
Civic positive-sum thinking vs. tribal zero-sum thinking. Both make sense in their own terms, but with vastly different consequences. Jihad thrives on chaos and failure, the crucible of scapegoating hatreds. Civil society builds and thrives on its commitment to positive-sum, self-critical interactions. Until 7/10 Muhammad Kabiya saw the major fault line in the Arab world between one area eaten up by Jihadi chaos and repression (Iran, Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon), in another, where they have renounced the zero-sum, honor driven narrative of Islam triumphant, Arabs thrive. Since 7/10, the forces of chaos have strengthened notably. BBC Arabic (and English), Al Jazeera, France24 Arabic, are all on the side of chaos in the Arab world. As one genuinely, courageously, moderate Muslim put it, we’re in much worse shape at 7/10 than we were at 9/11.
If you want a peaceful planet, if you want to encourage win-win voluntary relations around the globe, and discourage destructive, coercive, I-can-only-win-if-you-lose relations, then step back from both Hamas, and everybody who shares their sense of victory. They are not on your side. The Palestinian cause is not on your side. (Indeed it has corrupted your side and its institutions for decades, including feminism.) Their supporters, especially after 7/10, do not, whatever their protestations, abhor racism and treasure life. They have celebrated a human abomination. They have bowed to a death cult. Before 7/10, shame on the demopaths; from 8/10 on, shame on you .
Which brings us back to Balaam. The donkey’s response went to the heart of the matter: “Did I ever do this to you before?” Balaam confronted with his mistaken projection of malice onto a faithful companion, accepts the rebuke of his donkey and admits, “No.” And then the shingles fall from his eyes and he realizes the mortal danger he courted unknowingly when, in his humiliated rage, he beat his donkey forward.
Those who believe they are “progressive” and yet rejoice with Hamas, thinking they are showing their moral enthusiasm by cheering for the good guys and hating the bad guys (or now, after months of punishing warfare, solidarity with the suffering Palestinians, you are caught up in a gratuitous rage. If you approve of the rage, you plunge headlong into the sword of destruction which hangs over our heads, and which, unawares, we have been strengthening for over two decades. If only you might possess the self-critical ability to listen to their Israeli and (and even Muslim) asses… to even accept some rebuke from those asses… if they could acknowledge and put down the key Projection of genocide… then the shingles just might fall from their eyes, and they would see the forces they have until now supported, gathering together for their own – our own – destruction. When you hear someone who claims to be progressive, obsessively accusing Israel of genocide, know before whom you stand: someone fatally disoriented, an unconscious promoter of Global Jihad, a pre-emptive dhimmi, a member of a cult, a new religious movement.
Once the shingles fallen, progressives worthy of their name can begin the true task of our times for Western infidels: challenge Muslim supremacism by defending the Jews. Only then, only when the infidel can honestly criticize Muslims and not have a chorus to cancel-culture scream “Islamophobia!”, can all the people of the world sincerely hope for a planet of tolerance and peace. Otherwise, you just appease with your masochistic conflict-adversity, a savage supremacism that will devour you soon enough.
To effectively receive and give rebuke. Each harder than the other.
Welcome to the theater of Jihadi cognitive warfare in the 21st century. Just how much longer do you want to fight for their side?
Thank gd for a line in the snd.