Deutsch's Pattern and the Current Crisis of Judeophobia
The categorical imperative to justify hurting Jews (even when you don't want to do it yourself.
The following is the end of an essay published at Fathom that dealt with the astonishingly incompetent behavior of the Western legacy media about the alleged Israeli “strike on Al Ahli Hospital” that “flattened” the hospital and killed many hundreds, when in fact, it was a Palestinian rocket shortfall that left a small crater in the parking lot, did no structural damage to the Hospital, and may have killed dozens at most. In an attempt to understand why journalists would, as a pack, turn the most hostile Hamas propaganda into news for hours on end, even after the evidence of error became available, I found myself meditating on an unpublished essay by the Oxford physicist David Deutsch on what he calls “The Pattern.” The first part appeared in the Fathom article, the second available only here.
Deutsch’s Pattern.
The Pattern, according to Deutsch is visible even in pre-Christian times (Greece and Rome), and it consists of placing the highest priority on establishing “the legitimacy of hurting Jews for being Jews.” This is not necessarily “antisemitism” in the prevailing sense of the term, as a form of racism or bigotry or hate. Indeed, in the West, most enactors of the Pattern today would honestly protest they would never want to hurt a Jew, especially just for being Jewish. And indeed, even Jews can be Pattern-compliant. As a result, it’s not just the people who really do want to hurt Jews who enact the Pattern, it’s all those who for mysterious reasons strive mightily to give those haters legitimacy, who, whether or not they personally feel violent, somehow need to legitimate those who do.
This Pattern, Deutsch observes, is always present, but only sporadically causes persecution, expulsions and mass murder — particularly when there is a serious threat to the legitimacy of hurting Jews. Such a threat appeared when Europeans, previously Pattern compliant in their belief in Jewish deicide, stopped believing in the Christian God. Deutsch argues that this threat to the Pattern generated a frenzy of anti-Jewish ideologies in many European countries following the Enlightenment when Jews were nominally emancipated as equal citizens— as noted by Max Nordau in 1897.
That, in my analysis, corresponds well with what happened in 2000. In the West, the Holocaust temporarily rendered taboo some of the traditional expressions of the Pattern. Nie Weider! For two generations thereafter, Westerners refrained from publicly enacting the Pattern: legitimating hurting Jews, Jew-baiting, circulating the Protocols, was no longer politically correct.
Alone, the Palestinian grievance narrative stood strong, the last redoubt of the Pattern in the second half of the 20th century. For Westerners, legitimating the Palestinian cause preserved the Pattern without violating the Holocaust-imposed ban on bad-mouthing Jews. When Arab leaders, those responsible for the Nakba, kept the refugees in camps, it was their induced suffrering that gave legitimacy to a movement whose most prized means of “resistance” was targeting Jewish civilians. When Westerners, through their great new institution the UN, let them, helped them to weaponize the refugees suffering, they protected their last legitimate reason to hurt Jews. In other words, the Palestinian people were a sacrificial victim whose suffering was necessary to preserve the Pattern.
When the French National Assembly rose to its feet in applause for Yassir Arafat in the late 1980s, just as Arafat’s terror campaign threatened Europe, they cheered for an enemy who, for them, embodied the Pattern. When journalists insist that we not call Arafat and his successors that emotive and disapproving term “terrorists,” they were enacting the Pattern. Hurting Jews could just be freedom fighting.
But if, in the 1990s, a new threat to the Pattern arose. If, as planned in the Oslo Peace Process (1993-2000), Arafat gave up the Palestinian grievance to make “the peace of the brave,” and get his own state (the liberal, positive-sum, two state solution), that would eliminate the last major redoubt of the Pattern.
The Pattern-compliant need not have worried. Arafat said no to peace, confirming the (hard-line) Israeli narrative, and even some of the media briefly sympathized with Israel’s pacific efforts. And yet, within months (the outbreak of the “al Aqsa Intifada” to be precise), the wheel turned sharply in support of the Pattern. Just as Arafat declared war, precisely as he had promised in his Hudaybiyya speech, the news media decisively sided with this freedom fighter and lethal journalism became the consensus.
Asked by Israeli sources why Arafat wouldn’t stop the suicide bombings, a Palestinian insider responded, “Why should he? He exults, he’s even euphoric… the international media portrays the intifada in romantic colors, and the international community supports us.” Within a year, the NYT chief correspondent, Deborah Sontag, published an elaborate justification for Arafat’s “no” at Camp David, followed by otherwise quality intellectuals.
The effects of this spectacular reassertion of the Pattern, in which Israel was now no longer merely the Goliath, but according to increasingly loud voices, the new Nazi, were far-reaching. Not only did they greatly increase the call to Jihad in the Muslim world, but they found a warm welcome among European progressives, who greeted the fake news that the IDF had targeted a Palestinian child in his father’s arms eagerly. Catherine Nay, jumped on the al Durah story to declare an amnesty from Holocaust shame: “This picture replaces, erases the one of the boy in the Warsaw ghetto.” Two years later journalists jumped on Palestinian reports the Israelis were executing civilians and burying them in pits in Jenin, to accuse Israel of genocide. By the mid-aughts (00s), a plurality of Europeans believed that Israel was committing genocide. Apparently, accusing Jews of genocide had a wide appeal.
People openly expressed their relief that, at last, they could finally go back to Jew-baiting (what they called “criticizing”). One can hear the relief and enthusiasm felt by Pattern-deprived people, only recently startled at the prospect that this day of release from the Holocaust ban on bad-mouthing Jews might never come. Here a liberal peer in Parliament remarked, off the record, “Well, the Jews have been asking for it, and now, thank God, we can say what we think at last.” There, at the great “anti-war” rally attended by millions, including an aggressive Muslim contingent, a nicely dressed man declared: “I love and revere the suicide bombers. Every time I hear of a suicide bomb going off I wish it had been eighty or ninety Jews instead of a pitiful handful.” Even diplomats (here the French ambassador to Britain) had no problem calling Israel that “shitty little country.” The bully-boys were back and Jew-baiting was in.
Observing the Pattern since 7/10
Now Deutsch does not explain the Pattern. He’s a physicist and discovered it while working on a book of intelligent people’s lapses into the irrational. He observed, beneath the Sturm und Drang of antisemitic deliria over the centuries and millennia, something of a constant of human behavior, a kind of sub-atomic particle that held Jew-hatred together in the longue durée. If he’s right, he may be as close to an observable “law of human behavior” as we can achieve. Above all, conserve the legitimacy of hurting Jews.
Before trying to explain it, let us observe it at work in the behavior of the legacy media in the last two decades. Consider, for example, the irrationality at play in the powerful reassertion of the Pattern in the West, at the turn of the year 2000.
Why would journalists, trained to detect misinformation and not pass on war propaganda, trust implausible allegations coming from people who openly hate the people they are accusing, especially given their long past history of misinforming the press?
Why would journalists not correct the repeated errors of lethal journalism, like the Jenin “Massacre”?
Why would alleged information professionals, participants in a post-war culture committed to Nie Weider, conceal from the public the evidence of active genocidal hatred of the Jews?
Why would someone who claims to think morally, jump to the conclusion that a picture of dubious reliability about one child’s “death” should replace an image that symbolized the deliberate murder of over a million children?
Why would journalists repeatedly arouse Jihadi hatred of Jews, when those same Jihadis hate the “free press” just as much as they hate Jews?
Why, when confronted with the reality of Palestinian suicide terror, would one take it as the measure of Israeli guilt, and the more grotesque the terror grew (suicide bombers), the more it would convince them that the victims of that terror were guilty (Berman, Liberalism and Terror, 154)?
Why welcome ferociously imperialist, misogynistic, openly genocidal, religious movements like Hamas and Hizbullah into the bosom of the “global progressive left” as Judith Butler did, explaining that it was because they are “anti-imperialists?”
Why adopt the apocalyptic Jihadi narrative in which the US and Israel were “the great and little Satans” when, as far as the Jihadis are concerned, that means you?
I met Deutsch and learned of the Pattern while writing my recently published book about what I called “astoundingly stupid” behavior, which I defined in terms of game theory:
Carlo Cipolla’s stupid person plays a gratuitously self-defeating zero-sum game in which, without winning, he nonetheless damages others, who might otherwise be favorable. In this book, I define astoundingly stupid as “those who create advantages for those who want to hurt them,” those who, in the name of positive-sum principles, fall dupe to the hard, zero-sum strategies of their self-declared, demopathic enemies.
As far as I could make out, the West was literally committing suicide just so that they could tell themselves (and the world) that Israel has lost the moral high ground.
Up until talking with David and reading his chapter draft, I explained this counter-indicated behavior (Deutsch would call it “irrational”) with a combination of 1) denied Palestinian intimidation, 2) moral Schadenfreude at Israel’s blackened face, and 3) the academic trappings of post-colonial theory. Observing the scene, I could see a literally terrified press complying with Palestinian demands that they feature the Palestinian Grievance Narrative for Western consumption. And even as the Western journalists complied, they categorically denied their cowardice. Meantime these journalists courted an audience in the West eager for news of Jews behaving badly, pleased to see haughty Israel knocked off the moral high ground.
And this all fit nicely into the post-colonial reading of the conflict so dynamically articulated by Edward Saïd. What better way to prove that indigenes are good and invading imperialists bad, than turning the indigenes from two millennia earlier, displaced by Muslim imperial colonialists, into the worst kind of racist genociders, and the local Muslim population, still deeply in the grip of their imperialist religious supremacism (Dar al Islam vs Dar al Harb), into the innocent, indigenous victims of that evil? The transgressive thrill of calling Israel the bully Goliath, even Nazi, and presenting the Palestinians as the victims of their oppression, even genocide, was apparently just too delicious to pass up.
But the Pattern suggests something else, or, rather, more. It suggests that, for reasons yet unexplained, people need these narratives about Jews that justify the hatred and violence that some – ‘others, not me, God forbid!’ – might want to perform. The recent events, 7/10, the Hamas slaughter of Israelis in Israel, and 17/10, the explosion near the Al Ahli hospital, seem to me to illustrate Deutsch’s pattern with a near clinical accuracy.
For ten days after 7/10 there was an outpouring of sympathy for the Israelis, even from the German Greens. Hamas’ unfathomable cruelty revealed what “right-wing” Israelis had said all along: Israelis were defending themselves from a genocidal onslaught. And viewing the wide approval expressed by the Muslim public sphere, it became clear that this savage Jihad was, in the eyes of many, a genuine part of Islam (even as the perpetrators protested to the West that they would never do such a thing, because it was against Islam). The Islamophobes were right. (My daughters told me, “we hate it that you were right.” So do I.)
Suddenly, the Palestinian Grievance Narrative, which spoke of non-violence and civil-society, resistance to oppression, yearning for a state where they could live with human rights and dignity, suddenly looked like propaganda, doubletalk aimed at winning the West to a cause that violated every humane value of a progressive world at peace. If Hamas objected to being called terrorists, it wasn’t because they were freedom-fighters being smeared with so negative a descriptor; it was because that’s who they were, and they didn’t want us to acknowledge it. And if this betrayal of values were not enough to turn. off progressives, at the same time these embraced some of the most ferocious imperialism in history.
Now if the their prevailing paradigm - freedom fighter against Israeli colonial oppression, if that paradigm of Israeli guilt for denying the Palestinians their rights, were to cede to one (I think far more accurate) in which the Palestinian desire and efforts to wipe Israel out explained Israeli behavior (reluctant occupation, blockade), then the Pattern was threatened indeed. Without Palestinians suffering at the hands of Jews, the legitimacy hurting those Jews was in trouble.
Then came the great test: the parking lot explosion that killed outside Al Ahli Hospital in Gaza City at about 7PM October 17.
Here was the opportunity for journalists, having just seen Hamas for what it was, to genuinely repent for their decades of misreading the conflict… if it turned out – as it has – that Jihadi rockets had killed dozens of Gazan civilians, and the media reported that in their headlines… if they investigated how often in the past these deadly shortfalls had happened and continue to happen, and how consistently they had incorrectly reported those strikes as Israeli strikes… if they familiarized themselves with Hamas’ genocidal antisemitism… if they asked Palestinian spokespeople what they thought it meant that their own people could do this… they might have strengthened the move away from willy-nilly promoting a murderous cause that treated its own people with contempt and cynically manipulated Western compassion. (Even Abbas denounced Hamas’ mad contempt for Palestinian lives.) In so doing they could have seriously undermined the demonstrators in the West who openly celebrated this appalling abomination and called for global intifada (Terror Jihad).
Or, would they snap at the poison meat, report as Hamas wished, and spectacularly restore both the Palestinian grievance narrative and their practice of lethal journalism, despite the surety that once that poisonous accusation hit the airwaves, no evidence could tear haters away from their “truth”? Not in the Muslim world, not among Palestinian supporters in the West, not even among certain partisan congresswomen.
Alas, for both the Middle East, and for the world, our legacy media chose the latter. The pack swung into its compulsive, lethal mode, unleashing upon the global community permission for Jihadis and their demented supporters in the West to revel in their hatreds. One senses the relief in BBC reporter Jon Donnison’s, “this is a game changer!” One can hear the triumphal cries of the “defenders” of Palestinian “human rights” as they reverse the accusation of ten days earlier: “Israel commits genocide!” France, which had briefly and sanely banned pro-Hamas demonstrations, was forced to relent, and the streets filled with thousands of advocates of Jihad.
Nothing illustrates the Pattern more sharply than this compulsive own-goal war journalism: the Pattern must be preserved, even at a terrible cost to our own lives. It’s as if they were teenagers cutting their body politic. Or zombies acting out a role over which they have no control. To watch even journalists sympathetic to Israel enacting the Pattern despite every indicator of evidence and professional journalism is an impressive experience.
How to understand the Pattern:
I taught a course at ISGAP with Deutsch, and in the final seminar I tried to explain the Pattern. There, I argue that the Pattern is a manifestation of shame-honor dynamics, a cultural matrix in which public criticism poses an existential threat to a “man of honor”: them’s fighting words. The legitimacy of hurting Jews protects non-Jews, especially powerful ones, from the possibility that they will say something that might humiliate them.
Living in a society in which the accusation of deicide served as a blanket justification for hurting Jews, Jean-Jacques Rousseau wrote the following remarkable paragraph.
There is a pleasure in refuting people who do not dare speak. . . . [When] conversing with [us] . . . the unfortunate [Jews] feel themselves at our mercy. The tyranny practiced against them makes them fearful. I will never believe that I have rightly heard the Jews’ reasoning as long as they do not have a free state, schools, universities where they might speak and argue without risk. (Emile, 6:4, 618-20).
Here we have at least one person, at least temporarily, who freed himself from Pattern-compliance. (We don’t know how he would have responded to the fierce criticism of his work by Jews freed of their fear of those who would hurt them.)
To an Enlightenment atheist, at least in principle, the Christian doctrine of the stigmatized “witness,” in which the degraded and miserable Jews, the Christ-killers, testifies to the Christian “truth” of the divinity of Christ (which Jews stubbornly and inexplicably refuse to recognize) would not carry any conviction. And yet, so bold an atheist as Voltaire, no longer able to accuse them of killing a God he didn’t believe in, managed to replicate Augustine’s approach: they deserve the eternal hated of mankind… “Still, we ought not to burn them.” So when, at long last in the 18th century, “grown-up” Europeans who rejected Christian teachings, finally had a chance to speak with other, even older critics of Christianity, they mostly preferred to adopt the teaching of the religion they otherwise rejected, thereby preserving the Pattern.
The dhimmi code in Islam serves the same purpose as the Christian “witness” teaching, a legal institution enforcing the need for triumphalist Muslims to dominate the public sphere. Jews and Christians and other infidels were “protected” from Muslim violence as long as they accepted their debased status. They must not “blaspheme” Islam or insult Muslims, they must not try and throw off the Muslim yoke. If they did, they were worthy of death, all of them. The Armenians, the Slavs under Ottoman rule, all suffered not just genocide, but the sadistic cruelties Hamas once again demonstrated.
One way to think about the Pattern, then, is in terms of putting a firm limit on caustic Jewish criticism. Today, most people know about the acute Jewish ability to criticize from the many examples of self-criticism, of Jews so committed to taking responsibility for what goes wrong in the world, that they expend enormous energy and ingenuity accusing their own people of misbehaving. This is currently a great fashion among “progressive” Jews – we are racists, Israel is apartheid, we are committing genocide!
But that acute ability to analyze and criticize also testifies to an exceptional Jewish talent for discerning flaws and follies everywhere. Freud was afraid his ferociously introspective “science” might remain entirely Jewish (and Jung proved him right). The Frankfurt School and Derrida developed some of the most penetrating techniques of critique, of deconstructing the idols of the mind. The Jew is the child in the crowd who speaks up when he sees an emperor and the foolish courtiers who, to avoid being called foolish, counseled him to enact the colossal stupidity of parading naked.
In this sense one might even argue that progressive Jews affirm the Pattern because, like a defeated male cowering before the triumphant alpha, they can thereby reassure the non-Jews that they would never turn their critical skills against them. Heaven forbid! And certainly, the gentile enactors of the Pattern welcome their highly-prized service of confirming the legitimacy of hurting Jews.
It is not by accident that the Arabs who hate the Jews most, are those who hide their shame of failed supremacy with their Pattern-enacting victim narrative, even though the last thing a man of honor wants to show is weakness. As the Palestinian Poet Mahmoud Darwish admitted: “our cause is famous only because we are fighting the Jews.” Nor is it an accident that the Palestinian’s most fervent chorus in the West, the “progressives,” think they are the global moral hegemon, and then use social media to cancel critics. And the more absurd their claims, the more urgently critics must be silenced (transgender-phobes). No wonder both “identities” revel in heaping abuse on the Jews and respond with indignation when criticized in return. These are the classic patterns of shame-honor cultures where no one should dare criticize a man of honor.
The perdurance of the Pattern, I therefore argue, is testimony to a limbic fear of public humiliation. As long as Jews are free to speak, everyone is in danger of being rebuked (i.e. in the minds of the honor-driven, of being shamed). As long as the Pattern rules, however, as long as people comply with its prime directive to legitimate hurting Jews, even when they personally have nothing against the Jews, even when they like Jews, then Rousseau’s dream of Jewish free speech will never materialize.
The cancel-culture of the 21st century began at Durban in 2001, days before 9/11, with an NGO resolution to make Israel a pariah, drove her beyond the pale. The Zionist voice must not be heard; to do so would be to “normalize” evil, they argued to a receptive audience. Independent Jews were the first target of 21st century cancel culture. And when that assault on the legitimacy of the Zionist voice gains traction, as it has over the last two decades with the development of social media, it threatens the free speech of all. We witness the formation of another persecuting society, like the Pattern-governed one set in motion exactly a millennium ago, in the early 11th century. It only begins with the Jews… and it takes generations if not centuries to dig out from those damages.
The question is not whether people already sucked into the vortex of genocidal Jew hatred, like, alas, those living in the Palestinian and Muslim public sphere, can be extracted. The immediate question is, can good liberal and progressive infidels, who protest how much they love Jews (even when it’s mostly dead and self-degrading ones whose company they enjoy), manage to peel themselves away from this prime directive of millennia, and consciously renounce the need to legitimate hurting Jews.
That would mean, in the current scene, Western infidels, religious and secular, defending Jews against Muslim calumnies, defying the Pattern-compliant grievance narratives whereby what Israel does to Palestinians explains, even justifies, Jihad at its most savage. That would, of course, take considerable courage on many levels. But then, challenging the legitimacy of Jihadis hurting Jews, would have a most salutary effect on the ability of those same infidels to live free and at peace with their Muslim neighbors.
It is possible; there are scholars with intellectual and moral integrity. But far too many who have descended into the depths of Newspeak without even a “Big Brother” to force their compliance.
I know it’s a big ask, but as an historian of the last two millennia, I’d say our unparalleled and difficult global experiment in freedom and abundance for all, depends on defying this seemingly irresistible imperative, the Pattern.