Islam Isn't Special
They hate the Jews in the exact same way that Columbia students and the UN do. They’re just more consistent.
The kids on the college campuses, reporters on Sky News, and half the employees of the UN don’t hate Jews because they “hate Jews” personally. They hate Jews because they are ritual captives of a totalizing ideology in a civilization built from the ground up to make Jews the exception to all holy totalities.
That was a full sentence. Let me break it down for you.
A ritual captive isn’t held at gunpoint. They aren’t even sell-outs nowadays; no payoff is generally required. They go willingly into captivity by performing rites, symbolic gestures, and ritual sacrifices whereby they exchange their agency and human freedom for the opportunity to be told what and whom they are.
A totalizing ideology is not defined merely by making universal claims. It is defined by the need for a purified whole in which no irreducible exception remains. It can only tolerate what it can define; the undefinable must be destroyed. It shows no respect for the sacrifices offered. It does not say, as G-d does, “If you extinguish My lamp, I extinguish your lamp.” It is not personal and has no vulnerability. If it’s vulnerable, then its declaration of what and who I am is less than absolute. On the contrary, the message of the ideology to acolytes is, “Now that you are an insider, you can see that there was only ever the ideology.” This is thrilling to the ritual captive because they live in a morally uncertain, nihilistic cosmos in which identity offers false security and absolution, and their doubt, guilt, and self-scrutiny can be set aside. The message of what and whom they are is externally established and unassailable. It is an objective fact, like a diploma. Or a noose. Or a molotov.
Continuing to parse that sentence: a civilization is, among other things, a sort of terrarium for ideologies. We are discussing Western Civilization, and it has chosen to hate Jews at every step of its intellectual and moral development for two thousand years.
Holiness means unassailable distinction. Therefore, these ideologies provide a holy totality, an exhaustive categorization of all that is real, just, and deserving of life. Other things exist, but they are unholy, unreal, and unjust, and they shouldn’t. (This implies that totalizing ideologies can only ever be dualistic at the level of reality and must attempt unity and reconciliation merely through rational categorization.) The logic of totalization requires an outsider to explain why the world is still imperfect. The history of Western Civilization ensures that the Jew fills this role by default.
A Jew, of course, is a sort of residual, independent, embodied echo of G-d’s revelation on earth. They have resisted absorption into universalizing ideologies since Egyptian captivity and even before; it is something of a family motto.
Jews are an irreducible parallel civilization who for two thousand years have served as the default example of what’s wrong, worldly, mundane, and unholy for ~all western ideologies. As I wrote in my previous post, the Holocaust was not an aberration but the culmination of this very structure, and blindness to this continuity renders 99% of all discussions of antisemitism irrelevant or worse.
So: We have anxious, empty children in a terrifyingly free world who, through very simple and purely symbolic social rituals (chanting a chant, signing a sign), have found belonging. Their ideology, which is global and total, is not “about” Jews at all, but about saving the world. For the totalizing ideology to save the cosmos, it must purge it of the unholy and unreal. In Western Civ, this almost always means the Jew.
The previous paragraph was written about Columbia students. But it’s also a perfect description of Nazis. And Bolsheviks. And Hamas.
We must conclude that nearly every analysis of antisemitism locates Jew hatred in the wrong place. There are millions who “don’t hate Jews” whose antisemitism is structurally indistinguishable, on a fair assessment, from that of the Nazis. Personal hatred of Jews is totally irrelevant beside the totalizing ideology and the hoary structures of Western thought. Over the decades, we have seen significant efforts to obscure this reality. We have been taught that the real essence of Nazism is some other thing than what everyone in Europe always believed and never renounced. We have been taught that “educating oneself” or (fake) “sophistication” inoculates against the “ignorance” of antisemitism. These are comforting illusions.
The alleged disjoint between thought on campus and thought in Khan Yunis goes in the other direction as well. We are also taught that certain Muslims’ specific quarrels with Jews mean they are merely fighting a familial or tribal battle over land. “They actually have a social justice claim against some Jews, while the Nazis did not.” But this is equally as mistaken as the claim that Bolsheviks can’t be like the Nazis because they’re ideological opposites. The Palestinian cause does not have an antisemitism problem because of its previous run-ins with the Jews any more than the Nazis’ antisemitism arose from prior Jewish behavior. Hezbollah is antisemitic because it is a death cult, not a death cult because it is antisemitic.
In reality, the totalizing ideologues of today are well-funded. They are our neighbors, omnipresent on social media and on the streets. And they are allies in a war most normal people still somehow don’t realize they’re fighting.
Muddled folk like to discuss how Islam has an allegedly less antisemitic history than Christianity. But that doesn’t matter any more than what the campus protestors individually feel about their Jewish professor. Global Islam is now part of Western Civilization. And it is one of the most lockstep, totalizing ideologies on earth, at least when it comes to Jews. I’ll prove it to you:
There are some Jews who appear at “Free Palestine” protests wearing kaffiyehs. It is alarming and sad. However, if there are 20,000 such Jews in the United States (in my opinion, a very generous estimate), they represent 0.25% of Jews. They are at the level of statistical noise. You will find this freedom to think and act differently almost comforting once we turn to Islam.
You know what has no statistical noise? Islamic antisemitism. There are two billion Muslims in the world. Five hundred Muslims coming together, anywhere in the world, to march against Jihadist terrorism and barbarity, would represent 0.00003% of the global Muslim population. Of course, most Muslims live in non-free societies, a point that is sensationally central to the thesis of this essay. But let’s let even India and Southeast Asia off the hook and estimate that in Europe and the United States, free countries with protected speech and protest rights that Muslims regularly exercise, there are 35 million Muslims. Five hundred Muslims in these countries would be 0.0014%. A thousand Muslims would be 0.0028%. To reach parity with the number of Jews out marching for Palestine in the US, to match the statistical noise level we established (0.25%), you’re looking at 87,500 Muslims in Europe and the US taking to the streets and saying, “Not in my name.” This protest has not remotely occurred.
Making matters worse, Islam is hardly a monolith. The faith is fractious. Iran vs. Saudi Arabia, Shiite vs. Sunni, is one of the world’s most enduring and important grudges. Muslims live in utterly diverse societies from Indiana to Indonesia. There are undoubtedly a million decision points internally, on matters ranging from theology to aesthetics to ethics, on which its massive population might disagree. If murdering Jewish families in their homes is one of them, there is no mass or street-level evidence for it. Meanwhile, tepid governmental half-gestures, vague Saudi or UAE press releases, are still considered a politically risky breakthrough.
That even amid Islamic diversity, no faction or group mounts public resistance to jihadist antisemitism, even in societies where the police protect their right to do so, is itself evidence of profound structural captivity. Strange but true: it is specifically in Western democracies, in London, Paris and New York, where Islamic protest against Hamas is most unthinkable. It is so unthinkable, I feel, that most people don’t even detect its absence. But, in the language of the internet, once you see, you can’t unsee it. A Jew (global population: 20 million) searching for a Muslim (~100 times larger) street protest against October 7th is like Abraham searching for a righteous man in Sodom. The sheer vastness of this absence even amid so much internal diversity should terrify us.
Reform-minded Muslims, moderate Muslims, and westernized modern Muslims certainly exist. I assume they are found in every major city in America, in London, and in Paris. But it is only an assumption. There is no public proof like the following image.
Ironically, the only place where there has been a mass Muslim protest against Hamas since October 7th is Gaza. I try to sympathize with Israeli thinkers who hold out hope for internal Palestinian reform based on the changing ideological landscape of Arab politics in the Knesset and the liberal roots, a few generations back, of Salafism. But given the simple statistics presented above, I have to wonder. Were the Arabs of Gaza to get out from under the boot of Hamas and merge with the broader Muslim world, would they remember their anti-Hamas radicalism? Or would they only sink into a more persuasive and effective conformity? No Muslim community free of Hamas’ oppression seems meaningfully disturbed by their existence or their atrocities. What is the UAE’s ban on the Muslim Brotherhood meant to mean to me when a significant percentage of London’s population is, for all intents and purposes, the Muslim Brotherhood?
As Hussein over at The Abrahamic Metacritique first brought to my attention, Islam has become saturated with the thought of late Christendom, particularly of the Nazis and Marxists of the 20th century. It is no longer your great-grandfather’s Islam. It has become firmly intellectually established within the civilization in which Jews are the default exception to all holy totalities. Hamas is a hypermodern ideological movement whose antisemitism is Nazi, whose propaganda shield is Soviet, and whose money is Norwegian. As we have seen, Islam is also a demonstrably totalizing ideology. When it comes to the Jews, there is statistically zero dissent within it, and far too few dissenters who have escaped from it.
The ideology of Sky News or the UN is not Islam. The ideology of Islam is not our latter-day know-nothing left. And neither of them has to “hate Jews” to hate Jews. They are not world-conquering cults because they have antisemitism built into their texts. They hate Jews because they are world-conquering cults. These two cults are in alliance. It is unclear who is using whom.
Members of these cults are making choices that all normal people breathing the free air ought to call evil. The evil is not in their chosen victims. That, ironically, is how the cults define good and evil. The evil decision is the one where we forfeit human freedom, choice, and dignity for the security of the cult. Hating Jews is merely the demonstrably consistent consequence of this sort of decision in Western Civilization, due to the inherent structure of its culture.
Trying to pinpoint how the intellectual content of these cults is anti-Jewish is thus a fool’s errand. Academic and journalistic efforts to exonerate these groups on technicalities miss the point completely, and not always innocently. “Antizionism isn’t antisemitism” is their mantra, and my response is, I don’t care. If just about every group that has a manifesto and takes it too seriously is well on its way to hating Jews, then judging antisemitism by the content of a group’s manifesto is just the first concession to antisemitism. The problem is in manifestos and totalizing ideologies per se, which is exactly what Judaism has said about idol worship since ancient days and exactly where we got off on the wrong foot with Western Civilization. Until we recognize this, we will continue to convince ourselves that no one really hates Jews because they have a bunch of other concerns and interests.
If Jews are the consistent exception to totalization, the degree of antisemitism is the most reliable indicator of how fully a society has forfeited freedom for ideology. Yet, we as individuals can resist this tendency. Human souls remain free; the tragedy is that the structure of our civilization wars against it. We must have the courage to be non-optimal, to stand without being totalized, to possess no easy answers to who or what we are.
Do you really want to fight antisemitism? Contemplate, within your own soul, whether you’ve joined a totalizing ideological group cloaked in the language of justice, inclusion, or progress that brooks no dissent. Encourage others to believe in the whole reality of a free, irreducible, and infinitely valuable human soul, and the free G-d who created it. Anyone who can be convinced of this is with the Jews. Everyone else is just settling for a world in which murderous antisemites who “don’t hate Jews” are the absurd and depressing norm.
I am reading the novel Nothing Vast by Moshe Zvi Marvit. The preface is germane: Judaism was utterly destroyed 2000 years ago, and yet here are Jews all over the world, like a ghostly walking dead, offending the proper order of things.
To me it’s special for one reason. When I review my own prejudices, I cannot get past the mental picture of the Saudis doing their sword dance.
All other groups come up 50-50.
Best I can do.