1. material that can be readily ignited, used in starting a fire.
2. the act of one who kindles.
In Neuropsychiatry, kindling has a related meaning. It refers to a small group of hyper-reactive neurons that when rapidly firing can cause neighboring neurons to increase their firing rate as well (recruitment.) Depending on the locus this can result in a grand mal seizure or a Manic episode. Manic episodes are fascinating and highly disruptive states. Typically a manic patient feels that they have boundless energy, experiences intense bouts of creative intensity, have a decreased need for sleep and intense feelings of well being. At the same time, the manic patient is liable to become extremely angry and paranoid when their grandiose plans fail to materialize. When you have a plan to become incredibly wealthy or to bring about world peace, the only possible reason such plans can fail is that they are thwarted by those who are envious or hateful toward you. It is often the paranoid manic patient who is most difficult to treat. Mania rarely lasts long, however, since it overtaxes the system and leads to a state of depletion that is accompanied by severe, often suicidal, depression.
Understanding societies through analogy is always imperfect yet can offer useful means for increasing our understanding of often intractable problems. The concept of kindling applied to a specific aspect of the current crisis in the Middle East is worth considering. Earlier today I posted a note sent to Barry Rubin by a friend who was deeply concerned about Turkey's intensifying anti-Semitism. We should all be concerned about Turkey going down the path of anti-Semitism, a path that has facilitated tyranny, death, and destruction whenever it has been trod. Consider the comment of the Turkish Prime Minister in today's Jerusalem Post:
Turkish Prime Minsiter Recep Tayyip Erdogan on Tuesday reiterated his harsh criticism against Israeli Operation Cast Lead aimed at restoring calm to the south of Israel.
Speaking to the Turkish Parliament in Ankara in a session carried by local television, Erdogan said his words were "less harsh than the white phosphorous shells used by the Israeli army."
Whoever does not express resentment over the killing of civilians, including women and children, loses his self respect," Erdogan was quoted by Israel Radio as saying.
Erdogan said his criticism did not stem from anti-Semitism and emphasized that in the past he had termed anti-Semitism a crime against humanity.
However he then went on to say that "media outlets supported by Jews are disseminating false reports on what happens in Gaza, finding unfounded excuses to justify targeting of schools, mosques and hospitals."
Erdogan almost certainly knows that he is lying.
The Arab world is fully cognizant of the difference between the Israeli attempts to minimize Palestinian casualties, even going so far as to warn them when attacks are coming and eschewing attacking the Gaza hospital in which the Hamas leaders are hiding, and the Palestinian's strategy of maximizing Israeli and Palestinian civilian deaths and injuries, the more gruesome the better. The Palestinians understand the Israeli disinclination to engage in war crimes and use Israel's ethics as a weapon. In point of fact, Erdogan is doing what the Islamists have done throughout the Middle East at least since WWII when they actively allied themselves with the Nazis, that is, using the modern day "blood libel" that has become a standard trope of anti-Semites throughout the world. This is an unfortunate development.
Turkey is the shining example of "moderate Islam" in the world. If the Turkish government is succumbing to the siren call of Jew-hatred, there can be little hope that the Middle East will turn toward true moderation any time soon.
As noted by a host of commentators in the last days and months, the moderate Arabs, especially the Sunni Arab ruling class in the Middle East, have far more to fear from radical Islam than from Israel. Saudi Arabia, Egypt, the Gulf Emirates, and Jordan especially, are natural allies for Israel, if one only considers their compelling rational national interests. Israel does not threaten regime change in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, the Gulf Emirates, or Jordan; Shia Iran and the radical Sunnni Islamists (especially the Muslim Brotherhood) do threaten revolution in the name of Islam. Yet one thing above all prevents the so-called moderates (primarily moderate in that they do not actively work toward killing Jews at every moment) from acknowledging their shared interests with Israel and that is the single shared ideology that seems to motivate Islam in the present day: their anti-Semitism.
Toady in the New York Times, Jeffrey Goldberg describes his meeting with Nizar Rayyan, recently killed by an Israeli missile strike along with several of his wives and children, all of whom repeatedly expressed their love of martyrdom. Jeffery Goldberg discusses a sticking point which is too often simply ignored in the fog of Middle East politics and violence: the Islamists, who believe and are rarely refuted in their belief, that they are the true champions of Islam, simply cannot abide the presence of a Jewsih state in their neighborhood:
Why Israel Can’t Make Peace With Hamas
As the Gaza war moves to a cease-fire, a crucial question will inevitably arise, as it has before: Should Israel (and by extension, the United States) try to engage Hamas in a substantive and sustained manner?
It is a fair question, one worth debating, but it is unmoored from certain political and theological realities. One irresistible reality grows from Hamas’s complicated, competitive relationship with Hezbollah. For Hamas, Hezbollah is not only a source of weapons and instruction, it is a mentor and role model.
Hamas’s desire to best Hezbollah’s achievements is natural, of course, but, more to the point, it is radicalizing. One of the reasons, among many, that Hamas felt compelled to break its cease-fire with Israel last month was to prove its potency to Muslims impressed with Hezbollah.
Another reality worth considering concerns theology. Hamas and Hezbollah emerged from very different streams of Islam: Hamas is the Palestinian branch of the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood; Hezbollah is an outright Iranian proxy that takes its inspiration from the radical Shiite politics of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. But the groups share a common belief that Jews are a cosmological evil, enemies of Islam since Muhammad sought refuge in Medina.
Periodically, advocates of negotiation suggest that the hostility toward Jews expressed by Hamas is somehow mutable. But in years of listening, I haven’t heard much to suggest that its anti-Semitism is insincere. Like Hezbollah, Hamas believes that God is opposed to a Jewish state in Palestine. Both groups are rhetorically pitiless, though, again, Hamas sometimes appears to follow the lead of Hezbollah.
I once asked Abdel Aziz Rantisi where he learned what he called “the truth” of the Holocaust — that it didn’t happen — and he referred me to books published by Hezbollah. Hamas and Hezbollah also share the view that the solution for Palestine lies in Europe. A spokesman for Hezbollah, Hassan Izzedine, once told me that the Jews who survive the Muslim “liberation” of Palestine “can go back to Germany, or wherever they came from.” He went on to argue that the Jews are a “curse to anyone who lives near them.”
Nizar Rayyan expressed much the same sentiment the night we spoke in 2006. We had been discussing a passage of the Koran that suggests that God turns a group of impious Jews into apes and pigs. The Hezbollah leader, Hassan Nasrallah, among others, has deployed this passage in his speeches. Once, at a rally in Beirut, he said: “We shout in the face of the killers of prophets and the descendants of the apes and pigs: We hope we will not see you next year. The shout remains, ‘Death to Israel!’”
Mr. Rayyan said that, technically, Mr. Nasrallah was mistaken. “Allah changed disobedient Jews into apes and pigs, it is true, but he specifically said these apes and pigs did not have the ability to reproduce,” Mr. Rayyan said. “So it is not literally true that Jews today are descended from pigs and apes, but it is true that some of the ancestors of Jews were transformed into pigs and apes, and it is true that Allah continually makes the Jews pay for their crimes in many different ways. They are a cursed people.”
I asked him the question I always ask of Hamas leaders: Could you agree to anything more than a tactical cease-fire with Israel? I felt slightly ridiculous asking: A man who believes that God every now and again transforms Jews into pigs and apes might not be the most obvious candidate for peace talks at Camp David. Mr. Rayyan answered the question as I thought he would, saying that a long-term cease-fire would be unnecessary, because it will not take long for the forces of Islam to eradicate Israel.
There is a fixed idea among some Israeli leaders that Hamas can be bombed into moderation. This is a false and dangerous notion. It is true that Hamas can be deterred militarily for a time, but tanks cannot defeat deeply felt belief.
The reverse is also true: Hamas cannot be cajoled into moderation. Neither position credits Hamas with sincerity, or seriousness.
The only small chance for peace today is the same chance that existed before the Gaza invasion: The moderate Arab states, Europe, the United States and, mainly, Israel, must help Hamas’s enemy, Fatah, prepare the West Bank for real freedom, and then hope that the people of Gaza, vast numbers of whom are unsympathetic to Hamas, see the West Bank as an alternative to the squalid vision of Hassan Nasrallah and Nizar Rayyan.
When the "squalid vision of Hassan Nasrallah and Nizar Rayyan" is the bedrock ideology of the moderates as well as the radicals, Sunni as well as Shia, in the Middle East, it is hard to imagine a day when Peace with Israel will ever arrive.
Anti-Semitism is a paranoid delusion which kindles overt aggressive behavior in its victims. The kindling is spreading through the Middle East and there is no one who can intervene.
More to follow...
Recent Comments