… traditional reliance on conspiracy: the hidden plot.
Anti-Semitism never sees itself as a hatred; it views itself as a revelation. An attack on the Jew is never offensive; it is always defensive.
In Part II and Part III I told the story of Mr. A, an 18 year old who suffered his first psychotic episode shortly after graduating from high school.
In Part IV I introduced the idea that the development of a paranoid psychological structure is an emergency reaction to a severe threat to the integrity of the psyche. It allows the paranoid person to deny extremely frightening and unacceptable aspects of reality. In Mr. A's case, his paranoid delusion allowed him to avoid becoming fully aware of the devastating psychiatric illness which had befallen him.
The experience of Mr. A (which is hardly unique in Psychiatric practice) is instructive and can be analogized to what happens in societies which surrender to the siren call of anti-Semitism, the quintessential societal paranoid structure. Societies under extreme duress tend to regress, something I have written about on a number of occasions. (See the Societal Regression index.) When the American Psychoanalytic Association convened their panel on "Terror and Societal Regression" in 2005, they noted 14 major symptoms of large-group regression. I will not repeat them here but would note those that are significant for anti-Semitism, with some additional emphasis in bold: and additional comments added in bolded italics:
3) Severe splitting. This can occur as a polarity between "us" and "them" or within society.
4) Massive, shared introjections and projections, such as societal paranoia.
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6) Magical thinking, blurring of reality, and new or modified societal patterns. [The love affair with death that defines modern radical Islam is a relatively recent development. The early days of Palestinian terrorism conspicuously omitted the desire for suicide martyrdom; this is now a primary organizer for Palestinian society.]
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9) Reactivation of a "chosen trauma" whereby a large group unconsciously "chooses" to make a shared mental representation of an event that caused it terrible losses, helplessness, humiliation, and victimization. [The Nakba.]
10) Dehumanization. Exemplified by the Nazis, this is a two-step process. Step one is identifying undesirable humans; step two is turning them into nonhumans....
11) Border Psychology, in which borders become shared psychological skins.
12) The narcissism of minor differences. [The Arabs are Semites, just like the Jews; they accentuate this in order to prove they cannot therefore be anti-Semites but it also illustrates the close kinship of Palestinian Arabs and Jews dating back centuries.]
Anti-Semitism cannot be understood in the Arab world without understanding how it serves as a psychological defense for their cultures. Qanta Ahmed, MD, in the course of a courageous article in the Huffington Post, explicitly noted the defensive aspects of the Arab focus on the Palestinians: [HT: Elder of Ziyon]
Israel and the Flotilla: On the Dangers of a Binary View
His remarks [a spokesperson for Hamas who appeared on the BBC] reveal the extent to which Palestinians are now objectified political pawns, rather than a people. While we are comfortable with the longstanding objectification of Palestinians by Israelis as the 'other' in the form of a security threat (after all Israel must balance a constant struggle to determine the needs of a terrorized Israeli citizenship over the needs of an exploding ever-younger ever impoverished, increasingly radicalized Gaza population) we fail to encounter our own sinister objectification of the Palestinians which we accomplish so effectively all by ourselves. This objectification is not only held by their revolving, corrupt leadership, but also by an objectifying Muslim world. We the Muslims need the Palestinians to remain locked in their plight so that they might continue to serve as the Ummah's scotoma (a blindspot) which literally prevents us from seeing our own more immediate distresses, distresses which might demand our attention and perhaps even require societal interventions . [Emphasis added-SW] We would be lost, disarmed, and stunned without an external locus for our rage which is so piercingly trained on Gaza and the West Bank, so piercing in fact that Darfur barely warrants a sidelong glance.
[Rather than a scotoma, or blindspot, the focus on the Palestinians serves more as a screen perception, covering the reality behind the screen in he same way that screen memories cover an actual trauma.]
To the Arabs the Jews are superhuman demons (explicitly labeled as such by their Persian supporters as the Little Satan, only surpassed by the Great Satan] who victimize them, keep them oppressed, and in their more fanciful moments, invent new and nefarious ways to torment the poor, victimized Arab world. The intense focus on the Israeli-Palestinian war allows the Arab world to avoid the shame of looking at their manifest failure to become a productive part of the modern world. Pandering to their Honor-Shame structure, as our current administration seems intent upon continuing to do, is tantamount to supporting their most dysfunctional defenses. As long as a defense works to avoid recognizing unpleasant realities, no change is possible.
As for the resurgence of anti-Semitism in its traditional home, Europe, there, too, it serves a (Psychological) defensive purpose. Robin Shepherd describes the inversion of morality and reality that is well under way in his home:
Britain’s “extremist mainstream”: MidEast ambassadors reveal their true colours
Sometimes it takes a while before the sheer horror of what is going on in one’s own country truly sinks in. How many times have I written here about another “new low” in British attitudes to Israel, the Jews, and Islamist terrorism? How much room, therefore, can there still be for anything sufficiently dreadful to have any shock value? But the revelations last week about the British Foreign Office and two of its ambassadors in the Middle East were so mind bogglingly appalling that I felt it sensible to spend the weekend pondering on what this all meant. Others have written well (indeed brilliantly, see Melanie Phillips here) on the matter already. But, for what it is worth, here is what I have come up with after a couple of days thinking things over.
First the facts of the matter. Last week, Frances Guy, Britain’s ambassador to Lebanon wrote an entry on her official Foreign Office blog mourning the death of Sheikh Mohammed Hussein Fadlallah, the spiritual godfather of the Jew-hating, Hezbollah terror group. She described Fadlallah — the man who blessed (literally) the suicide bombers who killed more than 300 Americans in the 1983 Beirut bomb attack — as “a true man of religion; leaving an impact on everyone he meets, no matter what their faith.” And, she went on to say: “The world needs more men like him willing to reach out across faiths, acknowledging the reality of the modern world and daring to confront old constraints”.
The relatives of the hundreds of people whose arms, legs and heads he had blown off might take a different view of the kind of “impact” Fadlallah has on “everyone he meets, no matter what their faith”. But before we come to the commentary, be aware that there has been more of this sort of thing from the British government’s top representative to Jordan.
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But here, and simultaneously bringing in her counterpart in Jordan, we come to the core issue. In the thinking of the British Foreign Office, she (and he) committed no offence at all. A slip of the tongue, perhaps. A faux pas, certainly. But an offence? Not really. Who in the hierarchy of the British Foreign Office really disagrees with either of these two ambassadors’ views on terrorism, Israel and the conflict in the Middle East? These aren’t two rotten apples in an otherwise blemish-free barrel-load. As Mark Steyn is wont to say in such circumstances, quoting the language of the computer techies, this isn’t a bug, it’s a feature.
In other words, this is policy. This is what the British Foreign Office stands for. This what Great Britain Plc does in the world. This, in other words, is the extremist mainstream — a centre-ground in Britain which is now so saturated with hatred for the Jewish state, with sympathy for the “grievances” of the terrorist, with ambivalence about liberal-democratic values themselves that a complete reversal of normality has now been achieved.
Views which should exist only at the far fringes of a healthy democratic society now occupy the mainstream; views which should occupy the mainstream are shunned, demonised and exiled to the fringes.
In England the hatred of Israel, a very thinly rationalized recrudescence of English anti-Semitism, serves to allow the government and the media to avoid noticing that the worst elements of radical Islam now have free reign in their country and are changing the character of the country. The rule of law is rapidly eroding and thuggery is now becoming the law of the land. As long as anti-Semitism serves its purpose of screening the public's view of what is happening in front of their eyes, they will remain blind to the reality of the transformation taking place in their front yard while feeling virtuous that they are standing against the evil Jews.
There is, of course, much more to the explanation of anti-Semitism that is possible to explicate in a series of posts, or even a series of well researched tomes. It is an ancient scourge, a protean disorder of the mind, but until and unless we understand how it serves as a defense against terribly unpleasant reality, we will make no headway in combating the disease.
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