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Anti-Semitism as Thought Disorder

During my Residency training in Psychiatry at Bellevue Psychiatric Hospital I treated a great many patients suffering from Schizophrenia during acute psychotic episodes.  The most restrictive diagnostic criteria for Schizophrenia (in order to differentiate the episode from other psychotic disorders) involved the concept of a Thought Disorder, also referred to as Loosening of Associations. A patient exhibited such a thought disorder when the connections between their thoughts were based on idiosyncratic use of language; in other words their language served not to communicate but to express their own distorted, misperception of the world.  When the patient had a Paranoid Delusional System, which  defined their weltanschauung, it informed every thought that they had.  In other words, their paranoid delusion contaminated their thinking, often to such a degree that they were unable to navigate through the world of consensus reality.

In my series on The Ancient Scourge Revived, (part of my writings on Anti-Semitism) I described anti-Semitism, like paranoid delusions, as serving a defensive purpose, allowing the holder of the ideas to use them to avoid awareness of unpleasant and unacceptable reality.  Anti-Semitism also functions in a manner similar to a Paranoid Delusion by contaminating the thinking of the holder.

This morning, Roddy Boyd, who runs the The Financial Investigator such contamination is on display in an unlikely place: [HT: Glenn Reynolds]

Killing Jews For Fun and For Profit: The Continuing American Adventures of Arab Bank

According to a 2004 civil complaint now winding its way to trial, the bank’s purported customers got ahold of Jacob “Kobi” Mandell when he and a buddy skipped school in May of 2001 to hike near the Mandell’s place in Tokoa,Israel. The professional rescuers found the pair two-days later with skulls caved in and bodies mutilated.

He was an eighth-grader.

Palestinian Hezbollah claimed those pair of victories, but according to the claim, the Popular Resistance Committees are broadly understood to have been behind the attack.

The bank’s customers also managed to reroute the currents of Gloria Kushner’s life on May 19, 2002 as she shopped in an open-air market. A suicide bomber detonated a vest full of nails, screws and bolts and Kushner caught a fair amount of them; she was among the 50 lucky ones who took the flak in their spines, jaws, eyes and knees. Three weren’t as fortunate as she was: They took in their skulls and chests and died.

Oddly, both Hamas and the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine claimed credit.

In a 2005 complaint, a 23-year old Hamas suicide bomber named Shadi Toubasi walked into the Arab-owned Matza restaurant in Haifa and detonated a bomb surrounded by nails and bolts into the late lunch crowd, leaving 15 dead and 40 wounded.

Toubasi was also a customer of the bank, according to the claim.

The bank in question is Arab Bank, an Amman, Jordan-based bank with about $50.6-billion in assets and more than $780-million in profit last year. The complaints allege that  Arab Bank played a key role in what could be termed “The bureaucracy of terror.” Specifically, that the bank’s maintenance of at least seven separate accounts for Hamas-linked so-called charitable foundations facilitated the rapid transfer of donations (given by Arabs as zakat, a mandatory charitable tithe) between valid and efficient social-service groups and their sister organizations, the armed units that carry out the bombing attacks.

Roddy Boyd notes that the Bank is refusing to supply requested documents to the court and faces a difficult choice:

Last Wednesday, matters took a turn south for Arab Bank when Judge Gershon delivered an unsparing rebuke of Arab Bank and its efforts to avoid discovery in the Linde case. Rejecting the bank’s claim that it could not produce documents and account information about the activity in the Hamas and PIJ accounts for fear of violating privacy laws in Jordan, Lebanon and Palestine, Gershon noted that Lebanon and Jordan’s rules make clear that in matters of terror financing, any such privacy rules are void.

In a devastating blow, Gershon said that when and if the case gets to trial, the jury can presume “Adverse inference,” or more plainly, that Arab Bank–per the lawsuit claims–continued to knowingly provide key financial services to groups like Hamas and its leaders long after they had been designated terrorist groups in the U.S. and Europe.

This puts Arab Bank in a Morton’s Fork, caught between two very, very unpleasant choices.

On the one hand, Arab Bank can go into court in front of 12 people who have been instructed that they are hiding evidence that greatly supports their opponent’s cases in a courthouse a few miles from Ground Zero. Their ultimate liability in such a case could conceivably begin well into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Given the Judge’s ruling, even settling out of court becomes an expensive proposition.

On the other, they walk away from it all, shut their U.S. branch at 520 Madison Avenue in Manhattan and cease doing dollar-denominated business. At that point though, they are largely shut out of the global economy in that they cannot offer their corporate customers throughout the Middle-East an ability to move money into or out of the U.S. or its currency. It is, in a sense, choosing professional suicide.

There is, of course, a third choice–Arab Bank could produce the documents and, given the repeated public and legal claims of innocence, press its interests in court.

Here we have an international bank, whose mission is to make money, facing the destruction of its business; why would it take such a risk and how has it come to this?

Read the rest of Roddy Boyd's article and note how a conservative organization, a bank that operated under sound, rational, financial practices allowed itself to go from supporting the reasonable aspirations of its people (there is no point in re-arguing here the basis of Palestinian nationalism, a late 20th century construct) to covert support of the worst forms of terrorism.  The bank's thinking became contaminated by its anti-Semitism.  The "evils" of the Jews grew out of all human proportions and enabled the Bank's personnel to imagine they were helping combat terrible injustice, so terrible as to justify the most despicable atrocities, as long as they were directed at the Jews.  Their actions and rationalizations were ultimately self destructive and now verge on the suicidal. 

Allow me to offer the Arab Bank and any other interested parties some free Psychiatric advice: If your practices and thinking allow you to support people who believe that mutilating and murdering children is the height of courageous resistance, you have a serious psychiatric disorder and should seek help immediately.

According to the paranoid, anti-Semitic ravings that are ubiquitous in the Arab and Muslim world, the Jews are far worse than Hitler; they are worse than all evils that have come before.  It is worth noting that even as the Jews are seen as superhuman Genocidal villains, the worst in human history, they are certainly also the least effective Genocidaires in human history.  Thus does Jew hatred metastasize to destroy the rational thought of its holders. 

The Ancient Scourge Revived: Part V

In Part I of this series I quoted Edward Rothstein's article, A Hatred That Resists Exorcism, and empathized two points which supported the idea that anti-Semitism is the quintessential paranoid structure..

… 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. 
...
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.]
...
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.

...

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.

The Ancient Scourge Revived: Part IV

In Part I of this series I quoted Edward Rothstein's article, A Hatred That Resists Exorcism, and empathized two points which supported the idea that anti-Semitism is the quintessential paranoid structure..

… 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.

During the prodrome to his overt delusional psychosis and eventual hospitalization Mr. A had suffered from an increasingly dysfunctional cognitive apparatus.  In other words, his illness had attacked his ability to reason, remember, make inferences, in short to do all those things we take for granted.  He was indeed "losing his mind" as his ability to reason eroded.  He lost the ability to succeed at school, became estranged from the people near him, and became unemployable for any but those jobs which require the minimal cognitive function.  Eventually, even sheltered workshop employment became impossible for Mr. A.  During the prodrome of his illness, he had the wherewithal to subconsciously or unconsciously recognize his escalating impairment.  His paranoid delusions were an emergency measure invoked by his mind to protect itself from his ultimate deterioration and from the knowledge of the ongoing deterioration.

In Paranoia and Reason I described how a paranoid delusion can protect a patient temporarily from the terrible and terrifying knowledge that they have become seriously mentally ill: [Emphasis added]

Paranoia has a number of virtues to offer a frightened individual who secretly worries he is worthless.  Consider a hypothetical Paranoid Schizophrenic patient, admitted to the hospital with paranoid delusions that the FBI, CIA, and Mafia are out to get them.

Their illness, in reality, has estranged them from their family, made it impossible for them to maintain long term relationships or productive employment, often leaving them prone to drug and alcohol abuse, frequently victimized on the streets, in general with a bleak future outlook. A person who suffers the devastation of Schizophrenia, with rare exceptions, is emotionally and cognitively crippled. The delusion that they are being followed by the FBI suggests many compensatory attributes. They are never alone (there are always people thinking about them), they are clearly extremely important (the FBI doesn't waste time following people who are inconsequential) and often, they have grandiose fantasies that they are the key to world peace, or some other such problem. We admit them to the hospital, give them powerful medications to help them return to more appropriate reality testing, and often, have to deal with a severe, sometimes dangerous, condition referred to as a Post-psychotic Depression. Giving up their position of power and importance, and facing the bleakness of their lives is terribly distressing; for this reason suicide is a significant risk in young patients who recover from a first psychotic episode.

Consider what Mr. A's paranoia did for him.  It protected his self esteem in the ways listed above but it also performed other functions.  At the core of paranoia, including "normal" or neurotic paranoia, transient states that all of us suffer from at various times in our lives and development, is the defense of projection.  In projection, unacceptable impulses are disavowed and imagined to exist within another person.  In a fragile individual, rage and hatred can be destabilizing.  (We are all familiar with how our cognitive functioning deteriorates when we are most angry or frustrated or sad; intense affects interfere with optimal condition.)  The affects are disowned by disowning the impulses that evoke the affects.   The unconscious inner dialogue takes a specific form:

1) I do not hate him; I do not hate anyone.
2) I do not want to hurt him; such impulses are unacceptable.
3) The anger must be coming from him; he wants to hurt me.
4) I am in danger and need to defend myself.

Step 3 is the defense of projection.  Again, even a great many "normal" people (whatever that might mean) will under the right kinds of stress resort to projection.  The defense is not diagnostic of Schizophrenia or a Character Disorder.  The key point is that it is a pathological defense which attempts to deny an unacceptable aspect of reality and, as such, it can never work well for long; reality always eventually wins.

By using projection Mr. A could disavow his own sexual confusion (the voices calling him gay were the result of his own internal conflicts over sexuality) as well as his dawning awareness of the mental calamity that was befalling him.  It could never work for long but did give him a few months, perhaps a year, where he could maintain the fiction that there was nothing wrong with him.  Eventually the emergency measures put into action by his mind failed, as they inevitably must.

In a person who did not have the constitutional predisposition to psychosis, the same process would lead to a significantly different outcome.  A non-Schizophrenic who is unable to tolerate his own impulses and affects (perhaps murderous feelings toward minorities such as Jews or Blacks) could disown his hatred and project upon those he unconsciously hates.  In that case he may be a thoroughly unpleasant, vaguely paranoid individual, but within, for instance, the White Power community he would find kindred souls who would assure him that his beliefs, that the Blacks and Jews want to control/enslave/use him, were correct.  Instead of being a complete loser, he would have some status in his community for having seen through the lies that the minorities foist upon people and his unacceptable impulses would be successfully repudiated and disowned even as he is able to express his hatred in ways acceptable to his own mind and community.  In the West such belief would consign him to the margins but would preserve his self esteem and status.

The greater problem occurs when an entire culture or society, under great duress, follows a similar pathway.  That will be the subject of the next post in this series.

The Ancient Scourge Revived: Part I

As the demonization and delegitimization of Israel continues apace, it is worth wondering Why now?  Why is antisemitism approaching and surpassing the evil of the Nazi era at this particular point in time?  After all, the Jews have their own state, have effectively been erased from most of their traditional homes in Europe and throughout the Middle East, and despite being surrounded by hostile neighbors has offered tremendous benefits to the world while behaving in a manner that is almost unique in their realitons with thier foes.  No one expects the Russians to grant rights to the Chechens, or the Chinese to be especially solicitous of the well being of the Uighars; to suggest that the Persians offer full rights to non-Persians and non-Muslims, or that Saudi Arabia tolerate the most minimal of freedoms for non-Muslims is risible.  Only the Western powers, led by the United States, approach Israel's sensitivity to non-combatant casualties and when a Western nation mistakenly kills women and children with drone or mortar attacks, the conscience of the world barely registers the event. 

So, again, why is anti-Semitism now being revived, not only in the Arab/Muslim world, but in Europe, South America, and on the far Left in America, as well?

The first important point is that anti-Semitism is a protean disorder. Edward Rothstein has reviewed a number of the recent publications detailing the history and present course of anti-Semitism and makes some cogent points: [HT: Yaacov Lozowick]

A Hatred That Resists Exorcism

Is there anything left to be said about anti-Semitism? By now surely the outline is clear: how hatred of Jews grew out of early Christianity’s attempts to supplant Judaism; how the demonization of Jews in the Middle Ages turned violent; how the hatred was given its name by a 19th-century German journalist; and how it reached cataclysmic fulfillment in the Holocaust. 

There are other landmarks: the expulsion of the Jews from England, Spain and Portugal; intermittent massacres in Muslim lands; the construction of European ghettos; the pogroms of Russia and Eastern Europe; the Dreyfus Affair; the Nazification of Europe; Stalin’s purges and show trials.

And then, of course, there are the triumphs that act as a kind of remonstrance: the Enlightenment success of Jews in secular European societies, the myriad opportunities in the United States, the birth of modern Hebrew, and, after a half-century of settlement, land purchases and institution building, the creation of Israel, whose founding principles incorporated both democratic and Judaic ideals.

... 

Surely this attention is a bit overwrought? Aren’t we in an age that must be “post” all such sentiments — postmodern, post-Auschwitz and post-anti-Semitic? Haven’t many anti-Semitic doctrines (or their consequences) been largely overturned? How many people today would advocate ghettos or extermination? Who still believes that Jews bake Christian children’s blood into matzo? Many countries have forbidden hate speech; hasn’t that enforced a decorous social tact? And while it is difficult to ignore the vulgar hatreds expressed by Muslim protestors or in the newspapers of the Arab world or even among Westerners, aren’t those just frustrated expressions of justifiable political grievances?

Besides, anti-Semitism, we now understand, is a form of racism. Like all forms of group hatred, it is subject to reform and to the modern cure of sensitivity training. We learn about such hatreds in order to exorcise them. It seems every museum exhibition, textbook and children’s story about racism provides a similar moral prescription: tolerance.

So isn’t there something a little tasteless about bringing up anti-Semitism all the time, let alone drumming its theme page after page? Sure, racism may still flourish, but given the modern success of Jews, hasn’t this particular form of it become an anomaly? Or worse, hasn’t the term become a manipulative attempt to deflect judgment? As is often pointed out, criticism of Israel is not necessarily anti-Semitic any more than criticism of any particular Jew is.

The article is well worth reading in full.  There are two points I want to emphasize.  The first point is that anti-Semitism has the structure of a paranoid delusion: [All Emphases mine-SW] 

While anti-Semitism has tapped into racial hatreds in modern times, Mr. Julius and Mr. Wistrich highlight its traditional reliance on conspiracy: the hidden plot. Anti-Semitism isn’t just a matter of asserting unpleasant or reprehensible attributes. It sees the Jew as an antinomian threat, overturning all ethical laws. The Jew works in secret, creating invisible alliances, pulling elaborate strings, undermining society’s foundations. This is why the Protocols of the Elders of Zion has found such a fertile international ground. That 19th-century document purports to be the secret minutes of such a plotting ensemble of Jews. It is the counterfeit confirmation of a long-held belief.

The second point is that anti-Semitism organizes inchoate thoughts, perceptions, and feelings into a structure that makes sense:

Anti-Semitism is a metaphysical passion, not a materialist one. It doesn't even require a Jewish presence (as many anti-Semitic societies with Jews have proven). One reason anti-Semites have been so obsessed with the issue of finance in the modern world is that money is the circulatory system of capitalist society. It is mysterious, manipulable: the Jew’s perfect instrument. The Jew, first seen as a theological spoiler, becomes a metaphysical and monetary spoiler. The medieval image of the Jew was related to the vampire, Mr. Julius shows; the modern anti-Semitic vision sees the Jew as a guzzler of a society’s lifeblood.

This amplifies virulence as well: the Jew, for the anti-Semite, is not just a danger, but the greatest danger exerting the greatest powers. In current paradoxical parlance, the Jew is, in essence, a Nazi. The Jew does not just devour a Christian child’s blood, but the blood of all innocent children, and more completely, the blood of all innocents.

Is any evidence needed? Appearances are irrelevant; argument is illusion. What use is visible fact when the power of the Jew is in the web woven below the surface? Jewish autonomy is itself evidence of Jewish threat. Moreover, confrontation requires courage. 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. This is precisely how the Nazis portrayed it. It is precisely how Islamist ideology does as well, evident, for example, in the principles and founding documents of Hamas and Hezbollah.

These two points are worth amplifying and exploring.  I will first discuss how paranoid delusions work in the mind of a disturbed individual and then will attempt to use that analogue to illuminate some of the issues that emerge from such an understanding.  In so doing I hope to be able to address the questions of Why now? and What is to be done?

Using a Scalpel: A More Refined "Samson Option"

Over the last few years we have learned that the best way to protect ourselves against terrorism is to target the leaders of the terrorist groups.  Generally the leaders of such groups desire martyrdom, but primarily for their followers.  The leaders of such groups typically cry (to paraphrase St. Augustine) "Dear Allah, let me become a martyr... but not yet."  Even when the leaders do desire martyrdom, removing the leaders means that they are replaced by terrorists with less knowledge, sophistication, and ability.  Killing Imad Mughniyah did not destroy Hezbollah, but has eroded their ability to commit terrorist acts out of the area.  (That Hezbollah has become a powerful paramilitary force is another matter entirely.)

It is incontestable that Israel cannot destroy its enemies, even with overwhelming conventional force.  It must, therefor, find an alternative approach.  It may be that Israel can maintain its deterrence by threatening the destruction of Mecca, Medina, the Dome of the Rock as Geoffrey Britain suggests (and I would add the city of Qom and a number of other sites on the "holiest sites of Islam" list for greater deterrent effect)  but it may ultimately prove to be impossible to confidently deter Islam when it finds itself faced with an existential threat (which  is what modernity and the existence of the state of Israel represent to Islam.) 

Consider a near future scenario:

By 2020, Islam has become so emboldened that it has become unmistakable to most people in the West that Geoffrey Britain was correct; the problem is Islam and Islam and modern liberal society are incompatible. 

Israel's existence hangs by a thread.  It is increasingly being abandoned by its friends, who still need Arab oil and fear the fifth column in their midst.  It has never been able to solve the moral conundrum that a first strike use of Nuclear weapons poses and its deterrent capabilities have steadily eroded as it has never been able to master the Information War in ways which disarm its foes.  In 2020, for the first time, the number of people emigrating from Israel is greater than the number immigrating to Israel.  The future looks grim:

It is early spring, 2021 

In a magnanimous gesture applauded by the global community (this is fiction, so bear with me) the Israelis announce that they are going to release every Palestinian prisoner convicted of terrorism over the course of two weeks in March  of 2021.  The Americans and Europeans, committed to the chronically moribund "Peace Process" applaud the release and commit to re-convening the long eclipsed Final Status talks.  Finally it appears that the Peace Process will resume and that the Israelis, whose intransigence has been determined to be the primary cause of the failure of the Peace Process, have become committed to Peace.   A new dawn in the Middle East appears to be (once again) at hand.

The fact that the Palestinian Authority and Hamas, along with the rest of the HISH alliance (Hezbollah/Iran/Syria/Hamas) remain committed to the destruction of Israel and that genocidal propaganda remains a staple of Palestinian (along with Arab and  Iranian) media continues to be ignored as an inconvenient Israeli raised obstacle to Peace and as such has not been a matter of concern since the days of the Netanyahu administration.  With the news of the prisoner releases, the Palestinians and their allies are more convinced than ever that history is moving in its favor and that the hated Jewish state will soon be destroyed.  At the same time, paranoid conspiracy theories abound throughout the Middle East; the theories escalate and become increasingly fantastic as no one can believe the Israelis would release deadly enemies with no promise of peace, yet as the first prisoners arrive home to hero's welcomes, the idea that Israel may finally be surrendering due to exhaustion and because of the superior will of the Palestinians takes hold throughout the once occupied territories and throughout the Middle East.

Meanwhile, for the Western powers, the media are filled with the news that the new Labor government of Israel is ready to deal and a break thorough is at hand.  All assure that genocidal ravings are simply the background noise of the Middle east, not to be taken seriously.

Unbeknown to most of the participants, however, two major developments have occurred which render the Israeli behavior somewhat less than the suicidal acts that the Israeli and American right believe.

Each of the released prisoners, as part of one of his last meals, has unknowingly ingested, disguised as a grain of rice, a tiny nanobot which comes complete with an RFID and wideband transmitter.  Each nanobot is designed to not only relay real time information about its subject (including sounds in the ambient environment) but to become part of a seamless mesh network with each of the other nanobots now carried within each of the former prisoners.  For the weeks prior to their release the Israelis have been testing and bringing on line the computer network designed to integrate the immense amount of information that will be generated by these bots.

At the same time multiple squadrons of stealthed UAV's have taken off from an open field in Northern Israel.  Additional squadrons have been released near the border of Gaza.  Yet another set of UAV squadrons were already set aloft from the deck of an Israeli submarine in the Persian Gulf.  Each squadron is carrying a payload consisting of a multitude of "mosquitoes", "centipedes", "spiders" and, "wasps".  Once over their target, the UAV's all release their payloads and what appears to be nothing more than balloons drift down toward the surface, only to burst at various heights above their targets.  The bugs then drift, glide, and fly to their assigned locations (with specific locations unimportant since there are so many bugs that the coverage will be excellent) and begin to silently go about their deadly business.

One further data point: each of the nanobots and each of the bugs is equipped with a range of toxins designed to mimic various fatal conditions including cardiac arrests and intracranial hemorrhages and leave no trace on autopsy toxicology.

In the ensuing weeks and months a number of spectacular terror attacks are thwarted.  A planned cruise missile sneak attack from Southern Lebanon is noted prior to launch and coutner-measures deployed which destroy the missile and the launch crew.  A number of high ranking Hezbollah and Hamas members suffer mysterious deaths and several Iranian Mullahs along with the leader of Syria's intelligence agency also succumb.  Rumors of Israeli secret weapons, ray guns, biological agents, and other more fanciful inventions take off across the Middle East.  Paranoia escalates within the HISH alliance who have very good reason to believe they have been infiltrated by Israeli agents.  Massive purges take place as internecine warfare breaks out while the Israeli spies are sought out.  Many are executed though none have any actual connection to the Mossad.

When Mahmoud Ahmadinejad suffers a fatal heart attack, the Israelis announce that this is what happens to all tyrants and anti-Semites.  Several Rabbis announce that the mysterious deaths of so man of Israel's enemies in such a short period of time are signs of G-d's displeasure at the anti-Semitic ravings of our enemies.  The pace of attacks against Israel diminish as none are successful, save the rare "lone wolf" events.  Program directors at state run Arab media organizations also have been suffering the same mysterious illnesses and deaths.  The level of anti-Semitic agitprop begins to diminish as articles appear in the Arab press describing secret Jewish rays able to kill those who threaten Israel from a distance; such articles are occasionally based on suggestions from Israeli sources but more often occur to the writer de novo.  The pattern of suspicious deaths of leading anti-Semites does not go unremarked.  Eventually the Middle east quiets down. 

In this scenario the Israelis are able to wield a scalpel to remove the Cancerous stem cells from the Arab body.  The bugs and nanobots act as a powerfully enhanced immune system for the Jewish state.  Vigilance will be required for generations but the accelerating pace of technology means that those states and societies which have a lead in technology today will find their lead increasing exponentially against their competitors and adversaries.  The Arab world has existed for a thousand years as a culture based on extraction; for too many Arabs work is a dirty word and innovation is against Allah's will.  Such a  society cannot compete in a high tech environment.

Finally Peace comes to the Middle east through the workings of Jewish magic.

What Are You Willing to Die For?

[Update at end]

In post-religious, secularized Western countries, the answer to the title question tends to devolve to "nothing" beyond the self and its interests.  Western elites are fond of instructing their inferiors to sacrifice for their Utopian ideal of the moment but sacrificing one's life for the "life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness" for others is typically seen as the province of less well educated, less sophisticated, non-members of the elite.  America still has enough young people who value what this country has to offer that they are willing to put their lives on the line for us, but Europe has long since surrendered to the progressive forces of history and eschews self-defence of their ideals.   For Western elites, people who are motivated by religious beliefs, usually overlapping with those too ignorant to avoid the military, are essentially the equivalent of cannon fodder, ie, they do not count.  Our elites pride themselves on their functional atheism.  Politicians may from time to time profess their deep religious convictions but most often on the left this is a rather transparent attempt to appeal tot he rubes and when a politician appears to have genuine religious convictions, as for example Sarah Palin, they are savaged by the elites in media and academia.

Because religious belief has been so discredited by our elites, they tend to see anyone who believes as either a charlatan (using their beliefs to scam people) or as at best ignorant if not overtly intellectually limited.  The idea that there exist people whose religious beliefs motivate them to kill and die for their deity does not reach the threshold of consciousness for our elites.  They may occasionally give lip service to the idea (though less often since we are no longer at war with Islamic terrorists) and may admit that the Islamic foot soldiers of Iran, al Qaeda, Hamas, or Hezbollah are religious radicals, but they insist that the leaders of such groups can be approached as rational actors.  Greg Sheridan, in the Australian, points out how we fool ourselves by imagining our enemies to be rationally motivated:

Tehran on path to our destruction

Iran has been determined to acquire nuclear weapons for a long time. It is, as US Secretary of State Hillary Clinton describes it, something of a military dictatorship, with the Revolutionary Guard assuming more and more power. It is still also, however, a theocratic dictatorship. The purpose of the state is to serve theological ends.

Most Western analysts refuse to take Islamic religion seriously as a factor in geopolitics, assuming there must always be a rational national-interest explanation for any state's behaviour.

The truth is that history is littered with states behaving irrationally and pursuing irrational ends, and doing so in often self-destructive ways. In Mao's China tens of millions of people died in famines directly caused by state policy. North Korea has driven its people into starvation. Pol Pot not only committed genocide on his own people, he then attacked Vietnam so that it would destroy him. Saddam Hussein was such a canny, realist calculator of the odds that his regime ended up gone and he ended up dead.

It is intensely ahistorical to believe political regimes will always act according to Western conceptions of enlightened self-interest.

Melanie Philips' comment on Greg Sheridan's article is apt:

It is striking, to this British observer at least, how very unlikely it would be to encounter anywhere in the British media such a well-informed, realistic and intelligent analysis of the Iranian crisis and the paralysis of the west.

Even among seasoned and reasonable observers who have been involved in thinking about the Middle East for a very long time, there is an implicit assumption that the belief structure of the enemy can be approached using rationality.  In the course of an article about Andrew Sullivan's antipathy to Israel* and himself, Jeffery Goldberg notes that he has for a long time worried about Israel becoming complicit in its own destruction:

Andrew Sullivan is Going to Tear Me To Shreds

I've been writing since 2004 that Israel will one day be considered an apartheid state if it continues to rule over a population of Arabs that doesn't want to be ruled by Israelis. That is why it is vital for Israel to establish permanent, internationally-recognized borders that more-or-less adhere to the 1967 border. Unlike Andrew, I believe that Israel has tried to free itself from ruling these Palestinians (the pull-out from Gaza is an example, as is Ehud Olmert's recent, unanswered offer to the Palestinians to pull out from virtually 100 percent of the West Bank). But the reality remains: It will be very dangerous for Israel to engineer this pull-back, but it will be, over time, fatal for it to stay in the West Bank.  Anyway, more to come, eventually.

According to this fairly common point of view, Israel has the choice of continuing to "oppress and occupy" West bank Palestinians, which will inevitably lead to the delegitimization of the Jewish state or they must engineer a (unilateral) Peace agreement which would be tantamount to Israeli suicide.  There has never been any indication that any Palestinian leader, no matter how "moderate" would be willing to accept a Jewish state.  The current favored Moderates of the PA insist upon an unlimited right of return and indefensible borders for Israel. 

It is sophistry to pronounce that a Peace can be accomplished in which the Palestinians accept some financial inducements and a token right of return in exchange for permanent Peace.  There is no evidence, zero, that any Palestinian could cede the right of return and survive, let alone continue to rule.  To believe otherwise is delusional, an invention of the Western, rational mind.

Unfortunately, this is the current choice; there can be no compromise with people who believe that compromise, and the continued existence of the state of Israel is an anathema to their deity.  They are certainly willing to kill for their beliefs, more significantly, they are willing to die for their beliefs.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict can not end until the Palestinians, and their Arab backers, accept the legitimacy of Israel, yet they cannot do so and remain loyal to their religion.  Islam believes that it is the superior faith, that the Koran is the final, perfect word of Allah.  An independent Jewish state, especially one that has repeatedly humiliated the Arab world (in War and in Peace) threatens to destroy Islam merely by its continued existence.  After all, how can Allah be supreme when the hated Jews, who proclaim their G-d the one true G-d, remain victorious over Islam?  Islam, in its current form, cannot survive and adapt to he modern world; the very religious foundations of the faith are at risk every day that Israel persists.  The struggle to eradicate Israel and the Jews can only accommodate Peace if it temporary and in the service of the final solution.  This is not something I am simply making up out of whole cloth, it is what our enemies say on a daily basis, if we only choose to listen. 

Of course, for the West to accept this truth would be a deeply unsettling recognition.  Yet once we come to understand the reality, the solution becomes clearer, albeit one that makes our elites most uncomfortable.  A long term minimization of violence with occasional reminders by the West/Israel to the violent ones that we know where they live (ie, the current status quo) is the only way to keep the forces of destruction under control.  Allowing the Muslim world's most extreme variants to gain power and strength is a path to disaster.

* The question of whether or not Andrew Sullivan is an anti-Semite is a non-starter.  Andrew Sullivan has been increasingly using language which is indistinguishable from classical anti-Semitic tropes as filtered through the post-modern lens; after a while whether or not he entertains any particular antipathy to Jews is immaterial.  Others may disagree but ultimately it hardly matters.  The mainstreaming of anti-Semitic tropes is ongoing.

Update: In an excellent article today Barry Rubin points out that the complementary (mirror image?) of the ubiquitous blindness to the reality of radical Islamic religious ideology occurs in the views that  "Moderates" have of Israel:

Why Isn't There Peace? One Reason: Few People Know How Much is Being Offered

Among Palestinians, as more broadly with almost all of the public in the Muslim-majority world and a lot of the elite classes in Europe, there exists a mythical Israel, reminiscent of the fabricated antisemitic stereotypes of the past, that has little to do with reality. They believe Israel isn't interested in peace, doesn't offer the Palestinians anything, opposes any real Palestinian state, intends to keep the West Bank (until Israel's withdrawal from all of the Gaza Strip they would have added that territory as well), and is led by intransigent hardliners. Such a conception was comprehensible--if not fully accurate--describing the situation in parts of the 1980s but has nothing to do with the last 20 years.

In 2010 they have no idea what Israel actually offered in the 1990s' peace process, or at the Camp David summit in 2000, or what President Bill Clinton offered with Israel's agreement in December 2000, or what Prime Minister Ehud Olmert proffered in 2008, or what is in the current Israeli government's peace offer in 2010. All proposed the creation of an independent Palestinian state, the first three in close to 100 percent and the last three as equivalent to 100 percent (with some small, equal land swaps) in size to the pre-1967 West Bank and Gaza Strip.

Lacking any knowledge of these offers, or at least knowing only very distorted ones, they can maintain that Israel has offered "nothing" and that therefore the continuation of the conflict is not due to Palestinian intransigence but Israel's alleged opposition to the creation of a real independent Palestinian state. This reminds me of how Mahmoud Abbas, today leader of the Palestinian Authority, responded to some reasonably accurate descriptions in the Palestinian media of what Israel offered in 2000 at Camp David. It is better, he said at the time, not to talk about these things at all, presumably lest some Palestinians might think that it was a reasonable deal.

Anyone who actually lives in Israel knows that--whether they like it or not--Israel is ready to make big conessions and take reasonable risks to achieve peace. They know, whether or not they agree, that the overwhelming majority is ready to accept an independent Palestinian state as long as it is willing to end the conflict and live side by side in peace.

Outside Israel, far fewer people than should do so understand this reality. And that includes journalists,academics, and politicians. If they address the issue at all, they presume that Israel is asking the Palestinians to make some huge or unreasonable concession. Often, as noted above, their understanding of Israeli views is more than 20 years out of date.

Read the whole thing.  The complementary blind spots of our elites toward Israel and the Palestinians (and in a larger sense, toward ourselves and the Islamic radicals)  has important Psychological dimensions; elaboration to follow.

Israel, Existential Threats, and the Future of War

If aliens from Alpha Centauri were monitoring our airwaves over the last 40 years they would have concluded that Israel is the center of the world.  The disproportionate attention to Israel stems from a large confluence of themes, including the historical contribution of the Jews to civilization (Jews will never be forgiven for bringing guilt into the world), the genocidal hatred of their neighbors (who control the oil upon which the world's economy depends), the Middle East as a fulcrum during the Cold War, and a host of other issues too numerous to mention (and impossible to completely convey.)  The UN, where totalitarian despots get together to berate democracies for their imperfections, focuses on Israel to the exclusion of almost all other conflicts around the world.   The reasons for this are legion but at base there is a sense of envy and its ugly offspring, hatred, aroused by the existence of a state which should have, to their way of thinking, disappeared long ago.  There is a sense that Israel is approaching a nexus at an intersection of Israel's ability to defend itself versus its enemy's ability to destroy it.

George Gilder might well agree with those aliens and his thesis is instructive.

George Gilder* is a venture capitalist and writer.  His most recent book is The Israel Test (which I am about halfway through and which I plan to review when finished.)  His basic premise is detailed in an article in City Journal: [HT: Yaacov Lozowick]

Silicon Israel
How market capitalism saved the Jewish state

The most precious resource in the world economy is human genius, [Emphasis mine-SW] which we may define as the ability to devise significant inventions that enhance survival and prosperity. At any one time, genius is embodied in just a few score thousand people, a creative minority that accounts for most human accomplishment and wealth. Cities and nations rise and thrive when they welcome entrepreneurial and technical genius; when they overtax, criminalize, or ostracize it, they wither.

Jews have a long history of paranoia (though it is not paranoia when they really do want to kill you) and a deep insecurity about their position in the world and among their neighbors.  WWII showed that even the most cosmopolitan, secular, and assimilated Jews could be extruded and annihilated by a regressed society.  Insecurity is a birthrite of the modern Jew.  Yet in many ways the world's attitude toward Israel, the home of the Jews, is critical for our idea of the future. 

Those of us who are technophiles can imagine a future of ever increasing freedom and agency for the individual.  Our technology is the instrument that will allow us to escape many of the dangers that humans have always lived with.  Freedom from starvation, disease, even natural disaster mitigation are all outgrowths of our technology.  If our technology were to stagnate and begin to deteriorate, a new dark ages, with all the ancient scourges returning to haunt us, would be inevitable.  On a planet which has a subsistence capacity in the hundreds of millions, our current 6 billion could never survive without technology.  The forces opposed to the future, which includes such disparate fellow travelers as the far left, radical environmentalists, and in the purest form, radical Islamists, use but do not understand technology or how it makes their lives function, let alone how it secures civilization's functioning. 

Jews often gain some pleasure and great pride in e-mails that periodically make the rounds describing the high percentage of Jewish Nobel laureates in math and the sciences, the extraordinary numbers of Jews who have led the way to breakthroughs in such areas, the numbers and ranks of creative Jews who have been responsible for so much technology, entertainment (Hollywood) and culture.  When one gets the impression that most of the world would be quite happy to see the Jews disappear, such e-mails are comforting.  What stands out from George Gilder's writing, however, is how closely tied America and Israel have become, not only strategically (at a time when many on the left and right are questioning the value of the strategic relationship) but economically/technologically as well: 

Venture capital is the most catalytic force in the world economy. In the United States, venture-backed companies produced nearly one-fifth of GDP in 2007. At a time when American venture capital is flagging under the financial crisis, the emergence of a comparable venture scene in Israel, linked closely to Silicon Valley, is providential for both the American economy and its military defense.

This development makes Israel one of America’s most important economic allies. Israel’s creativity now pervades many of the most powerful and popular new technologies, from personal computers to iPods, from the Internet to the medical center.

Early in 2009, for example, Intel launched a massive new advertising campaign to celebrate what it described as its most important advance since its initial invention of the microprocessor chip some 40 years ago: the new Core i7 device, code-named “Nehalem,” which combined leading-edge computing power with unprecedented economy of energy use. Like many of the inventions that have made Intel the world’s leading microchip company, the Core i7 was designed in Israel.

Israelis are also leaders in arguably the most important technology arena today, particularly for military uses. This is the ability of computers using parallelism to sense, accept, and process information as quickly as modern transmission techniques—especially fiber-optics lines—can deliver it. A representative device in this effort, and a powerful symbol of Israel’s leading position in Internet technology, is the “network processor.” Just as a Pentium microchip is the microprocessor that makes most PCs work, the network processor is the device that makes the next-generation Internet work, doing the vital routing and switching at network nodes. The next-generation Internet will allow “petaflops” (1015 floating-point operations per second) of real-time computational power to be deployed to virtually any point on the earth. The network processor will let any desktop computer access data and processing power exponentially greater than that incorporated in any PC or any single corporate data center.

It is incontestable that Israel is facing an existential thereat from Iran.  It is also quite clear that her neighbors will not be accepting a Jewish state in their midst any time soon.  Yet from the minds of its people the potential to end this conflict in ways which preserve Israel and its moral standing is coming into focus.

I have written on several occasions about the impact of technology on counter-insurgency, indeed on the nature of armed conflict itself.  The day is approaching when Israel's ability to monitor its enemies in real time and respond with pinpoint accuracy to threats against it will effectively (though never completely) disarm its adversaries. 

From Moore's Law & Counter-Insurgency, July 2006:

It is clear that this is very dangerous work for the Israelis[iin Gaza]; the Palestinians can easily set up ambushes, IEDs, and other nasty surprises.  Now, picture the scene 5-10 years down the road.

During the day, a flock of Smart Sparrows networked together offer daylight coverage of areas of concern; at night, they are replaced by a flock of smart bats equipped with night vision and all part of a meshed network.  These flying birds and bats provide 24 hour real time coverage of whatever parts of an enemy territory you desire.  They can fly high enough to be invisible from the ground and are nearly impossible to shoot down even when spotted.  The Palestinians can kill all the birds they see in Gaza, but when Smart Sparrows cost a few dollars and the next generation of surveillance includes Smart Mosquitoes, their problems become exponentially greater.  If they spend all their time hidden indoors, they can't fire Qassam rockets at Israel, which is one of the goals of the current Israeli incursion.  Furthermore, Smart Snakes can slither into buildings, and even if they can be defended against, Smart Cockroaches and Centipedes, once cheap enough, will be ubiquitous.  If necessary, it would be simple to equip such robots with reservoirs of Cyanide or some other such poison (spider venom?), at which point targeted killings and Smart bullets would take on a whole new meaning.

We lost too many soldiers and Marines re-taking Falluja; imagine a future Falluja, or Mogadishu, (or Tehran?) where we fight machine guns and IEDs with Smart Birds, Bats, Insects, Snakes, and Spiders.  Our military could see the theater and manage the entire operation from safe bunkers connected by networks to the battle field, which could be an underground bunker, or an isolated field.

From An Endless War?, January 2009:

We are clearly not there yet, and technology is never going to be a perfect answer to warfare, but the point that future warfare will increase in specificity of targeting is proven valid on an almost daily basis.  Furthermore, the nature of information technology is that as it increases exponentially, those who start behind the curve can only fall increasingly behind the curve, with the disparity growing exponentially.  The Arab world has been, and Islamic fundamentalism remains fundamentally, parasitic on the productive developed world.  The disparity will increase, with the Israelis using their technological prowess to remain at the cutting edge while the Palestinians beg, borrow, buy, and steal the crumbs of technology the rest of the world provides.  As long as the Palestinians remain fixed on destroying Israel and killing Jews they will remain crippled in a world in which warfare is increasingly becoming an information technology.

The leaders of Palestinian hate groups, with rare exceptions, believe in martyrdom for their followers but tend to prefer to avoid it for themselves.  Once the Palestinians realize that in a future war they will be less and less able to hide from the Israeli weapons, when bullets and cyanide laden mosquitoes have their names written on them, the Palestinian leadership will come to realize that their core ideology, of killing Jews and destroying Israel, may need to be amended, in practice, even if not in theory.

The technological singularity is driven by the ability that technology supplies to leverage human genius.  Israel, and the Jews, are often hated for their genius, even as their genius offers a multitude of gifts to the world.  Israel does not have to destroy Iran's nuclear capabilities to preserve itself, it merely has to delay the Iranians their gratification. 

*It should not be necessary, but too often during discussions of Israel the religion of the discussant is considered a crucial element.  For the record, George Gilder is a Christian, not a Jew.

Apes and Angels

In January I offered my take on The 10,000 Year Explosion and called it a most A Most Dangerous Book.  I suggested that Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending had fired an early salvo in a battle that is going to reshape or destroy our culture, and probably our world, in the next 20-30 years (the time frame is mine.)   The book does not aim to solve the "Nature vs Nurture" conundrum but presents evidence from the field of population genetics to support their theory that, contrary to conventional wisdom in evolution and sociology, evolution has been speeding up in the last 10,000 years rather than remaining static.  As more and more evidence accrues elucidating the influence of genetics on behavior and population abilities, a clash is inevitable between science and political correctness.  I commented:

In Race, Ethnicity, and the Genetic Time Bomb I discussed the coming collision between the accumulating body of scientific data regarding human evolution and differentiation, and the PC shibboleth that all men and all populations are exactly equivalent.  The corollary to this assumption has become conventional wisdom, ie that any differences in outcome between populations can only be the result of discrimination by the powerful against the weak.  Various iterations of this assumption have become so deeply ingrained in science and society that it is considered a career destroyer to publicly question the idea. 

I cautioned in that post that as the science accumulates, the demarcation between scientific investigation and social transgression would become increasingly difficult to maintain.  Simply asserting that a minority group may have different levels of ability can mean academic death.  Now, more than ever before, the legacy of Darwin, supported by evolutionary biology, is bringing political (ideological and religious)  shibboleths into stark question.  Both the left and the right have exhibited an unconscious splitting in their relationship to Darwin's monumental achievement and this is the field of interest of Apes or Angels, by Neil Troost.  This slim, readable volume could well be considered a companion piece to Cochran and Harpending's book.  Dr. Troost unflinchingly examines the distortions of both left and right that interfere with an understanding of the meaning of Darwin's theory and the implications of our growing knowledge of evolutionary biology that is putting flesh onto the skeleton of evolution.  

In his introduction, he describes the conflictual relationship of both left and right to Darwin and his implications:

While we can thank Darwin for identifying our family tree and disabusing us of our wishful thinking, we are less certain of his revelations of human diversity.  As modern genetics increasingly supports Darwin's observations on human variability, the West is embroiled in a political war over the interpretation and meaning of these findings.  Secular humanism, set adrift from Christianity in part because of Darwin, now opposes the facts of human inequality first pointed out in 1871 by the great naturalist.  As in Galileo's day, science is under siege for discovering uncomfortable truths.  Pope's are no longer the enemy, but doctrinaire liberals within the scientific community are!  Darwin, the immortal hero of science, gave us ideas that offend both sides in the culture wars.  Liberals generally accept evolution and make it a foundation of their materialism, but they despise the idea that human races might be unequal.  Conservative Christians hate the idea of evolution without god, but, until recently, they accepted biological inequality without debate.  To understand who we are we must have the courage to follow Darwin's route to human nature, clearing the brush of superstition and myth while recognizing that  our common humanity may not be enough to overcome the problems of extreme diversity.  Struggle and strife, part of the basis of evolution, may well be ineradicable.

Dr. Troost spends the first part of the book reviewing Darwin's theories and some of the implications of his findings.  He has a habit of asking obvious but dangerous questions:

(p. 30)  Belief in inequality is not racist if we are talking about biological facts.  Darwin was against slavery but accepted inequality.  If I see a Kenyan runner and runners from Italy or Belgium, I am not a racist if I "stereotype" Kenyans by predicting victory in a marathon based upon race and nationality.  This is simply scientific generalization based upon evidence.  Racism is either a false generalization used denigratingly or the use of a true generalization to suppress or punish people.  One can believe in the fact of inequality and treat people as individuals, knowing that group differences are statistical.  As Steven Pinker put it: "equality refers to fair treatment and not human biology."

Sadly, a significant proportion of the population will take offence at his statements and accuse him of racism for merely acknowledging reality.  At the same time Dr. Troost offers ample ammunition for the religious right to attack.  He has little tolerance for Supernaturalism.

(p. 106) Evolution does produce increased diversity, complexity, amount, and scope of life.  Is this the work of a divine agency?  Since such an agency is unnecessary for evolutionary purposes, it is illogical that a purposeless process would result in process.

Between the Cosmologists who can theorize that the universe evolved out of nothing (quantum fluctuations in the vacuum) and evolutionary biologists, it is clear that a plausible, scientifically consistent explanation can encompass our origins and development without the necessity of a deity.  Faith in G-d must be maintained, if at all, in contradistinction to science.  (Whether religion has instrumental utility is another and longer discussion altogether, barely touched upon by Dr. Troost.)

If Darwin erodes the philosophical underpinnings of religion, leaving the religious right adrift, the greater danger going forward is that work in evolutionary biology will erode the philosophical underpinnings of the liberal ideal, leaving the left adrift.

As we understand how genes and genetic controls respond to environmental effects, we will be able to approach the answers to explosive questions, such as:

What is "g", the measure of general intelligence often described by IQ?  What genes encode for what proteins that lead to more efficient nerve conduction, more complex neural networks, and the resulting advantages in mentation and better problem solving that are the core biological substrate of intelligence?

At that point, the finding that certain genes are over-represented in some populations and under-represented in other populations is going to create problems that  our society, crippled by PC imposed elective mutism in relation to such subjects, will have great difficulty metabolizing; synthesizing our knowledge in ways which do not threaten social cohesion and amity will only be possible if we can talk about forbidden topics in a candid manner.

For the last 100 years we have known that there are persistent, reliable differences in IQ between groups and for the last 50 years there has been a mountain of material published attempting to deny the implications of such distinctions.  Dr. Troost's contribution is useful in illuminating just how heavily the scientific data weighs in one direction.

The Roots of Anti-Semitism

In Anti-Semitism and the Paranoid Dynamic I focused on the compensatory and adaptive uses to which anti-Semitism has traditionally been directed.  Although in the long run anti-Semitism, like the paranoid delusions which are a model for the pathology, always fails.  It drains energy and attention away from productive pursuits and introduces a confounding variable that interferes with an accurate assessment of reality.  When one's sense of reality is impaired, function and adaptation suffer.  This raises the question of what fuels anti-Semitism?  As Bernard-Henri Lévy noted, in the quote I posted yesterday, anti-Semitism has protean expression, shifting its shape to fit the needs of the anti-Semite:

As always. Anti-Semitism has no fixed pattern; it does not present itself always in the same form. It’s like a virus which changes. What are the workings of its changes, what is its logic is tied, simply, to what is acceptable. It is as if anti-Semitism—without giving it an intelligence, which it doesn’t have—is searching for the precise words or intellectual schemes for allowing itself to be heard, to be supported by the most people. It is as if it were searching for the words which might help it advance, not under the flag of pure evil, but under the flag of an evil aiming sort of in a good direction.

When a particular symptom complex can be so easily applied in many disparate situations, it suggests that there are key unconscious components that need to be identified in order to understand its meaning.  Anti-Semitism has a long history, starting with the early Christians who used it to differentiate themselves frm the Jews and to discredit Judaism.  Included in their felt need to supplant the Jews as G-d's "chosen people" was a less conscious "sibling rivalry."

Pity the Poor Anti-Semite II

I have read many angry articles and posts this morning regarding yesterday's atrocity in Jerusalem where 8 young men were murdered while studying the Torah.  I would suggest that pity is a more appropriate response for the Palestinians.  They are a  pathetic people, made more so by the fact that their pathos is self-imposed.  Hating the Palestinians, while a natural reaction to an atrocity, is no more useful than hating a rabid dog for his venom; the rabid dog must be put down but he is to be pitied rather than hated.  The Palestinians thought they were simply following through on a long, storied progression of successful anti-Semites, but the rules have changed and they don't appreciate that they are victims of a bait-and-switch.

Throughout history Jews have been handy people to have around.  They have traditionally been learned, peaceful, and ever willing to use their talents and abilities in any way acceptable to the greater society for their own benefit and for that of their society.  When the inevitable crises hit, the Jews provided an ideal "other" upon which to focus the citizenry's discontent, and as a bonus, when times were difficult, the leaders could reliably turn on the Jews and confiscate their property.  It has been a traditional and highly successful historical pattern throughout Christian Europe, Eurasia and the Muslim world.  Unfortunately for those who have relied on anti-Semitism as part of their legitimacy and to enrich and ensure their rule, a combination of factors have made the Jews much less valuable to the anti-Semitic world in the last century.

First, Germany and their fellow travelers in Europe shattered the paradigm.  Historically, tyrants prospered by evicting Jews and stealing their property.  Those tyrants who tried to exterminate the Jews always failed and destroyed themselves.  It is not for nothing that the wry description of most Jewish holidays is:  They tried to kill us; they failed; let's eat!  When Germany tried to institutionalize genocide and the rest of the world neglected to offer a home to which the Jews could relocate, it led to the destruction of Germany and the deaths of millions of non Jews along with the 6 million.

Second, the Holocaust led to the establishment of the state of Israel.  Interestingly, there is some evidence that Israel's establishment was supported by many anti-Semites in Europe who relished the idea of finally making Europe "Judenrein" and getting rid of their "Jewish problem."  Palestine was an ideal solution.  Most of Palestine was either swampland or desert and there were few indigenous people there.  (No one had heard of Palestinians in 1948; they were "discovered" in the 1960s when Yassar Arafat found that establishing a national liberation movement based on terror was a money making operation.)  Send the Jews to Palestine and the world could forget about them.  Unfortunately the Jews, as is their wont, did not cooperate.  They built a modern, liberal, democratic state which has been wildly successful and has become wealthy far out of proportion to its neighbors.  Between envy and traditional anti-Semitism (which predated the establishment of the state of Israel; please see Siggy's Deja Vu All Over Again, The Mufti And The Palestinian Authority) the Jewish state in the middle of the Ummah became an unacceptable insult, humiliation, and provocation.

The third problem for the anti-Semites is that, while the Arab world could have destroyed Israel in isolation, the American people in their wisdom had recognized a kindred spirit in the Jews who built a country out of sand, swamp, and stone.  Israel, with America's support, could not be destroyed using conventional means.

Since 1948 the Arab world has been faced with the irresistible force of their own anti-Semitism and the immovable object of Israel's increasingly certain existence.  The Arab world must either face reality and accept Israel or continue to escalate.  Unfortunately, anti-Semites cannot accept reality because their entire world view depends on their hatred (and unconscious idealization) of the Jews.