Israel's Moloch Syndrome
By Daniel Greenfield
SultanKnish.Blogspot.com
When religion goes, other religions take its
place. They mimic the forms and formalities of it
without the substance. They are faiths without any
gods, but ourselves, and without any devils, but
ourselves.
Confronted with the religious terror of Islam,
the post-religious faiths of the free world act out
a
godless religious drama in which they take turns
playing all the old religious roles without the
religion. The most pernicious of these is the martyr
to the morally superior high ground of humanism.
Faced with sectarian violence, they retreat into a
universalism that no one else shares. "We feel your
pain," they cry. "Our children are just like your
children." If that feeling were reciprocated, it
might mean something. But it isn't. Instead it's
another act of pointless humanistic martyrdom.
A morally superior society doesn't clamber onto some
universalist moral high ground. It isn't infinite
restraint in war that makes one society superior to
the other. That's a recipe for the eventual
extinction of everything that society has to offer,
to itself and to the world.
The elements that make one society superior to
another are to be found in its culture, its arts and
its sciences, in its religious inspirations, its
engineering feats, its medical research, its poems
and songs, its roots to the past and its vision to
the future. A morally superior society protects
these things by protecting them against invaders and
enemies.
Charity begins at home. So does morality.
A society that is too moral to protect itself is
immoral because it is incapable of protecting the
sources of its morality.
A moral society does not put its people in harm's
way rather than protect them. If it does so, in the
name of some warped sense of ethics toward the
enemy, it is not a moral society.
It is an immoral society.
Moral societies make it possible for their people to
be moral by taking on the burden of protecting them.
A society that abandons this burden and demands that
its people be moral by accepting suffering, whether
it comes from crime or terrorism, is a society that
gives its people a choice between becoming monsters
or martyrs.
This is not the behavior of a moral society, but a
self-destructive society that glories in the empty
martyrdom of the moral high ground.
A government that will not protect the people and
will not let the people protect themselves is not
moral, it is destructive. It demands that the people
embrace martyrdom in the name of a self-nullifying
set of ethics that will ultimately result in the
martyrdom of their extinction or their
transformation into monsters who are forced to
reject all human norms in order to survive.
A moral society does not embrace martyrdom for any
purpose other than the perpetuation of itself.
The traditional Jewish martyr who died for the
sanctification of the Name of G-d was choosing
physical death for the perpetuation of a religious
idea that was also a national identity. He was
choosing a form of death that would keep his
religious and national identity alive, over a living
death that would enable him personally to live,
while wiping out his people.
The new Jewish martyr dies for an irreligious
humanistic martyrdom. He perishes to prove the moral
high ground of his people. It is a martyrdom with no
point and no future. It echoes Gandhi's call that
the Jews voluntarily go to the gas chambers without
resisting in order to make an ethical point.
Gandhi's bit of genocidal madness has now become
mainstream in Jewish circles.
One of the Satmar rabbis was met with furious anger
when he called the murders of three Israeli
teenagers a divine punishment. But where was the
anger when Rabin called murdered Israelis, "Korbanot
Shalom" or "Sacrifices of Peace".
If the Satmar Rebbe is at least clear on who is
doing the killing and why, what is the theology of
the sacrifices of peace? Why do Israelis continue to
be murdered in the name of some abstract idea of
peace that never comes? What diplomatic deity are
they being sacrificed to? What is this strange
theology that has come into the house of religion
and sanctifies the needless death of children?
The Satmar Rebbe knows why Jewish children must die.
Hamas theocrats know why Jewish children must be
killed. But Israel's leadership is in thrall to a
humanistic Moloch that demands that they die to
prove our moral superiority to the world. Only by
allowing our children to be brought up on the altar
of liberalism as burnt offerings to the dead god of
universal ethics, will we be redeemed.
The redemption has yet to come. Countless
sacrifices of peace have been made and not only
peace, but the recognition that Israel was always
the ethical partner in the fight with Islamic
terrorists, is further away than ever. But its
leading thinkers and thinking leaders remain
convinced that this is only because not enough
martyrs have been offered up to the moral high
ground.
Perhaps if Tel Aviv is nuked and the flames of a new
Holocaust rise into the sky, the world will finally
realize that Israelis did their best to be nice to
their enemies. And if not, there are always millions
more to be offered up on the universalist pyre to
the man-made god of our own morality.
There is a perverse sadism and masochism in this
faithless faith whose disciples scourge themselves
like the pagan priests of old. No sooner do the
Israeli police announce a few arrests than all the
enlightened thinkers rush to call for harsher and
stricter measures, even the death penalty, a thing
that isn't even levied on Muslim terrorists. Having
pathetically tethered their identities to the
conviction of their own moral superiority, always a
shaky thing in human affairs, they will kill their
own brothers to protect this cheap delusion of their
own national martyrdom.
Having created our own faith in our own moral
superiority, we must be willing to die and kill each
other in its name. These are not sacrifices of
peace. They are the martyrdom of a moral superiority
that can only be proven through victimization and
our own mass murder. They are a perverse deviation
from both our religion as Jews and from Zionism as a
political movement.
For Israel and the Jewish people to survive, this
masochistic creed has to die. Instead of sacrificing
our children to Tikkun Olam, universalist ethics and
a conviction in our own moral superiority, let us
sacrifice these things on the altar so that our
children may live. Let us pile them up on the altars
of our hearts and burn them up. Let us take the
ideas and the books, and most of all, the false
sense of superiority that we are better because of
our martyrdom, and watch them go up in smoke.
Only when these things perish, will we be able to be
Jews or Zionists. As long as they live within us,
what we believe and what we worship is the Stockholm
Syndrome that says we must allow ourselves to be
abused and killed to prove to ourselves that we are
good people and thereby disprove the results of that
abuse on our psyche. The more we are abused, the
more certain we become that we deserve it and the
more we welcome that abuse, to disprove that we
deserve it.
It is a vicious cycle in which we allow ourselves to
be murdered to disprove that we deserve to be
killed, in which we hate ourselves to prove that we
do not deserve to be hated.
Instead of proving our morality through our
self-hatred, let us prove it by instead protecting
our worth. Our enemies are willing to die because
they have nothing to offer but murder. It is natural
for them to choose death because they are worthless
in every sense of the word.
Let us choose life.
This twisted attitude is not unique to Israel and
Jews. It has engulfed the entire West. Against the
Islamic cult of death, we have constructed our own
cult of death. The dysfunctional relationship is
that of the abuser to the abused. They know that
they are morally superior because they kill us. We
know that we are morally superior because we accept
their abuse and allow ourselves to be killed.
This is the great spiritual sickness that is
bringing entire civilizations down into the grave.
It is a sickness born out of self-hatred and an
abiding sense of worthlessness. The abuser and the
abused both have a deep conviction that they are
worthless. The abuser hides it through abuse. The
abused accepts it and transcends it through abuse.
If we do not learn to take pride in our
civilizations, if we do not learn to love our
accomplishments, then we will die. If we continue to
eat away at ourselves, to act as if our moral and
ethics are inferior to those of our enemies, then
they will destroy us and then destroy themselves and
the darkness will fall.
Let us choose life, light and love. Let us learn to
love ourselves and hate our enemies, not out of some
reflex or petty jingoism, but because we have come
to value what they seek to take from us. Let us
drive out the self-hatred. Let us take apart our own
cult of death and replace it with a religion of
life.
Only when we destroy our own cult of death, will be
able to defeat the cult of death of our enemies.
"I have yet before you life and death, the blessing
and the curse," G-d tells Israel. "Therefore choose
life that you may live, you and your children."
If we do not choose life, then we cannot live.