Allowing Evil to Triumph for the Sake of Peace
The IDF is fighting bravely, but many Jews in the Diaspora have yet to fight, and we are already surrounded.
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This is a guest essay written by Saul Goldman. You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, or Spotify.
In 1839, British author Edward Bulwer Lytton wrote a play entitled “Conspiracy” about Cardinal Richelieu, whose line in Act II, Scene II is incredibly prescient of our present war:
“Beneath the rule of men entirely great. The pen is mightier than the sword.”
As we all know the pen, or the writer behind the pen, is often a liar. Lies have always constituted the first strike against Jews. Usually, lying begins in the Church or Mosque.
The enemy of truth is dogma: an intellectual laziness prohibiting people from thinking clearly. And dogma, we must always remember, is the foundation of Islam and Christianity.
There was a sermon or even a papal encyclical about the perfidious Jews. It reminded people that Jews were avaricious (extremely greedy) and deicidal (the killer of God). Lies in German, Russian, Arabic, French, and English stirred up hatred against the Jews.
Throughout the world people today are expressing sympathy with murderers and liars. Or, should I say, liars and murderers? Because violence is conceived in the lie.
There are huge demonstrations intended to intimidate and bully us, hundreds of thousands of Americans, Brits, Australians, and French marching through cities echoing the Palestinian chant meant to drive Jews from Israel.
The lies have another purpose as well: They are intended for the ignorant and the feeble-minded. They are also intended to isolate Jews from their fellow neighbors and citizens. And they are intended to influence Western politicians who care more about their polling results than about the way of life they were elected to defend.
We should remember Nazi Joseph Goebbels’ words that if a lie is repeated often enough, it becomes the truth. This psychological fact is, in a more benign sense, the basis of advertising and sales. In a malign way, it is propaganda capable of instilling fear and rage.
The antisemite is a bully who hides in crowds. He relies upon centuries of brainwashing people to accept the untrue as truth. Thus, when they claim that the “poor Palestinians” were the indigenous residents of our land, and that land was stolen by the Jews, it resonates to centuries of the essential lie. Facts are irrelevant.
Indigenous, of course, means a people that existed in a land from the earliest times and before the arrival of the colonists. Well, to the simple-minded who have no clue about history, we could say that these indigenous peoples, like the Canaanites or Hittites, are now extinct. And the colonists were the Muslim hordes from Arabia and later the Ottomans.
But, bullies are driven by hate rather than curiosity. And if hate speech is repeated effectively, it is heard by politicians who themselves care little about facts. Throughout the world, politicians and intellectuals are becoming the useful idiots manipulated by the kingdom of ignorance and death, the very negation of all our Western values and aspirations.
Humanity has often encountered threats: the barbarians, the Medieval church, and the Nazis to name a few. But, it found the strength and courage to resist. The Reformation and Enlightenment. The call for liberty and equal rights. And when need be, people stood up and fought back in places like Omaha Beach and Guadalcanal.
It was not about what the bad guys said that really counted. It was what the good guys did that mattered. Back in 1940, the good guys were surrounded and alone. Winston Churchill, referring to his Royal Air Force, once said, “Never before in the history of human conflict have so many owed so much to so few.”
Today, we Israelis and Jews in the Diaspora who stand with us constitute a lonely band of brothers and sisters. The valiant few are no longer the British. Neither are they the kind of brave Americans who, when surrounded on Wake Island and asked what they needed, answered: “Send us more Japs.”
The Allied Powers defeated Germany in combat, as well as in argument. Germany was defeated because it was wrong and evil. There was little ambiguity. Perhaps nowadays what we lack most is the kind of clarity that the Americans had when facing Germany.
In order to become effective defenders, we must first ask ourselves: Are these people inherently insane, or are they just stupid? Who in their right mind wants a (Palestinian) state that is governed by murderers? Unless, of course, those murderers intend to murder Jews. Are they crazy? Or, are they evil? And can the two be differentiated?
In Robert Waite’s biography of Adolf Hitler, “The Psychopathic God,” he described a severely stunted and paranoid personality. A total failure in every endeavor he attempted. Yet, a great success in attracting the loyalty of many other pathological types. A continuum exists between insanity and sin. The sinner murders others, the insane individual kills himself. At the end of Hitler’s reign, he had succeeded in murdering millions and killing himself.
It is impossible to interview Hamas leadership. Any psychological investigation would be purely historical, anecdotal. But, there are telltale signs of insanity. Like Hitler, Palestinian leaders Yahya Sinwar, Mahmoud Abbas, and Yasser Arafat have little compunction about murdering their own people. They are encouraged to be “martyrs” — a code word for kamikaze.
While the IDF has been tasked with standing up to this masked bully in a keffiyeh (Palestinian scarf), how will Jews in the Diaspora stand up to the masked bullies marching down the streets of the cities they once believed were home?
Our situation is further complicated by the fact that both disorders, the moral and the medical, are contagious. In his study of mass psychosis, Gustave Le Bon wrote that there are several characteristics of crowd psychology, such as impulsiveness, irritability, incapacity to reason, the absence of judgement or critical thinking, and the exaggeration of sentiments.
Le Bon claimed that “an individual immersed for some length of time in a crowd soon finds himself — either in consequence of magnetic influence given out by the crowd or from some other cause of which we are ignorant — in a special state, which much resembles the state of fascination in which the individual finds himself in the hands of the hypnotizer.”
When we look at the young “pro-Palestinian” demonstrators, it is easy to see the look on the faces reminiscent of those treated by German physician Anton Mesmer. It is the Mesmer character, the hypnotizer who has moral and intellectual control over the crowd. The intellectual, the journalist, or the politician who hates Jews has the capacity to motivate an entire nation. Unless we fight back.
I have often thought that the intellectual basis of evil begins in dogmatic thinking, the attitude that one idea is the right one, even divine. What do Medieval Christianity, Islam, and Nazism all have in common? They thrived upon dogma and punished dissent via auto-da-fé (death by burning), excommunication, or murder.
The war against the Jews has been going on for centuries. But, when we look carefully beyond the pseudo-democratic slogans such as “Free Palestine,” we see a nefarious movement toward unfreedom. The Church or the Mosque did not seek to liberate, but to enslave. However, since everyone thinks freedom is a good idea, they first inverted the very idea of freedom. “Free Palestine!”
Does this mean enabling Palestinians to become self-directed individuals? Does it mean helping them to build a society based upon equality and liberty? Or, does it really mean creating a culture of unfreedom wherein people are chained to the medieval ideas and dogmas of a failed civilization? What kind of freedom is based upon the murder of another?
Eventually, intelligent Germans realized that Nazism was not about Germany; it was about Hitler. Again, in the words of Edward Bulwer Lytton, they (these demagogues) are “the arch-enchanters” taking sorcery from the master-hand to paralyze the Caesars — and to strike the loud earth breathless! Take away the sword. States can be saved (or established) without it.
The German war against the Jews illustrated the power of the pen, of “Der Stürmer” (a weekly German tabloid-format newspaper) and Goebbels’ propaganda. Long before the Gestapo and German soldiers came to round up the Jews, they were isolated from their former neighbors and fellow citizens without the Germans having to fire a shot.
Indeed, we know how many Panzer tank divisions were deployed against Russians, Czechs, or the French. So how many were deployed against the Jews? How many rounds of ammunition were fired at the Jews? The reason that the German soldiers could so easily control the Jews (with few exceptions) was that the Jews no longer had the support of their neighbors and their governments.
In effect, the illusion that they were Germans or French was demolished. They were simply Jews incapable of organizing themselves and of reestablishing a collective identity. Accordingly, they did not believe that they could resist. What could they do against the German or the Poles who rejected them?
Like the Germans, the Muslims are now conducting a rhetorical war against the Jews, accusing us of the most horrible crimes against humanity, such as ethnic cleansing and genocide. And as we see, the useful idiots, who cannot tell us what river and what sea the Muslims are referring to, scream almost in unison with the ecstatic millions, chanting Sieg Heil (the Nazi salute).
The fact is that the pen is mightier than the sword. And perhaps now we are forced to fight with our sword because over the last decades we refused to fight with our pens. Even when freedom of speech was sacrosanct in America, and while our enemies were reinvigorating old canards, we remained smugly silent or uttered vapid circumlocutions about Western values and tolerance.
In every utterance we linked antisemitism to Islamophobia in an utterly silly way. By doing this, we undermine our own position; we belittle our plight. We, indeed, have much to fear from Islamic warriors and their passive-aggressive accomplices. What we know to be true in sports and in battle, that the best defense is offense, is also true in debate.
Words are truly powerful; they can motivate, console, and even heal. But, they can also mobilize. Just think of how Churchill “mobilized” the English language and sent it to war. If we truly believe in our own rights, including our right to speak freely, then we must defend them. And we defend these rights by speaking freely about our enemy.
Combat, as Churchill demonstrated when he took over as Prime Minister in 1940, begins in rhetoric or polemic. (The Greek polemos means war.) The IDF is fighting bravely, but many Jews in the Diaspora have yet to fight, and we are already surrounded.
U.S. President Joe Biden and so many European politicians have betrayed not only the Jews, but those very Biblical and Judaic values America’s Founding Fathers set down as the American raison d’etre (reason or purpose for living).
Liberal Europe has sided with extremist Islam and a Palestinian population of fellow travelers. The West faces a terrible war. But in the final analysis, it is not the war that is immoral. Throughout history men and women were called upon to resist evil. Perhaps we can win this war. But that depends upon having learned the lessons of history.
The tragedy would not be that we fight. It would be that we allow evil to triumph for the sake of peace.
Israeli fight is a source of ispiration from all the people want to be free and not enslaved.
Glory to Israel!
Glory to Heroes!
I want to yell, “you do not have to beg for the approval of others to act in your own defense.” I understand though - foolish people, with foolish opinions, are undermining the will of Israelis to fight and win the war with Hamas. I too am in a smaller, but analogous dilemma - if, as a male American Christian citizen I defend myself against assault, a phalanx of writers will write furiously to portray me as evil and worthy of death. It’s maddening. But you must fight on to victory, period!