For some reason, 'the Jews' make societies go mad.
While Sudan burns and Muslims in the UK make up a disproportionate amount of its crime, the world obsesses about a tiny Jewish state.
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Every so often, societies lose their grip on reality.
They begin to prize moral theater over moral truth, emotion over evidence, identity over integrity.
It happened during the witch trials, when mass hysteria passed for righteousness. It happened during the French Revolution, when “virtue” became a justification for violence. It happened in McCarthyism, when suspicion replaced reason.
And it is happening again today, in the moral frenzy surrounding Israel and the Palestinians. What we are witnessing is not just political bias or ignorance; it is “an incurable disease in the public mind.”
The phrase “incurable disease in the public mind” refers to U.S. President James Buchanan’s description of the intense, nationwide division over slavery in America, particularly following John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, an attempted armed insurrection led by a radical abolitionist whose goal was to ignite a slave rebellion that would spread across the American South and ultimately destroy the institution of slavery.
Buchanan believed this fanaticism, especially among abolitionists, was a symptom of a deep-seated “disease” that was leading the country toward civil war. His use of the term reflected his belief that the coming conflict was not merely political or economic, but the result of an irrational, emotional contagion: a breakdown of reason within the national psyche.
More than 165 years later, that same diagnosis feels disturbingly relevant. Societies still fall prey to moral panics that masquerade as virtue. We still elevate feelings above facts, outrage above understanding, and moral posturing above truth. In our time, the disease has metastasized beyond America. It has gone global, living in the fevered rhetoric that dominates discourse about Israel and the Palestinians. Once again, hysteria has replaced history.
As in James Buchanan’s America, many people no longer seek truth but moral superiority. Across several social circles, reason has been replaced by righteousness. The result is a mass delusion, one that has inverted the moral order and turned parts of the world upside down.
Nowhere is this clearer than in the widespread claim that Israel has been committing “genocide” against the Palestinians since 1948. The accusation is as mathematically absurd as it is morally grotesque. Since 1949, the Palestinian population has increased by approximately 550 percent. For those who forgot what a dictionary is, genocide does not lead to population growth; it leads to disappearance.
Actual genocides (the Holocaust, Rwanda, Armenia, Cambodia) left unimaginable demographic scars. During World War II, the Jewish People lost more than 60 percent of our population. The Rwandan genocide of 1994 annihilated roughly 81 percent of the Tutsi population. The Armenian genocide of 1915 destroyed 78 percent of Armenians in the Ottoman Empire. The Cambodian genocide in the 1970s killed a quarter of the nation’s population.
To equate the Palestinian experience — characterized by population expansion, international recognition, and billions upon billions of dollars in foreign aid — with these historical genocides is not just factually wrong; it is a desecration of memory and a gross insult to the dead.
Meanwhile, in Sudan right now, Muslim militias are massacring Christians by the thousands, a slow-motion genocide unfolding in real time. Entire villages are being wiped out, women are enslaved, and churches are burned to the ground. Yet, there are no viral hashtags, no campus protests, no global outrage. The same activists and institutions that posture as moral beacons suddenly go silent. It’s not that they don’t know; it’s that they don’t care to know. This, too, is part of the incurable disease: the moral selectivity that defines modern conscience.
The disease in the public mind thrives on emotional contagion, not evidence. It feeds on the satisfaction of outrage. That is why no amount of data can cure it, because its sufferers derive their identity from their indignation. They need to believe that Israelis and Jews are evil to preserve the illusion of their own virtue.
Consider the testimony of Dr. Mudar Zahran, the head of the largest Palestinian community in the world — roughly three million Palestinians living in Jordan. In a remarkable address to the European Parliament, Zahran spoke candidly about the hypocrisy that underlies Europe’s obsessive condemnation of Israel:
“We, the Palestinian Jordanian people, are the ‘chosen people’ of the European Parliament. People in the European Parliament love the Palestinians, they care for them, they dream about us in their sleep. How beautiful they care about how we are oppressed by the ‘evil Zionist Israelis’ — while, in fact, those ‘evil Zionist Israelis’ are the ones giving us jobs when Lebanon bans us from all forms of jobs, when the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, which occupied 78 percent of our homeland, prevents us from all kinds of jobs.”
“You guys are obviously caring for us in good intentions, but your judgment is very cloudy. Unfortunately, most of you are seeking to destroy the very and only source of income and stability that we have, which is the Israeli Jewish state. That state has offered us every hope there is in the last 70 years.”
His words should have shattered illusions, but they did not. Because the modern West is not suffering from ignorance; it is suffering from a moral addiction. It is addicted to empathy without accountability. Western elites perform their compassion for the cameras, chanting for “liberation” while ignoring the Palestinian dictators, terrorists, and regimes that actually oppress the people they claim to champion. They mistake emotion for ethics, hashtags for heroism. It’s not moral courage; it’s moral theater.
We see it again in how international institutions manipulate language to serve ideology. Just two months after October 7th, international organizations were already discussing how to apply the term “famine” to the situation in Gaza. In December 2023 in Geneva, at the World Health Organization’s governance meeting about Gaza, attendees discussed “how important it would be to scientifically demonstrate the occurrence of a famine in Gaza, and how to use the term for communication and political pressure on Israel.”1
Dr. Michel Thieren, the World Health Organization’s representative to Israel, who was in attendance at that Geneva meeting, said: “from October 8,” the perpetrators and victims had already been designated. “The crimes were predetermined,” he explained, “and then the organizations tried to demonstrate them.”
In James Buchanan’s time, hysteria spread through sermons and pamphlets. Today, it travels at the speed of Wi-Fi. The digital mob has replaced the village mob. Outrage has been gamified, monetized, and amplified. Algorithms feed us emotional validation, not truth. The more people hate Israel and Jews, the more “likes” they receive. The public mind is not just diseased; it’s wired for frenzy. And those who try to inject facts into the bloodstream are treated as heretics.
Even worse, the very societies most infected by this moral disease are being consumed from within by their own contradictions. Take the United Kingdom, for example. Muslims make up about 6.5 percent of the population there, yet since 2000 they account for roughly 90 percent of terrorism-related murders, 75 percent of terror threats, 84 percent of child gang rapes, and nearly half the unemployment among adults aged 18 to 64.
These are not random statistics; they are indicators of a deeper social fracture that the political class refuses to acknowledge. Instead of confronting their own failures, they turn their moral outrage outward, lecturing Israel about “human rights” and their societies about “Islamophobia” while their own streets are filled with Muslim-led hate marches calling for another Jewish genocide.
The same pathology infects major American cities. In New York City, nearly 600 Israeli-founded companies have created more than 27,000 jobs, generating an estimated $12.4 billion in value to the city’s economy and $17.9 billion in total gross economic output.2 Israeli innovation has made the city more dynamic, more prosperous, more future-oriented.
Yet the same city flirts with electing a mayor who openly supports the Israel boycott movement, a campaign designed to cripple the Jewish state economically. The disease in the public mind does not merely corrupt moral judgment; it leads societies to act against their own interests.
When a society becomes infected with moral hysteria, it begins to destroy itself in the name of virtue. In the 1850s, that hysteria culminated in civil war. Today, it has produced a world in which Jews are once again demonized, history is rewritten, and moral clarity is smeared as bigotry. The very nations that claim to champion justice now champion those who murder civilians and praise those who die killing Jews. It is a sickness of the soul: a civilization so consumed by self-righteousness that it can no longer distinguish the innocent from the guilty, the defender from the aggressor, the truth from the lie.
But there is still an antidote. The cure will not come from censorship, nor from consensus, nor from moral fashion. It will come from courage — the courage to see clearly, speak truthfully, and care more about what is right than what is popular. The courage to call lies by their names and to defend civilization against the contagion of hysteria. In every generation, sanity begins as heresy. But only the heretics of clarity can heal a society that has forgotten how to think.
The disease in the public mind is curable, but only if patients are willing to face the cold, hard truth.
“WHO discussed use of term ‘famine’ to pressure Israel in December 2023, doctor reveals.” The Jerusalem Post.
United States-Israel Business Alliance
Lately I've been starting to think that the liberal West's deep, mindless and reflexive hatred of Israel is downstream of the new sacred morality and sacred crusade of the post-Christian post-Civil Rights era, meaning more or less white guilt and white saviorism.
White guilt is the one shared trait of all Western liberals, esp those in positions of authority (or aspiring to them) in culture, media, and especially academia. If you don't believe in your bones in the moral urgency of "centering the marginalized" and the rectification of historical injustice, you will either be expelled from these circles or never want to endure them in the first place. All of DEI, for instance, is rooted in white guilt and saviorism, and criticizing POCs in these areas is simply bad etiquette that all good people know to avoid—they are sacred victims, meant to be worshipped not questioned.
So when the aspiring white savior in our age of performative moralism comes to global politics, what's the most bang for the buck? There is nothing here to be gained by denouncing Iran or Qatar or Sudan or any Muslims or black/brown people killing each other, because as there are no white people involved, the West gets quickly bored and confused and prefers to look away. Who are we to judge!? Different cultures have different ways of handling disputes etc.
But when we get to Israel, we find the perfect stage for the ambitious yet gullible and anxious Westerner to perform their virtue and run with the cool kids who imagine themselves on the Right Side of History™. On one side of this endless conflict is a rich, powerful country created by European exiles who have a very strong military and aren't afraid to use it; and on the other side are the poor brown and oppressed 4th-generation refugees who were "kicked off their land" and who just want Justice, Equality, a state, and Amazon Prime and Pornhub—just like the rest of us. And this inability to imagine people having different beliefs and desires (Western liberals imagine themselves residing at both the apex of civilization and of morality), leads to a second, much more dangerous, mistaken assumption: that the Jews of Israel must be terrible butchers, why else would the Palestinians raise their kids to be martyrs and aspire to blowing themselves up on buses and in restaurants!? As there can't possibly be anything deficient in the culture of the poor brown and marginalized (even thinking this is coded as "racist"), thus the only possible answer is Jewish evil. The Palestinians can't help themselves—the Jewish devil made them do it!
The West has taken the Jewish scapegoat out of storage and now hopes to use it to make itself and its rulers appear as compassionate saviors who just love the marginalized and all it takes is vilifying a bunch of Jews—again—which comes pretty easily to most people.
Hope this makes sense.
Not a good analogy to compare the rightful and necessary abolition of slavery which needed to be ended to the Jew hating terrorist supporters who seek to destroy capitalism and Western civilisation along with Israel, the only democracy in the Middle East. And just the record, the British ended slavers before America dead because they realised how vile it was. Not a good example at all.