It's mostly not about Islam

Muh hadith

Don’t you know what Dar al-Harb is? Look at this hadith in which Muhammad clearly tells Abu Garanga that he should kill every infidel for looking at him funny. Oh, I suppose you like being a dhimmi? Look at this video demonstrating that according to all four madwadabwabs Muslims are obligated to fight against the Jews until they pay the jizya and ride on a little horse. THIS IS THE MIDDLE EAST!!!!

If, like me, you are a big liberal gaylord who thinks this country has to find a way to get along with its Arab neighbours unless it wants to enter a spiral of ever more delirious militarism until it eventually spectacularly flames out in a spasm of atrocities which will burden your descendants for the next 100 generations, if they even exist, you will probably have heard the above arguments and similar many times. Today, we’re going to explain why that is basically wrong, but before we do, I need to get something out of the way. Islam is a stupid religion. If I was an important Israeli politician, I wouldn’t say that, and I shouldn’t say that because it’s irresponsible, but I’m just a blogger and (a) I can say whatever I want and (b) I can personally most effectively move things in a better direction by just saying what’s true rather than what’s politic. So, again, Islam is dumb. If you are Muslim and this offends you, then fix your religion so it’s less dumb and then you won’t be offended.

I know Islamophobia. I was reading Lawrence Auster when you were still reading Thomas Sowell or whatever like the stupid noobie you are. Not only do I know Islamophobia, I am Islamophobic. Back in the day when David Wood made funny videos instead of seventy-five hour streams about who knows what, I used to watch every one.

That’s funny. So, I’m not saying that we shouldn’t say mean things about Islam, even though, to repeat, if you have a position of public responsibility, then that’s exactly what I think you shouldn’t do. I’m saying that saying mean things about Islam is of limited value in understanding the Israeli-Arab conflict.

Demonstrating this isn’t very hard. At the 1972 Olympics, Palestinian terrorists kidnapped and murdered eleven Israeli athletes. This was, obviously, very shocking because it’s completely beyond the bounds of what any remotely normal person would consider an acceptable way of pursuing political goals, even very just ones. Actually, it was even worse than people knew at the time, with the athletes being not only murdered, but also tortured and castrated. The operation was carried out by a group called ‘Black September’, which was a radical branch of Fatah originally formed to take revenge on Jordanians after the expulsion of the PLO. The head of Black September was this guy:

If you think that he doesn’t look like a big Muslim fundamentalist, you would be right. Wikipedia notes that ‘He was known for flaunting his wealth, being surrounded by women and driving sports cars, and having popular appeal among Palestinian young men’. When trying to track him down, Mossad accidentally killed some random Moroccan waiter, who looked like this:

Apart from the Munich massacre, maybe the craziest act of Palestinian terrorism was the hijacking of Air France Flight 139, which culminated in the peak of Israeli basedness at Entebbe. This episode had all the signs that are typically used to prove that anti-Zionism is really antisemitism, since non-Israeli passengers were released by the hijackers, but Jewish ones, including a Holocaust survivor, had to stay with the Israelis. However, the hijacking was carried out by a splinter group of the PFLP founded by Wadie Haddad, a Marxist fruitcake from a Christian family (the original PFLP had similar heritage).

Or take these guys:

This isn’t a scene from Goodfellas, it’s the people arrested in Egypt for murdering the Jordanian Prime Minister. I mentioned this before because one of them bent down and started lapping up the poor dead guy’s blood in front of everyone like some total mentalist. We could pile on the examples here all day, but the point is that you don’t need any Islam to explain why Palestinian nationalism is batty, addicted to revolting and self-destructive violence, soaked in vindictive self-pity, glorifies its most sociopathic and depraved elements, and sucks. It can be that all on its own.

Before we move on, we can make here an observation about the famous allegation that Israel ‘created Hamas’. What this basically means is that, during the 1970s and 1980s, Israel tolerated the growth of the Muslim Brotherhood, especially in the Gaza Strip, and also threw a bit of spare change at its charity and educational projects. The context is that, at the time, the Muslim Brotherhood was committed to a policy of tactical non-violence, and rejected the leadership of the Palestinian nationalist movement on the grounds of it being too secular. Given that said Palestinian nationalist leadership was hijacking planes and mangling weightlifters and drinking human blood while the Muslim Brotherhood was handing out prayer beads and imploring Gazans to go to the mosque five times a day, this was not the dastardly Machiavellian move it is typically assumed to be. Mostly, it was just shortsighted, but gaining a few years of quiet at the expense of greater trouble down the line is just what Israeli security policy is. There’s no need to seek a special explanation in this case.

Back to our point, though, what is the actual relationship of Islamism to Palestinian political violence? Well, it’s complicated. One thing it does is act as a force multiplier. As every bankrobber knows, the trickiest part isn’t getting to the money, it’s getting it into the getaway car. If you are planning a terrorist operation, and you don’t have to plan how to get the terrorists safely back home, then you can do a lot more terrorism. Suicide bombings, therefore, are just no brainers from an operational view, but there’s a big problem persuading people to do them. After all, even if you, collectively, are spectacularly successful, the Jews all go back to Krakow and the glorious Arab nation rules from river to sea, you, personally, are just a bunch of splatter on a bus seat. You need to be really into it for that to be a worthwhile deal. If, though, you can persuade some retards that they will get 72 (72!) raisins as their eternal reward, though, then you can really cook.

That’s just an example, but you get the point. Islam stiffens the Palestinian cause; it adds transcendence, after a fashion, intransigence, fanaticism, courage in the face of death, persistence in the face of hardship, that kind of stuff, plus, best of all, it gives a lot of excuses for teleological suspension of the ethical, which come in handy when there’s a granny to stab, a child’s throat to be slit. Islam isn’t necessarily better per se at winding up numnutses to do crazy nonsense than Arab nationalism, but it’s more timeless, less vulnerable to the ebbs and flows of ideological fashion. Islamicizing the conflict also gets you support from countries like Indonesia and Pakistan, that don’t objectively have anything to do with the dispute, but do share your religion. However, the true relationship of Islam to the conflict is quite different, almost opposite. Islam feeds the conflict, no doubt about that, but more importantly, the conflict feeds Islam.

Who is parasiting off who?

Let’s take some things everyone knows. Hamas is more Islamist than Fatah. Hamas is more committed to armed struggle and opposed to territorial compromise than Fatah. Hamas is more popular than Fatah, way more. What is the relationship between these facts? As always, it’s complicated, but the dominant dynamic is that Palestinians like Hamas because it is more committed to armed struggle, and they take the Islamism as part of the package.

This may seem confusing, but it shouldn’t be. The right wing in Israel is defined by territorial maximalism. The more territory you want to take, and the more people you are willing/eager to kill to do it, the more right wing you are. At the same time, the right wing is characterized by political Judaism. The more you want Israel to be a Jewish state, substantively, the more right wing you are. What is the relationship between these factors? Well, again, it’s complicated. The Kook dynasty started with the premise that Jewish settlement throughout the land of Israel was necessary to repair some kind of cosmic tear. Originally, they combined this with effete humanitarian idealism, but then when the Arabs made it clear that they weren’t up for it, the Kookists decided they needed some military muscle to grease the wheels of metaphysical redemption and it all kind of spiralled. On the other hand, the Israeli far right that split off from the Revisionist movement, started with the principle of territorial maximalism and militarism and cycled through a whole bunch of different ideologies, many of them overtly hostile to the Jewish religion, until eventually they settled on religious zionism as their vehicle after 1967. In many cases, such as Daniella Weiss, it’s genuinely hard to know what’s driving what.

Broadly speaking, though, we can say that people who are mainly in it for the religion and consider militarism the cost of doing business vote Noam, those who see Judaism as a vehicle for militarism and aren’t overly concerned about plausible deniability vote Otzma, and those who are somewhere in between vote for whatever Smotrich’s party is called. If we look at the polls, Noam consistently poll at half a seat, and have to join a different list to get anywhere, Smotrich might not pass the threshold if he ran alone, and Otzma are on course for 9 or 10. Militarism is popular, and Judaism is OK, too, as long as it serves militarism. That’s how it mostly works in Palestine as well. There are sincere Islamists around, but their way of becoming a party capable of winning elections is to promote Islamism as the best way to fight Zionism, and then test the boundaries of how much burka Palestinians are willing to put up with in practice. Of course, what they actually have achieved is relentless, calamitous defeat, but, luckily for Allah, Palestinians are as dumb as a bin full of bricks.

You only hate me because your religious book tells you to!

Globally, we are not polling well at all, but even if we literally just kill everyone in Gaza, we probably won’t do as badly as we already do in the Arab world:

Rough. These are, of course, all Muslim countries, so maybe it is Islam to blame? If you really squint, there’s probably a bit of a relationship. Lebanon is slightly less than 70% Muslim these days and it’s a shade more open to peaceful relations than the average Arab country. Perhaps greater traditionalism in Qatar explains the 1% difference with Kuwait. However, clearly something else is the overriding factor.

That factor is that Arabs believe Israel is a uniquely evil country founded on and maintained by crime, and how into Islam they are is barely relevant. A good example of this appears in a recent article by Aymenn Jawad Al-Tamimi, who, by the way, is a major legend who just emails random warlords and militia heads from across the Middle East and asks them for interviews, kind of analogous to getting a first-hand account of the political ideology of Gelimer king of the Vandals. Anyway, here’s him talking about Saudi Arabia:

Dislike of Israel among Saudis is not somehow the preserve of Islamists. It also exists among Saudis whom one might deem to be relatively liberal in social terms. Consider the case of Aseel Omran. A Saudi model, singer and actress residing in the UAE, Aseel stood out for her Western-style appearance even before the social liberalisation brought about by Muhammad bin Salman (whom she supports). As a brand ambassador for cosmetics company L’Oréal Paris, Aseel has spoken openly about how she faced wider criticism for her career path on the basis that it did not conform with societal expectations about the role of women.

Clearly then, she is no Islamist. But one of the few political issues she does speak up about is the Palestinian cause, and she has made clear that she does not think Israel should exist in any form, as can be seen from her Instagram posts. For example, even prior to the Gaza war, she shared the following post (see below): ‘Teach your children that Palestine is occupied, that the al-Aqsa Mosque is held captive, that the Zionist entity is an enemy, that resistance is honourable, and that there is no state called Israel.’

The point then is that relative Saudi social liberalism does not necessarily correspond to a willingness to be more open to and understanding of Israel. Normalising relations with Israel- especially in the absence of a Palestinian state- is unpopular in both Saudi Arabia and the wider Arab world, and has become even more unpopular since 7 October 2023. In this regard, the Saudi leadership has to have at least some regard for public opinion: while social liberalisation may be welcomed among many younger Saudis, normalisation would be a very tough sell indeed.

At this point, my hasbaratard readers will intone that actually it’s not Islam that’s the problem, it’s some kind of Arab domination complex. They just can’t bear the fact that their identity is based on being the best ever warriors and they got wrecked over and over by a bunch of jewboys with crappy Czech weapons. Sure, there’s part of it, but it’s actually worse than that. Arabs have completely ridiculous views about the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict. They think that Palestine was this great place, and then the Zionists got together with the imperialists who were desperate to control its sweet, sweet dates and made the Balfour Declaration which says Arabs have to be slaves, and then the Jews attacked the Arabs while they were just picking olives, and then just kept attacking them more and more, until eventually they kicked them all out, and then they just kept attacking them for kicks.

When confronted with this great wall of madness, many find it greatly depressing, but for me it’s basically my only sliver of hope. The fact that the vast majority of people on both sides of the conflict have completely ridiculous views of the history of the conflict means that there’s something you can actually fix. To the extent their opinions are based on mistaken beliefs, correcting the beliefs improves the opinion. The problem for Zionists, however, is simple: it’s more important for them to hold on to their own ridiculous views than it is to correct ridiculous Arab views. And they are right. Unless you are a major psycho, if you have a reasonably accurate view of what happened in this place over the past 140 years, you’re going to end up, at most, a very tepid kind of Zionist. You’ll sympathise with Zionists up to a point, but you’ll think it was a pretty dumb idea because of basic facts they should have been able to figure out. Worst of all, you’ll eventually realise that, far from being implemented badly (which would imply there’s a fix switch), the fact that it actually achieved anything at all is because it was implemented much better than one has a right to expect. The true red pill is that you’re already living in the best of all possible Zionist worlds, or close enough that it makes little odds.

I recall, shortly after October 7th, Hussein Aboubakr Mansour posted something very interesting. Since then, he deleted all his old tweets, so I’ll have to describe it roughly. Basically, he was working for some Jewish-American think tank, and his job was to influence the American public and elite opinion in a pro-Israel direction by collating material showing Arabs saying demented, murderous things about Israel in their media. Nice work if you can get it, but Hussein was dissatisfied with just documenting this sick stuff for the horrified fascination of a western audience, he wanted to use his knowledge of Arab culture to create social media campaigns to encourage Arabs to have less sick views about Israel. So he went to his bosses, and they told him there’s no budget for that.

Since then, Mansour has decided that the only intellectual faction that isn’t completely bad is the Tikvah Foundation crowd - or at least that’s what he says - and I don’t blame him. The truth is there is no faction that isn’t completely bad, at any rate none that gives out grants, but we can’t all just make money on substack rants (… yet). However, it does mean that he has developed a penchant for making rather convoluted arguments identifying the problem with the American Liberal Zionist Jewish establishment as being a function of their liberalism, not their Zionism, so I suspect he’ll disagree with my explanation of his testimony, but I’m right.

If we make a scale from 1-10 where 1 is ‘fact-based and sober’ and 10 is ‘so stupid and preposterous that it actually degrades humanity as a whole simply by existing’, the average Jewish narrative of the history of the conflict is perhaps a 7, and the average Arab one is a 12. I mostly rag on the Jewish version because that’s what I’m exposed to day after day, and I come here to let off steam, but we should state that if we are judging retardation, it’s not correct to strictly bothsides it. Arabsbara is worse. The problem is, though, that, while hasbara can beat Arabsbara on points, it can’t actually defeat it. The Arab can always point to something preposterous and plainly false that the Jew said and so retreat back to his own narrative. It would be easy, really easy, to debunk 95% of anti-Zionism, but the problem is that the only weapon you have to do so is truth and then, uh-oh, poof that’s your Zionism gone too. Having the basic ability to collate and analyse information isn’t a universal acid, but it’s a universal acid for anything proximate to this cursed debate. And that is why Zionists will always be stuck parading the grotesques of their enemy’s discourse rather than refuting them. You can only keep your glorious lies if they can too.

It might be objected to here that this is a race realist blog, and therefore I can’t seriously be claiming that the 80 IQ biomass of Egypt could actually be won round by facts and logic if only we used them. Certainly not, but the biomass cannot be won round ever. I am talking about the elites, and not even the very elite elites. That L’Oreal woman counts. It is possible, of course, that social media means the cat is out of the bag, the complex of words (we do not consent to calling it thought) that comes out of the mouths of the mass mind has been liberated to wreak havoc wherever it wills indefinitely. However, for the sake of argument, let’s assume that’s not so; we still live in history and the task of changing a society’s views is the same as changing the views of the intellectuals. The rest will adopt whatever they adopt in due course, only dumber. Can you convince the Arabs with glasses and V-neck sweaters that they are grossly in error? If not, it doesn’t say much for you. It might be because you are trying the wrong thing. Einat Wilf says there will be no peace until the Arabs become Zionists. Plainly, this is a very unreasonable thing to expect, but that they become nonzionists, what could be more reasonable? Righteous Victims has never been translated into Arabic; the most basic work has not been done because that’s how the Zionists prefer it. The Arabs get their delusions; we get ours. The contradictions between the two delusions are arbitrated by means of checkpoints and perimeter fences and a security guard outside the post office. It was manageable. Maybe it still is. But is it still worth it? Really?