Why The Hague Needs to Convict Israel
The World wants the State of Nature
The oldest hate is also the most frustrating hate – why is there antisemitism and why does it never end? All the reasons to hate the Jews have been refuted by Jewish actions. We are filthy capitalists and then communists. We are separatists and then assimilationists. We are stateless and we have a state. The list goes on and on and we can come to the conclusion that there is no answer.
The late Lutheran Pastor turned Catholic Priest, Richard John Neuhaus said years ago – I paraphrase as I don’t remember the exact quite – if you don’t like Christian America, just wait until you get post-Christian America. No one can doubt that for centuries Christianity was the source of antisemitism in the European continent as Jews were the easy scapegoats to everything from the Plague to economic crashes. But with the dawn of the scientific age, Christian antisemitism lost its cache along with Christianity itself. What we are dealing with now is an antisemitism of the nihilists.
The nihilists are those anti-semites who, like the operettist Wagner and the philosophers Karl Marx and Voltaire started a trend that reached it climax with Nazi and Stalinist totalitarianism and has now made a comeback with a combination of Islamist and progressive ideologies which are all based on the glorification of violence and cruelty that we see in ISIS, Hamas, Fatah, Al-Qaeda and now manifesting itself in America’s great cities and universities. The question still remains – why do all of these seemingly contradictory ideas all converge in anti-semitism?
The answer, it seems to me lies in exactly that one international body that was created in the wake of the actions of greatest and most horrible of anti-semitic regimes – the Nazi perpetrators of the Holocaust. The Western world – the modern Christian west, led by the United States, felt it needed laws of war and international bodies that would continue the work of the Nurenburg Trials and make sure all those who would perpetrate genocide would, eventually, be brought to justice. That these bodies have failed miserably is proven by the genocides in Rwanda and Cambodia, the mass murders going on in Sudan and other parts of Africa, the genocide, still ongoing of Sunni Moslems in Syria and the Chinese incarceration in concentration camps (and who knows what else?) of the Uighurs.
So why Israel? Why is Israel, why are the Jews the main enemies of the new nihilists?
The enemy is the moral code that the Bible brought into the world – a code that protected slaves from cruel behavior, a code that did not allow the rape of women captured in war, a code that limited the number of horses and wives a king could have, a code with laws of war. Maimonides, writing in the middle ages in Spain and then Egypt, has a whole section of his Code on the laws of kings and war. Jews didn’t always follow the law and the books of Joshua and Judges are filled with difficult passages but the commandments were there, nonetheless.
Hugo Grotius, writing in the 16th and 17th century developed Just War theory based on Christian thinking and that has formed the basis of the international laws of warfare ever since. This certainly would not have happened without the Bible and the codes that followed it and this is what the nihilists hate most of all.
Israel is at the heart of the progressive Western, radical Islamic, pan-Slavic and Communist revolt against the containment of violence, cruelty and bloodlust under the rubric of a higher moral law. Maybe it is true that man’s natural state is war , as Hobbes believed. Maybe Heraclitus is right that “war is the father of us all and our king” and maybe as he continued, it “discloses who is godlike and who is but a man” but the Judeo-Christian tradition taught us that we need to overcome this nature and to live with a moral code that can overcome it and change what it means to be “godlike”.
The “court” in the Hague represents that pagan and nihilistic outlook on life and the desire to return to a time where violence and cruelty is unregulated, where war can be fought without the rules that the Jews foisted onto mankind. Camille Paglia writes in her magnum oppose “Sexual Personae” that society is the “defense against nature’s power”. Without society and the moral and behavioral codes that make it up, Paglia writes, we would be” storm-tossed on the barbarous sea that is nature”.
Convicting Israel of violating the very laws it itself created will finally put an end to the “farce that is morality” according to the nihilists and return us to that “barbarous sea that is nature”. The destruction of Israel will allow the world to finally defeat that 3,000 year old code that we call the Judeo-Christian heritage that prohibits the nihilists from living as they wish. The Hague needs to convict Israel and the woke left along with radical Islam need to finish the job on the battlefield so that they can return to their beloved state of nature.
They hate the Jews now because we have provided them with the framework to be civilized and they hate civilization most of all.
Israel will be convicted in the Hague because to find it innocent means the nihilists will be shackled to a morality that prevents them from cruelly murdering, raping and destroying as they please. It means that Hollywood will not be able to continue glorifying the dismemberment of children in their “realistic” crime dramas. It means the universities will have to teach of truth and beauty and not perpetuate the bloody ideologies it loves. It means that they will have to subordinate their beloved blood thirsty ideologies to that horrible bourgeois virtue, human kindness.
What infuriates the contemporary Left is the undeniable historical fact that our modern concept human equality (as expressed in the American Declaration of Independence) derives from the Judeo-Christian tradition. The doctrine that all human beings are equal in the sight of God was the first step in a long and torturous process that produced a general philosophy of human equality. The Abolitionist movement in England and America was deeply influenced by ideas of Christian morality; the commitment of American Jews to the cause of civil rights was likewise influenced by Jewish religious teachings and commentary going backs centuries if not millennia.
Dostoevsky said that without God everything is permitted, and twentieth-century history bears out the truth of his prophetic words. And it may be said with equal truth that without God, nothing is validated. If you say to me that all men are created equal and I respond, “Says who?”— what’s your answer? The evidence of our eyes and ears goes to show that there is no such thing as human equality. Obviously, therefore, the claim that it does exist can only be supported by an appeal to some higher power.
Baseline human equality and natural rights: There are the concepts that the contemporary Left rejects, because they deprive the Left of agency. The comrades believe that they’re the makers and bestowers of rights, which is why their ideology is so focused on sorting human beings into groups. Some are to be reviled, some are to be exalted; some are to be cast down, some are to be uplifted. There’s only so much equality to go around, and the comrades will be handing our the ration books.
This, I believe, is the deep explanation of the antisemitism of the contemporary Left. The miracle of Israel’s rebirth, the Jewish people’s reassumption of their rightful place among the nations, was in the eyes of the comrades an intolerable piece of hubris.
They also hate the Jews for being so mysteriously resilient in the face of historical forces that have returned so many nations to the dust. A merciless clock is ticking for many national identities while the Jews keep on keeping on.