Colonisation & Exploitation Masked as Messianism.
To those who will listen, it is clear that the mythical ‘End of Days’ is nigh. Awakened in 1967, the birth pangs of the Messiah that signal the advent of redemption can be felt in the War of Gog & Magog, being fought now in Gaza, as starving, desperate, unarmed women, children and men seek food aid & instead fall to the bullets of the heroic snipers; as whole families are turned to red mist by sheer weight of arms. The more they kill, the more they maim, the greater the pangs, the closer the redemption.
‘Israel came into being because it never came out of being. Israel came back to life because it never died. It was the Jewish State in the days of Joshua, it was the Jewish State when there were Pharoahs…do you think Theodor Herzl created Zionism? Not so! Zionism came into being the day the Jews went into exile and was nurtured by every religious law and custom…Had there been no Balfour Declaration…here would still have risen the State of Israel. Had there been no United Nations — there would have come into being a Jewish State…the stubbornness of Jewish zeydes (Grandfathers) can be denied for only so long.’
Meir Kahane, ‘Listen World, Listen Jew.’ Quoted in ‘Meir Kahane: The public life and political thought of an American Jewish radical,’ by Shaul Magid (1).
All Hail! The God of Death & Destruction.
Amit Varshizky, writing in ‘Haaretz Magazine,’ explained how messianic fervour in Israel is gaining ground, ensnaring many more than the ‘religious fanatics’ who have been telling us of the eminent arrival of the Messiah ever since the miraculous victory of 1967 that opened up the Middle East for the American armed and backed IDF to annex and occupy territories far beyond the legitimate, recognised borders of Israel.
As Varshizky tells us, disasters have always been fertile ground for apocalyptic fantasies and visions. ‘Increasing numbers in right-wing circles have lately joined Orit Strock (Israel’s national missions minster) in identifying the war in the Gaza Strip with the War of Gog and Magog, and the ongoing disaster of October 7 with the birth pangs of the Messiah and the advent of redemption.’
Many draw on the words of the founder of religious Zionism, Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook (1865–1935), who said, “When there is a great war in the world, the power of the Messiah awakens.” War has a purifying power, Rabbi Kook maintains, because it arouses the divine in humanity and helps overcome the selfish instinct. “The greater the destruction and the more systems that have fallen part… the greater the anticipation of the Messiah’s footsteps.”
Professor Motti Inbari explains the motivation of the movement begun by followers of Rav Kook in the wake of the Six Day war; Gush Emunim, that is now under the benevolent wing of Rabbi Yitzchak Ginsburg, and how they believe that occupation (of the OPT, the Sinai, Golan Heights, Southern Lebanon, Gaza, etc) is in itself an act of redemption.
‘The victory in 1967 was achieved because that is what God wanted, and the import is that we, the Jewish people, must try to understand what God wants and is requesting, and to cooperate with that by means of the settlements. Giving up territory undermines the entire religious worldview, which sees itself as the connection between Zionism and redemption. Any territorial compromise is detrimental to the messianic process which Israel is undergoing.’
Thus, the withdrawal of settlers from both the Sinai, in 1979, (following the Oslo Accords in 1993) and Gaza (in 2005) were seen as going against God’s plan for the Jewish people, and have been problematic developments to explain for the leaders and Rabbis of the Religious Zionist movement. Why would God allow the State, and in particular, the secularists of the Israeli Supreme Court, to work against divine will and return land that was promised to the Jews by God?
These questions, and more, I will delve into in my next post, suffice to say, for now, this extremist view of Zionism, whilst prevalent on the Israeli political right, remains a minority view, and is by no means accepted or acceptable to many Jews.
As Haggai Mattar explains, ‘…it is important to remember that Zionism means vastly different things to different people, and plenty of those who subscribe to that label would say they are committed to justice and liberation for Palestinians…’
Over the decades since Herzl first put some flesh on the bones of modern Zionism, it has been called out by critics and those opposed to Zionism as ‘forcing the end,’ or in other words forcing a supernatural prophecy by human hands, and again I shall examine this aspect of Zionism in more detail in my next post.
As Varshivzky points out though, times of national or existential peril are seen or taken to be a ‘formative moment of spiritual renascence,’ and such patterns are not limited to religious beliefs at all. Marxism for instance, suggests that the world is heading for a final cataclysm that will be the end of all history, after which there will be no more wars, injustice or oppression and will arise out of worldwide revolution of the downtrodden working class, which will usher in a global classless society.
Ideological movements, Varshivsky explains, ‘offered their believers a utopian vision that was based not on divine redemption but on scientific progress, naturalism and the sovereignty of humanity. Their followers were driven by a sense of moral eclipse and existential dread, accompanied by a call to eradicate the old world and to build on its ruins a new, orderly world. The total war, in the Nazi case, or the total revolution, in the communist case, were perceived as a necessary stage to realize the secular utopia, and made it possible to normalize the most horrific crimes and sanctify every form of violence.’
In a watered down, but infinitely more aggressive political form, Trump’s MAGA movement offers a similar vision based on an idealised America to be found and regained from some unnamed, mystical time in the past. Indeed, Putin, as he struggles as Ukraine, calls on the memory of the fallen from the Great Patriotic War as the low point from which Russia can rise anew.
In his Victory Day speech in 2012, more than two years before the war with Ukraine began, Putin said, “We have the great moral right to be principled and insistent in defending our positions, because it was our country that bore the brunt of the fight against Nazism…The young people of today are the heirs of the true freedom fighters…We will always be faithful to their valour, and that means we have a future…Glory to Russia! (2)”
Inspired by the rise of Benito Mussolini, and thereafter Hitler, Ivan Ilyin, the white Russian fascist, who himself inspired Putin, wrote a thesis, a metaphysical defence that comprised an ethical apology for an emerging system where ‘Christianity meant the call of the right-seeing philosopher (insert Putin and his monstrous ego) to apply decisive violence in the name of love. To be immersed in such love,” he said, “was to struggle ‘against the enemies of the divine order on earth (3).’
Thus theology and politics become one, much as they are in Iran, much as they have become in Israel; much as they are becoming in America.
Ilyin dedicated his thesis, the ‘Use of Violence to Resist Evil,’ (1925), to the future of Russia, to be used as a fascist manual for the fight against Bolshevism in a Russia where the rule of law would have to be turned on its head. Putin adopted and modernised this to suit his purposes to achieve his fascist Russian state, just as Netanyahu is doing in a proto-fascist Israel, just as Trump is doing in an increasingly fascist leaning America.
‘Fascism is a redemptive excess of patriotic arbitrariness,’ Ilyin wrote and, as Tim Snyder explains (3), in this one sentence two universal concepts, law and Christianity (but we can write religion, more generally), are undone. A spirit of lawlessness replaces the spirit of the law; a spirit of murder replaces a spirit of mercy.
Much as things happen in Russia and Iran today, much as they have been happening in Israel, much as they are becoming in America.
Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, explaining the irrelevance and arbitrariness of antisemitism in the modern world, wrote (4) that, ‘for some people today antisemitism involves the destiny of the mankind; for others it is a mere pretext. The Fascists (Adorno and Horkheimer, Jewish refugees both from Hitler’s Germany, were writing during the war years) do not view the Jews as a minority but as an opposing race, the embodiment of the negative principle. They must be exterminated for the happiness of the world.’
And I see in that simple statement many elements of post-9/11 Islamophobia and the global backlash against democracy, and particularly, liberal democracy. Whilst opinions may yet be divided on the extent of fascism within the current Israeli and American administrations, that both see Muslims as the embodiment of the negative principle is a given.
Yet, as Edward Gibbon (5) warns:
‘From enthusiasm to imposture the step is perilous and slippery; the demon of Socrates affords a memorable instance how a wise man may deceive himself, how a good man may deceive others, how the conscience may slumber in a mixed and middle state between self-illusion and voluntary fraud.’
Ah, yes. Again, opinions may be divided on the idea of Trump or Netanyahu being either ‘wise’ or ‘good’ men— for myself, I’m erring on the side of the pair of them being the embodiment of the negative principle of both wisdom and goodness — but, a slumbering conscience, self-delusion, and a talent for fraud and mass deception are certainly things they do have in common, along with the Islamophobia they wear so clearly on their breast. The joint task then, of exterminating, or at the very least exploiting to the maximum, the nations of black and brown Islam for the happiness of the (white) world is a prerequisite of the power they wield.
‘It is the blindness of and lack of purpose of antisemitism (or today write Islamophobia) which lends a measure of truth to the explanation that it is an outlet. Anger is discharged on defenceless victims,’ be they starving women and children in a tent city, or migrants looking for a helping hand and a safe haven. ‘And since the victims are interchangeable according to circumstances — gypsies, Jews, Protestants, Catholics, and so on — any one of them may take the place of the murderers, with the same blind lust for blood, should they be invested with the title of the norm,’ just as Israel’s Jews have now taken the place of murderers to bring their blind lust for blood to bear against all Palestinians.
‘There is no genuine antisemitism, and certainly no such thing as a born anti-semite,’ write Adorno and Horkheimer. ‘The adults to whom the cry for the blood of Jews has become second nature do not know the reason why any more than the young people who are called upon to spill that blood (4).’
Adorno and Horkheimer were in the eye of the storm in the great war of the world, and yet this was immense conflagration was not taken to be the birth pangs of the second coming. Rav Kook’s prophecy, taken up by today’s messianists, call the slaughter of innocents in Gaza the great war of the world; a misrepresentation and misdirection of terms if ever there was one.
If antisemitism does not exist, then neither does Islamophobia; it is merely the blind lust for blood that drives the narrative and the hands of men to do their evil. The invocation of messianist prophecies is then, nothing more than political slight of hand masked as prophecy, used to justify what is cold blooded slaughter by any other name.
Thus, Religious Zionist extremists, see the purpose of Gush Emunim as creating facts of the ground that ensure there is no withdrawal from any territory for any reason because it is, according to prophecy, against God’s will. So, when territory was actually ceded by Israel, the problem became understanding God’s purpose in such events and how should they respond.
As Professor Inbari explains, ‘The mainstream of religious Zionism is caught in a trap. From their point of view, the Land of Israel is holy, because that is what is written in the Torah. But they themselves developed a model according to which the State of Israel is holy, too, because God decided to bring about redemption via the State of Israel. But what happens when the holy State of Israel inflicts harm on the holy Land of Israel? What are we supposed to be loyal to? To the state, by means of agreeing to territorial compromises, or to the Land of Israel, through acts of resistance?’
Thus, a sort of ‘religious constitutional crisis’ arose which they sought to convert into an actual constitutional crisis; and one has to acknowledge and agree that in this, they have largely succeeded.
‘This crisis is the key to understanding the situation of religious Zionism in our time. It is an integral part of the judicial revolution being led by these kippa-wearers, whose motivation, I assume, is the thought that if they control the Supreme Court they will be able to avert a territorial compromise in the future. From their point of view, as long as they are not in control of the Supreme Court, the Land of Israel is in danger.’
And whilst control of the Supreme Court would free the political agents of Religious Zionism to dispossess, displace, destroy and kill at will to gain God’s favour, yet as Adorno and Horkheimer point out, it is the unknowing, exploited young whose blood will be spilled to achieve these ends; not those sitting in the safe and secure Knesset. And perhaps, the most distasteful, dishonest part of all this is, is that it would not be the blood of their young that is spilled, because they share their religious Zionist affiliation, and are then exempted from conscription, yet still reap all the benefits.
The late Tony Judt, as ever, saw things in a much clearer, more pragmatic light. He wrote, ‘The problem with Israel, in short, is not — as is sometimes suggested — that it is a European “enclave” in the Arab world; but rather that it arrived too late. It has imported a characteristically late-nineteenth-century separatist project into a world that has moved on, a world of individual rights, open frontiers, and international law. The very idea of a “Jewish state” — a state in which Jews and the Jewish religion have exclusive privileges from which non-Jewish citizens are forever excluded — is rooted in another time and place. Israel, in short, is an anachronism.’
‘The historical lesson is thus clear,’ writes Varshivzky, ‘Every attempt to establish the Kingdom of God on earth,’ or some earthly political utopia, ‘is destined to ignite the first of in the abode of man.’
Yet, for the life of me, I see nothing divine in the death and destruction Israel and America mete out all over the Middle East. All I see are the hands and actions of power hungry, irreligious men posing as devout disciples in order to twist the supposedly divine to suit their purpose.
Here lies the danger, Varshivzky says, in co-opting the divine as a partner while striving for a politics of “total solutions,” whether on the right or on the left. ‘That form of politics entrenches a false picture of reality and paves the way for demagogues and populist false messiahs who are adept at exploiting social distress and anxiety by appealing to the urge for redemption and the human need for absoluteness.’
‘Not only does political messianism cast on its leaders a sanctity of religious mission that is insusceptible to doubt,’ he writes, ‘it also requires the marking of enemies (or political rivals) as foes that are delaying redemption, in the spirit of the Latin phrase, “Nullus diabolus, nullus redemptor” (No devil, no redeemer). In this sense, the more powerful the messianic idea is, the greater the violence and the destruction it sows when the demand for absoluteness shatters on the rocks of reality; the height of the sublimity toward which it thrusts is matched only by the depth of the abyss into which it is liable to slide. For the more that reality declines to acquiesce to the absolutist demands of the advocates of political messianism, the greater the strength they wield to shape it in the image of their utopian visions; and the more untenable this becomes, the more they attribute their failure to an internal enemy and to the power of abstract conspiracies.’
And what when the prophesied coming does not materialise? I’m sure Putin, Netanyahu and Trump would like nothing better than to be deified for all eternity, because in the absence of the true redeemer what is the alternative? But would they really be suitable replacements…it’s hard to imagine so.
‘End of days? Oh, eerr! Yeah, so, I sort of made it all up because it was the perfect way to vanquish our foes! But make me a God anyway!’
But then, what of hope? What of belief? What of faith itself? Yes, the putative enemies may have all been slaughtered, but the utopia remains more elusive, more unattainable, and now further away than ever, as everything is revealed to be little more than a poorly executed political calamity. Internal enemies, as Varshivszky calls them, can be blamed only so far. But in the end, internal enemies didn’t commit or abet a genocide; internal enemies didn’t destroy the nations reputation; internal enemies didn’t assume the mantle of their God and promise redemption and greatness amid a transcendent utopian future.
Nietzsche said famously that ‘God was dead.’ ‘Two thousand years have come and gone — and not a single new god!’ And who knows if Nietzsche knew more than us...
I, perhaps more than you could know, would long for him to be proven wrong. I have always felt the pull of religion, but not of the God’s most men worship. For those God’s are made in man’s image, with a man’s wanton desires for death, dominance, mayhem and war. Most God’s preach love, togetherness, compassion and understanding, but are invoked to do the very opposite of those things.
What would the Messiah think, having returned to earth amid the ruins of Gaza, the stench of blood, shit and fear ripe in his nostrils and the knowledge that this had all been done in his name? Would this God of love and neighbourliness be cheered or angry?
I yearn for spiritual fulfilment, but I cannot find it among the God’s of men who offer only a mirror image of man’s never-ending greed and desires. If this truly is God’s requirement then he can keep it; and I will keep searching for a God who is true to his word, and doesn’t require supplication and worship and dominance to feel his Godliness, and uses neither threats nor coercion to get it.
Our leaders invoke our God’s to do their bidding, to bless their wars, to smite down our enemies. In the West, the ubiquitous enemy is Islam, a religion of violence, we are told, that can be traced back to the religions core teaching and practices.
And yet, the violence of colonialism was perpetrated in large part, under the guiding light of the so-called peace loving Christian God. Native South Americans, native North Americans, native Australians, native Africans, native Asians, were all eliminated in their entirety, or decimated to become a palid, sickly shadow of their ancestral communities. Is not Christianity then also a religion of violence?
And the Jews themselves; for so long a target of Jew-hatred — what we now call antisemitism — persecuted more often than not in the name of the Christian God, whose son, our Holy books teach, they sent to his death.
And yet, now they, after thousands of years in the wilderness, invoke their God to kill and destroy their enemies, who, rather conveniently, happen to occupy the lands their God tells them have been set aside for them. So, is not Judaism also a religion of violence?
Why is it that the white men’s God’s are good, peace loving and righteous, and the
brown and black men’s God is evil, violent, and backward? Is this not also a reflection of the superiority the white man thinks he is owed?
An empty line to think on that…
‘If the solidarity of mankind is to be based on something more solid than the justified fear of man’s demonic capabilities, if the new universal neighborship of all countries is to result in something more promising than a tremendous increase in mutual hatred and a somewhat universal irritability of everybody against everybody else, then a process of mutual understanding and progressing self-clarification on a gigantic scale must take place.’
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, 1963 (6).
Religion & political violence…
The unsavoury images of both President Donald Trump and Prime Minster Netanyahu effectively legitimating calls for the assassination of Iranian Supreme Leader, the Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, are just the latest illustration in a long line of hypocritical, moralistically flawed statements by Judaeo-Christian Western leaders who still see their nations foreign policy aspirations and actions in bygone imperialistic, wholly racialised terms that render such ‘throwaway’ comments a valid part of the ongoing Western dialogue to bring black and brown, and especially Muslim black and brown nations, into alignment with their more enlightened, civilised viewpoints.
One wonders at the furore that would ensue if Khamenei had said something similar? ‘We could kill Trump; we know where he is (cheating on the golf course most likely) and we could kill him at any time.’ But for imperialistic Western leaders to openly discuss regime change for a sovereign nation is seen as a perfectly acceptable, if not welcome, addition to the conversation, and merely raises questions of how, why and if, it could be done without too much mess; though ‘mess,’ aka chaos, widespread death and destruction has never been any sort of stumbling to meddling Presidents who have always put America’s interests far ahead of the lives of the little brown Muslim people thousands of miles away in some pointless, uncivilised Oriental backwater.
And this despite America’s disastrous record of attempting regime change before, not only in Iran, Libya, Iraq and Afghanistan, but also widely across Central and Southern America; interventions that have seriously destabilised the Middle East for decades, have led directly to the rise of Al Qaeda and ISIS, the theocratic regimes in Afghanistan and Iran, but have also destabilised an entire continent that has resulted directly, or indirectly in the current crisis at the United States own Southern border, and were all missions invariably undertaken to allegedly, either protect or promote American interests, people, or sham democratic/humanitarian principles and concerns.
Yet the supposed legitimacy of American imposed regime change and the violence it curates is not supported by historical facts, despite the lofty rhetoric that U.S. Presidents have indulged in over the decades. As Noam Chomsky and Nathan Robinson explain: ‘The United States is very much like other powerful states. It pursues the strategic and economic interests of dominant sectors of the domestic population.In practice,this means that the United States has typically acted with almost complete disregard for moral principle and the rule of law, except insofar as complying with principle and law serves the interests of American elites. There is little evidence of authentic humanitarian concern among leading statesmen, and when it does exist, it is acted upon only to the extent that doing so does not go against domestic elites’ interests.’
More pertinently, lessons learned from previous misadventures into Iran’s domestic politics have remained unlearned by the Americans, just as I. F. Stone rightly suggested they were back in the turmoil of the days of the Islamic Revolution in the 70's. The biased, blanket views of much of the legacy Western media, and the vast majority of politicians back then, as now, in respect of the Iranian people, their desires and wants, and the aims, and philosophy of their leaders remain now, as they were back then, replete with ‘euphemism and hyperbole,’ just as Edward Said so memorably, and tragically pointed out first time around (7).
The generational persistence of ignorance and arrogance in respect of America’s imperialist aims and visions — MAGA and America first be damned —is not unexpected to most serious watchers. Perhaps only Americans themselves remain immune to any worthwhile introspection and self-criticism in respect of the American exceptionalism that they hold so close to their entitled and blackened Imperialistic hearts.
Unlike Mr Stone, Said explains (7), most American officials and journalists both in the 70’s, and again today I might add, do not understand politics, and one might add, that in many instances, do not understand, or if they do, then they blatantly choose to misrepresent the religion they profess to be their mainstay and grounding.
Stone made no attempt to predict or suggest what the secretive Iranian people may need or want, let alone suggest what might cause Iranian society to act politically, and yet was still able to accurately predict the outcome of the revolutionary events back then.
And yet, broadcasting the extent of their hubristic ineptness would seem to be a badge of honour for many politicians, one that is worn alongside their own misfiring, yet mysteriously inept strategic imperatives, that remain mired in in controversy simply because there is no apparent strategy, aim or suggested outcome beyond the unintelligibly vague, euphemistic generalisations they make about a society very few Westerners now understand, and even less than that, actually know.
And yet sadly, but rather predictably, the two Western leaders concerned, the undoubted aggressors and major protagonists in this latest war, personify the lingering imperialistic characteristics of ignorance, arrogance and ‘might makes right;’ ceasefire or no!
Internationally wanted war criminal, Netanyahu, his chest swollen with pride at the international destruction his regime has wrought, and the hundreds of thousands of lives he has taken, including the Israeli lives squandered to satisfy his own megalomanic urge for power, and the wholly immoral need to shift the blame for his own failings onto the shoulders of others, opined Live on Fox News, that ‘the government in Tehran…was “very weak”, adding that given the opportunity, “80% of the people would throw these theological thugs out.”
So says the man whose government is propped up by Bezalel Smotrich, a self-declared fascist homophobe and leader of the Rabbi (Rav) Abraham Isaac Kook inspired Religious Zionist Party, and Itamar Ben-Gvir, a man with such extreme, racist views he was banned from joining the armed forces, and has been convicted of incitement to racism and supporting a terrorist group, and is amazingly, leader of the Jewish Power Party. Between the two of them they control just one sixth of the seats in the Knesset, yet by virtue of the delicate balance of political power in Israel and within the Netanyahu’s ruling coalition, that they have successfully managed to destroy all chance of a peace deal with Hamas at the expense of the lives of the vast majority of the hostages, in so doing holding the whole country to ransom in order that their aims for the establishment of an Israeli theocratic state stay on track.
Together with the ultra-Orthodox Haredi Party and Shas, an anti-elite party of Orthodox Mizrahi, they are pushing for the establishment of a biblical vision of a greater Israel (Eretz Yisrael) to be ruled, not by democratic means, but by adherence to Halakhah, or Jewish theocratic law, that might be considered analogous to Sharia law in Islam, and this despite the minority-majority of Israelis (45%) identifying as secular in 2022.
So, it might be fair to say that most Israelis might throw Netanyahu’s theological thugs out given the chance…? And maybe even Netanyahu himself.
Yet, as Peter Beaumont pointed out in The Guardian, Netanyahu ‘views himself as an expert on (Iran’s) internal politics, (despite the fact that he) has never visited Iran. His knowledge of the country is filtered through intelligence briefings, which see Iran as a hostile problem, and through the lens of pro-Israeli think tanks.’
Netanyahu, once again illustrating the folly of repeated failure, and the maxim of violence first that has characterised Western imperialist foreign policy in the Middle East and elsewhere for the last two hundred years or more, proudly parades his ignorance as a badge of honour. Beaumont writes, ‘…if Netanyahu’s comments appear eerily familiar, it is because they are. The same Netanyahu, and Iran hawks in the US, pushed a similar argument in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Iraqis then, like Iranians, the world was told, would welcome the removal of Saddam. The Middle East would be reshaped.’
And so it was, but not by the massive ineptitude of US Presidents, diplomats, or officials, but by ISIS who grew out of the Iraqi insurgency to wreak havoc and slaughter all across the Middle East and Europe. And it would be reasonable to assume that the collapse of the regime in Iran would likely be capitalised upon by the extant remnants of ISIS, who still prowl the wilds of Arabia in spite of Trump’s claims long ago that they were finished.
And now, with that same preening narcissist, with his puerile, infantile, weak-willed, easily swayed intellect and a fragile, insecure ego once again resident in the White House, the extent of the U.S’s ‘violence prerogative’ is more apparent than ever, in a new strategy that Oona Hathaway and Scott Shapiro are calling ‘might unmakes right,’ that promotes war, or at least the threat of war, as the mainstay of how ‘states (might) resolve their disagreements and seek economic gain.’
And thrown into the gruel, there’s Trump’s faux religiosity that I find offensive even though I’m not a practising Christian. Though the Christian-right in the US seems happy to ignore Trump’s flagrant and mercenary coercion of God and God’s will to his electoral cause so long as it gives them what they want; namely, power over the women in their lives, power over minorities, particularly those of the immigrant or non-Christian variety, and power over those deemed to be enemies of the U.S., which is basically any person or nation attached or devoted to Islam, or who won’t beg and plead for American economic favour. And all this despite the very un-Christian nature of such personally held enmities which are allegedly promoted by these freedom-loving Christians.
Trump’s speech celebrating the ‘obliteration’ of Iran’s nuclear programme, which lasted less than four minutes, ended with the invocation of God’s name no fewer than five times in a span of seven seconds: “And I wanna just thank everybody and in particular, God. I wanna just say, ‘We love you God, and we love our great military — protect them.’ God bless the Middle East, God bless Israel, and God bless America.”
But Paul tells us that this is not the Christian idea of freedom that the gospels teach. In verses Galatians 5:13–15, Paul confronts directly any misunderstanding of Christian freedom that might be used as license for self-serving autonomy:
‘For you were called to freedom, brothers and sisters; only do not use your freedom as an opportunity for self-indulgence, but through love become slaves to one another.’ Galatians 5:13.
Jasmine Devadason, writing in Political Theology, tells us that, ‘in the Roman imperial world, freedom (libertas) was tied to status, property, and power, the privilege of elite male citizens who had legal autonomy and social authority. It was defined over against slavery, dependence, and otherness. In this cultural matrix, freedom was the right to dominate, to control one’s destiny, household, and others. This paradigm also influenced hierarchical structures within early Christian communities and continues to shape modern notions of freedom, where it is often equated with individualism, personal choice, and non-interference.
Paul, however, radically subverts this paradigm. He insists that Christian freedom is not freedom from obligation but freedom for service.’
Freedom then finds its truest expression through Christ not in forced subjugation or dominance, but ‘in mutual servanthood.’ A message that echoes with and reinvigorates that found in Leviticus 19:18, ‘You shall love your neighbour as yourself.’
In Galatians 5:15 Paul warns against any subversion or misuse of Christ’s freedoms. ‘If, however, you bite and devour one another, take care that you are not consumed by one another;’ a maxim that then becomes a metaphor for the social breakdown that results when freedom is abused or mistreated, as Trump is undoubtedly doing in the U.S.. ‘The imagery seems to portray a community folded in on itself,’ says Devadason, ‘where freedom, severed from love, spirals into mutual ruin. Paul shows that when people only think about themselves, whether by following rules too strictly or ignoring them completely, it harms Christian life; but true freedom comes when we serve each other with love.’
This notion of freedom resists any pretence to dominate or perpetuate systems of dominance such as apartheid, caste, racism of any description, including patriarchy, in the name of God in favour of mutual care, to bring justice, healing and inclusion to all.
Though to hear Trump, it would seem that God cannot get enough of war, and that God’s freedom, as spelled out in the gospels, lie but a poor second to all ideas of U.S. national security, U.S. national interest, and the project of making America great again!
But then the invocation of God’s will and the diminution of his freedoms is nothing new to American Presidents who have long been known to possess God-like powers, including the ability to rewrite scripture to fit the narrative, by generations of American people in all their ‘manifest’ wisdom.
Back in 2003, just as the ‘War on Terror’ and the hunt for WMD’s was gaining pace, Palestinian Foreign Minister Nabil Shaath told of a conversation he had with George ‘Dubya,’ who was only to happy to explain the details of his ‘mission from God.’
Dubya told him that “God would tell me, ‘George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan.’ And I did, and then God would tell me, ‘George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq.’ And I did.”
Some evangelical adherents in the U.S., and many in Israel [for example, devotees of both Rav Kook (8) and Meir Kahane (1)], see the current upheaval in the Middle East as potentially expediting the Biblical prophecy of the ‘end of days’ and the second coming of Jesus, or the Jewish Messiah (8)(in the Torah) — ‘which,’ as Belen Fernandez explains, ‘means the more war, the better. And the more that God can be portrayed as an ally in US and Israeli-inflicted devastation, the better for Trump’s delusions of deification,’ and certainly for his pursuit of his wet dream of winning a Nobel Peace Prize, expedited, no doubt, by dropping the of world’s biggest bombs!
You can’t make this shit up; really you can’t!
The blatant racism aside, Chomsky and Robinson tell us, that we might call this unsavoury way of doing the ‘diplomatic’ rounds, ‘the Mafia Doctrine. Its logic is straightforward and completely rational. The Godfather’s word is law. Those who defy the Godfather will be punished. The Godfather may be generous from time to time, but he does not tolerate disagreement.’
‘We might also think about this violence prerogative as the “Fifth Freedom,” the one Franklin D. Roosevelt forgot to mention when he laid out his famous Four Freedoms: freedom of speech, freedom of worship, freedom from want, and freedom from fear. The United States has always claimed a fundamental additional freedom underlying the others: crudely speaking, the freedom to dominate, to undertake any course of action to ensure that existing privilege is protected and advanced. Maintenance of this freedom is the operative principle that accounts for a substantial part of what the U.S. government does in the world. When the Four Freedoms are perceived to be incompatible with the Fifth (which occurs regularly), they are set aside with little notice or concern.’
And putting aside all regional concerns in favour of returning Iran back into the American proxy it was during the Shah’s reign, Trump said on his incongruously named social media platform, ‘Truth Social…’:
‘It’s not politically correct to use the term, “Regime Change,” but if the current Iranian Regime is unable to MAKE IRAN GREAT AGAIN, why wouldn’t there be a Regime change??? MIGA!!!’ (Trump’s caps, not mine).
Words that go in stark contrast to the claims of some of his more, shall we say, ‘savvy’ advisers, and the widespread, seemingly indiscriminate nature of Israeli attacks on prisons and public squares, as well repeated attacks on the nuclear sites that Trump said had already been ‘obliterated.’
Ori Golberg, Israeli analyst based in Tel Aviv, said on Al Jazeera (June 23) that this was further proof of Israel’s lack of a strategy or plan, and is more likely just a haphazard targeting of locations it believes have some importance to the Iranian regime.
Now, of course, regime change in Iran hasn’t happened, and perhaps the reaction both within the Trump Party (previously known as The Republican Party) and without across America more widely, led Trump to call a halt to things and enforce, an initially shaky, ceasefire on both Israel and Iran.
And none of this is to say that the Iranian regime doesn’t need changing. Certainly the Iranian people, could do with a more benevolent, less restrictive regime that would perhaps give a greater measure of the freedoms that they had enjoyed in the not too distant past. But such freedoms, and the extent of those freedoms, should be theirs to choose; not ours to enforce, and certainly not by leveraging Iranian resources to the benefit of already mega-wealthy Westerners.
It may be that since the American and Israeli attacks the regime is cracking down internally on those Iranians who may view regime change favourably. However, it would also seem, writes Mohammad Ayatollahi Tabaar, that ‘rather than prompting popular outrage at the Iranian state, the attacks led to an outburst of nationalism. As the Islamic Republic weathered Israel’s assault and retaliated with ballistic missiles of its own, the regime’s response was cheered on by Iranian writers, artists, and singers, many of whom are typically apolitical or in opposition to the government. Iranian commentators across the political spectrum likened the Israeli assault to Nazi Germany’s 1941 invasion of the Soviet Union, casting the conflict as Iran’s own patriotic war: a national struggle that transcends politics.’
The joint attacks also seem to have had the unlikely effect of uniting dissidents and jailed political prisoners in support of the regime they had previously been actively resisting; having the very opposite effect of that intended by Netanyahu and Trump, by relieving, rather than adding to the internal pressure on the regime, even as the Iranian military and nuclear facilities were weakened.
However, the fact remains that such monumental events as regime change should not be enforced at the point of a Western gun, and certainly not with anything other than a solid, agreeable plan in place that would see the Iranian people become the prime beneficiaries of any regime change. This should not be just another way of further lining the pockets of another generation of American, British and Israeli arms manufacturers and oil billionaires, which is, no matter what they might say and call on God to countenance, what this is always just about, and always has been just about.
As Andrew Feinstein wrote back in 2012 in his deeply disturbing expose of the arms industry, ‘The Shadow World (9),’ that an Israeli source told him ‘“Israel gets between $2bn to $3bn (numbers correct at the time of his writing) from the U.S. to buy U.S-made weapons. It uses some of them itself and then also arms countries the U.S. couldn’t, with a nod and a wink.” The most extreme manifestation of this was the the selling of arms to Iran.’
He continues: ‘It is well known that Israel had joined the U.S. in supporting the Shah of Iran politically and militarily…/…It is not common knowledge, though, that while the West, and for a time the Soviets, supported Saddam Hussein’s Iraq against the Islamic Republic of Iran, the Israeli government and its arms agents, on behalf of the U.S., transferred hundreds of tons of weapons and equipment to Iran, shoring up a weak Iranian army as it faced defeat at Saddam’s hands.’
The desire to save the Iranian people is not, and has never been about the welfare of the Iranian people; it is about exploitation, power and dollars. Control of Iran’s vast oil reserves would give the American’s much needed leverage and the power they seek over the Chinese.
Not wishing to be left out of the latest ‘rush on oil’ the British parliament invited Raza Pahlavi, the son of the ousted Shah, to address them a few days back. Labour MP Luke Akehurst said in anticipation that, “It is for the Iranian people to decide what type of government they want, but clearly MPs are going to be interested in hearing what different opposition voices have got to say about the future of such an important country.”
And he said this without a hint of irony…if that can be believed.
Even though it would seem that Pahlavi has very little support from Iranian people living within Iran, with just a handful of exiled Iranians remaining enthusiastic about the potential for his return.
Yasmine, a British-Iranian in her 20’s, told Al Jazeera that, “He (Pahlavi) really symbolises what Iran was (a government that was secular and pro-West) prior to the Islamic Republic, and that’s what those who are asking for Reza Pahlavi want back.”
And given the West’s appalling recent history of fabricating evidence to enforce regime change in the Middle East, such flimsy evidence would certainly be enough for many Western officials, given the chance and the riches that would flow should Iran once again be exploited as a Western proxy state.
After all, such is the history of the West in the region…
Thanks for reading.
- Meir Kahane: The Public Life and Political Thought of an American Jewish Radical; Shaul Magid, 2022.
- The Future is History: How Totalitarianism Reclaimed Russia; Masha Gessen, 2017.
- The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America; Timothy Snyder, 2018.
- Dialectic of Enlightenment; Theodor Adorno & Max Horkheimer, 1944.
- The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire; Edward Gibbon, 1776. Kindle Version, 2016.
- Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil; Hannah Arendt, 1963 (republished 2006).
- Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World; Edward W. Said, 1981 (1997 version).
- Messianism, Zionism and Jewish Religious Radicalism; Aviezer Ravitzky, 1996.
- The Shadow World: Inside the Global Arms Trade; Andrew Feinstein, 2012.
