super4

 (This is a continuation of the series on my Unified Field Theory of Antisemitism, where I postulate that a major source of most forms of antisemitism is supersessionism. )

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Didn't my Lord deliver Daniel,

Then why not every man?

He deliver'd Daniel from the lion's den,

Jonah from the belly of the whale,

And the Hebrew children from the fiery furnace,

And why not every man?

I set my foot on the Gospel ship,

And the ship, it begin to sail,

It landed me over on Canaan's shore,

And I'll never come anymore.

This excerpt from an African American spiritual is typical of the genre. In the early 1700s, white evangelists preached to African slaves and taught them Bible stories, and the slaves naturally felt an affinity to the Jews of the Hebrew scripture. Most of all, they identified with the Jews enslaved in Egypt and their miraculous Exodus, hoping for a similar miracle to free them. 

There is nothing wrong with identifying with Jews in the Bible. There is something wrong with claiming, without any evidence, that your people are Israelites. There is a great deal wrong with saying that the Jews of today are imposters. 

 In the late 19th century, at least two Black people started their own churches based on the idea that Black people were  Israelites. 

William Saunders Crowdy established the Church of God and Saints of Christ in 1896 after he claimed to have had visions telling him "that blacks were descendants of the twelve lost tribes of Israel." He does not appear to have been antisemitic.

But Frank Cherry, who also claimed that God told him that Blacks were Jews and  established the Church of the Living God, the Pillar Ground of Truth for All Nations in 1915, did preach both Black supremacy and antisemitism. Cherry preached that white Jews were not Jews, and moreover that white Jews as outside God’s favor, divinely cursed, echoing both Christian and Muslim supersessionism with a  racial twist. 

Other people with similar theologies gained some popularity through the 20th century. In the 1960s, these groups and offshoots proliferated, some of them rejecting both Judaism and Christianity and forming their own "Israelite" cults. They went beyond the supersessionism of Frank Cherry: these radical "Israelites" believe that they have been robbed of their identity as being “God’s chosen people" by the evil white Jews, who are referred to as “Edomites” or the “Synagogue of Satan.”

The hugely popular Louis Farrakhan of the Nation of Islam is certainly not a Black Israelite, but he has adopted their claims. Farrakhan has been saying since the 1980s that “the real Jews are Black people,” and he has also spread the slander that “the Black man and woman of America are the real children of Israel, and the Jews have stolen their identity.”

The idea is not limited to the relatively small numbers of Black people who are actual members of these groups. These toxic ideas are mainstream.

Kendrick Lamar’s #1 2017 album DAMN included  lyrics like “I’m an Israelite, don’t call me Black no mo’.”  Kanye West said "Black people are actually Jews." Basketball star Kyrie Irving promoted a Black Hebrew Israelite film and book filled with both the supersessionist beliefs and blatant antisemitism like Holocaust denial. Nick Cannon and Professor Griff, two enormously popular celebrities, discussed at length during a 2020  podcast that Jews have taken the Black people’s birthright and are now scared because Jews know that Blacks know that they are fakes.

It is no coincidence that the belief that Black people are the real Jews is often paired with classic antisemitism, as with Farrakhan, Kanye West and Nick Cannon's rant in that same podcast about the Rothschilds. The murderers who attacked a kosher grocery in Jersey City in 2019 adhered to the Black Hebrew Israelite philosophy. 

This is supersessionism happening today, in the US, almost completely under the radar of the media. 

While the actual number of members of these groups is not known, their ideas have spread widely among the Black community. A 2023 Manhattan Institute survey found that 49% of Blacks in America strongly or somewhat believe that they are descended from Israelites, and 13.2% believe that Jews are not descended from Israelites - i.e., that Jews want to steal the Blacks' birthright. That translates to over 6 million Blacks in America holding antisemitic, supersessionist beliefs. 

This is especially concerning since the Black Hebrew Israelites have been associated with violence, including one of the worst antisemitic attacks in US history, the 2020 murders at a kosher grocery store in Jersey City. 

It is also significant that while the other forms of supersessionism that we've discussed so far are based on ideas that are not easily disproven by their nature, the claim that American Blacks descended from Israelites is easily debunked. In this case, the truth is not even on the radar. People believe what they want to believe, and when it comes to hating Jews, they will literally believe anything. 

Supersessionism is not a historic curiosity. It is here, today, and it is being used as an excuse for attacking Jews. 

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supersessionism 2

 Last week I wrote A Unified Field Theory of Antisemitism, a way to understand why hatred of Jews (and, today, of Israel)  goes way beyond the more prosaic hate that is usually directed at "the Other."

My theory is that all the major strains of today's antisemitism - Muslim/Arab, progressive, and others I plan to examine - point back to updated twists of Christian supersessionism.  In short, all major antisemitic groups feel that they are the rightful heirs to the Jewish people, but the actual reality and continued success of the Jews is not just an obstacle to their success but a personal challenge to their worldview. This dissonance causes hate.

Let's dive deeper into this theory, starting with the original supersessionists.

We described how the figures of Ecclesia and Sinagoga, prominent in many European cathedrals, symbolize the Church replacing Israel as God's chosen people. Where does this idea come from?

The very name New Testament implies that the old one is no longer relevant. The authors of the New Testament refer to the Torah by its literal translation, the "Law." To them, Jesus' death makes the Law no longer relevant as a means to salvation.  Paul in Galatians 3 says, "Before the coming of this faith, we were held in custody under the law, locked up until the faith that was to come would be revealed," saying that faith supersedes adherence to the Torah and the Torah's  laws were a temporary but insufficient means to gain salvation.

There is a clear tension here between the idea that the Hebrew Scripture is the Word of God and that it is being superseded by a new Word. Why would God create something that He knew would become irrelevant? Why would he create laws that man could not fulfill, that would be a yoke that people would be unable to bear? Jesus quotes the Shema prayer (Mark 29-30), which says how central the laws are to everyday life - how could Christianity say that faith by itself replaces the laws? 

That tension is not enough to explain Jew-hatred. But two other verses can.

 In Acts 15, Peter participates in a debate as to whether Gentile converts to Christianity require circumcision, and he describes the Torah as "a yoke that neither we nor our ancestors have been able to bear.” Here, Peter is claiming that the laws are too onerous for even Jews. In context, he was trying to attract the largest numbers of believers to the new religion, and practically speaking circumcision is not a great selling point. But Peter is couching this sales pitch that the laws no longer apply as a theological fact. 

Yet Jews did manage to keep the Laws. Their existence, and continued success, threw a wrench into the truthfulness of Peter's words.

Far more starkly, we have Hebrews 8, the cornerstone of supersessionism. It describes how belief in Jesus makes the Jewish laws, especially the laws of sacrifice in the Temple, outdated. It culminates with a prediction: "By calling this covenant 'new,' he has made the first one obsolete; and what is obsolete and outdated will soon disappear."

The Christians of the Middle Ages saw that the Jews and their practice of the Law did not disappear. They were not obsolete. They lived and thrived in their own communities. The words of the New Testament were proven to be untrue every time there was interaction with Jews. 

That is what changes a mere theological difference of opinion into hate. If Jews continue to exist and succeed while (and by) living under the rules of the "old" covenant a thousand years after they were supposed to disappear according to the new one,  the new covenant seems flawed.

Not only that, but the existence of Jewish communities following the law in the midst of a hostile gentile population supported the supposedly obsolete scriptures.  "The Torah of the Lord is perfect, renewing life; the decrees of the Lord are enduring, making the simple wise (Psalms 19:8.) " The Hebrew Scriptures directly say the Laws are eternal and a source of happiness; saying that God didn't want them to be permanent is calling God a liar.

Faith is intensely personal, and the Jews' success looked like nothing less than a stab in the heart of the Christian faithful of the era. And this is what transformed Jews into objects of hate and envy. 

The irony is that the Hebrew Scriptures were not written as a message to the entire world. It was written for the Jewish people. The laws are meant only for the Jewish people. Jews don't expect, or want, anyone else to follow the laws. The Torah's commandments create a high bar for the Jewish people alone. It might be a yoke for others, but Psalms 1:2 says that the Torah is not a burden but a delight (Psalms 1:2). The Jews following the Laws survived and thrived - not in spite of the Law but because of it.

 Christianity adopted the "Old Testament" as theirs. They claimed the mantle of being the new Jews. Yet their adoption of the scriptures never meant for them caused a constant friction, parts of the "Old Testament" are foundational and others discarded. The Ten Commandments are important, but the Sabbath one - nah, not so much. Real Jews who manage to keep the entire set of laws were a constant rebuke to the fundamental sense of self of the medieval Christians. The contradictions between the "Old Testament" being relevant to Jews while irrelevant to the Christians who say they transcended it caused a kind of identity crisis.

That's why they created  Ecclesia and Sinagoga; a way to reassure themselves that they are right. Yet the fact that they were forced to enshrine this fable is itself proof of their own discomfort at the existence of Jews.

The Christian love-hate relationship with the Hebrew Scriptures became an important part of the modern Western world. The UN’s Peace Plaza in San Francisco has Isaiah 2:4 engraved: “They shall beat their swords into plowshares."  A Hebrew Biblical reference is part of the logo of Yale University.  Hebrew Biblical references abound in scholarly 18th and 19th  century writings. 

The Law, far from being irrelevant and obsolete, is integral to modern legal practice. John Selden, one of the most important legal theorists of the West, based his writings not only on the Torah, but on the Talmud of the hated Pharisees. 

This underpinning of Hebrew law into the fabric of the modern West is part of the reason supersessionism has become a driving factor of today's secular, progressive antisemitism. It claims to have inherited the mantle of morality, and those morals come squarely from Jewish law and philosophy.  This is a topic for future essays. 

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OK, who is reading this blog?

 This "eoznews" site meant to be a scratch area for me to use for other purposes and is not meant to be where my "official" articles are. . But I see people are reading it. So,  if you could tell me in the comments, how are you finding this site and why are you here instead of the main site at elderofziyon.blogspot.com? 

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unified theory on antisemitism

Why is there so much outsized hate for Jews?

Antisemitism is not like other hatreds. Most other forms of hate hinge on disliking the other purely because they are different. Jew-hatred goes way beyond that; the hate is more extreme, more personal.

What explains the obsession that so many have against Jews - and in recent times, against Israel - that goes way beyond hating the other? After all, most of the world is "other" to everyone.

Ten years ago, I wrote about how many historic cathedrals in Europe depict two figures, Ecclesia and Sinagoga, which symbolize the triumph of the Church over the Jewish people. Ecclesia is a figure bathed in light wearing fine clothing and holding a chalice, while Sinagoga is a defeated, blindfolded figure with the Tablets falling from her hand. The message was one of supersessionism, where the Church replaced Jews as the Chosen People. The churches with the artwork tended to be built in areas with larger Jewish populations: they weren't only a message of Church superiority but also an insult to the Jewish community, reminding them of their despised status.

To the Church, the very existence of Jews centuries after they were supposed to have disappeared by the sheer rightness of Christian faith was a poke in the eye. As long as Jews existed and thrived, it meant that there might be a problem with the doctrine - how could reasonably smart people not automatically flock to what is so clearly superior? One of them must be wrong, and the creation of Ecclesia and Sinagoga is itself a form of grappling with the threat to Christian certainty. 

From the church's perspective, this is not just a disagreement between religions. Jews themselves were a challenge to the entire narrative behind Christianity.  They are seen as a direct assault on Christians' basic faith, one that could not be adequately answered within Christianity.

This reached a peak with Martin Luther, who could not conceive how Jews would not convert on their own. This culminated in his desire to destroy Judaism itself - burning synagogues and schools, confiscating Jewish holy books, and creating a world where Jews could either convert or be driven out. 

This sense of Jews' very existence being an attack on the most treasured tenets of faith explains how antisemitism goes way beyond "normal" hate. Killing Jews is almost self-defense for those with that mindset. 

During the Holocaust, some fundamentalist Christians found a silver lining in the genocide, that their scripture was finally being validated. The rebirth of Israel gave these folks whiplash - suddenly, the permanently wandering Jews had a place of their own, and even worse, in the same spot that they had built a nation before. 

Theologically, hating Israel is a direct outcome for age-old Christian antisemitism. 

This way of thinking has been baked into the Western world. Vatican II softened supersessionism, giving Jews a covenant role within the Roman Catholic church but not other churches like Eastern Orthodox and Lutheran. Supersessionist theology persists in Catholic circles, and for tens of millions, Jews’ existence subtly challenges one of their faith’s beliefs.

We can say the same thing about Islam. Here is a faith that also is, to a degree, supersessionist. Mohammed is supposed to be the last, perfect prophet, but all of the preceding prophets were Jews. The Quran is supposed to be the perfect word of Allah that replaces the "corrupted" Torah that precedes it and contradicts it. Mohammed tried to attract the Jews to his religion (this is why he first set the prayer direction to be Jerusalem) but they spurned him.  

Yet the Jews still exist. Jews who do not accept Islam, Jews who consider Mohammed to be a false prophet, Jews who study the Torah that Islam claims is corrupted. 

The continued existence of the Jewish people is not as much of a theological challenge to Islam as it is to some churches, but it rankles. Jews are supposed to be second class citizens in Islamic societies, and over the centuries, while Christians gained a measure of respect when they defeated Islam militarily,  Muslims could still consider themselves to be stronger than the Jews. 

Until the rebirth of Israel.

Israel's victory in 1948 was no less an earthquake in the Muslim world than it was in many churches. Jews were not meant to be stronger than Muslims, who pride themselves on their warcraft. The Zionist victories were a source of intense shame, and the reason for the shame was that it violated a deeply held belief among Muslims - not necessarily a religious belief but one that was no less sacred to Arab Muslims. 

The antisemitism we have been discussing so far has been ascribed to Jews' existence being a direct challenge to faith. Faith is intensely personal and seeing it called into question naturally evokes an emotional reaction. This explains why Jews and Israel are seen as actual enemies, not just different. 

Today's antisemitism, however, does not appear at first glance to fit that paradigm. Most Westerners are not religious and the idea of supersessionism is not fashionable in the liberal world. 

This ignores human nature. People naturally tend to seek spirituality; they want to be part of something much bigger than themselves. When the church falls by the wayside, the vacuum that results must be filled with something. 

Today, that "something" is often progressivism, or socialism in general. Many have noted how this has become a creed in itself. From animal rights to environmentalism to settler-colonialism to critical race theory, each of the tenets of this modern faith must not be questioned.  Like any faith, there is an orthodoxy of belief, and excommunication ("canceling") of those who disagree or question the official line. 

Israel challenges the progressive orthodoxy no less than Jews challenge Christian orthodoxy.

Here is a state that is meant to be a refuge for Jews only. It is unapologetically capitalist. It is unapologetically military - by necessity. It is unapologetically particularist. 

Worst of all, it is wildly successful. It has grown and thrived while breaking the rules created by today's progressives. It is an economic, military and technological powerhouse. It has even made peace by being strong. 

To these people, progressivism is just as supersessionist as Christianity historically has been. Their worldview is that they are on the "right side of history," the idea that over time their ideas and theories will be proven correct. Israel's existence and success contradicts this deeply held belief.

Hence, hate. Not disagreement, not measured criticism, but obsession and visceral loathing that go beyond their opinions of any other country. Israel does not fit their belief system and therefore it must be delegitimized, and any attackers are heroes.

This theory that obsessive hate of Jews driven by faith is further strengthened by counterexamples of cultures that have no such levels of antisemitism.

Asian nations like India, China and Japan do not have the same strong feelings about Jews as their Western and Muslim counterparts. Their religions are not based on Jewish concepts of monotheism and their cultures are not based on Western values that trace back to Judaism. To them, Jews are just another people: they may disagree with Israeli policies but they lack the obsessive nature of the antisemitism of the Western and Muslim worlds.  The Korean obsession with the Talmud from a few years back is not antisemitism, it is curiosity. 

The hate for Jews and Israel isn't because of anything that Jews are doing. It is entirely due to Jews and Israel being an eternal contradiction to the deeply-held belief system of hundreds of millions of people. 

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poshnost

Sometimes there is a happy confluence of truth that together point to a much greater truth than the sum of their parts.

On Sunday night I tweeted this:

The media was wrong when they said Israel bombed the Al Ahli Hospital.

They were wrong for repeating the Gaza health ministry claim that Gaza deaths were "70% women and children."

They were wrong when they reported that 10,000 bodies were buried under the rubble.

They were wrong when they said the Gaza hospitals had no terrorists.

They were wrong when they repeated absurd claims that 186,000 Gazans had died.

They were wrong when they said Hamas was not stealing aid.

They were wrong for saying that Gaza was in the midst of a famine. 

They were wrong for repeating the "genocide" claims without rebuttal.

They were wrong for doubting everything the IDF said  and giving credence to everything Hamas said. 

They are wrong for not admitting that they have been consistently, constantly wrong about every aspect of the Gaza war. 

All of their mistakes have been in the same direction - accusing Jews of being inhumane monsters.

Why, exactly, should anyone believe the mainstream media about Israel, ever?

The Israel haters are in a tizzy, responding to my tweet with an amusing combination of strident denial, doubling down on the lies and explicit Jew-hatred.

Then I saw this brilliant article in Commentary by Irina Velitskaya:

Of all the untranslatable words in the Russian language, my favorite is пошлость— poshlost—representing a concept that is ubiquitous, albeit unacknowledged, in the modern Western world. It’s untranslatable because it can’t be summed up in a single word and stands instead for a great many interrelated concepts. But if, in an effort to understand it, one were to dissect poshlost, one would find inside it, wriggling like little worms, the words “smarmy,” “smug,” “superficial,” and “shabby.”

And yet, squirmy as this image is, that’s only half of what’s inside poshlost, because entangled with the first set of meanings is a second set: “self-importance,” “imaginary virtue,” “oblivious narcissism,” “belligerent weepiness,” and “preening self-regard.”

“It is not only the obviously trashy but also the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive,” as Vladimir Nabokov put it. It’s the mistaken belief, Nabokov continued, “that the acme of human happiness is purchasable and that its purchase somehow ennobles the purchaser.” A literary critic who wrote on Nabokov’s work described the word as “petty evil or self-satisfied vulgarity.”

And what is the “acme of human happiness” for these self-satisfied vulgarians? In the contemporary Western context, and particularly among university students and the intelligentsia, it is the feeling that you are better, more virtuous, and more deeply human than most of the mean-spirited, seething, insensible masses around you.

Which brings us, of course, to the most repellent example of poshlost in the modern world: the thin veneer of ersatz humanitarianism and pathos that Western intellectuals splotch across the nakedly hateful reality of Islamist supremacist rhetoric and violence.

There are ....syrupy emoji assemblages that feature the Palestinian flag, accompanied by one or more of the following: a bright red heart, a white dove of peace, a rainbow, a unicorn, an LGBTQ+ flag, and, of course, a watermelon, often accompanied by a fundraising link for the families of Gaza (though said funds will likely never get further than a Hamas bank account in a place like Qatar, but hey, it’s the thought that counts!).

Often, there is a “land acknowledgment” in the bio—a reference to, for example, “Syilx Okanagan stolen land.” This is a confession that the poster lives on land conquered from its indigenous inhabitants; it’s deployed as a means of expiating guilt while preempting charges of hypocrisy. Needless to say, the poster has no intention of actually moving from the conquered land, thereby reinforcing the very hypocrisy he wishes to avoid. People post these acknowledgments of theft only because they are secure in the knowledge that the indigenous people on whose land they live will not rape them, burn them alive, or behead them. In their minds, the payment for this privilege is merely a nickel inserted into an imaginary vending machine that dispenses virtue.

This is a perfect description of many of the people responding with reflexive anger to my off-the-cuff tweet.

Put the two together and you see how the practitioners of poshlost react to any facts that threaten their self-righteous perch. 

Their efforts to climb to the peak of virtue involves consuming a great deal of lies. These lies are a web spun by the media. NGOs, academia and Palestinian socialists (usually traced back to the PFLP) who know the lingo and how to package the most illiberal, far-right wing Islamist terrorists as progressive heroes.

In general, exposure to these lies aren't what caused them to become poshlosters. Their own self-absorption takes care of that. The lies are supporting (and recruiting) material, whose effectiveness is entirely tied to being consumed by a crowd who desperately wants them to be true, to validate their conceit. 

Exposure to the truth - learning that the cause that they have spent so much emotional capital to support is illusory -  is their greatest fear. 

The poshlosters dwell in a castle in the clouds of sanctimony, built from the vapor of Washington Post reports, Amnesty International claims, and UN declarations. A bubble of denial shields them, its seeming solidity their only defense - until someone arrives with a pin.

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links

 The media was wrong when they said Israel bombed the Al Ahli Hospital.

They were wrong for repeating the Gaza health ministry claim that Gaza deaths were "70% women and children."

They were wrong when they reported that 10,000 bodies were buried under the rubble.

They were wrong when they said the Gaza hospitals had no terrorists.

They were wrong when they repeated absurd claims that 186,000 Gazans had died.

They were wrong when they said Hamas was not stealing aid.

They were wrong for saying that Gaza was in the midst of a famine. 

They were wrong for repeating the "genocide" claims without rebuttal.

They were wrong for doubting everything the IDF said  and giving credence to everything Hamas said. 

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trump biden

 

Last year, Columbia University turned Jewish students into fugitives on their own campus. Need to study? Call an escort. Want to avoid the anti-Israel mob? Sneak through a back door. The “Safe Passage Liaison” wasn’t protection—it was a surrender to antisemites who faced no consequences for turning swaths of campus into no-go zones for Jews.  

Columbia protected the antisemites more than they protected the Jews - the antisemites had no restrictions on their movement. Yet this  “Safe Passage Liaison” was framed as a way of defending Jews.

That travesty is emblematic of President Biden’s approach to antisemitism: bubble-wrap the victims, not battle the hate. 

He signed generic acts against hate crimes. He condemned antisemitic incidents. It was almost all talk. Perhaps the most pro-active thing he did to combat antisemitism was not original to him - he supported Trump's previous executive order asserting that Title VI of the Civil Rights Act prohibits antisemitic and related discrimination in federally funded programs.

Biden's crowning achievement ostensibly against Jew-hatred was the U.S. National Strategy to Counter Antisemitism. But it was a failure before it started, not even defining antisemitism. It couldn’t even specify the enemy it claimed to fight.

The focus of the national strategy was passive and defensive - raising awareness, protecting Jewish communities and institutions, fostering cross-community solidarity. DEI was considered a solution for antisemitism, not part of the problem. 

Compare the situation at Columbia University only nine months ago with Columbia now. Columbia is now in the news due to the Trump administration cutting hundreds of millions of dollars of funding because Columbia did little to actually allow Jews to have equal rights on campus - the simple right to walk on campus and to gather in groups without fear. The Trump administration is going after the ringleaders of the antisemitic protests. (Yes, "resistance by all means necessary" and "globalize the intifada" are barely veiled dog-whistles to murder Jews.) 

Biden's efforts were nearly all about protecting Jews at a time when antisemites will always find new ways to attack. Trump's efforts are to go after the antisemites -  against the specific people who make the lives of Jews on campus hell. 

While Biden's focus was "hate," Trump's is antisemitism. He recognizes that not all hate is the same. Watering down attacks on Jews as another form of discrimination does not fight antisemitism at all. It arguably worsens antisemitism because it leans on a "oppressor" and "oppressed" dichotomy that invariably slots Jews as the oppressors (and the people of color who attack Jews as the oppressed.)

Trump's methods are not subtle. They are a sledgehammer. They may hurt people who are not the targets of the actions. Some of the criticisms of Trump's blunt methods have some validity. 

But for Jews who are embattled on campus, and by extension in the entire country, the way Trump attacks antisemitism allows us to begin to breathe again. 

Whether most Jews recognized it or not, contently being on the defensive and knowing that the people who want you dead are protected by the same leaders who pledge to defend you was suffocating. There was nothing the Democratic Party would ever do that would put today's antisemites on the defensive, and the Jew haters knew this quite well. They could take over campus buildings and other areas with impunity, covering their faces, knowing that there is almost no chance that they would be punished or expelled. 

Under Trump, the dynamic has changed. When he says he wants to protect Jews, that means going after the antisemites. 

They are the ones who are afraid now, and that is how it should be. 

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masks

 

In 2004, John Suter of the psychology department of Ryder University wrote a seminal paper titled "The Online Disinhibition Effect." It states that some people act out more frequently or intensely  online than they would in person.

Suter identifies six factors that contribute to the increased aggression of online users compared to how they act in the real world. Some of them apply to the wearing of masks in public, meaning that the same factors that have been studied for two decades that increase hostility and aggression online are being transferred to the physical world by the widespread use of masks in these protests, ostensibly for health (face masks) or solidarity (keffiyehs) reasons.

The major factor Suter found is the dissociative anonymity: 

Anonymity is one of the principle factors that creates the disinhibition effect. When people have the opportunity to separate their actions online from their in-person lifestyle and identity, they feel less vulnerable about self-disclosing and acting out. Whatever they say or do can’t be directly linked to the rest of their lives. In a process of dissociation, they don’t have to own their behavior by acknowledging it within the full context of an integrated online/offline identity. The online self becomes a compartmentalized self. In the case of expressed hostilities or other deviant actions, the person can avert responsibility for those behaviors, almost as if superego restrictions and moral cognitive processes have been temporarily suspended from the online psyche.

This is exactly what happens when people use masks in public. The anonymity encourages more aggressive behavior than they would do when they are identifiable.

Indeed, as we have seen many times over the past year, those wearing  masks tend to be the ones who are more likely to engage in bullying behavior, vandalism and violence. 

There is a question of cause and effect - some of the instigators no doubt planned to do criminal behavior and the masks are a tool to avoid persecution - but the very act of masking, which is insisted upon by many of the organizing protest groups, are meant to minimize inhibitions in the larger groups.

Other factors Suter identifies also have analogues in real world protests. For example, he describes dissociative imagination:

If we combine the opportunity to easily escape or dissociate from what happens online with the psychological process of creating imaginary characters, we get a somewhat different force that magnifies disinhibition. Consciously or unconsciously, people may feel that the imaginary characters they “created” exist in a different space, that one’s online persona along with the online others live in an make-believe dimension, separate and apart from the demands and responsibilities of the real world. They split or dissociate online fiction from offline fact. Emily Finch, an author and criminal lawyer who studies identity theft in cyberspace, has suggested that some people see their online life as a kind of game with rules and norms that don’t apply to everyday living (E. Finch, unpublished observations, 2002). Once they turn off the computer and return to their daily routine, they believe they can leave behind that game and their game identity. They relinquish their responsible for what happens in a make-believe play world that has nothing to do with reality.

Wearing keffiyehs and masks allows participants to more easily acquire mob mentality, mindlessly following their leaders without thinking for themselves. This is a part of the behaviors we see including mindless chant/responses, which I maintain is a mild form of hypnotism. Repeating slogans or phrases like  “From the river to the sea…” creates a  mantra-like effect, similar to how hypnotic suggestions are reinforced.

This imperfectly but compellingly fits in with another of Suter's online attributes: solipsistic introjection.

Absent face-to-face cues combined with text communication can alter self-boundaries. People may feel that their mind has merged with the mind of the online companion. Reading another person’s message might be experienced as a voice within one’s head, as if that person’s psychological presence and influence have been assimilated or introjected into one’s psyche.

I believe that the chants have the same function of directly fomenting groupthink.

Later studies show how online anonymity fosters bullying behaviors. Another influential paper, "Bullying in the digital age: a critical review and meta-analysis of cyberbullying research among youth" (Kowalski et. al, 2014) says:

Perpetrators of cyberbullying often perceive themselves to be anonymous. Research on deindividuation (Diener, 1980; Postmes & Spears, 1998) shows that people will say and do things anonymously that they would not say or do in face-to-face interactions. This anonymity significantly opens up the pool of potential perpetrators of cyberbullying, compared to traditional bullying. 

This applies as well to masked bullies who physically bar Jewish students from parts of campus, for example. 

The entire point of these protests is deindividuation. Everyone must act as one, and anyone who deviates from the official line is outcast. I suggest that pro-Israel protests have very few chants and far more speeches than anti-Zionist protests for this very reason: the pro-Israel participants want to think for themselves and hear ideas, while the anti-Israel crowd wants to be led without thought.  The crowds and anonymity from covering their faces allows them to engage in cult-like behavior, where they can be led to do things they would not consider if they were on their own. 

The masks add a dimension beyond mindless following into encouraging aggressive and criminal activities. It is no accident that the people most likely to cover their faces in their rallies are the "progressive" Left - and white supremacists. 

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masafer

 Last night, the film "No Other Land" won the Academy Award for Best Documentary.

It is described at the film site "Deadline" as exploring "root causes of enmity as the filmmakers chronicle the Israeli military’s incremental expulsion of the West Bank community of Masafer Yatta — home to 20 ancient Palestinian villages."

That is a myth. There were not 20 ancient Palestinian villages there. All of structures in the area were built since the 1980s, deliberately as a land grab of state lands. 

Here is the entire history of the area as described by Wikipedia, today:

In 1881, the British Palestine Exploration Fund (PEF) noted the following places: Shảb el Butm, meaning 'the spur of the terebinth', Tuweil esh Shîh, meaning 'the peak or ridge of Artemisia', Khirbet el Fekhît, meaning 'the ruin of the fissure', and Khirbet Bîr el 'Edd, meaning 'the ruin of the perennial well'. At Khirbet Bîr el 'Edd, PEF noted "traces of ruins, and a cistern", while at Khirbet el Fekhît, they noted "traces of ruins, and a cave."

Here is the PEF map showing the four (not twenty!) places:

The British found no villages, no population, just traces of old ruins.

In 1981, then Agriculture Minister Ariel Sharon was alarmed at the spread of illegal Palestinian structures moving towards this area. He proposed to turn the area into a firing zone for IDF training.  “I want to tell the representatives of the general staff, we want to offer you additional training areas. Additional training areas must be closed in at the border, [between] the bottom of the Hebron Hills and the Judean Desert. In light of that phenomenon – the spreading of the Arab villagers on the mountainside toward the desert....We have an interest in expanding and enlarging the shooting zones there, in order to keep these areas, which are so vital, in our hands."

There is no doubt that his purpose was political to keep the areas empty in light of Arab expansion towards this desert. There is also no doubt that at the time, there were no permanent structures there yet. 

The Regavim NGO describes how these empty areas became today's Masafer Yatta:

The shepherds of Yatta would sleep in caves in nearby grazing areas, rather than trekking back to the village each night. After the IDF closed off the area, the shepherds were permitted to continue grazing their flocks there; the IDF gave them a few days’ warning before live-fire exercises to insure that no one got hurt. The Palestinian Authority seized the opportunity – and began funding construction of permanent structures. Foreign interests jumped right in after them, funding infrastructure projects to support the “indigenous farmers” – laying water and electricity lines that enabled more and more people to set up homesteads on the “free” land.

Aerial images show this to be the case. Here are two such images from 1997 and 2021, showing a village in the area built from scratch.

The Israeli High Court ruled in 2022 that the people claiming they lived on the land for decades had no case - and that even their own evidence contradicted their claims!

For the sake of example, our focus will be on the aerial photographs of "Khirbet al-Fahit" presented by the respondents ("al-Fahit" according to the petitioners). In 1967 and 1981 the area was completely empty of buildings. Some development is evident during the years 1990 and 1991. In 2001 it is evident that a number of buildings were already built in Kharbit, and such were built more and more in 2007, 2009, 2011 and 2012. 

An identical picture is revealed from the aerial photographs attached by the petitioners and even more clearly. It can also be seen that in 1972 and 1981 there is no evidence of buildings in the area compared to 2011, when there is a lot of construction on the site. 

The same is true with regard to Khirbet Hilweh ("Al Hilweh" according to the petitioners). There is not much room to doubt that in the early years (1967, 1979, 1981 and even 1991) there is no evidence of construction on the site. However in the years 2007, 2009, 2011 and 2012 more and more buildings and houses were built.  There is a sharp and noticeable difference between the photos from the early period (in 1972, 1981 and even 1993) and the photo from 2011 in which  construction can be clearly identified.

Similarly, the Arabs claimed that the book "Life in the Caves of Mount Hebron" by Yaakov Havakook, published by the Ministry of Defense in 1985, proved that these villages were permanent. The High Court read the book and found that it said the opposite, and moreover, that all the residents of the caves had permanent homes in nearby real villages.

Havakook reiterates that at the time the book was written (1984), it can be seen that every year shepherds from nearby villages used to stay in these ruins and "at the end of winter, the shepherd families return and abandon the caves, which were used during the grazing months, and move to their mother villages or to other, more promising grazing places" (p. 56). Therefore, the reference to Havakook's book does not help the petitioners.

Of the many reviews I've read of "No Other Land," none of them even hint at the facts here. The film is pure propaganda meant to incite people to hate Israel. One review even says the film "will make you want to throw rocks." 

That is the entire point.

Propaganda exists not to inform but to manipulate people's emotions.  Many reviews mention that the film itself is "resistance," which in Palestinian parlance means both creating propaganda like this and murdering Jews: there is little distinction between the cognitive war and the kinetic war. 

Make no mistake: "No Other Land" is part of the cognitive war against the Jewish state.

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