Over the past few years, I have engaged in ongoing dialogue with people across the spectrum of Islam, from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who left her religious upbringing behind, to moderates like Mustafa Akyol and Hamza Yusuf, and even some of the hardliners. commentators whose perspectives are popular with Muslim millennials in the UK.
I have done this because I believe that Jews, Christians and Muslims have more in common than what divides them, and because I know that since there is no world without religion, we must make the best of what we have been. legacy.
However, this week I am in deep trouble because I argued that Israel’s authorities should give the terrorists who invaded their land, torturing and killing their citizens, the hell they really deserve.
How could I say such a thing, some argued, while maintaining my desire for rapprochement between the peoples of the Abrahamic tradition? Let’s begin that discussion by giving to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s.
Hamas’ motivation and Biden’s failure
The attack on Israel by Hamas monsters occurred not because Muslims and Jews are destined, by religious necessity, to confront each other, but because Hamas’ biggest supporters in Iran (a country ruled by thugs, and considered so even on his own – had been concerned that Saudi Arabia’s rulers would continue their laudable attempts to formulate a productive peace with Israel.
Four Arab countries signed the Abraham Accords, a Trump-era initiative that should have earned that former president, for all his many flaws, a Nobel Peace Prize (at least in a world where people like Barack Obama were considered deserving of such an award). honor). Behind the current signatories – the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan – were the Saudis, without whose tacit agreement such steps would not have been taken, and everyone knew it. Joe Biden and the Democrats therefore had a historic and unparalleled opportunity to formally incorporate the occasionally problematic Saudis soon after they took office, building on the work of the Trump administration. Instead, with miraculous shortsightedness, they alienated them almost immediately, choosing—in lieu of peace—to deny the former President of the United States any honor for his revolutionary advance, something the blinkered fools who ran the State Department considered absolutely impossible. for decades.
Despite being so insultingly snubbed and their consequent justified anger (remember their unwillingness to provide additional oil to the United States, when asked by Biden, and their recent flirtation with China?), the Saudis had been seriously considering the continuation and extension of the Abrahamic peace. process. Consequently, Iran’s totalitarian mullahs – who collaborated with Hamas – were driven to desperation, knowing full well that such an agreement would fatally undermine and isolate them. This is the same Iran, by the way, that the Democrats, under Biden, have failed to resist or control at all, continuing a pattern well established by the aforementioned Nobel laureate Obama.
All this means, therefore, that the Saudis could have been on the side two years ago if Biden had seized the opportunity, thereby negating Hamas’s (and Iran’s) primary goal of attacking Israel. Instead, he and his fellow Democrats downplayed the importance of the Trump administration’s cardinal achievement just to score the cheapest (and yet most expensive) political point.
So here we are again, with Israeli and Palestinian blood once again needlessly spilled.
Social media and the fetishization of bloodshed
One of the most shocking elements of this entire tragedy is how many in the West, particularly on the radical left, have been championing a cause dedicated solely to violence. As a psychologist, I see this as a phenomenon facilitated by the power, accessibility, and irresponsibility of social media, which allows toxic traits exhibited by a small minority to spread and proliferate, without any of the usual real-world consequences.
In recent decades, a particular form of psychopathology has been well detailed: a combination of Machiavellianism (instrumental manipulation and deception), narcissism (inflated false self-esteem and desire for undeserved attention and status), and psychopathy (an evil mixture of criminal propensity, callousness and parasitism). These are collectively known as the dark triad. More recent researchers of the structure of darker temperamental tendencies found it necessary to add an extra dimension to the matrix: sadism – positive delight in the suffering of others. So today we have the Dark Tetrad.
Dark Tetrad The types fit well into what is known as B Group of personality disorders. Those who demonstrate B Group The symptomatology has, in addition to its other psychologically and socially dangerous tendencies, the propensity to claim positive virtues or an absolute victim status while pursuing its totally selfish, grandiose and destructive ends. They lie, cheat, steal, gossip, attack their reputations, brag, claim credit when they don’t deserve it, and distribute the blame to everyone but themselves, while pursuing nothing but their own immediate, immature, hedonistic self-gratification, preaching their principles. morals. virtue and/or brandishing their identity as oppressed innocents.
It is this narrow and historically excluded behavior that has been encouraged and facilitated in its distribution by contemporary social media. When these individuals organize – and this happens from time to time – they threaten the integrity of the entire society in which they operate, hoping to set everything on fire and dance, orgiastically, among the ruins.
This happened after the French Revolution. It happened in Soviet Russia. It happened in Nazi Germany. It is happening now, in the West, with the rise of the most insane causes of awakening.
This warped psychological perspective appeals to groups larger than the central individuals, and in various surreal ways. How else can one explain the astonishingly incomprehensible spectacle of, for example, ‘Queers for Palestine’ (perhaps the most egregious example of the coming together of ‘progressives’ desire to tear down everything worthy in the West, even to world level? cost of formulating an alliance that in an instant would be suicidal if it ever manifested itself.
An appeal to Muslims
That’s one of the ways social media allows for subtle forms of psychological manipulation. inside West. But what happens since outside?
There are many Muslims willing to believe conspiratorial narratives – also spread on social media – about the Jewish people. Many of these narratives, if we look at their source, are deliberately spread by the brutal Iranian regime.
You might ask Muslims who accept such stories: is Iran their idea of a decent Islamic state? The same Iran whose citizens, all Muslim, have been rebelling against their psychopathic masters for over a year (and dreaming about it for much longer)? The same Iran whose hypothetically religious leaders have to oppress their own women?
I would also ask those same Muslims to consider those in the West who have allied themselves with the Palestinian cause in the days following the Hamas invasion. Many of those radical university students and professors you consider your allies are Marxists. Remember: the essential and absolute enemy of communist utopia is the same religious practice you share with your Abrahamic brethren.
Then there is the increasingly delusional alphabet brigade of the LGBT ‘community’, foolish and blind enough to assume that the similarity of hypothetical oppression is enough to unite them, somehow, with the mullahs of Tehran and the gangsters of Hamas. . This is useful idiocy on a scale never dreamed of by either Leninists or the most extreme Maoists.
Tell me this, honestly, those of you who wish to genuinely practice your faith: do you really believe you have anything in common with those who have hypothetically sided with you in the West over the past week? And tell me, again, how is that alliance more appropriate for your faith than the recognition of your Abrahamic community with Christians and the present-day descendants of the ancient Hebrews?
I would argue that the Saudis, and the other signatories of the Abraham Accords, have a stark choice before them, as do the distributed and diverse peoples of the Islamic world. They can allow the bullies, particularly those from Iran and Palestine, to succeed in their propaganda efforts to prop up their own depressing, miserable and tyrannical states. Consequently, they can destroy the new peace treaty signed with Israel, renounce all the obvious benefits for the Muslim world that this agreement offers and accept that the cruelest hypocrites continue to govern, abusing the faith in the worst of ways. possible.
Or you can consider the universal message of Islam, Judaism, and Christianity alike: do not ascribe to yourself the virtue of the divine when you act in your own name, much less when you act under the bondage of the forces of darkness.
I plead with those of you reading this in the Muslim world: to take off the blindfold (as we should, likewise, in the West) and see what is manifesting itself so clearly in the world: toxic ideologies, whether of Iran or pseudo-Marxists in the west. We must all turn away from the terrible and tempting path of righteous destruction, continue the work already begun to unite the people of the book and thus bring a productive, generous, wise and lasting peace to this ignorant but not yet- doomed green and blue orb even potentially wonderful.
We need a transcendental axis around which to rotate, that takes us beyond blinded materialism, that protects us against foolish populism and that lifts our eyes to the eternal Heaven, which calls us. In the West, we have that – despite all the flaws of the followers of the creeds, and even, with the creeds themselves as they are currently understood – in the form of Islam, Christianity and Judaism. We need our Abrahamic faith, lest hedonistic pagans and worse prevail, and we must be united behind it. And that’s why I’m pro-Muslim, but I’m against the thuggish behavior we’ve seen this past week. And if you are a true follower of Allah, that is the decision that lies with you, in equal measure.
And that also applies to Jews and Christians.
You can watch The Telegraph’s most recent interview with Jordan Peterson through this link.
More from Jordan Peterson exclusively for The Telegraph:
– “We are sacrificing our children on the altar of a brutal far-left ideology”
– ‘Trans activism is sexist and delusional’
– ‘Why I love Britain’
– “Environmental disaster peddlers have shown their true totalitarian colors”
– “Twitter is driving us all crazy”
