The Haman Syndrome or Why do Jews answer a
question with a question?
By Israel Shamir
(A talk given in Paris on October 5, 2006 at
the presentation of
Notre-Dame des Douleurs, the French translation of Shamir’s
book
Our Lady of Sorrow).
Should one try to be fair and just? Ulysses,
Homer’s wanderer, said definitely yes, for the Gods hate
injustice. Not, if you want to get laid, as
Michel Houellebecq so vividly shows in his novel on the
defeated revolution of 1968, Elementary Particles. It
appears that once people tried to be fair, and if they weren’t,
they felt rather ashamed of themselves; and that now they have
given up on fairness. Perhaps the Gods of Ulysses who hated
injustice have changed their minds? Or rather, did mankind
change its Gods?
The beginning of the great change can be
traced ultimately to humanism, that is, to Europe’s severance of
man’s ties to the Divine in its rush for individual freedom and
happiness. But even without direct reference to God, fairness
continued to be based on religious feeling. Thus, in the century
of Reason and Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant stated that the
instinct for fairness is a moral law within us, corresponding to
the starry sky above us, another veiled reference to God. Behave
in such a way that your deeds may be emulated by others and
serve as a universal rule, quoth Kant’s Categorical Imperative,
or in other words, “Act according to that
maxim you would like to be a universal law”.
Despite its secular appearance, the Kantian
attitude is based on a hidden and very Christian presumption of
the equality of men (also shared by Muslims, Confucians,
Buddhists). But if we were to accept a presumption of Judaic
law, we’d come to a very different conclusion. According to
Judaic law, some men are inherently more equal than others, and
no one universal law can cover both the higher and the
lower species. There is one law for the Chosen Minority and
another law for the Native and Unwashed Majority, and a third
law yet for their interaction (This view is shared by Hindu
Brahmans, but they did not influence us). The Judaic ethic
became the rule in the countries where the natives were defeated
or subjugated most profoundly, that is in the United States and
Israel. Since 1968, this double-standard ethic has made deep
inroads into our Kantian world to the point of subverting all
political discourse in respect to justice and fairness.
A law is just if it is stipulated in general
terms, and applied to specifics: Do not
murder. In Kantian (or Christian) ethics, this prohibition
must fit all to be fair. But in traditional
Judaic ethics, “do not murder” means only “you must not kill
Jews”. Killing other, (lesser) beings, does not even qualify as
“murder”. In full agreement with this understanding, last month
the US
deported an 80-year old German woman who was a former
concentration camp guard, but never demanded the extradition of
the
Israeli killers of American sailors. Israel jails Arabs for
life who murder Jews. But a Jew who murdered fifty Arabs
was fined one cent.
If you approve of the
general rule: Do not possess nuclear weapons, then, in a
Kantian world, this prohibition must refer to all states - or at
least to all states that did not possess such weapons by the
time the NPT treaty was concluded. But from a Judaic
perspective, a US official was right in proclaiming that “we
won’t live with a nuclear North Korea or Iran”, though they live
quite happily with a nuclear Israel.
The Jews learned much from a stupid mistake
made by their enemy, Haman, a character in the biblical Book of
Esther. Prime Minister Haman
was asked: “What shall be done to the man whom the King
delights to honour?” The dummy answered: “He should be given the
greatest honours”. Of course, Haman thought that the King
Ahasuerus was referring to himself when he asked Haman the
question. It quickly became clear that Haman made a mistake: the
King had in mind his bitter enemy Mordecai; and Haman was forced
to pay obeisance to the Jew.
This story has been repeated and discussed by
Jews for millennia, and these fruitful discussions have taught
them: before answering any general question, you must find
out where you stand in the equation. In other words, do not
be Kantian, be Jewish. If Haman were a Jew (and he was not) he
would answer the royal question with a question: “Is this person
a Jew?” and only after knowing that would he feel comfortable to
proceed. Thus, modest home-grown psychologists that we are, we
shall add a new illness to the long list of mental pathologies:
the Haman Syndrome, a mental sickness acquired from
learning the error of Haman, which leads to the inability of
applying Kant’s categorical imperative.
Suffering from the Haman Syndrome, Jews use a
catch-all phrase: “How can you compare?” in order to defeat the
Kantian universal approach. If a Jew complains that Palestinians
kill Jewish civilians, try to answer with “You kill their women
and children”. You will get an indignant: “How can you compare!”
- maybe accompanied by a list of differences: they kill by
body-strapped explosives, we kill by guided missiles, etc, and
the most important but rarely voiced: we kill goyim, but they
kill Jews!
But who cares what the Jews think? What is
important is that the US and its allies have adopted their
outlook. When the Jews elected as Prime Minister Menachem Begin,
an old terrorist and the
man who bombed the King David Hotel and killed 90 men, women
and children, the West accepted Begin as Israel’s democratic
choice. But when the Palestinians democratically elected a
majority government led by Hamas, (with its own terrorist
links), the Jews subjected Palestine to a blockade, incarcerated
Hamas MPs and seized Palestinian monies – all with full support
of the West. When Jews starve and kill Palestinians in Gaza,
it’s business-as-usual. But when the Iranian President called to
dismantle the Jewish supremacy regime, he was summoned to a
Western court as a
potential genocidaire.
Here’s another example of the general vs. the
specific. If you want to obtain the release of your POWs, go and
snatch some of your enemy’s soldiers or civilians in order to be
in a better position to bargain for them. Right or wrong? Well,
if you are the Jewish state, and you snatch a Lebanese citizen -
let us call him
Mustafa Dirani - in order to save your POW Ron Arad,
you are “caring for your soldier”. But if you are Lebanese and
snatch a Jewish soldier to secure the release of your POWs, it
is an outright
provocation and a naked act of aggression (according to the
Jewish enlightened left of Amos Oz).
One has to be a devoted Hamanian to
understand why the US’s nuking of Hiroshima was a legitimate act
of warfare, while Pearl Harbor was an atrocity; why Stalin’s
GULAG was an atrocity but Guantanamo is legitimate, why bombing
Haifa is a war crime, but shelling Gaza is not, why the
deportation of Jewish civilians by Germans was genocide, but the
deportation of German civilians by the Poles was not.
Is a naval blockade an act of war? That’s a
good question. If it is the Egyptian blockade of Israeli
shipping to Eilat, it’s an act of war and it should be met by
all-out war, as it was in 1967. But if it is an Israeli blockade
of Lebanon, or Gaza, it’s only a measure of permissible
self-defence.
If you deny a massacre, it is surely
upsetting to the kin of massacred. May it be done? After the
Israeli air force bombed and killed dozens of
Lebanese children at Qana in Lebanon, the Jewish media
published
hundreds of items denying it. They said that the pictures
were either staged or Photoshop-altered, that the photo of a
dead child, or a truckload of dead bodies were brought in from
elsewhere. But when the British historian David Irving applied
this same critique to the
photographs of Auschwitz , he was called ‘négationniste’
(Holocaust Denier - Fr.) and sentenced to three years of jail.
Udo Walendy served time in jail for doubting authenticity of Jewish
photos, but the Jews who doubt Lebanese photos or outright deny
the massacres of Deir Yassin and Qana are very much at large.
Now, the Jews are not the only people in need
of exception. Indeed, their peculiar ethics became the ethics of
the new, thoroughly godless post-1968 ruling class. Their
history and traditions became the banner of men with the Haman
syndrome. The Jews became the pet of the preferred minorities
waging merciless wars upon the majorities all over the world. In
order to confuse the rest, they would unite in one breath the
exclusive minority of stockbrokers with underprivileged minority
of black immigrants against the vast majority of ordinary
people. Their obsession with minorities, be it lesbian single
mothers or HIV-positive illegal immigrants, has a reason: in
this way they seize the moral high ground for their own minority
rule. This is also the reason why so many members of the
majority are annoyed with unprivileged minorities, be it Blacks
or Gays: they correctly (if subconsciously) feel that the people
who promote minority causes do not really give a damn about the
ordinary majority.
In countries where hard-core Judaic ethics
rule - the US and Israel - the majority is brought to a new low.
The native majority of Jewish-ruled Palestine is
disenfranchised, dispossessed and its working places were
outsourced to imported guest-workers. The majority of nominally
Jewish workers are forced to part-time jobs or to
“self-employment” in order to save on social benefits. In the
US, “American employers are waging a successful war against
wages”,
writes Paul Krugman in the IHT. “After-tax corporate profits
have more than doubled, because workers' productivity is up, but
their wages aren't. Wal-Mart workers' children were either on
Medicaid or lacked health insurance, and still they want to pay
their workers even less by denying them permanent employment”.
Donald Luskin, an admirer of Israel and Ayn
Rand, attacked Krugman for his “antisemitism” (he did not
denounce Mahathir) and wrote: “The measure of a man is what he
worries about. President Bush is a big man who worries about big
things like protecting America from global terrorism. New
York Times columnist Paul Krugman — Bush’s most vicious
media opponent and America’s looniest liberal pundit — is a
little man who worries about little things, whether retail
workers are being paid too little by Wal-Mart.” We are also
little men who worry about little things for we know that the
big things like war on terrorism are done in order to pay us
less.
Those who suffer from the Haman Syndrome are
aware that people won’t take their oppression in their stride.
That is why their economic down-pressure is accompanied by
terror against majorities. In Israel it was always legal to
torture and imprison without trial. Now the US has its Patriot
Act and Military Commissions Act, bringing it to the Israeli
level. A wise Palestinian professor at Columbia University,
Rashid Khalidi
correctly said that the Mearsheimer/Walt paper overestimated
the influence of the Jewish Lobby on foreign policy but also
underestimated its influence on domestic policy such as The
Patriot Act. This is exactly a point that we have been making
all along: the Jewish Lobby’s primary goal is not Palestine, but
your freedom.
I was asked whether it is necessary to refer
to Jews at all, given that not only Jews, and not all Jews,
support the rule of the Minority. Indeed, the origin is not
important, for everyone makes one’s choice whether to stick with
the trampled-upon majority, or to aspire to be a member of a
chosen minority. The true heroes of mankind were the minority
members who crossed over to the side of majority. Jesus of
Nazareth was born a prince of the House of David, his maternal
grandfather was an important man at the Temple, while Siddhartha
Gautama was brought up in a palace ready to inherit his father’s
kingdom. Still these princes, Christ and Buddha, opened the way
to majority. Many people of Jewish origin also made this trek.
But Jewish organisations are practically always on the side of
minorities, trying to make an exception for Jews even while
among the chosen moneyed caste.
One of their favourite tools is persecution
of those who wish to measure Jews by the same yardstick as the
rest of men. Alas, I am one of those. I called for a full
equality of Jew and non-Jew in Israel/Palestine, and my fellow
Israeli citizens did not mind it, but the French Jews got me
indicted in France for “defaming Jews”. This sounds weird. Why
should the French care what an Israeli citizen says to other
Israeli citizens about their Jewish ethics? Is Palestine a part
of France? Does France consider its sovereignty world-embracing?
Should the French feel very proud that their writ reaches as far
as my Jaffa? Well, no. This is the only case where a French
court would interfere. Otherwise, they would wisely desist, as
they desisted when French Jews
Flatto,
Gaydamak etc. ran away to Israel with stolen French money.
In my case, the French Republic is just doing its small bit in
upholding Jewish exceptionalism.
This protection is exceptional: could the
Turks of Paris go to a French court against Orhan Pamuk, the
great Turkish writer, for defaming Turks (some Turks thought
so), and would a French court find Pamuk guilty? Well, it is not
a very likely story. The Turks won’t ask for it, and the French
won’t grant it. There is only one nation above the law that can
get away with it.
Is it because the French do not want to
offend a religion? When the offended religion is Christianity or
Islam, its adherents are supposed to just bite their lip. An
offensive anti-Muslim book by Oriana Fallaci was found kosher by
a French court (some Muslims, unaware of Haman, had the temerity
to sue her). But when Jewish writers (such as French Emmanuel
Levinas) attributed the mistreatment of Jews by Nazis to …
Christianity, no court interfered. But if the offended religion
is Judaism, its offenders go to jail. It’s as simple as that.
There is a good reason why laws are
territorial. We all commit offences against some law in some
land. When you smoke grass in the Netherlands, you know that it
would be illegal under, say, French law; but you know that you
are safe in the Netherlands. When you drink wine in Paris, you
know that you commit an offence under the laws of Saudi Arabia,
but you are not in Saudi Arabia, so you do not have to care. In
the USSR, it was illegal to read Solzhenitsyn, but French
publishers could print his Archipelago. But one offence is
perfectly extra-territorial, and wherever you commit it, you can
be punished – this is an offence against Jews.
In order to make their exceptional position
clear, the Jewish organisation that sues everybody for offending
Jews, the CRIF, now
defends the right of a French teacher Robert Redeker to
insult Islam. Redeker described Mohammed as a “ruthless and
looter warlord, a Jew slaughterer and a polygamist”. This
definition applies to King David as well; he had 18 wives, was a
ruthless warlord and slaughtered a lot of Jews. Polygamy was an
offence Muhammad shared with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, while
every king who began a dynasty was a ruthless warlord to start
with and slaughtered a lot of people, though not necessarily
Jews. Who cares if Jews or non-Jews were slaughtered? If
you ask this question, you are not subject to the Haman
Syndrome.
Why should we bother and pay attention to
this universal adoration of Jews? Not only for the sake of
Palestine must we attend to - and end - this obsession. Our
future and the future of our children is at stake. France is
also a victim of minority rule, or rather of the minority’s war
against the majority. When Nicolas Sarkozy, the conservative
candidate front-runner for French presidency next year,
declared himself a “friend of America and a friend of Jews”
during his trip to Washington last week, he did not mean that he
loves Gefilte Fish and Hamburgers (no Frenchman is that dumb);
he gave a cryptic sign that he will support the Minority against
the Majority.
Instead of oscillating between the Left of
Blair and the Right of Sarkozy, united in their love of rich
minorities, we may seek for the lost paths leading to majority
rule. The Left may continue the unfinished work of
the revolution ‘68 from where it failed, betrayed and
misused for the advancement of the Judaic ethics by the likes of
Daniel
Cohn-Bendit,
Todd Gitlin and Joschka
Fischer. The Right may reinvent the masculine spirituality
of Chesterton, Eliot, Evola and Guenon. Together they may turn
the people away from the threshold of slavery to the gates of
freedom, destroy the imposed authority of the mainstream media
and the universities, and undermine the plan “drawn up well away
from the cries of the electorate or the laments of society’s
victims by serene and lucid minds” (Le
Corbusier), thus restoring the justice and fairness of
Kant’s imperative, instead of the perverse exceptionalism of the
Haman Syndrome.
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