Anti-Muslim sentiments seem to be rising at present in some Western countries and, looking at the phenomenon superficially, a number of reasons can be cited as to why this is happening. But could the phenomenon be a fleeting one? Could it be that it will soon disappear and leave behind a telltale relic as to why it happened in the first place? Or can it go out of control and transform into something more dangerous? In fact, there were signs before this development that the old anti-Semitism was making a comeback in some Western countries, especially the English speaking ones, more specifically North America. I wrote about this at the time but, having no website on which to publish my thoughts, I only circulated my findings among some interested parties. What I saw then was that people who hated the activities of the Jewish organizations but were afraid to confront them, expressed their frustration in the form of antagonism toward the Arabs whom they thought had it within their power to confront the Jews and disarm them but were not doing it. To these people, the Arabs represented the cat they went home to kick and thus shake off the frustration they built up all day long as they had to interact with Jews who dealt directly with the offending Jewish organizations or just followed them. Can it be that the Muslim faith is now taking the place of the Arabs as the cat to kick when frustration builds up?
This is how the phenomenon could have risen. After the events of 9/11 a genuine apprehension about the Arabs and Islam arose in the Western countries. With time the mention of the Arabs began to fade form the discussions as the anti-Muslim expressions were intensifying. And true to form, the Jewish organizations pounced on the opportunity to defame Islam aiming to realize their long held dream of triggering a war between this religion and Christianity, a tactic that the Jews always used to make the gains that have allowed them to live at the expense of others through the centuries. The drawback in the use of this tactic, however, is that it requires a huge amount of energy and firepower to sustain it for any length of time. And so the Jewish organizations fielded all that they had in their arsenals but achieved very little before running out of energy and the ability to deliver a powerful punch. When all was said and done, the effect of the propaganda blitzkrieg they launched with great promise fizzled out slowly but surely. They found themselves overextended and worse, they discovered they were outflanked from every direction. What may still be working in their favor are tired old ideas about a threat posed by a handful of kids calling themselves Muslims who are out to conquer the world and turn it into a Caliphate they dream to rule like Sultans as they live the good life surrounded by a harem of sumptuous women. Needless to say this is a picture that apprehends a few feeble minds in the West but causes the intelligent people to smile and shrug.
Is this the end of it? No, it is not. People who appreciate drama know that the making of history is the best drama of all. And why is that? Because at the end of every act, your intuition will tell you this must be the end of the story but your brain will say history never ends, therefore, there is going to be another act. And sure enough, another act begins each and every time. Its direction will surprise you at the start but its unfolding will prove to be totally rational having taken roots in all the previous acts. And yet, the narrative will never reveal where it will go next until it gets there even though it may tease you along the way by removing the veil just a little to give you a glimpse of what you will encounter ahead. But the sad part is that drama can sometimes turn into melodrama. Even if the unfolding of the action is elegant, flawless and superior in a technical sense, the melodrama may portray the horror that lurks behind the dark side of the human character. And what is happening nowadays that may turn into melodrama is the rise of a genuine form of anti-Semitism in the West, having been “canalized” by the activities of the Jewish organizations.
But what is this “canalized” thing? Well, canalization is a complicated process that begins with self deception. We sometimes lie to ourselves because we do not want to confront the truth. We tinker with the truth or change it entirely to make it look like something else and direct our attention to the fake concoction to avoid the consequences of having to deal with the real thing. For example, instead of kicking the Jewish boss at the office, we go home and kick the cat. Instead of cursing the Jews and risk being called anti-Semitic, we curse Islam and feel good about it especially if it is the thing to do in public. And this redirection of our attention is the process that is called canalization. While this human trait is more prevalent among children than it is among adults, it is not completely erased with age. It is also the tool that is used by manipulative individuals and organizations to canalize the sentiments of other people and turn them against each other. Thus, to understand what role canalization plays in the drama that is unfolding in the West at this time with regard to Islam, we need to know a little more about the lie.
People lie all the time. Some people tell small lies; some tell big lies but soon thereafter they all forget about the lie and go on to live their precious little lives as if nothing had happened. Some people lie because they find themselves in a bind which they neutralize with a lie, sometimes successfully, and they too forget about the lie soon thereafter and go on to live their precious little lives. But the treacherous thing about the telling of lies is that some people do it because they develop the habit and worse, they tell a fat lie and hang on to it throughout life. These habitual liars then pass their habit on to the next generation and to generations after that who will never know why they were made to lie in the first place or why they must continue to lie. And this leaves us with a two-pronged question: How do people develop such a habit and why do they hang on to it for generations even after they realize it is detrimental to the causes they try to promote?
To answer the question we take the most egregious example and discuss it. In fact, there is only one example in all of history where a culture has adopted the lie and made it the core of its system of beliefs. This culture has lived long enough to become a religion and has survived from antiquity to this day, moving from one continent to another and from one race to another. The people who started it were so enamored with what they did, they wrote a book about their movement and bragged about the fictitious exploits they fantasized about but then recorded as if they were historical truths. These people then passed the bragging rights to their disciples who have been bragging ever since. The book they wrote is called the Torah, and it is sometimes referred to as the Old Testament. The people whose story the Torah is supposed to be telling were called the Hebrew tribes and no one knows what happened to them because they naturally disappeared as did all the ancient tribes. The modern disciples who follow the old movement call themselves Jews because this was the religion that the early Hebrew tribes were said to have adopted.
Today's Jews who think for themselves consider the stories told in the Torah to be allegories that convey lessons carrying a significance that is meant to stay in the domain of religion. But leaders have emerged among the Jews with a penchant to develop new ideas that suit the moment. These were political and social ideas with implications that reached deep into the secular domain. Seeing an opportunity for synergy in the merger of the two domains, the Jewish leaders married the religious significance contained in the stories of the Torah with the political and social significance contained in the secular dimension of their own ideas. And the marriage has allowed these leaders to gather political power based on the secular side of their arguments while gathering wealth and prestige based on the religious side of the same arguments. Now armed with a double-barreled gun, the Jewish leaders were able to gather around them an army of foot soldiers, stuff them with religious zeal and send them on a secular war of conquest throughout the world.
When life was simple and communication among the people outside a neighborhood was thin, those leaders could tell a lie and let it spread by word of mouth through the neighborhood and through the societies immediately surrounding the neighborhood. However slowly the lie was spreading and however long it took it to permeate the body of the societies it was infecting, the leaders knew that at the end of the day they will have scored another conquest. But things began to change when life became more complicated and communication among the people of the neighborhood -- and between them and the societies that lay beyond the neighborhood – became heavy traffic. In this climate, ordinary people began to develop short attention spans and shorter memories. The result was that the lie of the leaders could no longer impress ordinary people or convince them of anything. This development was so significant that the Jewish leaders were forced to replace the old techniques for spreading the lie with new techniques that were more suited for the times.
After experimenting with a number of new ideas, the Jewish leaders have settled on the method of relentlessly driving into the heads of their audiences not the one big lie that can be laughed at but the series of fragmented insinuations that saturate the landscape and are expected to achieve the result that is aimed for. Since the main idea is to say that Israel and the Jews are good, that their enemy of the day is bad and that everyone else is mediocre, the leaders of the Jewish movement are continually putting together propaganda packages for the media to use and thus drive the main point into the heads of their audiences in a steady and barely perceptible way. The result has been that people in the English speaking world cannot now escape hearing or reading relentless drivel to the effect that Israel is a benevolent democracy, Jews are the saviors of the world, Muslims hate America and the West while the rest of the world is doing precious little to end anti-Semitism.
What the Jewish leaders did not take into account, however, was that repeated drivel bores the audience so badly it causes people to reverse the message in their sub-conscience as a way to get back at the purveyors of the drivel. By the time the leaders became aware of this reality and tried to put together an antidote to deal with their blunder, they discovered they had another problem on their hand. It was that because the message was made of fragmented insinuations in the first place, members of the audience not only reversed the message in their mind; they each reconstructed the message by piecing the fragments together in a different way. And the Jewish leaders realized to their chagrin that what they had concocted has now metastasized into a million new forms of cancer requiring millions of different antidotes to cure them. And all the anti-Muslim hatred they had generated over the decades was now turning into anti-Jewish hatred. And so the Jewish leaders resorted to the old accusation that humanity is genetically designed to be anti-Semitic.
But the world is laughing at them because people realize that once again the Jews have become the architects of their own misfortune. The circle they wrought is closing on them because the lava of anti-Arab and anti-Muslim hatred they generated is being canalized in their direction. And the question to ask is this: Will it be a pogrom this time? A Holocaust? Hitler's Final Solution?
Time will tell.