Shaytan II

I.

In Shaytan I, this being the sequel, I mentioned that the viewpoint put over by Peterson in his “Message to Muslims” video seemed to derive from the 1970s TV show Quincy, M.E.—and I think it would be worthwhile to unpick exactly what I meant by that, along with the real reasons why Muslims and Jews (specifically, Palestinians and Israelis) like to soak holy sand in blood.

The basic Quincy, M.E. conceit is that Jack Klugman, as the Los Angeles Medical Examiner “Quincy”, meets a man whose daughter has gone missing. “I think we all know who’s responsible…it’s those negroes over the way,” says the father, as he adjusts his pork pie hat and drops cigar ash all over Quincy’s avocado wall-to-wall shag pile carpet (or whatever they had in the 1970s). Quincy discreetly rolls his eyes heavenwards and his moustachioed uptight WASP supervisor, Dr. Asten, looks awkward—Sam Fujiyama, Quincy’s Oriental lab assistant, flinches (“They’re very bright, you know—the Japanese, that’s why they’re always doctors and people who work in laboratories. The chief LA Coroner right now is actually an Oriental, a Japanese.” “Yes, but is the Midwest in 1974 ready for an Oriental in a 7 o’clock slot?”).

Yet, of course, being bleeding-heart liberals Quincy & company have great compassion—nay, even for a racist; after all, his daughter has gone missing. Later in the episode, it will turn out that the only man with vital information to save the daughter is a negro from “over the way” (or, as Quincy pointedly says, although not too obtrusively, “a black man”—you see, Stokley Carmichael, when Quincy caught his teach-in at Berkeley, said this was the preferred term today).

The daughter is saved, embraces her father (“Daddy, daddy.”) and, after a slightly awkward pause, her father shakes hands with the negro (black). “Thank you, Richard.” “That’s alright, sir.” After he has left, the father turns to Quincy and says, “Well, doc, I guess I was wrong—guess we’ve all got a lot to learn from each other—and I’ve got a lot to learn about myself.” “That’s alright, Mr. Brown, you know, in this crazy mixed up world, even a medical examiner can make snap judgements sometimes, but if we all work together we can make the world a lot safer for girls like your daughter.” Quincy then returns to his yacht and engages in witty repartee with his attractive yet curiously tomboyish bob-haired girlfriend about some humorous sub-plot encoded (as encoded into each story) for comic relief so the audience is not too bummed out by child abductions. “But Quincy, the tamale was under the cushion right here the whole time!” Klugman turns to camera, raises his eyes heavenwards (what’s a guy to do?). “Perfect, Diane.” And…rooooll credits, cue theme music.

The basic moral in each story is that people do not know each other and so have formed irrational hatreds based on religion, race, and sex—if only people just met and talked and refrained from snap judgements (even scientists make snap judgements sometimes, Quincy humbly avers) then there would be no more racial and religious strife. It was this ethos that Peterson explicated in his video—with the idea being that Jews, Shiites, and Sunnis just need to have a chat and then they will suddenly see “we’ve all got a lot to learn from each other—and about ourselves”.

One thing we have to learn about ourselves is that Quincy is about how the Jews see themselves, Klugman being a Jew. The Quincy view: there is a WASP with a moustache who runs the whole organisation and who has a slightly risible fixation with rules and procedures; meanwhile, the brilliant funny Jewish doctor, beloved by all races and peoples, works tirelessly for positive social change from the bowels of the LA Coroner’s Office (oh, and women love him too). Occasionally, the Aryan with the moustache comes down and tentatively suggests (“Why so coy? Why not spit it out already?”) that Quincy is, once again, not following procedures. “But, but I’ve found a negro from the wrong side of the tracks and…he needs our help. Just one exception, one time—have a heart…It’s really serious, it’s in a good cause, Asten—c’mon, c’mon, atta boy.”

The Quincy conceit is partly an American one that arises from her vast continental size. In America, it really is possible to come from somewhere called Mechanicsville, Oklahoma (pop. 2,545) that is 97.2% white and where there are 16 churches, and one Catholic chapel. A wizened hayseed leans on a fence: “Could say we have some of that there die-var-city in Mechanicsville these days,” pauses to chew on a grass stalk, “now we’ve got that there Papist chapel. He-he-he.” The idea is that once little Jimmy goes to Orens, a “college town” with a crossing light and all (pop. 21,367), and meets “a black”, “an Indian” (“No, not a Red Indian, Mom—this one’s from India where they have the Taj Mahal”), and—most daring of all—“a Jew” (“Welensky, good news—boy, do we have a post-doctoral position for you. Have you heard of Orens? Swell little college, near…err…Mechanicsville, Oklahoma.” Car brakes screech on exterior Brooklyn street.)

Once little Jimmy “gets educated” his prejudices fall away—he becomes just like Quincy, M.E.; and when he visits the folks in Mechanicsville it just isn’t the same anymore. “Folk are so small-minded here, if they’d just meet my sociology instructor, Dr. Welensky, they’d never say these things about the Jews—some ‘joke’.”

Of course, today Mechanicsville is somewhat depopulated—and little Jimmy’s cousin has died from a fentanyl overdose, and the wizened old hayseeds are long dead, and the local convenience store has been run by Indians (type, Taj Mahal) for two decades now; and little Jimmy, now big Jimmy, lives in the big big city, and his daughter—who used to be his son—has a Furry Tumblr account. Really, there was never much truth in the Quincy view; the view is predicated, incidentally, on the idea that what your family and church—even your own experiences—teach you is wrong. Once you move to the big city, get educated, you can forget all that superstitious and prejudiced nonsense—you can listen to a scientist like Quincy, listen to the state; and, remember, Quincy is not just a scientist—he also has a big heart, even for racists…you could almost say he is a priest.

Nobody has made, to my knowledge, a show about the reality—for reality is the other way about, and it certainly was for me. I was the sort of teenager to read The Guardian in an ethnically pure village and think nice Quincy-ish thoughts about how it is just so damn irrational and unfair to make snap judgements about people—and how a city, the big city, can be measured positively in accord with its diversity. Except…then I moved to the big city and…“Don’t go down there, whites don’t go down there.” An early comment from an already well-educated person a year higher than me at university. “Well, no need to make snap judgements…I’m sure if my daughter was kidnapped…” Well, yes, technically you can go down there…but at your own risk—probably it will be fine, but, you know. “Hey, this wasn’t in Quincy…This wasn’t in The Guardian. Are people…lying about diversity?”

As already mentioned in Shaytan I, the problem in the Middle East is that Jews, Sunnis, and Shiites (and all the other sub-tribes, such as the Alawites and Druze) have known each other very well for centuries. They live cheek by jowl. In the Old City in Jerusalem, a kind of square, everyone is locked into the four quarters and the fight for land is conducted one occupied apartment at a time. People will point out where Ariel Sharon’s family owns a flat—and how they want to push the Arabs back from this block; and all the little tricks they get up to the make them sell, to make life difficult (*power cut*).

As you walk the streets, you encounter Protestant ministers from the Midwest who lead their congregations with an actual cross to fully reenact the Via Dolorosa on the Via Dolorosa—and there in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre you are surrounded by Russian grannies on pilgrimage, on their knees. Everything is there, the Orthodox Jews—the secular Jews, the Muslims, the Ethiopian Christians. Occasionally, there is a stabbing—or a riot. You know, Jerusalem is a very diverse area—perhaps that is why it is embroiled in constant war.

Absence makes the heart grow fonder, it is easy to sit in Mechanicsville—in my ideal Mechanicsville, as was—and think, “I wonder what life is like in Africa? It looks pretty neat with Bogart and Hepburn.”; or to look in a Children’s Illustrated Bible with its technicolour paintings and think, “Gee, Jerusalem must be so magical—a real Aladdin’s cave.” So, in all likelihood, the folks in Mechanicsville—contra Hollywood—used to make off-colour jokes that would shock Quincy’s supervisor but basically thought “folks is folks the world over and how quaint and magical must Africa and the Middle East be?”

It is only when you get up close and personal with other races and religions that you begin to notice differences—differences in interests, behaviours, desires; and it is to state these differences, even in a neutral manner, that constitutes “hate” under the current system—again, a show like Quincy conceals reality. For the progressive liberal believes, as with Peterson, that everyone is equal—everyone is the same, everywhere. Hence to notice difference is hate, even if you notice the difference positively.

II.

In Israel, I met a man who had planted a bomb at the Damascus Gate in the 1970s—it killed several people, several Jews. At the time, he was in a leftist paramilitary group—somewhat like the PFLP; and all the Palestinian groups were leftist then—although they were not really socialists, it was not really about socialism; it was about the land—blood and soil. So this man had done his time in prison, been released during one of the endless deals in the endless “peace process”. Why did he do it? Because he had never met a Jew, he never talked to a Jew. <<raises eyes to the ceiling>> “Cool it, Quincy. You’re off the case.” He knew Jews, he grew up with Jews—and Christians, and Druze. Now released, he lived in the Old City among all these different people—the Russian grandmothers, the Ethiopian Orthodox, the ultra-Orthodox Jews, and even random progressives and atheists who wander about the place.

The reason he did it? Not because he was “suffused with hate” and had then later repented in prison, per the Mandela storyline. No, his family was forced into a refugee camp by the Zionists—and he rather wanted not to be in a refugee camp and to recover his ancestral land. Since violence had been used to remove him, violence he would use to get it back. Now you might jump up and say “the Arabs started it, the Arabs started it—actually, it was justified.” Well, I have no idea about that—people have different justifications for what they do. Unless you have decided to believe what the Zionists say or what the Arabs say completely, if you have picked a team, it is hard to tell—and if you have already picked a team, then how can you look at this objectively?

The Zionists themselves are secular 19th-century nationalists; they would have happily started their country in Uganda as in their ancestral homeland; it just so happened, as it shook out, they ended up where the Jews have been historically—although not for some time. Anyway, Israel as a project is not integral to this territory—in principle you could even have started it in Mechanicsville, Oklahoma; and, further, the Zionist project does not accord with the views held by many religious Jews—precisely because it is a secular project that does not correspond to the Jewish religion.

Right or wrong—difficult to tell, and possession is 9/10ths of the law. The Zionists took the land, the Palestinians want it back. Unlike the Red Indians, they have a fighting chance to do so. The problem with Zionism is that it started too late. It started a 19th-century style settler-colonial project when such projects were being wrapped up around the world. One reason why they were being wrapped up was because there had been a shift in technology. Around 1880, Britain—other European powers—could just roll into places like Burma and steamroller the opposition. There would be battle with casualty lists along the lines: Britain 22 | Burmese 1,345. Other countries lacked the military technology and discipline to confront Europeans; admittedly, sometimes the Europeans got cocky and were totally massacred by tribesmen—yet even these “lost causes” have casualty figures along the lines: Britain 134 | Zulus 6,467. “Whatever happens we have got, the Gatling gun—and they have not,” as Hilaire Belloc said; except, they have it now.

By the time Israel was founded, every idiot south of the Zambezi was about to get an AK-47 and some plastic explosive (courtesy, the USSR). The cost to maintain your amiable settler-colonial plantation in Malaya was about to become way too high—any idiot native could whizz round, spray your villa with a machine-gun burst and so murder your daughter and your spaniel (“Quite a blow Nigel’s had.” “Quite.”). The price to stop this was to use what were, in fact, SS methods to suppress native Communist insurgencies—so Britain built brutal concentration camps, as complained about by E. Powell, in Kenya; and in Malaya men with names like Colonel Fotherington-Smyth (DSO, bar) offered rewards per the head of a Communist guerrilla taken. “Nigel’s off head-hunting again. Haw, Haw, Haw.”

The strategy worked, except it was unacceptable in a democracy—so the settlers sold up and moved to a Victorian terrace in Ealing (“I always liked to play with Uncle Nigel’s Malaya artefacts and his pickled heads when I visited as a lad.”) or to a small Australian town with a name like BullaBungo (“Strewth”). At the same time, the Israelis attempted what everyone else had given up—although with a more socialist complexion, as evidenced in the kibbutz system.

The problem is that the Israelis neither enjoyed the absolute superiority the Europeans had when they expanded up until the late 19th century, nor could they go full SS on the opposition—being also a democracy, also constrained by liberal sensibilities (at most, there are occasional crises where effective anti-guerrilla strategies are utilised to take the edge off the Palestinian insurgency). The Palestinians, on the other hand, unlike the unfortunate Umbingo tribe in 1880, had AK-47s and RPGs—and many more toys besides. They also had a fertile population—rather annoyed, as you would be, to have been driven off the land.

The Israelis can count on support from the world’s largest economy, and can also utilise the most advanced military kit—although they have never had it all their own way (Nixon, for example, though generally supportive, would nix bits and pieces), and so they have had to steal various “items” from the Europeans through espionage (why it helps to keep men like Prince Andrew in whores, you never know when a contact will come in handy). The Palestinians, for their part, are poor and not particularly bright—yet they have the ummah, one billion Muslims, and they have rich Muslims with oil. Moreover, unlike the West, they have Islam. Now, many Muslims are as secular as any Westerner you could meet (“We just want to integrate,” the harried Syrian PhD student tells me—oh, what your daughter will see when fully integrated, my girl). Yet, generally, the Muslims have quite high coherence and clarity as regards what Islam is and the fact they are Muslims.

This is important because the most vital “X” factor in war is spirit, the will to fight—and the Muslims still have it in spades; they know who they are and where they are going. The West, meanwhile, wants to worship blacks, women, sexual perverts, and Jews—anyone who is like a victim; and so it has a rather low fighting spirit—indeed, the people who will do the fighting, white men, are demonised as “evil” and effectively constitute the real “enemy within” for the system.

Zionists are bit more sturdy than that, but not by much—a point we will return to. Anyway, the point is that the Palestinians are unlike an Inuit in Canada who has been utterly defeated—lost not only his land but also his spirit and so been reduced to an alcoholic state-dependent who is occasionally patronised for good boi points by progressive liberals. Palestinians are Muslims; and, per the Koran, the Muslims have been at war with Jewish tribes since the beginning. So, in short, the Palestinians have enough punch, just enough resources, and enough spirit to keep on fighting—even though the Jews are smarter than them and have the techno-economic colossus and its military might on their side.

As any man knows, when someone barges in and takes your land you do not just say: “Fair play. Let’s just work together to build the economy, let’s have a chat over coffee.” This is not Quincy, M.E.—and, in fact, the person who barged in and took your land is not just anyone, he is “the old enemy” of the holy book. “Well, let’s just forget all that and be friends.” Won’t you tell me how to get, how to get to Sesame Street (a production of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation—what is it with Canadians?). No, if you have enough resources and spirit to keep going the fight goes on, quite apart from the fact that “the reservations” you are on are pretty grim. The other alternative, the one the Inuits should have taken, is to kill yourself—if you have no realistic chance in the fight, it would be better to jump off a cliff than condemn your descendants to a life as alcoholic state-dependent fodder for “guilt tourists” and/or life as a casino huckster (although the people who own “native casinos” are all whites or Jews who pretend to be natives—the natives are still “on the reservation”).

So the Palestinians fight—and the ummah fights with them. They have known the Jews, as they say, “from time immemorial”—the quarrels have changed, been over different questions, and abated somewhat at times; and yet the difference has always been there—the difference in blood, the difference in spiritual identify. Only a progressive liberal—a post-modernist, perhaps—would dismiss all this and say: “Let’s all have a chat, the important thing is that we can all enjoy a Starbucks and a good career—after all, isn’t that what life is ultimately about?” “My friend, my friend: life is about blood, soil, spirit—and honour; and, above all, the Koran. You in the West supply the Jews with arms to kill our children, so we will kill your children in Paris. We will murder your whores in their clubs—so they can join shaytan. Yes, it is shaytan’s music—made by the Jews. Your television, your films—made by the Jews. That’s why your daughters are whores—because you worship the Jews. Jesus was a prophet, so says the Koran; now you do not even worship him—you just worship the Jews. Shaytan.” “How are you boys getting along, getting to know each other yet—anyone for a cinnamon bun?”

So the fight is hard because there is still something to play for, so long as a man thinks he has a chance he will keep fighting; and in the current environment, though it would be easy, the Israelis are not going to exterminate the Palestinians—no final solution here, so the death by a thousand cuts will continue. At the same time, people are complicated—they all walk together in the Old City, although outside the Old City there is a divide like static electricity between the Palestinian side of the street and the Israeli side of the street; and with good reason—you do not just mix in willy-nilly unless you want to start an incident, one moment you knock an Orthodox’s big black wide-brimmed hat off by accident and the next there is an “international incident” on CNN as the mob wades in. On the other hand, people do interact across the divide too—it is just they know who they are and what is ultimately at play. Of course, perhaps they could be more peaceful if they abandoned their religion, their tribes, their race, their land—imagine no countries, it’s easy if you try...

Thanks for that, John—lovely sentiment. As it happens, the Zionist project has a certain fatal flaw. The Zionists, as with any nationalists, wanted to get back to nature—and the Jews were the people most divorced from nature in the world. Their religion had explicitly told them to study the book and abandon the farms. Jesus tried to dissuade them from this course, but many did not heed him. In consequence, what was produced was the intellectual bookish ghetto Jew; and this Jew, strictly religious, was what the Zionists wanted to do away with. They wanted what most nationalists want: strong, tanned men who fork hay off a cart while they sing folk songs in the sunshine of their native land—and at lunch their wives and daughters, dressed in the national costume, will bring them lunch from their gardens in baskets covered with gingham etc…Just livin’ the trad wife dream.

As such, the men who created Zionism were very secular—very much 19th-century men; and the religious Jew was their enemy; for not only was he unmanly and weak, he also had religious convictions that said that a “Jewish state” was against G-d’s commandments—now was not the time.

So Israel was originally a nationalist and socialist state (yes, I know—we all know). Over time, by the 1980s, the socialism reduced significantly—all the early idealised kibbutzes with their socialised childcare proved to be unnatural. Israel still has a very healthy bureaucracy, yet it has retreated somewhat from socialism—or from romantic agricultural commune socialism. However, Israel’s secular population—her Zionist backbone—suffers from the same problems all modern populations suffer from: low birthrates, out-marriage—demographic extinction. Israel has a stellar birthrate, except the stellar birthrate—the eight children per woman—exists…among the most Orthodox Jews, the very people who are the least Zionist. I have watched these people through a crack in the door as they study, study, study…they are almost as bad as me with posts to this website. What they are not is the Zionist ideal: strong-limbed healthy men rooted to the land who sing folk songs in the hay with a rifle by their side.

This is a real problem for the Israelis, especially as back in America—the other centre for global Jewry—the most secularised Jews have lost nationalist zeal just as young people across the West have lost their ethnocentric outlook. They are also tainted with luxury and progressive views—perhaps even try to boycott Israel. So the Zionist project faces a problem; now, perhaps it will sufficiently tie everything together with those more orthodox strands in Judaism that can tolerate Zionism to an extent—and ride on their birthrates; then again, perhaps not.

There is a well-known commentator, David P. Goldman (“Spengler”), who likes to crow about the decline in European birthrates and yet retails himself as interested in a reconciliation between Catholicism and Judaism; yet if he cared so much for Christianity, he would convert—yet he remains a Jew, with contemporary progressive Europe characterised as “pagan” in his worldview (though it is not pagan at all, it is post-Christian). Yet he is too busy in his celebration of Europe’s demise to note that his own project is also sick, also against nature.

The Christian would respond that Jesus offered the Jews a way back to nature, and they refused it—and then suffered dispossession and persecution as an unnatural people dedicated to their scholarly religious pursuits in the diaspora. The Zionists tried to go back to nature through European romantic nationalism and socialism—yet they have also failed, they are also infected with progressivism; they cannot reproduce—only the most orthodox reproduce; and their views direct Jews away from Zionism…

III.

So we have a clear idea as to “why they fight”; it is not because they never talk—they talk, and have talked down the generations. The land remains at stake—the injunctions of the fathers remain at stake, the difference in blood remains at stake; anyone who says either side should “just talk” wants the Jews and the Muslims to convert to progressivism—to another religion, a secular anti-religion. They fight because they know each, not because they have never met each other—and the only people who get on because they “know each other” are progressives who recognise another progressive, albeit dressed in a headscarf or a yarmulke.

So what do you think? I think Europe’s only interest in the region is in its oil, the areas of land that are strategic waypoints, and, since the West remains residually Christian, in access to the Holy Land for Christians. Otherwise, we have no interest in support for either group—when we support Israel, the Muslim world rises against us and yet we must respond tepidly because to respond as the West, to respond as the Muslims meet us, would foreground Jewish influence in our midst because historic Western identity has always included a profound scepticism, if not downright hostility, towards the Jews; hence we can never meet the Islamic challenge effectively. The Muslims are not our friends and are historically hostile to the West—remember the centuries of wars all too well; and so they have to be met with strength.

You cannot be a Christian and support Israel. It would be too strong to say that Israel persecutes Christians in the sense the word usually conjures up; however, Christians are not allowed to really proselytise there, to practice their religion. If you are Christian, the Holy Land should be Christian; it should not be Jewish, religious Jews regard Jesus as a false prophet and have had some very choice things to say about him. Secular Jews, Zionists, may not follow this strict religious anti-Christian ethos, but they understand that the Christians are their historic enemies qua Jews; and so they have little time for Christianity, except insofar as they can manipulate it through contrived appeals to “the Judeo-Christian legacy”—and insofar as the Christian legacy is the West, Zionists are anti-Western.

The Judeo-Christian notion is an inversion; it puts the Jews, those who called for Christ’s crucifixion, before Christ—it establishes a clear hierarchy, an anti-Christian hierarchy; and that means, implicitly, an anti-Western hierarchy. Israel causes us only trouble—and weakens our position vis-à-vis our Islamic foes; and, further, Israel itself is anti-Western in her implicit stance.

When I was a student, I met a Syrian PhD student; he had come to do a “real” PhD in the West—not a fake Arab PhD, even faker than a Western PhD I am sorry to say. “The Jews run your media,” he said to me at a party. I was young and felt embarrassed for him—he was going to get in trouble if he went round and said that, said what Arabs say as common sense.

For a time, I thought like Quincy—you know, it was just some prejudice he picked up in Syria, all the media brainwashed him into such a horrid view; it was his family, the hostilities—it was all superstition, religious fanaticism (although he was already infected with progressivism); hopefully, he would learn the truth before he messed up his academic career here. Then, of course, I began to wonder, “What if it’s not that what he says that is untrue, what if it is too true to be said?…”. At first, the mind bats it away, “evil”—to put it correctly, it was too real to be permitted…the implications…one logical point leads to another, so cleanly; it was only ever repression…Who are the real freethinkers? Do you have your Enlightenment values in check? What did Voltaire say about the Jews, anyway? What was Jack Klugman, our Quincy—our hero?.