Why Children Kill Children
This Christian
syndrome of displaced aggressiveness, which took the form of
Christian-transferred violence in the dar al-Islam, has travelled all
through history and still appears today. It can be seen, for instance, in
numerous ritual murder accusations that Christian dhimmis brought
against Jews. These accusations proliferated in the nineteenth century when
uprisings by Orthodox Christians and Western military supremacy exacerbated
Muslim anti-Christian fanaticism.[1]
Four
members of the Fogel family of Itamar, a Jewish settlement, in the Land of
Israel in early 2011 were murdered in what seems to have been a random act of
thrill-killing by a small group of Palestinian teenagers without any political
agenda, other than what they call “revenge”, egged on by older relatives.
However, their actions recapitulate the pattern of a traditional, ritualized
performance, similar to pogroms in Eastern Europe during the late nineteenth
century—and even more grotesquely, purgative village or folk rites among the
Balkan peoples. At first glance the newspaper reports do not reveal the
ritualized nature of this horrendous act nor do they justify reading into them
a consciously planned parody of archaic Near or Middle Eastern festivals of
blood and revenge, the kinds recorded in ancient or classical literatures. But
looked at more closely, the archetypal nature of the murders begins to emerge,
and therefore I want to synthesize these news stories in such a way as to make
the bizarre scenario evident. Then I will show how this contemporary instance
swerves from the normative script of these older generic events, and yet even
then signals something which is neither the expected format of a pogrom or folk
play nor the satiric or comic manipulation of those literary topoi to
expose the absurdity or hypocrisy of anti-Semitism.
Because Palestinian children have for
the past several decades been subjected to sustained political propaganda about
the inhuman Jews and non-human Israelis — Jews as pigs and monkeys, poisoners
of children, blood-suckers; Israelis as Nazi storm troopers and murderers. The
children have been encouraged to dress-up as martyrs and suicide bombers, to
celebrate the blowing up of Jewish children in pizza parlours and buses, and to
dedicate their lives to the destruction of Israel, it is difficult for normal
individuals to differentiate between the games they play and the reality of the
world around them. This is particularly true when that reality includes
political instability, domestic tensions, pressure from parents, older siblings
and other relatives to participate in the intifada by throwing stones in the
street and taunting IDF soldiers, and thus to live within a symbolic universe
of hate.
This deviation both from the archaic
patterns of ritualized violence and the cynical manipulation of infantile
aggression suggests that prevention of further acts of violence like this in
Israel or against Jews anywhere in the world needs to be treated as more than a
manifestation of criminal rage. As Bat Ye’or says, “The Arab-Israeli conflict
released a latent hatred, formerly held in check by the Western colonial
administration.”[2]
Rather than exhausting itself in the days of open warfare, this hatred gathered
around it a new cloak of legitimacy as anti-colonialism and anti-Zionism, more
and more openly, but at the same time it also became occluded, a deep ditch of
unconsciousness where it festers as something more elemental, something that we
shall see is neither political nor religious, nor is it even specific to the
Middle East or Eastern Europe: a force that manifests in the most primitive of
archaic images—a festival of blood.
According to various news sources, one
evening two Palestinian youths from a nearby village entered the settler
compound[3]
where the Fogel family lived, passed unnoticed through several security fences
and gates. The young perpetrators waited until darkness fell and most communal activities
had quietened down. They then knocked on the door of the Fogel family house,
forced their way in, and began to stab the children they saw, as well as
killing the father who was in bed with his youngest son; and then, overlooking
a daughter asleep on the couch, the adolescents departed. They returned to their village, where several
older relatives and friends helped them dispose of their knives, burnt their
blood-stained clothing, and fabricated an alibi for them should Israeli police
or soldiers inquire about the murder.
The details emerge as part of a
patterned scenario rather than as random events. First, in this horrible affair, there were
only two teen-agers involved in the actual slaying, but a small group of adults
who providing aid and protection. Second, the murders were carried out with
forethought and deliberate planning, at least in a general way, that yet shows
both carelessness in missing some of the children in the house while the action
was being performed; and significantly the repeated stabbing of each victim
indicates an intention to do more than merely kill—there is a mixture of
enthusiastic or even frenzied rage and cold-blooded, formulaic revenge for the
supposed wrongs of the mythical “occupation” of Palestinian lands. According to the left-leaning Israeli
newspaper Ha’aretz, the family of the
youths who performed this outrage of multiple murder lauded their actions and
saw them as heroes:[4]
Palestinian television aired an interview
with the relatives of the Fogel family murderers earlier this month, praising
the two cousins convicted with the brutal attack as "heroes." The
broadcast was aired as part of a weekly show on the Palestinian state-run
station called "For You," which focuses on Palestinian prisoners
incarcerated in Israel. The show featured the aunt and mother of Hakim Awad,
who along with his cousin Amjad was convicted of brutally stabbing to death
five Fogel family members in an attack on their home in the West Bank
settlement of Itamar on the night of March 11, 2011. Hakim Awad's mother sent
her regards to her son, proudly describing him as the perpetrator of the Itamar
attack and that he was sentenced to 5 consecutive life sentences. Awad's aunt
then proceeded to describe her nephew as a "hero and a legend."[5]
This
new rationalization of the murder of whole Jewish families and groups of
children forms a recent extension of a programme of ritualized butchery going
deep into the terrorist war against Israel waged by self-styled Palestinian
freedom-fighters, nationalists, and religious fanatics. It is not just that
since the 1890s there has been a shift from anti-Semitism based on religion and
then race to anti-Zionism based on race and post-colonial fanaticism,[6] hardly gradual, but accelerated in some
periods more than others, such as the massive Nazi campaign to gain the support
of Arabs for their military entrance into the Middle East,[7] that provides some of the key background to
the murder of the Fogel family. But politics, ideology and racial myths hardly
explain the virulence of the attacks or their focus on women and children. By
targeting parents, young children and even infants, these attacks serve no
strategic or military purposes and thus fall into the category of terrorism—or
do they? Whatever the fashionable rationale meant to garner support from
liberal, leftwing, politically-correct western audiences, the generic
performance rather fits within the paradigms of archaic and/or psychotic
behaviour. This is particularly true of those acts against the youngest and the
most vulnerable of the victims, including, as we will see in the case of the
inverted blood libel in Bulgaria near the end of the nineteenth century,
wherein Jewish child corpses were dug up from graves and mutilated. When such
bloody events occur without rhyme or reason, whether political or ideological,
it means that rational analysis and tactical strategies of prevention cannot be
based on intellectual grounds. either
to argue away or even bribe the likely perpetrators, to convince them of the erroneous
or miscalculated goal or deflect their anger to less lethal targets.
To understand this kind of completely
irrational blood-lust which does not even distinguish between military and
civilian targets or between adults who may be held accountable for their
political or social choices and children who have not reached maturity of
understanding of anything going around them or carried out in their name, we
have to address matters normally restricted to psychoanalysis, anthropology and
folklore. This means moving away from the so-called rational fallacy of
history, wherein events take place because they are willed to or are the result
of institutional and legal structures developed by governments and agencies. To
cite Bat Ye’or again,
It
is not generally known that Syro-Palestinian Christianity nurtured the most
virulent Judeophobic sources, whose poisonous manifestations shocked both
consuls and travellers up to the end of the nineteenth century. Anti-Jewish
hatred was unleashed in Syria-Palestine by frequent accusations of alleged
ritual crimes and the murder of Jews The diverse religious orders and the
crowds of Christian pilgrims, particularly at Easter, exacerbated latent mass
fanaticism,[8]
It
is thus not something intrinsic to the core values of Christianity or Islam
that bubbles away in the unconscious of most peoples but something that is
allowed to inhabit the darkest underground places of these religions, in spite
of their own conscious teachings to the contrary, concerned with the love and
harmony. The doctrines and principles do not trigger the emergence of
the latent blood-lust; the ideas and the laws in those religions cannot control
the rage when it is let loose, and at times, thanks to the imagery and the
liturgical patterns of worship, provides it with a rationalization and a
theological significance. José Faur, as we shall show later in this essay,
argues that blood lust does not derive from a religious conflict of interests
but rather from a difference in how the mind perceives the world, reaches
rational decisions, and institutionalizes its concepts of law and justice. The
fury that breaks out into festivals of blood articulates in word, image and
action a grotesque inversion, reversal and distortion of the Jewish mentality.
At its most superficial and obvious, the process can be seen in the way
Palestinians claim to be the new Jews and the Israelis the Nazi persecutors
bent on genocide. Bat Ye’or describes the absurd twists of political logic and
narrative history:
The
following Palestinian phase after 1967 consists of a search for identity,
formed in opposition to Israel but modelled on Jewish identity. This imitation
comes from a Christian source, since Christians, not Muslims, knew the Bible
well. Through Christian mediation, biblical history, appropriated from the
Israelis, was transferred to the Palestinians.[9]
As
Christianity once did, and in many instances still does, claim to be Verus
Israel, True Israel,[10]
so Palestinians don the mask of Muslim national identity in face-to-face opposition
to Western Christendom: what is mirrored, however, is not a superficial image
of appearances, but a projection of the latent fanatical urge to replace by
becoming the people who threaten most profoundly the elusive identity of the
abused and neglected self.[11]
To try to explain such matters in terms of political events or historical
circumstances cannot be sustained for very long; sooner or later, one comes to
realize this optics of self-delusion and moral mimicry belongs to a different
kind of optics. One way to put it, as Bat Ye’or does, goes like this:
This
type of reasoning...illustrates the perverted mentality of the dhimmi, who
refuses to denounce his real oppressor and substitutes another. This propaganda
imposed the taboos of disinformation...[12]
A
better way, however, would come from the field of aesthetics and from
photography or cinematography. Paul Klee, for example, wrote in 1923:
The
artist of today is more than an improved camera, he is more complex, richer and
wider. He is a creature on the earth and a creature within the whole, that is,
a creature on a star among stars...
The
object grows beyond its appearance through our knowledge of its inner nature.
It grows by the knowledge that a thing is more than its outward appearance
suggests. Man dissects the thing and the plane sections demonstrated the inner
structure of it, whereby the character of the object is built up by the number
and kind of the required sections. This is visual penetration, partly by means
of the simple, sharp knife, party with the help of more delicate instruments
that can reveal the material structure or material function to us...[13]
The
visual penetration here goes beyond x-rays, as much as it sees further and in
different ways than microscopes or telescopes: into a dynamic re-ordering of
the constituent parts, a creative re-creation of the world as both inner and
outer simultaneously. It almost reaches its pinnacle of theoretical
experimentation in Ludwig Hirschfeld-Mach’s discussions of Reflected Light
Compositions, a radical innovation based on early films seen in 1912, when
he says that “by studying the representational means of the cinema,” the
aesthetic theoretician of painting gains
...the
power of the abrupt changes from sudden to slow motion, of a multitude of light
in a darkened room, the transformation of the light from the brightest white to
the darkest black...light in motion, arranged in a rhythm based on time
sequences...[14]
Speaking
also of “music accompanying the film,” Hirschfeld-Mach continues,
...the
time sequences of a movement can be understood more easily and accurately by an
acoustic than by a visual arrangement...
And
so on, with the significance of this addition of time sequences, rhythmical
plays of light and colour, the sense of colour as a manifestation of form—all
this points towards a way of studying the historical moments of the past as
instants, that is, as action in the process of coming into and going out of
focus. In effect, through lamps, templates and a variety of other technological
means, what is set forth here is a midrashic exercise in the explosive
confrontation of the questioning mind with a fixed text, its disassembly and
scattering, and then its reconstruction and enhancement through greater insight
and understanding.. The effect should
be not only enlightening, but morally probative, offering a model for
corrective and eventually ameliorative actions to prevent further outbreaks of
anti-Semitic violence.
[2] Bat Ye’or, Islam
and Dhimmitude, p. 178.
[3] Settler in Israeli political
parlance has become a technical term to designate groups of ultra-religious and
nationalist individuals who choose to occupy land claimed by so-called
Palestinians, usually Muslim Arabs, outside the formal boundaries of the State
of Israel. They settle on the grounds of divine mandate to occupy the whole of
the Land of Israel promised to them in biblical times by God. To them, it is
the Arabs who have usurped this territory and have been living there for a
relatively short time, and thus have little or no legitimate right to the
fields and villages they occupy.
[4]
What
distinguishes this performance from any number of suicide murderers in the
United States, France and Germany in recent years are (1) the collusion between
instigating adults and receptive and obedient youths; (2) the deliberate
targeting of certain individuals, in this case Jews, rather than groups of
victims assembled in public spaces, such as
schools, shopping malls or schools. I
have written a series of brief essays on this topic during 2012, beginning with
“How to Play the Game of Blood Justice” Family Security Matters (28
March 2012) online at
http://familysecuritymatters.org/publicationsid.11683,css.print/ pub_detail.asp
through “The Dawning of a Blood-Red Day: Violence and Heroism in Colorado” Family Security Matters (27 July 2012) http://www.familysecuritymatters. org/publications/detail/the-dawning-of-a-blood-red-day-violence-and-heroism-in-colorado to “Who is
Responsible for Mass Killings and Mass Killers?” Family Security Matters (8
August 2012)http:www.familysecurity,matters. org/publications/detail/who-is-responsible-for-mass-killings-
[5] Benjamin, “Recognition and
Destruction: An Outline of Intersubjectivity” argues that “the psychoanalytic
process should be understood as occurring between subjects rather than within
the individual” and “[i]ntersubjectivity... is useful because it specifically
addresses the problem of defining the other as object... It refers to that zone
of experience or theory in which the other is not merely the object of the
ego’s need/drive or cognition/perception but has a separate and equivalent
center of self.” Particularly relevant for our study here is her comment,
following Winnicott: “The creation of a symbolic space within the infant-mother
relationship fosters the dimension of intersubjectivity, a concomitant of
mutual understanding. This [symbolic] space... is a function not only of the
child’s play alone in the presence of the mother but also of play between
mother and child, beginning with the earliest play of mutual gaze.”
[6] Bat Ye’or, Islam
and Dhimmitude, pp. 164-165. On the
involvement of the Jesuits in this shift and therefore of its connections to
the Dreyfus Affair, see also the views of Pierre-André Taguieff, cited by Bat
Ye’or , pp. 165ff). Further discussion
on these all important European backgrounds, see Cambridge Forecast Group Blog,
“Emile Zola’s Novel ‘The Debacle” as Background for Muslims and Jews in the
World System” (27 April 2008) online at http://cambridgeforecast. wordporess.com/2008/04.27/zolas-novel--the
debacle-as-back (seen 20/22/2011); and the companion discussion “Muslims and
Jews in the World System: The Example of Algeria (1830-1962)”
http://cambridgeforecast.wordporess.com/2008/04./26/muslims-and-jews-in-the-world
(seen 20/11/2011).
[7] See Curp’s long review essay on
Jeffrey Herf, Nazi Propaganda for the Arab World (“Review essay on H-Net
Reviews, H-German, November 2011). Curp
tends to view Herf as too essentialist in his view, questioning the Orientalist
views of those who fail to see the Realpolitik of local issues enraged
by the Anglo-American and Israeli colonialist mentality. But while the German
effort to engage with the Arab masses during the mid-1940s may have been
without real consequences, the ideological transformation—and the merging of
Arab nationalist and racism with Nazi theories—is all too real. This is
particularly evident in the so-called “Palestinzation” of political discourse
at all levels in the western media and in the deliberate distortions of history
in the propaganda among Arabs inside and along the borders of Israel. For the term Palestinization, see Phyllis Chesler, The New Anti-Semitism and What We mnust Do About it (Edison, NJ:
Jossey-Bass, 2003).
[10] On this sort of supercessionism,
see Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude, pp. 244,
310, 319,370, etc.
[11] Bashir Gemeyal remarked in this
regard: “Because we [Lebanese Christians] have mocked the world for forty
years, the world has mocked us. Because we have deceived the world for forty
years, the world in turn has deceived us” (cited in Bat Ye’or, Islam
and Dhimmitude, p. 252).
[13]
Paul Klee, “Ways of Nature
Study: from Staatliche Bauhaus Weimar, 1919-1923 in Hans Maria Wingler,
ed. Bauhaus, trans. Wolfgang Jaks and Basil Gilbert, ed., Joseph Stein
(Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press, 1969, 1980; org. 1962) p. 73.
[14] Ludwig Hitschfeld-Mach, “Reflected
Light Compositions” Reflextionische
Farbenliochtspiele (1925) in Wingler 1980: 83.
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