An Epistemological Crisis:
The Fear of Knowing what we Know
To refuse to tell the truth when you know what the
truth is
constitutes bad journalistic practice, to my mind. But it is also
deluding and utterly gutless.[i]
constitutes bad journalistic practice, to my mind. But it is also
deluding and utterly gutless.[i]
[Dr. Mads] Gilbert, a Norwegian anesthesiologist is a
representative of the Norwegian Aid
Committee (NORWAC), an NGO that has purportedly worked with
Hezbollah-affiliated groups. He politicizes his humanitarian work to the extent
of legitimizing terror attacks, including a defense of 9/11. In regards to the
2009 Gaza War, Gilbert stated[in The
Lancet} there was “clear evidence”
that the IDF was using Dense Inert Metal Explosives (DIME)munitions. In another
interview, he admitted that he had no proof concerning his earlier convictions.[ii]
An epistemological crisis is a failure in
knowing how to recognize, accept and act on what plain everyday experience,
common sense, logic and institutionalized wisdom around us tell us what is true
and real in the world. This is not a matter
of simple error, naiveté, disingenuous pretence, or pure malice, that is,
evil. There is, no doubt, an element of
mendaciousness and bigotry operative in some of the reporters, editors,
intellectuals, academics and ordinary folk who gather on street corners to
affirm their identity with a hate-filled terrorist group like Hamas (first
cousin to ISIS and Al-Qaida and son of the Muslim Brotherhood), so that for
reasons of total insanity, political gain, or economic advantage—or maybe to
please or tease their girl or boy friends, work-mates, and other pals or
comrades, they lie through their teeth.
This is, as I have been arguing, something different from the
propagandistic ploys marshalled by Hamas agents and their associates or
allies. What is at issue in these essays
on Job’s Dung Heap is why intellectuals and the so-called chattering classes in
Western Europe, North America and even in Israel itself act and speak as though
Israel were the most vicious, dangerous and wicked state in the universe.
The epistemological crisis occurs when, for
some reason or another, for large groups of people, usually without their
realizing what is happening to them, their sense of reality no longer fits what
they experience, the language they use to express their concepts and feelings
breaks down and so what they say, think and recollect as assurance of their
sanity and reason is inadequate and they have a vague uncomfortable sense of
something wrong, a discomfort they fill with denial, blame, rage or grief. It does not happen consistently, coherently,
gradually, but in fits and starts, usually prompted by some external event,
some natural disaster, political collapse, military action: not everywhere, but
in some places more than others, or just off on the side, virtually out of
view; not everywhere, not all the time, but often enough to be exasperating,
worrying, frustrating. What we expected
to see is not there; what we wanted to hear does not sound right; how we
thought we would react has become something else. But otherwise we feel fine. Every day, ordinary things happen as they
always have—or maybe not.
Back on the Dung Heap of History
The
British newspaper The Guardian
rejected an advertorial piece
penned by famed Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, JNS.org has
learned. In the ad, Dershowitz refutes statements by many media outlets that
all of the Gaza Strip is densely populated, a claim that has been used to
justify the use of human shields by Hamas in the terrorist group’s recent
conflict with Israel.[iii]
penned by famed Harvard Law School professor Alan Dershowitz, JNS.org has
learned. In the ad, Dershowitz refutes statements by many media outlets that
all of the Gaza Strip is densely populated, a claim that has been used to
justify the use of human shields by Hamas in the terrorist group’s recent
conflict with Israel.[iii]
It isn’t merely that respected newspapers like The Guardian in the UK or The New York Times in the USA or
important news networks like the BBC or CNN have become piles of excrement in
regard to the Gaza Crisis but that they don’t realize or own up to their
biases, and seem unaware of how they repeat (or re-actualize) the smut, the
scandals and the hate propaganda of earlier Judeophobic events in the last
century and a half. They think they are tolerant, liberal and compassionate
people. They believe they are on the
right side of history. If you tell them
they are anti-Semites, they become rabidly defensive: they throw back the
charges in your face, claiming Zionists are Nazis, Jews are bigots, and Judaism
is a religion of child-murder. These
so-called defenders of human rights look like they still live in the world of
their past ideals, but they have dropped off the planet and are now floating in
a great heap of emptiness and irrationality.
How
Does It Happen?
I am a Jew because the
faith of Israel demands no abdication of my mind.[iv]
I wrote early on in this essay that the
processes by which susceptible minds are transformed from sane and rational
into strange deformed creatures without commonsense or logical means of knowing
are psychological events; and then added in this section of the piece that it
takes an epistemological crisis to trigger off the lapse.
There is the power of suggestion, that is, of
providing versions of competing texts—anti-texts, un-texts and non-texts—by the
persuasive power of rhetoric and image technology; this special kind of enargeia overwhelms the normal cognitive
and affective faculties of the mind and sets off fantastical illusions and
delusions. What Aby Warburg called Pathoformelen, emotionally-loaded
imagery embodying traumatic memories pass through the filters of rhetorical
excess, illogical picture-creating lenses, allusions that short-circuit
historical connections and other techniques.
Then, by means of a trance-inducing contagion
of hysterical anxiety, fear and confusion, the mind of individuals begin to
imitate repeated non-texts, and each repetition and submission of other minds
generates shared hallucinations. For
example, a supposed photograph of a school or home in Gaza that originally
showed dead Hamas ighters, weapons, rockets, booby-trapped wires, entrances to
a tunnel and perhaps one or corpses of children forced to stay in the building
goes out into the world, carefully selected, photo-shopped, air-brush clean, so
as to only transmit images of bloodied, dismembered young boys and girls. The susceptible viewer—someone already
convinced that Jews are aggressor and baby-sacrificers and Palestinians all
passive innocent civilians—receives the picture and responds with a mixture of
sympathy for the victims, rage at the aggressor, and increased expectation of
further “war crimes” by the IDF.
The Nachleben
(another term from Warburg meaning “after-life”) takes the images through
repeated showings in different media, embeds the pictures into existing
memories of similar grotesque visualizations, and enhances the mind’s
misperception of the sentimental qualities, divorced from history, present
contexts of motivation and consequences, and thus again increases expectations
and distorting feelings of moral outrage.
These topoi
(conventionalized constructs of people, places, actions and ideas) of Jewish
evil cannot be changed by rational argument, nor even by demonstrations of what
actually happened; so that no matter how many times foreign reporters, once
freed from the intimidation and threats within Hamas-ruled Gaza, speak freely
of what they saw or offer video clips of the realty they were able to smuggle
into Europe, the brainwashed viewers deny the existence of these less excited
scenes.[v]
[i] Ron Liddle, “Who's responsible for these anti-Semitic attacks? Give me one
guess” The Spectator (16 August 2014)
online at http://www.spectator.co.uk/columnists/rod-liddle/9286532/its-ok-to-mention-anti-semitic-attacks-but-not-who-commits-them/
[ii] Eliana Trink, “Exploiting medicine for the politics of hate (August 14, 2014) first
written for JNS.org and filed under “Israel, Opinion, World” online at http://www.jns.org/latest-articles/2014/8/14/exploiting-medicine-for-the-politics-of-hate.
[iii] Alina Dain Sharon, “Britain’s The Guardian
Blocks Dershowitz Ad on Hamas Tactics” Jerusalem Post reprinted by The
Algemeiner (16 August 2014) online at http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/08/16/britains-the-guardian-blocks-dershowitz-ad-on-hamas-tactics/
[iv] Edmond Fleg, Why I Am A Jew,
trans. Louise Waterman Wise (New York: Block Publishing, 1933) p. 94.
[v] More detailed discussion of the principles laid out here as a mere
sketch will be given in the later sections of this essay.
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