An Awakening…or Just Terror?
Latest update: March 7th, 2013
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An entire block in Damascus destroyed by Syrian Army shelling.
Over the years I have urged readers to look behind the news. Now, amid relentless socio-political eruption and upheaval taking place across the Middle East and North Africa, there has still been too little serious effort to look for any underlying meanings and explanations. To some extent, perhaps, the reasons for this laxity have to do with an apparent sense of obviousness. On the surface, after all, much of the violence is entirely predictable, having been spawned by the traditionally visible array of Islamist fears andjihadist goals.
In essence, cascading and intersecting crises of religion, war, and terror in volatile sectors of the Islamic world represent distinctly primal kinds of social behavior. Such behavior, moreover, is the inevitable result of both compelling private needs, and ecstatic collective expectations.
Sometimes, even more than their typically overriding need to avoid death, human beings want to belong. This often desperate need can be manifested harmlessly, as in sports hysteria or rock concerts, or more perniciously, as in rioting, war, and terrorism. In all cases, however, the critically underlying motivations are pretty much the same.
Back in classical Greece, Aristotle had already proclaimed that “Man is a social animal.” Now, we readily understand that even the “normal” individual often feels empty and insignificant apart from his or her membership in the “mass,” the “crowd,” or the “herd.” Often, that herd is the state. Sometimes it is the tribe. Sometimes it is the faith (always, the “one true faith”). Sometimes it is the liberation movement, or, in a plainly kindred relationship, the revolution.
Whatever the particular demanding collectivity of the moment, it is the persistent craving for membership that hastens to bring forth a catastrophic downfall of individual responsibility, and, as corollary, a corrosive triumph of collective will. Today, unless millions of our fellow humans in parts of the Middle East and North Africa can learn to temper their overwhelming desire to belong, the prevailing military and political schemes to control regional violence, war, and terrorism will inevitably fail.
To best understand what is going on here analysts must first learn to locate pre-political causes. These “molecular” explanations stem from the celebrated fusion of susceptible individuals into popular crowd-centered collectives. Not every mass or crowdor tribe or herd is pernicious, of course, but war and terrorism can never take place in the absence of consuming collective identifications.
Whenever individuals crowd together and form a herd, the murderous dynamics of the mob may be released, thus lowering each person’s moral and intellectual level to a point where absolutely anything, even mass killing, can be accepted.
Publicly, current Arab/Islamic rioting, war and terror are fueled by certain effectively incontestable presumptions of Divine Will. In reality, of course, the net result of homicide bombings, chaotic riots, and mass denunciations must always be to drown out any residual hint of sacredness or godliness. Once empathy and compassion outside the Islamist herd go intentionally unrewarded, they become extraneous, and as virtues completely beside the point.
In the presumed name of divinity, Arab/Islamist war, terror, and the murder of “others” impose upon the wider world neither salvation nor holiness but groupthink. Reciprocally, and expectedly, the hideously intolerant rhythms of such a suffocating ethos make it increasingly futile to advance any meaningful efforts at coexistence. This futility is especially troubling in Israel, where assorted promises of a peaceful “two-State solution” are resoundingly unpersuasive.
To mount now urgent investigations of an already widening Arab/Islamic jihad against Israel and the United States, our scholars and policy makers should begin to look more closely at human meaning. Before we can prevent further expanding violence against innocents, certain Arab/Islamic states and terrorist groups will have to be shorn of their capacity to bestow significance upon complicit individuals. To affect those individuals who now turn ritually to rioting, war, terror, and killing for affirmations of importance, we will first have to identify more benign and similarly appealing sources of belonging.
An underlying cause of present Islamist violence in Libya, Egypt, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Sudan and elsewhere in the region is the enduring incapacity of individuals to draw authentic meaning from within themselves. In the Middle East and North Africa, at least among large swaths of enthusiastic Islamists, true redemption still requires Muslims to present tangible proof of “membership.”
The stubbornly cumulative violence that we face in the Middle East and North Africa is a problem of displaced human centeredness. Ever anxious about drawing meaning from their own inwardness, large numbers of Islamist adherents draw closer and closer to the faith-based tribe. In too many cases, this collective voice spawns hatreds and excesses that may make even genocidal forms of mass killing appear thoroughly desirable. Fostering a visceral refrain of “us” versus “them,” it may eventually prevent each affected person from becoming fully human.
This prevention is accomplished by encouraging motivated adherents to inflict mortal harms upon selected “outsiders” and then by subsequently celebrating such egregious harms as a proper expression of religious “sacrifice.”
Every person contains the possibility of becoming more fully human, an empathetic possibility that could reduce potentially destructive loyalties to any manifestations of groupthink. It is only by nurturing this indispensable possibility that we can seriously seek promising remedies to our current difficulties. Our immediate task must be to encourage certain amenable masses in the Arab/Islamic world to discover the way back to themselves, as genuinely feeling and caringindividuals and as members of an entire species that would seek only a graciously universal, or non-discriminatory, redemption.
This sort of redemption would depict an infinite circle of membership, an inclusive geometry in which the whole could become more than the sum of its parts, into which everyone could “fit,” and from which no one could be denied entry.
The core challenge we face in Middle East and North African “awakenings” is not one of securing criminal justice for the terrorist killers (“we will find and punish those responsible…” – always a silly refrain) but rather of acquiring a better cultural understanding of our pertinent foes.
tell a friendAbout the Author: Louis René Beres, strategic and military affairs columnist for The Jewish Press, is professor of Political Science at Purdue University. Educated at Princeton (Ph.D., 1971), he lectures and publishes widely on international relations and international law and is the author of ten major books in the field. In Israel, Professor Beres was chair of Project Daniel.
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I have resigned from the metuchen edison clegy association. I AM A PAST PRESIDENT. Rabbi Dr. Bernhard Rosenberg
HATIKVAH has been included in every service since I created interfaith holocaust services in 1974 with no objection. N0 ONE HAS EVER WALKED out, sat down OR OBJECTED until recently. With Israel and Jews being attacked throughout the world, I PERSONALLY will and have fought to keep it in. We are living in a world where anti-SEMITISM is rampant especially in Europe where JEWS ARE FLEEING IN MASS to Israel and other countries. Everyone is entitled to their OWN opinion , I stand by mine. Another Holocaust is on the horizon. A nuclear extremist muslim regime would like nothing better than the complete destruction of Israel and if you listen to Morsi all Jews should perish.
I will be the keynote speaker at another Holocaust event that evening. I refuse to compromise my beliefs or allow the Hatikvah to be disgraced. I am taking my highway to what I believe in. Rabbi DR. BERNHARD ROSENBERG
THERE MAY BE A PROTEST AGAINST THE IMAM BEING ORGANIZED BY THOSE WHO ARE EXTREMELY ANGRY AT WHAT IS HAPPENING. GREAT PUBLICITY for THE TOWNSHIP OF EDISON N.J.. AND THE J.C.C. I am neither organizing it or will participate as I will be speaking at another synagogue. RABBI ROSENBERG
If you believe a Imam should not be invited to a holocaust program where he will walk out before Hatikvah speak out.
http://www.aish.com/j/as/The_History_of_Hatikvah.html
As it states,
• The British Mandate government briefly banned its performance in 1919 due to Arab anti-Zionist political activity.
• In 1944, Czech Jews spontaneously sang it at the entry to the Auschwitz-Birkenau gas chamber and, as reported by a member of the Sonderkommando, were beaten by SS guards.
The link is clear, the Arabs were against Hatikvah before there was Israel or even before the myth of Palestinian people. Furthermore, Jews sang it while being led to their death. How dare anyone allow individuals to leave in protest during Hatikvah with the canard they are commemorating the Holocaust but against the State of Israel. Just keep quoting Dr Martin Luther King, Jr “When people criticize Zionists, they mean Jews. You're talking anti-Semitism.” RABBI DR. BERNHARD ROSENBERG