A Critical Look at Islam and Israel: Building a World of Love Out of the Ashes
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This is the third excerpt in a series. Click the links to catch up on Part One and Part Two. However, as this article is quite long and it’s the one I’m most proud of, this is where I suggest you start. If you’re squeamish, feel free to skip the 2nd paragraph, excluding this one.
Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s father, Hirsi Magan Isse, didn’t believe in female genital mutilation. In Ali’s homeland of Somalia, 98% of young girls undergo the ritual. In other more moderate coastal African countries including Egypt, this rite is performed for 91% percent of women. An elite dissident, Ali’s father was too dangerous to the newly installed government to live freely in his homeland. When he was jailed, the three-year-old Ali was left in the care of her grandmother. Since “Uncircumcised girls will be possessed by devils, fall into vice and perdition, and become whores,” the reasonable thing was done, her genitals were cut out.
The procedure goes as follows. “After the child’s clitoris and labia are carved out, scraped off, or, in more compassionate areas, merely cut or pricked, the whole area is often sewn up, so that a thick band of tissue forms a chastity belt made of the girl’s own scarred flesh. A small hole is carefully situated to permit a thin flow of pee…Many girls die during or after their excision, from infection.” This practice is beginning to make its way to America.
A few years later, Ali and her father later escaped to Saudi Arabia, before settling in Kenya. As a teenager, Ali embraced the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood. She decided to wear a hijab, a fairly radical sartorial choice in early 80s Africa. Still, Ali’s arranged marriage was enough motivation for her to begin to question her faith and seek asylum in the Netherlands in 1992 at the age of 23.
She quickly began to embrace Western society. After gaining awareness of the works of secular thinkers divorced from religion like Sigmund Freud, she could contemplate the luck of her situation in a free society. Her world was so isolated from the West, she had never heard of the Holocaust, but knew well the perceived evil of Zionism.
By the age of 33, she was a Member of the Dutch Parliament. During this time, she provided the voiceover for the short film Submission, depicting the punishments to women as described in the Quran, which pointedly warns the public about the widespread misguided attempts at literal interpretation of the religious text.
The filmmaker, Theo Van Gogh, was murdered. The attacker left a five-page death threat addressed to Ayaan pinned to Theo’s chest by a dagger. Even after living under a fatwa in hiding, she vocally opposed Islamic oppression of women across the globe, using her experience to expose horrors the West was largely ignorant of in her landmark memoir Infidel: My Life. Clearly, as someone who actively works to combat the oppression of women in Africa and the Middle East like herself, she should be a feminist icon.
Curiously, in some circles, the exact opposite has held true. The Brooklyn born Conservative Muslim Women’s March leading hipster prop of Bernie Sanders, The Muslim Brotherhood and the Democratic Party, Linda Sarsour, has attacked Ali relentlessly. I only found one critical liberal (i.e. mainstream) Op-Ed about Sarsour, in spite of the fact she advocates for Sharia law and shouted about the evils of Charlie Hebdo days after the attack, while supporting The Muslim Brotherhood and the theocratic terrorist party of her native Palestine Hamas, that was formed with the aid of the Muslim Brotherhood. Even in Brooklyn, her marriage was arranged. Though her sect only allows men to decide on the issues of abortion, she felt it perfectly reasonable to announce the Women’s March would have to exclude half the women in America who oppose abortion.
While Ayaan Hirsi Ali visits Bill Maher and Anderson Cooper from time to time, her message is largely ignored by the leftist majority of the mainstream media. Fox News rightly champions her expertise and heroism, but this only further marginalizes her voice in the culture, since liberals who dominate most if not all mainstream culture view Fox and even the never-Trump voices of the Wall Street Journal as sensationalist fake news. The left doesn’t have any use for Ayaan Hirsi Ali, because she contradicts the false Islam as religion of peace narrative. Linda Sarsour is to speak at the City University of New York commencement next month, to further con young people into the belief that there is no moral justification to support Israel who she calls White Supremacists, though 65% of Israel is non-white.
Leftists generally side with the oppressed, in the victim-oppressor paradigm. Still, party loyalty trumps moral authority. Andrew Breitbart became aware of this hypocrisy watching the womanizer lush Ted Kennedy “of Chappaquiddick fame” and Joe Biden relentlessly attack the black conservative Supreme Court Justice, Clarence Thomas, for allegedly “talking about sex and pornography?” In hindsight, even the accusations presented without evidence are much tamer than one would assume lawyers, judges and politicians discuss if you’ve ever watched an episode of Veep.
This made it clear that ideology matters more than race. The press skewered Thomas as a perverted misogynist, while Bill Clinton was celebrated by the media in the preceding years as a breath of fresh air, with a sexual history as sordid as Caligula. Just like the left, the right will side with completely with moronic views in service of party loyalty from time to time, but they don’t have the weapon of the race card, or the “you’re a racist” card to end the discussion. The only defense to the attack on Western values is Donald Trump.
When Israel miraculously began winning wars on multiple fronts in 1967, to the left, they began to resemble the West. Before the state was established, England promised the territory to both the secular Zionists, who rightfully escaped religious persecution and the Arab nobility of Jerusalem who wanted to form a caliphate. During the Holocaust, with nowhere to go, Jews arrived by ships and battled The British navy and Arabs to find a safe haven. Thousands died. This was remedied by Churchill, when Israel became a state in 1948.
A year earlier, when Britain decided to leave Palestine, The Arab leaders wouldn’t agree to Israel taking 56% of the area that now compromises Israel, The West Bank and Gaza. The fact that this state is much smaller than Israel (even by the absurd UN orders) is forgotten by many, like the man behind the decision to reject the idea.
The Grand Mufti Amin al-Husseini, the genetically Caucasian noble of Jerusalem who traced his roots all the way to Mohammed was an honorary Aryan, worked in anti-Semitic Nazi propaganda after having developed a knack for it in the 20s when he devised the idea of Palestinian statehood in opposition to the Zionists. Of course he would be King. In his first meeting with Adolf Hitler in 1941, the Mufti requested the Fuhrer’s help in their common enemy, the Jews, but Hitler saw it as a fool’s errand. He knew there was no united people living in Palestine. The Mufti’s belief that he could destroy the Jews and take the land for himself is what created this situation, along with Jordan’s fearfulness of a Palestinian State and unwillingness to absorb the Arabs of the region. Sound familiar?
Though on all sides except for Jordan (for the most part) historically, Israel has been surrounded by enemies and the Jews had nowhere to go during and after enduring the Holocaust, they are viewed as oppressors. I don’t see the damage in allowing Jews to settle what was then sparsely populated land, after the Holocaust made it pretty clear they weren’t safe in Europe.
The backlash reminds me of our current climate with the Syrian refugee non-debate. Universal hatred of Israel in the Middle East and North Africa forced massive expulsion of Jews into Israel. While they coexisted in the Muslim countries, Jews were treated as second class citizens. Of the 75,000 Jews in Egypt, only 10,000 were citizens. Though there were only hundreds of reported deaths, nearly a million Jews of Arabic descent were expelled from their homes and sent on an exodus to Israel from Muslim nations.
Unlike many of the powerful Arab powers of the day, Israel absorbed the refugees without question. Though it may seem tribal to leftists, the largely secular Zionists felt it was their duty to take in those who they shared a heritage with in spite of their wildly different cultures. The refugee state of Israel, constantly under attack to this very day by powerful Arab countries and the Palestinians became emblematic of Western Imperialism.
Today’s world is lacking in core values, so we live in the confusion of moral relativism, where the level of victimhood takes precedence over the values a culture holds. The worse the values, the less responsibility the nation has to justify its actions. When the UN puts Saudi Arabia on the Women’s Rights Commission, it’s hard to take the globalist leaders seriously. Since Israel is a liberal democracy that began with the migration of Europeans before the Holocaust, the very right of the nation to exist is in question, even though Western Europeans make up barely 100,000 of the country’s six million citizens.
No one on either side wants to exist in reality. Levels of victimhood determine the value of arguments, whether the argument is valid or not. Self-proclaimed “victims” like Sarsour who hold objectively terrifying points of view that directly contradict once universal liberal values are sanctified, while those who fight real injustice are ignored or even criticized.
Weighing the insanity of the left’s decision to treat Islam like every other religion and after fighting with my brother and his girlfriend about the ultimately unsuccessful “Muslim Ban,” that excluded 88% of the world’s Muslims on Instagram, I took to facebook, to embed video evidence that I had not lost my mind. I wasn’t paranoid or hateful.
I got the typically thoughtless emotional responses of a community organizer. Rather than examine the inherent danger of bringing in Syrian refugees, I was talked down to like a redneck Trump supporter. So I cited my protestations with my brother’s girlfriend’s conventional multicultural wisdom.
While I’m sure people will misconstrue my point as I’m wrestling with a sensitive issue and the leftist perspective on these matters is that it’s racist for the white man to examine them, I have no problem doing so because I know I have no hate in my heart for anyone but evil theocratic governments.
As a spiritual Jewish person, I care about freedom of religion, but believe it’s dangerous to freely admit people from oppressive cultures while signaling that since Islam is a universally beautiful religion of peace, everything is kosher. Hillary with her world without borders, leftist message with some neoconservatism spliced in was saying, “We understand why you hate the West, that it is totally fine for refugees from Somalia, Syria and other incredibly problematic nations, you know to advocate for sharia and treat women as one-half a person. We’re totally cool with that man, cause you know, you can’t judge the merits of such a beautiful culture.” But why can’t you judge?
The left judges all the time. Dark-skinned Imams, religious Kings and oligarchs controlled by Imams are usually beyond critique, but secular Syrians like Assad who look like White European dictators are clearly Nazis. Like Trump’s decision to reverse his plan on Syria, the leftists are guided by emotion more than results. Like the neocons, they’ve adopted the “if someone looks like the bad guy in a movie we go after him strategy.”
How can you solve a problem without looking at the details rationally? You can’t just throw money at it. This isn’t Keynesian economics (which I don’t really buy), it’s life and death. The future of the Western World, the place that brought you everything from Judeo-Christianity to Aristotle to Game of Thrones and most other things in your life, is at stake. The left says it’s obvious that Western values need to be demystified, as culture has no inherent value. I just want to remove the protective barrier that disallows us from addressing these problems aloud, because we’re asking a very serious question here. We’re asking if Western civilization is worth saving.
On the right you shouldn’t accept that the United States is some sort of flawless monolith of good fighting pure evil above critique, and the left shouldn’t trust that America is the most evil empire in the history of the world, “cause…The Indians, I mean Native Americans and neoliberalism man.”
“What is neoliberalism?”
“I don’t know man, less restrictions on the banks. More collusion between government and banking, ensuring that the banks benefit more than the middle class.”
“Oh, OK, I see what you mean. Though I’m a free market capitalist, the banks need some restrictions to protect themselves from their own greed.”
“I just think the banks have too much power, like a private corporation shouldn’t be too big to fail.” This is the kind of dialogue liberal and conservative stoner teenagers should be having. While I wish they weren’t so high, it’s valuable for them to see the merits in each other’s argument. If they weren’t so high they would probably remember to research more perspectives from reputable sources to check their stance. When people have basic literacy of government issues from different perspectives they can debate and develop valuable opinions.
Without checks and balances between the parties, in education and the media, young and even some older liberals sound like the Stasi. Like government, people just attack the other side, rarely thinking about their worldview’s implications. I don’t love the West’s foreign policy post World War 2, but I don’t understand how it makes me a right wing lunatic in the eyes of some when I say to grown men that, “We are not as bad as the terrorists and it’s not even close. I’ve actually thought about this. Just because I don’t take Howard Zinn and Noam Chomsky at face value, doesn’t mean I like fascism. How old are you, 18?”
The argument below has my answers in (). She clearly doesn’t answer my factual, reasoned arguments, because liberals are not used to dealing with informed opposition and when their arguments don’t stick, they attack the character of the opponent so they don’t have to win losing battles.
I couldn’t have predicted better, with the last parenthesis of my post as the JCC bomb threats were done by a mentally unstable Israeli teenager and an ex-Intercept (apparently also mentally ill) reporter trying to get back at his Jewish ex girlfriend in some roundabout delusional way. It was obviously clear to me that the extremism and hatred was coming from left with much more force than the right and that hellholes like Detroit were becoming Escape From New York style dystopias of alternate societies of Muslim extremism bent on bringing us back to the dark ages, like the cliterectomy story at the top suggests.
Then I was very wrong about the following, as Trump has become a neocon, I believe to salvage his unpopularity and show he’s not Putin’s lapdog to the conspiratorial mainstream media. This isn’t working as much as I’m sure Trump predicted, but if he remembers he was elected because he was the antithesis of Killary, everything should be OK in time. He shouldn’t worry about his popularity since the left doesn’t have any candidates worth their salt.
Here is the moment it was clear to me I was a conservative. When I saw that video on Glenn Greenwald’s uncommonly impartial post for someone in the current media landscape (especially for someone to the left of Jane Fonda) on the really interesting 13,000 word (more than twice as long as this, if you can believe it) Trump Russia collusion New Yorker piece, it was clear I could no longer be a Democrat.
When someone who knows me pretty well calls me hateful and full of fear, for not supporting a candidate driven by hate, fear and corruption, it was over. I could no longer look at reality from that side of the aisle. My maybe a bit brash point of view about the Muslim world was rejected without consideration, because leftists are ideologues.
Of course this isn’t an assault on the majority of Muslims and not individual Muslims who by and large are some of the most interesting people I know (I’m sure this statement will be construed as racist by someone), but political ideologies dependent on the Quran, and its political aim to turn the map green from Rome to Constantinople, is now sacred territory that cannot be touched. This is in spite of the fact that the ultra-rich Saudis (3rd biggest military budget on the planet, almost double Russia) and the people they’re recruiting seem to be doing a good job fulfilling their aims. With the world less dependent on Saudi oil, they could see the time to strike as sooner than later. It bothers me that the left with all their political activism never examines these issues. The premise is that they are always right, because they are morally superior. If America were to give up on the military, what would happen?
Everything I hated about multiculturalism, mass surveillance, the cold-shouldered acceptance of Israel as an ally (while Obama privately screwed Israel at every chance he could), political correctness, dividing people by ethnicities and inefficient welfare was now married to the inefficient warfare of neoconservatism. As unpredictable as Trump is and as angry at his administration I am over Syria, I could not support the clearly inequivalent forces of evil that Clinton aligned herself with to lose her campaign (both the Sunni extremists and the brownshirt social justice warriors).
While I don’t think 600 Muslims polled is an accurate sample size to support the claim of the far right media that 51% of Muslims in America support sharia, I would assume our demographics resemble England where 23% want sharia and half think homosexuality should be illegal. Though Pew stopped polling on Sharia in America (probably in service of a PC agenda), they did find 8% of Muslims think suicide bombings are often or sometimes justified in defending Islam. While it’s a fairly low number, that’s 300,000 jihadist sympathizers living in America. 299,999 excluding Linda Sarsour. No wonder the surveillance net of the deep state is too wide to catch anyone.
According to the left, it’s ignorant to blame immigration for terror. This is doubly true when it is responsible for the Brussels and Paris attacks, and a host of other terrorist attacks throughout Europe. Talking to a highly educated Swedish girl about Paris, she said it was OK, “because more people died immigrating to Europe than were killed in the attacks.” If life were only a numbers game it would be a valid point, but academia is where wisdom goes to die. Like Chomsky, she completely ignores motivation. She hasn’t even considered that Muslim extremism could harm Sweden, though it already has.
In Sweden, a country that has ironically made checkpoints at its borders to prevent undocumented immigration, it was made illegal to publicly advocate against accepting refugees, in spite of the fact roughly ¾ of the refugees are males, many young and single. Of course the place where civil liberties have been destroyed in favor of “tolerance” is the place the left idealizes.
This is the type of thing that is inappropriate to point out, just as it’s politically incorrect to mention the widely held extreme theocratic Muslim beliefs to the tune of executing homosexuals in the cultural bastion Iran, honor killings in the oppressed Gaza and the raping of infidels in Germany, Iraq, Kurdistan and virtually every hotbed of Muslim extremism.
Cast to the side, women are unable to drive by law in Saudi Arabia. Even if a Saudi has four wives, none of them can drive to the grocery store. There are many women who enjoy wearing their burkas in such a place, and I’m sure many people are treated well interpersonally, but this involuntary theocratic modesty is the opposite of feminism.
Somehow it’s OK for the Obama administration to sell 115 billion dollars of weapons there, while he and Hillary were fully aware that the Saudi government was funding ISIS. Even if the Wikileaks report where this was revealed was spurned by Russian intelligence (there is still not one credible shred of evidence to support this), it’s an uncomfortable truth to reconcile. Curiously no one has denied the validity of Assange’s leaks, while American intelligence agencies sling his name through the mud.
This revelation is of course why Obama was constantly underplaying the importance of ISIS, calling them JV, before saying ISIL (the name for combined ISIS and Al Qaeda forces), to appear less wrong about ISIS (if only to his administration), subtly projecting with the “L sound” that ISIS’s newfound strength was the result of its allegiance with Al Qaeda, whose power was always grossly exaggerated by the federal government.
The 150 billion dollars Iran was given to not make nuclear weapons for ten years in hopes they would buy weapons from us has not worked out, since their weapons were purchased on the cheap from Russia, as we fight a proxy war with both powers in our pursuit of Assad who poses literally no threat to America, despite Hillary Clinton’s insistence on reverting our foreign policy back to neoconservatism.
Trump fell into this trap. It was a great disappointment to me, as we’re now fighting alongside Saudi Arabia. This is the same place where Osama bin Laden’s dad, Mohammed bin Awad, fathered 56 children by 22 wives (only four at a time as prescribed by sharia). The right wing often cites single motherhood as the greatest predictor of crime, but I would venture a guess that Osama’s criminal inclinations owed a larger debt to Wahhabi sect of Sunni Islam that the majority of Saudi Arabia practices. Scarier still to a Democrat, the guy’s political philosophy was largely borrowed from Noam Chomsky. These ideas became Obama’s speaking points.
If you are on the left, you may be wondering why one would diverge into Saudi Arabia, and 9/11, when talking about “The Muslim Ban.” It’s not to fear-monger and justify “Islamophobia (a totalitarian word),” but to illustrate the real root causes of terror. Saudi Arabia is the country that has spent more than 100 billion dollars exporting Sunni extremism throughout the Muslim World, Europe and even America over the past few decades, with other slightly less extreme jihadist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood following suit, wisely forging alliances with leftist political activists, so people like my brother and his girlfriend unconsciously associate Islam with Civil Rights and Planned Parenthood.
You might find David Horowitz’s tactics below unseemly, but what he reveals below is the reality the leftists willfully ignore in favor of Sarsour and Bin Laden’s point.
By and large, the majority of people in the Muslim world, like any other religion, are pretty apathetic about religion and jihad. Still, in my experience, most secular Muslims I know detest Israel, but this isn’t different from many of my liberal friends. My concern is that according to a very low estimate, 133 million of the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims believe in jihadist terror, a lot of whom believe it is justifiable to exterminate the Jews, especially the “creepy Zionists.” So if you want to compare Islam to Christianity, the parallels only exist if you’re talking about the Spanish Inquisition of the 15th century.
It was pretty clear to me with America’s ally Saudi Arabia omitted from the list this wasn’t a Muslim ban. In Part 2, I wrote of the Hawaii judge’s decision that he based largely on the speculation that since Donald Trump was Islamophobic and professed to ban Muslims on his campaign, it meant that the ban was unconstitutional, in its targeting of one religion. I don’t believe speculation needs to play such a large role in our legal system. However, Trump probably should have presented a more reasoned plan for preventing terrorists and extremists from entering the United States. However, my fight had nothing to do with that.
My fight was with the endless accusations that everyone who disagreed with the Democrats on this issue and virtually any other issue was cast as a bigoted redneck, those who Hillary Clinton called irredeemable and deplorable.
As someone who grew up in elite circles, I understand how these things work. Upper Middle Class intellectuals and the extremely wealthy shape public opinion. When no politician in their right mind would bring up gay marriage and the legalization of marijuana (two positions I support btw), you could feel the visceral condescension of flyover country morality. The same thing is happening today with transgender issues, to devastating effect. It’s now bigoted to critique small children getting hormone therapy, when most children who think they are transgender actually end up being happy homosexuals.
While the elites have little to no stake in the outcomes of their social policy perspectives, their egos are coddled by the belief that their deep sympathy for minorities makes them better people than the Christians and rednecks who have an irrational fear of God, women with penises in bathrooms with their small children, and immigrants. Unlike Middle Class Americans, most elites have little interaction with other ethnicities aside from minority elites and employees. Working and middle class whites more likely than not have black friends. The elites fully support socialism and are gravely concerned with global warming, flying private from LA to Louisiana and Toronto to get tax breaks on their films, while paying effective tax rates on par with the national average. Then they justify it all by saying that the left has been right about every issue in their lifetime and they spend money to further the reach of the left.
The one flaw in that argument is that all the social policies done in the name of creating a more equitable society have achieved the inverse of their noble aims. Democrats have controlled virtually every major city in America for decades. The quality of life for the urban poor only gets worse. While I’m not into the idea of grouping people by race, this of course disproportionately affects African Americans and Hispanics. There are some clear culprits; the social welfare system, neoliberalism, education, the prison industrial complex, single motherhood, the unspoken prejudice of low expectations, connected with the victim mentality actively and passively promoted by leftist values.
The Democrats continue to blame inherent racism in a country that had a black president for the last eight years and literally worships at the altar of Oprah, Michael Jordan, Beyoncé and Michelle Obama. They also blame systemic problems, but I am still waiting to hear a viable solution other than protesting racism and attacking real racists (Donald Sterling, Milo Yiannopoulos?), and people perceived to be racist (Charles Murray, Ben Shapiro, Steve Bannon), or Islamophobic (Bill Maher, Sam Harris, Steve Bannon, Milo Yiannopoulus, Christopher Hitchens, Ayaan Hirsi Ali), for not blindly accepting liberal policy as inarguable truth. Or worse yet, the witch hunt mentality that goes after any celebrity with a whiff of Trump support or “cultural appropriation” (whatever the fuck that means) in their Halloween costume.
As this class of liberal elites believes in mostly nothing but the enjoyable, ultimately hollow fulfillment of their material desires and acquisition of perceived power and control (I’m talking to you John Podesta and George Soros!), they replace religion with ideology, not unlike the Communist revolutionaries in Russia. Though they’ve convinced themselves that they are doing the right thing, for they are so open minded and tolerant, they are just blindly following the same patterns without questioning if their plans are making anything discernibly better. Since they are divorced from the middle of the country and reality, they don’t even consider the implications of their welfare state, America’s role in the foundation of ISIS and the radical Islamization of Europe.
Moderate elites don’t even consider voting for Trump, because he’s vulgar, he allegedly groped a girl on a plane in the 70s and bragged about how many hot girls he gets on the side to Billy Bush eight years ago in private. I’ve heard leftists claim Trump raped a thirteen-year-old girl, completely ignoring that Bill Clinton may have done much worse. I won’t get into the plausible accusations against him, because I generally like Bill Clinton and don’t think people should be slandered without evidence.
Then they cheer as their kids protest “fascism,” wearing symbols of terrorism around their necks. If this were a fascist country, I think the students who tried to physically attack Charles Murray at Middlebury would have been suspended.
No one knows anything anymore and everyone is a hypocrite. Neither party has a viable solution on most issues, as party loyalty and populist dumbing down of politics to unimportant issues makes it so very little real change through politics is possible.
White is not black, it’s green. Nothing makes sense anymore. Examining the divisions in these countries by policies and party lines is ultimately a futile exercise if we can’t begin to bridge the gap by looking for commonalities. I saw the election of Trump as some kind of opportunity to reevaluate the parties and the broken political system. The post-truth world could be an opening to a revolution in our perception. If we could look at the opposing sides compassionately, even in spirited debate and consider the pros and cons of different perspectives honestly, we could awaken more fundamental truth. First we need to expose ourselves to uncomfortable truths by examining histories and facts before making a decision on an issue.
As it is now, the world is in decay, which is part of why mainstream Democratic party positions now mirror extremist leftist values that consciously or unconsciously aim to destroy Western liberal culture. As Islamist leaders who studied political philosophy in America understood, individualism leads to nihilism. This is why half the country is willing to vote for something between a standup comedian and a conman, and half the country thinks American foreign policy is something on par with a sharia state.
I think America took the wrong lessons from history. While fascism is evil, building a society with shared values is usually not fascism. The selfishness of Ayn Rand that a lot of Silicon Valley types latched onto greatly damages society. Still, economic redistribution, though nice in theory will not fix inequality, because the world is not equal by nature. A desire for compassion and selflessness would be better. Something is broken on a much more existential level. We’ve created a world without meaning.
The video below on 2014, describes 2016 and 2017 even better. While critics of my argument would say Trump is using the Putin playbook, the left and right has being doing the same for decades. They just didn’t have someone making a mockery of his office to make it so obvious.
While I think it is foolish to recreate the past like Trump’s campaign suggested, I think it is valuable to investigate past errors, to see where we lost our way, in our plan to build something entirely new. People no longer even try.
Trump, like Obama, presented a desire to reform the country and though it was problematic, this is what pushed the forgotten majority to give the orange guy a chance. While his first hundred days haven’t been earth shattering, aside from the public sentiment of anger and confusion, he could still do a lot of good. We should take example from Trump’s optimism, as repulsive as he may be to your senses. Bickering and shouting will not solve anything. There needs to be a concerted effort to live within multiple perspectives.
With my ego, I am as guilty as everyone else and I want to overcome this nonsense. People have an inherent desire to connect and care for each other, but it’s hidden deep inside the layers of hate, fear, fatigue and frustration. Our culture sends us these messages through sentimental entertainment, but our hearts feel something more selfish and sinister in the culture that we all unconsciously emulate. We seek easy comforts and pleasures to avoid looking at the powers operating us. These powers are the economies and the governments, but really these are our desires, which we don’t really have any control over.
Though I’ve probably turned some of you off with my positions, I want to hear your suggestions for better alternatives. Maybe your suggestions will be the force that finds the meaning we’ve all been searching for. There will be a revolution in consciousness, and when the revolution comes it will depend on shared values that all of humanity, or some group that acts as an example for humanity wants and aims for. It might not be pleasant to face your self-interest at first, but the nihilism of both sides is in need of an antidote, and great things only tend to happen when there is a dire need for them.
We are social animals. We are also tribal animals, but breaking through disgust with different perspectives and tribes broadens our worldview. This is what is so troubling about the Social Justice Movement. Aside from it being boring to censor contrary or politically incorrect opinions and different kinds of people, it prevents growth and change, resigning us to maintain a level of distrust. This leads to more racism.
Unlike 1984, which is also happening with massive widespread surveillance, we self monitor. We have become less free in the service of not offending one another. We’re always castrating our behavior so as not to offend, even though this masks larger truths that have the potential to improve our current state of meekness and unhealthy resentment.
Society and individuals need pressures to develop and grow. Ayaan Hirsi Ali is always pivoting. Rather than victimize herself, she confronts the evil within the belief system that tortures millions of women. Still, she has an open mind. Branded an infidel by many, she still believes in the possibility of reforming Islam and has a desire to help those who are abused by faulty ideology. She sees it as possible, in spite of the horrors the men of faith showed her. Crazier things have happened.
If Americans could harness the power they hold together, they would shape the world far better than the elites currently driving the car. This depends on a willingness to compromise, because we live under the illusion that only by realizing our individual desires can we find our true selves, when in reality the best version of us lives when we lose ourselves in the thoughts, desires and concerns of others. This is where we create the space for love, the only force that can free us of the enslavement of our doomed personal and collective destiny.
This is the third excerpt in a series. Click the links to catch up on Part One and Part Two. I’m going to leave you with the most interesting perspective on politics, from an apolitical voice, not about the politics themselves, but the personal toll and stupidity of the visceral outrage over Trump’s election in LA...
Jesse Bogner is a twenty nine year old author, screenwriter and journalist. His memoir and social critique, The Egotist, has been translated into four languages. In 2013, he moved from New York City, where he was born and raised, abandoning a decadent lifestyle chockfull of substance abuse, to study Kabbalah in Israel. His work has been featured in The Huffington Post, The Jerusalem Post and The Times of Israel. He has been featured in misleading articles from media outlets including CNN, Wired Magazine and others. He is currently writing a novel.
