Gustav Klimt. Death and Life. 1908–1916

367 — Hamas Is Not the Palestinians — Hamas Is a Jihadi Culture of Death: Homo Amor Stands on the Side of Life

We cannot just stand against Jihad, we need to stand for life and value

This piece is a lightly edited transcript of a live talk [October 22, 2023] given by Dr. Marc Gafni on the weekly broadcast One Mountain, Many Paths, founded by Gafni and his evolutionary partner Barbara Marx Hubbard. Thus, the style of the piece is spoken word and not a formal essay.

Edited by Elena Maslova-Levin. Prepared for publication by Jamie Long.

Summary: This episode is a questions-and-answers session to the previous episode, an attempt to answer the hardest and most challenging questions — because at this difficult time, there is a lot of confusion in the space, and we should be confused. We speak with a broken heart, with infinitely intimate tears for all of the innocent victims of the Hamas atrocities and the innocent families in Gaza. As Homo Amor, both shatter our hearts. We also recognize that a true lover — Homo Amor — cannot lazily resort to moral equivalence. The bombing of Nazi strongholds that tragically killed innocents during World War II must break our hearts, but it is not morally equivalent to the Nazi concentration camps.

Moral equivalence is a failure of Homo Amor, while moral complexity — the ability to make distinctions and discern moral hierarchies — is a sign of Homo Amor. We need to understand and feel that everyone is in the circle, that there is a holy spark in everyone — there are no orcs in this story. And yet, we need to be able to make distinctions and to call evil evil.

We stand for life — for all life. We need to take responsibility not only for the present, but for the future. In a world not yet liberated, this sometimes requires the use of force, just like the Allies had to respond to Nazism with force.

It is really important to understand that this is not about terrorism (terrorism is just a method), it is about Jihad, and Jihad is a culture of death. It is completely different from secular nationalism, and it is not about creating a Palestinian state — but a world-wide caliphate. You have to take Jihad seriously, and believe them when they say they’re going to kill anyone who doesn’t accept their version of Islam. Jihad is powerful in the world today, and whatever happens in Israel is not just about Israel, but about the whole world. Israel is a miner’s canary for the world.

We cannot just stand against Jihad, we need to stand for life and value, with the same and more passion. That’s why our overwhelming moral obligation, the most urgent need in response to Jihad is to tell a New Story of Value that includes everyone and speaks to everyone, a story which will be alluring even to people within jihadist cultures, as a life-affirming alternative to Jihad.

How we have a conversation is everything

I have received dozens and dozens of notes — and I appreciate, just crazy appreciate all of them. People wrote so many beautiful notes. We did very intense One Mountains last week and the week before; they were a couple hours each. And lots of people wrote that it actually helped them clarify, and follow the thread, and understand. We must have made 15 to 20 different points in each one of the One Mountains. I super, super appreciate, from the bottom of my heart, all of the notes.

Nonetheless, I wanted to focus on the five or six people who had questions. I printed out lots and lots of questions. There must be fifty different questions, so I am going to put bunches of questions together, and respond to, as much as I can, to the four or five different categories of questions.

I want to begin by thanking everyone for being here, and saying that this is an unimaginably hard moment. I want to begin by saying that I’m proud of us.

We wrote in our email invitation:
We live in the best of times. We live in the worst of times. We live in a time between worlds. We live in a time between stories.

Let us just locate this together. We understand, after October 7th in Israel, more clearly than ever before, that —

• our ability to cultivate discernment,
• our ability to love outrageously within the context of a shared grammar of value,
• our ability to articulate a story of desire, a story of lines and circles, a new vision of feminine and masculine, a story of the new human and new humanity, the emergence from homo sapiens to Homo Amor —

remains the best hope, and the desperate and urgent need, of humanity. I want to just feel that together.

We are at a moment of immense and unimaginable devastation and horror, and we have to articulate this New Story in response — because it’s only this New Story of Value that will raise all boats and transform Reality.

We are here today on this Sunday, in One Mountain Many Paths, and we’re going to have a huge question and answer session. That’s what we are here for. I spent the morning reading the questions. We are going to have a conversation: you’ve begun the conversation with the questions, now I’m going to try and respond to the questions.

But we are not having an egoic conversation. I looked at everyone’s questions carefully. If I missed something someone pointed to, I am delighted. This is not about being right. This is about finding the deepest shared truth that we can find — and so I invited everyone to bring the hardest questions, which challenge everything.

There is no bad question.
There is no question that’s off the table.
That’s part of what it means to be Homo Amor.

There is a series of values that are at play in this invitation that are themselves part of the response to the challenge. These values are enormously important. Because it’s about how you have a conversation — and how you have a conversation is everything.

We live in a Conversational Cosmos, quite literally. One of the things we’ve been working on is this vision rooted in science of The Universe: A Love Story. The Conversational Cosmos means that atoms are having conversations in some very real way. There is a conversation that takes place in the world of matter, in the world of life, and in the human world — and how we have a conversation, who we are in a conversation is everything.

The Hebrew word for Messiah, Mashiach, literally means conversation. And Messiah is another word, in the lineage of Solomon, for what we’re calling Homo Amor. Messiah means the new world, the new human, the new humanity, the new possibility — but it actually means conversation. And so, how we have a conversation is not nothing, it’s everything.

It’s who we are.

Moral complexity is the sign of Homo Amor

How did we get here?
What should Israel do?
Should Israel go into Gaza?
Should Israel not go into Gaza?

Innocent people, hostages. The world itself being held hostage.

How do we engage? Do we forgive? What’s the relationship between forgiveness and justice? If I was the President, if I was in Gaza, if I was in Israel — how do I respond?

The set of impossibilities here is unimaginable.

I am operating under the assumption that most of the people here have listened to either the podcast I did with Aubrey, or last week’s One Mountain, or the One Mountain the week before, because there is a lot in them. This is a place you’ve got to listen deeply, so I am just inviting everyone — so tenderly, so sweetly — we’ve got to stay inside and really just feel this.

This week’s code:

THIS WEEK'S EVOLUTIONARY LOVE CODE:
Moral complexity is the sign of Homo Amor.
Moral equivalence is the failure of Homo Amor.

That’s our code. What does that mean?

I get the confusion. If you are not confused, you are crazy. You should be confused; we should be confused. We should all be confused.

There is an enormous amount of confusion in the space.
There are impossibilities in the space.

The beginning, the first step in being Homo Amor, is to hold the confusion, and to lead from the confusion — or, to say it slightly more clearly, to lead from the uncertainty together with the certainty. There are uncertainties here and there are certainties — and we have to lead with the uncertainty, and yet we have to hold the certainties.

Everyone is in the circle. There are no orcs in the story

One of the questions — people asked this question in different ways — was:

If we are Homo Amor, and we are saying there is no moral equivalence (meaning not all positions are equal), does that mean that there are people who are outside of the circle? Are there people that have no holy spark? Are there people here who are now just outside the circle?

I want to start there. I want to say this clearly and unequivocally: everyone is in the circle.

When we say there is no moral equivalence, we don’t mean that anyone is outside of the circle, and this is really important. In the experience of Homo Amor, everyone is in the circle.

Everyone is in the circle means em-pathos. Em-pathos means there is pathos, there is feeling, there is empathy — not just mind. I can feel, to the best extent possible, everybody in the story.

Em-pathos: I can feel everyone in the story.

This is why the story is so unbearably painful: there are no orcs in the story — even if, as a left-wing commentator, who is at the center of the Human Potential Movement, Marianne Williamson, said in her post, what Hamas did was pure evil. This is coming from a person who’s teaching A Course in Miracles, and it’s coming from the deep left-wing position. Marianne says, Hamas is pure evil — but that doesn’t mean that they are orcs, even if Hamas is behaving in a way which is pure evil.

I want to be really clear, friends. When you go into a Nature festival, and you target civilians — and targeting civilians means you take men and you cut their cocks off while they’re alive, as you rape and kill their women. You cut people’s heads off. You kill children in front of parents and burn them, and kill parents in front of children. You murder a grandmother, and film it, and upload it to her Facebook page — if we can’t call that evil, we are in trouble. So, Marianne Williamson — not a right-wing commentator, not a pro-Israel person — Marianne Williamson, who leans all the way to the left, called it pure evil. Robert Kennedy, who is holding a certain position in America today, called it pure evil. This is not a pro/anti-Israel thing. It has nothing to do with pro-Israel, anti-Israel. That’s not the conversation here.

We just need to be able to say that’s evil.

Having said that — and here is where it gets impossible — that doesn’t mean that even the Hamas young man who committed the evil is an orc from The Lord of the Rings, from Tolkien. That’s not his internal experience. His internal experience is complicated and painful, and also, a certain kind of ecstasy. We are going to need to understand what that internal experience is, it’s unimaginably important to understand. We’ll get to that.

If the Hamas young man was an orc — it wouldn’t be evil (evil means you make a set of choices), and it wouldn’t be tragic. The actual experience of the Hamas young man is horrific and tragic.

The need of love sometimes requires the use of force

Even when we have no choice but to defend value — to defend against the slaughter, the intentional, targeted, brutal, filmed slaughter — and in order to do that, we have to kill, there is nothing exciting about it.

Like America had to engage Germany: it was the Allies’ willingness to engage Hitler, which involved bombing Germany, that allows all of us to live today. All of our lives, any freedom we have in our lives is because America, and Europe, and Great Britain, and France did their best to take on Hitler, and only the willingness to do that created the very fact that we live today in the world that we do. Even when the Allied troops had to kill Nazis, you still didn’t get to have rallies of jubilation and be excited about it.

There is nothing exciting.
There is no joy.
There is no triumphalism.

No, it’s tragic to have to kill.

Even if I am killing someone, who I have no choice but to kill because I am defending my family, and I am defending value, I still don’t take joy in killing.

There is no joy in killing.

When I sat with the Dalai Lama, in his room in Dharamshala, and we had this moment of very beautiful friendship, he said to me — we were talking about the tragedy of the world situation on many levels — people say I pacifist, ha-ha. No — world army, no pacifist, China. What he meant was that there is a need, as Homo Amor, in a world that’s not yet liberated, the need of love sometimes requires the use of force.

Pacifism stands against Homo Amor.

Homo Amor would not say, let Nazism triumph and rule Europe.
Homo Amor would not say that — and, at the same time, Homo Amor also wouldn’t say that all the German soldiers were orcs.

• No, it’s a tragedy to kill your enemy. Your heart is ripped apart.

In the archetypal story of the lineage of Solomon, where we talk about the Egyptians, who are represented as these terrible vicious taskmasters who enslave and kill, in the mythical story of the Exodus, when the Egyptians drown, and the angels go to sing praise, God says, why are you singing when my people are drowning?

There is no jubilation. There is no celebration.

It breaks my heart to say, but to see around the world — after we knew the details of the slaughter — to see Harvard students, and Stanford students, and students from all over Europe, and Sydney and London, rejoicing, to see woke communities rejoicing — it broke my heart. It broke my heart in a thousand pieces. I can still barely breathe from it. Pictures of the rally in Sydney, Australia, or in London, rejoicing, broke my heart.

Homo Amor never rejoices when they have to kill. If I have to go and kill, in World War II, to defeat Nazism, I don’t rejoice. And I always recognize that there is a spark of light, a spark of the sacred everywhere, including in Hamas. That’s always true. That’s why it’s tragic. The Hamas are not orcs, I just want to say that.

We have to take responsibility for the present and for the future

Homo Amor always feels.

The radical, massive, huge, unimaginable obligation of this moment is to feel everyone.

To feel everyone means that whatever Israel should or shouldn’t do (which I’m leaving off the table right now), or whatever the Allied forces of Europe should or shouldn’t have done in World War II when they bombed Germany, our hearts have to be ripped apart at any thought that innocent people will be killed. Any notion that says that my heart is not ripped apart can’t be held.

Sometimes the people who are closest to the pain are understandably so lost in their own pain that we have to feel for them, that’s true. On this issue, I have real common ground with my colleague, Yuval Harari. We have significantly critiqued Yuval’s thought — and not Yuval particularly, but Yuval as an expression of postmodernity. Having said that, Yuval understands, and he wrote about it, the experience that a person can have when they are so tragically ripped apart by the pain in front of them that they cannot feel the other person’s pain. There are people like that, for sure, which we totally understand. But we have to hold that feeling field. We have to feel the pain all across.

We cannot allow the drive for vengeance to determine policy.

Vengeance can’t determine policy. Revenge can’t determine policy. It can’t be done. When we decide how to respond, we have to respond as Homo Amor.

The Allies in World War II — who bombed Germany — may have been acting as Homo Amor. Homo Amor may have said that it is necessary for the sake of the future of humanity, because the Nazi and Japanese triumph in World War II will destroy untold generations and trillions of people. Had Nazism trapped and ruled Europe, and then the technologies that were to emerge in the future became Nazi technologies and Imperial Japanese technologies in the shadow of Imperial Japan, none of us would be living in the same world — and so Homo Amor may have needed to bomb Germany at that time. But Homo Amor couldn’t do that as an expression of vengeance, but needed to do that as an expression of love. Meaning, I love all of Reality, and I love all people, and I love the future, and I actually hear the call of the future, and I have to take responsibility for the present and for the future.

The boys who died on the beaches of Normandy, the European and American soldiers who died in the Far East, died in order to allow people to walk around Antwerp today, and to walk around Amsterdam today, and to have the potential of a world that’s free, in which the rights of women are honored, in which all the values that we hold dear in our bodies have a possibility of blooming and flourishing.

That’s the first set of points: No one is outside the circle. Even pure evil has a holy spark.

Because if you actually get what it means that we live in a CosmoErotic Universe, it means that in every moment, Eros sustains Reality. Nothing is sustained without the sacred Eros of Reality, so anything that exists has a holy spark.

Now you might think that’s insane, right, my friends? So let’s just think about something. Think about one of the most stunning developments that’s ever happened in the world that tells you that no one’s outside the circle.

What are, in many ways, two of the most beautiful and most moral countries in the world today?

This is shocking: Germany and Japan.

After Germany and Japan were defeated in World War II, the Allies and the Germans and the Japanese engaged in a project of reconstruction — and that project of reconstruction changed the world. It changed the world, and Germany and Japan became best friends of Reality. They became democracies. It is one of the most unimaginable transformations that ever took place in world history. An unimaginable transformation, where Japan, as we knew it in 1930, faded from our eyes, and Germany as we knew it went through an unimaginable transformation.

That gives me great hope. Who would have thought in 1943 or 1944, when 12,000 people were being gassed every day in Auschwitz, that we could, today in 2023, be talking about a healthy, thriving German democracy — even with all of its problems? And I am aware of the Neo-Nazism that exists in strains of Germany, and I’m aware of the challenges in Japan. Those are all real. Nonetheless, Germany at this moment is a thriving democracy, as is Japan. That’s unimaginable.

If there wasn’t a spark of the sacred, that couldn’t happen.

I just want to feel that for a moment.

Morality is not based on body count

I want to come to the next point, and this is a hard one. This conversation is not an easy conversation. I wasn’t looking forward to it this morning — and I’m madly delighted to be with everybody. But it’s a hard conversation, we have to cut through, and actually be able to see and feel everyone and everything.

I’m going to ask a real question, and I’m going to do a couple of thought experiments. They are utterly necessary to do.

Moral equivalence means that I cannot make a distinction.

To make a distinction, I have to be in the Field of Value. If I’m not in the Field of Value, I can’t make a distinction.

There is no room for moral equivalence. There is room for moral complexity.

Let me just explain what that means.

When I was 21 or 22 years old, I began, in teaching, to ask the following question. I asked the question the first time at a very famous school in New York, and I’ve asked it at the best private schools, at the best public schools, at the best universities around the world, in the Western world particularly.

You were shipwrecked, and you find yourself on an island with Mother Teresa, and Mother Teresa turns out to be a bitch (apologies to Mother Teresa). She turns out to be impossible. It’s just you and her on the island, you know you’re never going to be rescued, and she drives you out of your mind. She drives you crazy. It’s like nails on a board. You are there for ten years, you can barely breathe. She gets injured, you happen to be a doctor. You can easily save her. No one will know if you don’t. Do you have an absolute moral obligation to save her?

I asked that question in universities around the world. I asked the question at an Academy here in America.

Of course the answer is yes!

But the majority of people, an overwhelming majority, above 95%, said you cannot say that there is an absolute moral obligation to save her. The best students at the best schools.

It’s a nice thing to do.
It’s a good thing to do.
But you cannot say it’s an intrinsic moral obligation.

Because they were raised in a postmodern way of thinking, which says that there are no absolute moral obligations. What postmodernity says is that one story of value is not better than any other story of value. And when Yuval Harari implies, in the second chapter of his book Sapiens, that there is no fundamental difference between Libya at its worst under Qaddafi, and a vision of universal human rights, that those are both just stories of value, and there is no intrinsic difference between them — then we’ve stepped out of the Field of Value. And we have stepped out of the Field of Value, which is the postmodern understanding that lies deep.

First, I just want to kind of feel that. That’s a big deal. That’s a huge realization.

Therefore, I am always going to have a very hard time creating any kind of moral hierarchy, and even the word hierarchy gets me upset. Just feel it in your body, when I say the word hierarchy, and you get upset: he just said hierarchy, why is he saying hierarchy?

This summer, we talked about lines and circles as two qualities of Cosmos. Each one has shadow and light.

The beauty of the circle is that everyone is inside. Everyone is inside, no one is outside the circle. Every point in the circle is equidistant from the center, so there is an egalitarianism in the circle. It’s not about hierarchy. And the Hebrew word egul means circle. Egalitarian: there is an equality, and we recognize there’s a spark of light everywhere, and everyone is inside the circle, and no one is excluded, and we are all sitting face to face, and it’s beautiful. It’s gorgeous, we desperately need the circle. And if I think that when I’m bombing Nazi Germany, I cannot feel the horror of an innocent German baby being killed, then I’m not Homo Amor. Everyone is in the circle. No one is outside the circle, no one.

And there is a line. The line makes distinctions, that’s part of what the line does. The shadow of the line is it makes artificial distinctions: I’m black and you’re white, so I’m better than you. I’m white and you’re black. I’m Sunni, and you’re Shiite. I’m radical Islam, and you’re a Christian. Anyone who says, based on any kind of arbitrary distinction, that they are somehow intrinsically better, that’s what a line is. The line discriminates. That’s discrimination, that’s racism of the worst kind. There is a great shadow to the line.

The line also creates a hierarchy. There are things that are higher and lower on a line. And the line also distinguishes. That’s what a line does, it distinguishes.

I need a line and a circle together. I need hieros gamos. I need the line and the circle to make love with each other. I need to say everyone is inside the circle and there is a hierarchy.

The hierarchy means that not all decisions are equal. For example, the Allies bombing Nazi Germany, killing innocents, is a horror — but that’s not morally equal to Nazism. Morality is not based on body count. That’s a very, very important understanding.

Morality is based on your intention.

Is your intention to free the world for value and goodness and truth and beauty, or is your intention to dominate and control the world and gas 12,000 people a day?

Those are not the same. That’s a distinction that needs to be made. Meaning, I need to be able to live in the Field of Value.

Now just remember, we said there is a shadow to the line, and there is a shadow to the circle. The shadow of the line is to arbitrarily place other people on the other side of the line. When I place someone else on the other side of the line, I can’t feel them anymore. That’s the great, horrible shadow of the line.

What’s the shadow of the circle? I can’t make distinctions. I don’t know how to make distinctions anymore.

I’ve got to be able to bring line and circle together, that’s hieros gamos.

It is not about terrorism, it is about Jihad

Next step is hard.

Have I taken a side here?

Yes, I want to be really clear about that. I have taken a side. I am on the side of life.

The side we are on is the side of life, and that’s unimaginably important.

We have to be on the side of life.

But to be on the side of life doesn’t mean that we don’t go to defeat Nazism. I’m not just on the side of life now. To be Homo Amor is to feel the future. Homo Amor takes responsibility for the future, and for the past and for the present. I don’t just live in the present. Homo Amor feels the future, so I need to defeat Nazism, in order to be able to create a future in which people can walk around Amsterdam or Germany, and we can have the great miracle of the transformation of Germany and Japan.

So, we are taking a side here. But the side we’re taking is we are all in for all life.

We are at this time between worlds and at a time between stories. We live in a world of outrageous pain. We live in a world of outrageous beauty. We live in a world of Outrageous Love. And in this time between stories, we step beyond the old stories of good and evil.

That’s the first thing. We’ve got to step beyond the old stories of good and evil in their primitive forms. That’s step one.

• Level one is, there are old stories of good and evil. And everyone says: we are good, they are evil. That’s level one.
• Level two, we step beyond that, and we realize it’s more complex. Homo Amor holds moral complexity.

By the way, if people want to criticize the Israeli government, then criticize the Israeli government — of course you should. If you want to criticize the Belgian government, criticize the Belgian government. That’s what a democracy does. And Israel is this insanely gregarious, protesting, conflicted democracy. That’s absolutely legitimate. But don’t go from moral complexity to moral equivalence.

Here, I want to say something that’s really, really, really deep. We speak with a broken heart, with clarity, but always in the unknowing, always in devotion to the mystery. I am going to say something hard here:

This is not about terrorism. It’s about Jihad.

I want you to get the distinction. Terrorism and Jihad are not the same thing.

Terror is a method, and terror can be used by different kinds of people.

Jihad is something else. Jihad is Taliban, and Jihad is Al-Qaeda, and Jihad is ISIS, the Islamic State, and Jihad is Hezbollah, and Jihad is Hamas. I want to be really clear to my friends all over the world, whether you’re in Antarctica or Australia or South America or Europe. I want to be really clear, and this is painful and true — Jihad is powerful in the world today, and Hamas is a jihadist organization. Jihad says, we spill the blood — in active atrocity and war — of anyone who doesn’t accept our version of Islam.

In the interpretation of the jihadists, Jihad is not an internal category. It’s not an internal battle.

There is a huge amount of moderate Islam that says Jihad is an internal battle that takes place within you, which is beautiful. But radical Islam, which is driving the Islamic agenda of Jihad, is not just about Israel. (And the words they use is “from the river to the sea,” meaning there’s no room for two states. This is not an issue of someone is trying to prevent a Palestinian state. That’s not what’s happening. There have been eight distinct opportunities to have a flourishing Palestinian state, that many Palestinians, I would say most of the Palestinians wanted to do, but the jihadist slaughters any Palestinian who wants to make that kind of peace. If you are in Gaza today, and you want to make peace with Israel, because there’s a conflict, because there are two competing claims to the same land, which should produce a two-state solution of peace, the jihadist kills you.)

The jihadist dimension of Islam, as expressed in the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt, as expressed in the Islamic State that beheads soldiers and civilians and puts their heads on spikes, which cuts men’s cocks off as they rape their women on top of the dead bodies of their friends — the jihadist says, we’re not for life. We are a culture of death.

Hamas says, as much as the West loves life, we love death. That’s an almost exact quote.

That’s Jihad.

You can’t negotiate with Jihad.

We have to stand for life

It is not just an issue of two states in Israel. Hamas has completely destroyed that possibility.

No, the jihadist agenda is to actually have a world caliphate (Caliph means ‘ruler’) — a world caliphate, in which Belgium is ruled by Islamic law, in which Holland is ruled by Islamic law, in which France is ruled by Islamic law, in which Germany is ruled by Islamic law — and the list goes on.

The jihadist agenda is stated clearly and openly: for as long as it takes, we will keep fighting to the death. And if we die, and our children die, and we provoke Gaza being bombed, and we don’t let anyone go to the south, we keep everybody in the north, because we want to cause as many innocent deaths as we can, because we’re holding our own people hostage — we are going to do that because our agenda is Jihad, and Jihad means death to the infidel, and the infidel is anyone who doesn’t subscribe to my particular vision of Islam.

It’s not just, as the Hadith (which is quoted in the Hamas covenant) says, that in the the good time, every stone and every tree will cry out: Look, there’s a Jew behind me, slaughter them. From the river to the sea, meaning from the Jordan River to the Mediterranean Sea. No two-state solution, only blood massacre.

It’s not just that, that’s just one issue.

Israel is a miner’s canary. You put the canary into the mine, to see if the canary will survive, or the mine is poisoned and the canary dies. Israel is the miner’s canary for the world. Anyone who thinks, it’s not about me, I can say whatever I want, this is about some Israel issue — that is not correct.

If anyone wants to read, I am going to recommend, particularly to my friends from Europe, Douglas Murray, to really understand where Europe is today and where Europe will be in 20 years from now. And if you really understand what’s happening, you understand, without a doubt, that how we respond to Hamas will determine whether the massacres that took place in the south of Israel are going take place in Antwerp, and Brussels, and Amsterdam. There is very little question about that, if you’re actually tracking. I want to ask everyone, read Douglas Murray. That’s just one author, but he’s looking at this very intelligently, and he’s been talking about this for a decade.

The support of Jihad is very, very, very real and very deep.

We need to be able to respond to Jihad.

Jihad is a real issue.

Homo Amor says no to Jihad. Homo Amor is all in for all life. Jihad is a culture of death, which is why, in the movie Star Wars, they call their battleship the Death Star. Now, you have to understand, and it’s very, very, very hard to understand: the purpose of the jihadist is to die. When I die, and I literally go to heaven, and I’m embraced by 70 virgins — in one version of that. But this entire world and life in this world is irrelevant. Life in this world is not a value — that is the jihadist position at its core. Life in this world is not a value. I die in Jihad, I take as many of my people with me, and I ascend to heaven.

This is completely different from any form of secular nationalism.

Now, if you want to say I don’t want to take jihadists seriously, they are lying — well, they are not lying, this is what they say. This is the open, clear position of ISIS, the Islamic State, of Al-Qaeda, of the Taliban, of Hamas, of Hezbollah. This entire group is funded from a number of places. One of them is Iran. There are also vectors of funding from China, and there are vectors of funding from Russia, because it potentially undermines the West. You’ve got these strange and terrible alliances.

You can’t negotiate with Jihad.

So, do we take a side here? We do. We’re all in for all life. We are on the side of life, and we’re standing against death. And this particular moment is a miner’s canary moment.

If you don’t get the Jihadi idea, then you literally have just no clue what’s happening here. This is not about terrorism, it’s about Jihad. Those are two very, very distinct expressions. It’s deep. It’s painful. It’s beyond painful.

Is Jihad a valid understanding of Islam? Yes, but that doesn’t make it okay.

That’s when we say there’s no moral equivalence.

It is an understanding which allows for the brutal methods of ISIS or Al-Qaeda — again, I’m not even talking about the methods against Israel, I am talking about the methods against their own daughters and sisters.

You’ve just got to find this in your body: can you imagine killing your daughter? You can’t even imagine it. It’s so out. For a secular Westerner, it is impossible to even imagine. How could you kill your daughter in an honor killing, because somehow she showed up inappropriately in some way, which betrayed some hint of her sensuality — and you killed her?

That’s Jihad, I just want you to understand this. I kill her because in this honor killing, the name of the family is protected, and my place in heaven is protected.

We have to stand for life. We have to stand for life.

For life doesn’t mean for the United States. It doesn’t mean for Israel. It means for every life, for every life that affirms life. But if there are people who affirm death, inflicting brutal death, well, then we have to respond to that. That’s what Homo Amor has to do.

Homo Amor has to love life.

You have to take the jihadist seriously

Now, I want to make one more point.

This is a point that Yuval Harari made correctly, and Sam Harris made correctly. I made the point independently, and dozens of other people have made the point. But it needs to be made here, because it’s gotten lost in the chat boxes that refuse to condemn Israel, that refuse to condemn Hamas, and it’s this strange moral equivalence.

A group of students at Harvard said, Israel is completely responsible for all the atrocities. Stanford, editor at Teen Vogue, a Washington Post columnist, a couple of columnists in The Guardian: Israel is absolutely responsible.

Well, that’s actually not true.

If you deeply understand the story —

• and you understand that there were many, many, many possibilities for a full peace that were utterly rejected by the Hamas jihadist position;
• and the huge beauty of the Palestinian nation that came together and became a nation — this notion of the local Arab population that wanted to come together and create a state in this place, and the local Jewish population that wanted to create a state, and the conflict between those two populations, and how that happened

— however we got to that place, let’s say that you really, really understand. You’re not repeating what you read in a chat box, or what you saw in an article. You’ve really gone deeply, and you understand the whole thing.

And let’s say you think that Israel should have done something different than it did, which is possible. Israel has been in a very, very complicated, impossible position. What should Israel do? Israel’s entire left wing, which has been in favor of establishing a Palestinian state (which I’m aligned with, I think there should be two states) — they have been unable to find a partner for peace, because the Hamas jihadist element has alway destroyed it.

But ignore all that. Let’s say you are really looking at the situation, and you’ve got this fierce critique of Israel. Yuval Harari has a fierce critique of Israel, he completely disagrees with Israel’s policy in a thousand ways. Fair, critique Israel — but don’t say that Hamas did what it did because somehow Israel laid siege to Gaza. Israel laid siege to Gaza because Hamas wanted to kill every Jew in the territory, and Israel laid siege to Gaza together with Jordan and Egypt — because Hamas was considered a jihadist, destructive of life organization by Egypt, by Jordan, and by most major countries in the world that were in touch with Hamas.

Hamas wasn’t acting to create a state. Hamas doesn’t want a state, unless all the Jews are annihilated and obliterated. It doesn’t say the Israelis. It says the Jews in all of that land are annihilated, in a bloodbath. That’s what Hamas wants — and then to go on from there, to establish an Islamic state all over the world in every country in the world.

That’s Hamas’s goal. That’s what they clearly say. Respect them enough to take them seriously.

What happened on October 7th wasn’t because of the Israeli political position. You can agree or disagree with the Israeli political position, you can critique the hell out of it. But Jihad is not responding to a particular political position. That completely misunderstands the conversation. That’s a secular Westerner, self-involved, terrible ignorance. The jihadist says, you have to be destroyed, you have to be killed, and I’m willing to die to kill you, and I’m willing for my family to die to kill you. There’s no negotiation, and there’s no compromise, and there’s no peace. That’s the jihadist position.

Moral equivalence would say, oh no, the reason this happened was because Hamas was just engaged in decolonizing, as the Teen Vogue editor wrote. This was just decolonization, this utter slaughter. And if Israel would have been willing to agree to some version of peace, it wouldn’t have happened.

But that’s not true, you can’t lie. Israel has agreed to a thousand peaces — at least eight — that have been completely rejected. Even if you think that Israel got it wrong in a thousand ways, that’s not what the jihadist is responding to.

It means you’re not understanding Jihad.

You’re actually not respecting Jihad, in a certain strange way. You are imposing your secular liberal experience of Reality on the jihadist, which is a huge, tragic, horrific mistake. The jihadist believes: I go to heaven directly only if I spill the blood — by the sword, through direct attack. That’s the jihadist belief.

Not only in Gaza, but in Belgium, and in South America, and in Amsterdam, and in England. That’s the jihadist belief. You’ve got to really get this.

Whatever your critique of Israel is, that’s not the cause for Jihad.

I am going to do a little critique now of the United States — because the United States deserves critique, and so does Israel. But I am going to do a little United States critique here for a moment, and a critique of Netanyahu, which is connected.

The United States has engaged in a policy, under Barack Obama and under Joe Biden (Biden was Obama’s Vice President, he ran this policy), of basically saying:

• We can work with Iran, we can work with Hamas.
• They say they are jihadist, but they are really not.
• We can buy their jihadi beliefs with economic incentives.

They actually cultivated and encouraged a view which says we can deal with Tehran, we can deal with Hamas — which was a huge mistake. Because you have to take the jihadist seriously. You have to give them the minimal respect, which is, they say exactly what they intend. They are being very honest, and very straight, and very clear, and they have given an enormous amount of evidence for that.

That’s really, really a difficult thing to understand. But it’s undeniably correct and being expressed — not by people who think Israeli government is right, but people who think the Israeli government is wrong about a thousand things. Having said that, what caused the slaughter was not an oppressed people rising up against their oppressor.

That’s not what this is. Jihad is something of an entirely different nature than a nationalist movement. When you have two competing nationalist movements, two competing claims in a land, you can negotiate, you can listen to each other, you can have a conversation — because you’re in a shared Field of Value. When you’re in a shared Field of Value, then you can actually create possibility.

But there is no shared Field of Value. For the jihadist, the only Field of Value is the culture of death, which says I go to heaven by killing non-Islamists and by establishing a worldwide caliphate, so that there is Islamic State ISIS, Al Qaeda, Taliban, Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran, Khomeini, control of Reality.

That’s what people are afraid to say in chat boxes. This has nothing to do with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is a legitimate conflict that should be able to be resolved if we step out of martyrdom, suicide bombing, and Jihad. If there are competing claims to land in a shared Field of Value, then something good can happen.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is legitimate, and you can take different positions on it that are critical and important. That’s not Jihad. That’s a critical distinction.

Where are you going to take your children to live?

I’m going to do another thought experiment, the last one.

Here’s the thought experiment. You have to make a choice. My Belgian friends, my Amsterdam friends, my Argentinian friends, my American friends, my friends in the Arab world, across the world — you have to make a choice. And remember, we’re making this huge differentiation. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is legitimate, and you can take different positions on it that are critical and important. That is not Jihad. That’s a critical distinction.

I want to do this thought experiment really clearly so we can really feel it. And you’ve got to be honest with yourself — fully crazy honest.

You have a choice. You and your family have to choose where you’re going to live. You can go and live — let’s assume before October 7th — you can go and live in Gaza under Hamas, or you can go and live in Tel Aviv in a pluralistic democracy. Where are you going to take your sons and daughters to live?

This is how you know. Where do you want to live? You have to make a decision of what your actual values are. What are your values? You’ve got to make a decision where to live.

Now, that doesn’t mean, let me be really clear, that you agree with Israeli policy. You might disagree with Israeli policy completely. You might decide to go to live in Tel Aviv and protest against the government, because you get to do that without being killed there. You might decide to go in Tel Aviv and be an activist for a particular position, because your daughters are safe there.

Just feel this: Gaza under Hamas, would you go live there?

The answer is you wouldn’t, and the reason you wouldn’t is because if you disagree with Hamas’s policy, you and your children will be killed brutally.

Those are two different structures or relationships to life. We’ve got to feel that.

Now again, again, let’s go really carefully.

Egypt has Gaza under siege. The Arab world doesn’t want Hamas in it — because the jihadist of Hamas wants to destroy Egypt, the way it’s structured now, which is why Egypt closed its border.

Now, if you asked me, what should we do today?

For example, should we give food and water in the siege? Of course we should.

Should we do everything we can to protect innocents? Of course we should.

Should Israel invade Gaza now? I don’t know.

I don’t want to avoid that question — I don’t know. I don’t have enough valid information to understand exactly what should be done here. It’s an impossible question, which breaks my heart a thousand times. What I can say is, whatever decision is taken in Tel Aviv, the same decision eventually is going to be taken in Brussels, and in London, and in Paris, and Argentina, and around the world.

It’s one world. It’s one globe. It’s one heart. It’s one love.

I said in the beginning, we have to, at this moment, lead from certainty and lead from uncertainty. And if I tell you I know everything, don’t believe me, I don’t. There is deep confusion, and my heart is broken.

We can’t just stand against — we have to stand for

I want to answer one other question, the last one, that was implicit in many things that people asked:

What we need to do in order to respond, what is ours to do, is we need to create a Field of Value.

The jihadist feels that they are the people that take God seriously; they take value seriously, they take honor seriously. It’s distorted and wrong, it’s a cult of death — but they look at the West and they say, no one believes anything, no one stands for anything; there is no integrity, there is no honor.

Now, that’s not true. In order for us to be able to actually stand for life, to be all in for all life, we need to generate a New Story of Value.

We need to generate that which we stand for.
We need to stand for life with the same passion that the jihadist stands for death.
We need to stand for value with the same passion that the jihadist stands for what we would call anti-life or anti-value.

And we need to stand for a world in which no one is outside the circle.
We need to stand for a world in which everyone realizes —

• that they have a unique instrument to play in the Unique Self Symphony;
• that everyone’s feelings matter;
• that the color of our skin is not what matters, what matters is the contents of our character;
• that we love each other in our brokenness;
• that we feel each other in our pain;
• that we hold our traumas together, and we hold vision;
• and that we actually have a story of Homo Amor.

What does it mean that I am related to the whole?
What does it mean that I want a new vision of relationship?
What does it mean that I have a new vision of desire?

The jihadist has desecrated desire, and particularly desire that lives in the body. It is a desecration of desire that lives in the body, and a desecration of life in the form of woman, in the form of the feminine. The feminine stands for life, and that standing for life that is the feminine is desecrated by the jihadist in a fundamental way, which is why sexual abuse, and horrific rape, and honor killing define the jihadi world, in a tragic way.

We need a new narrative of desire; we need a new narrative of relationship.

We can’t just stand against. We have to stand for.

It’s not just freedom from something, we need freedom for something.

We need to stand for a New Story of Value — and that New Story of Value has to be more passionate, and more powerful, and more profound, and has to include everyone, and it has to speak to everyone.

That’s what happened in the Renaissance. They told a New Story of Value. They told a New Story of love. That’s what Homo Amor has to do.

I spoke to a friend of mine this morning, from Belgium. And I said, so you and your friends, what are you guys up to? They said, well, basically, we want to be entrepreneurs, and make a bunch of money and have good vacations. I said, wow! He’s a good man, the young man. Really, that’s what you’re about?

That won’t work. It’s a new world.

• You’ve got to stand for the world.
• You’ve got to live in a New Story of Value in which you feel the whole and the whole feels you.
• You’ve got to give your unique gift.

And you have to feel — here’s a big word — obligated, committed to that unique gift.

You’ve got to be willing to live for goodness, truth, and beauty with the same — but exponentially more — passion than the jihadist is willing to die for the sake of Islamic supremacy.

But now, here’s the crazy thing. This is the most insane thing we’re going to say.

• When we actually stand for the God-Field (but the God you don’t believe in doesn’t exist — the real God-Field: the Field of LoveIntimacy, the Field of Value, and the Field of Goodness, Truth, and Beauty, the Field of Eros, the Field of Desire)…
• When we stand for that Field, and we live for that Field..
• When we live beyond ourselves — for ourselves and beyond ourselves…
• When we stand for the All, with radical commitment, radical joy, radical responsibility, radical integrity…

— that actually arouses respect.

I think that there are many young men and women in the Islamic Jihads of the world, who would actually notice: We bring sacred texts. We create new beauty. We create a new world vision of the sacred. That’s alluring. That’s attractive. That will invite an alternative to the brutalized, degraded story that is Jihad.

We need, if you will, a Jihad for life — a contradiction in terms. A radical commitment to life.

I’ll finish with this.

I have a young friend that we text every day, a young friend from Belgium. Let me just share with you what we write each other every day:

The good is real. I serve the good. I serve no other master. I’m powerful and free to serve the good. Baraye, for the sake of the All.

Amen.

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