If antisemitism is not included in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders), it should be.
The International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance composed a well-intentioned, lengthy (thirty-seven-word) definition/description of antisemitic thinking supported by many countries and states. Three words would have sufficed: “Antisemitism is lying about Jews.” That is all one needs to know about the phenomenon.
A case in point: Piers Morgan’s recent interview with aging British rocker Roger Waters, who is in a class with fellow anti-Jew Brit Jeremy Corbyn. During the interview, Waters called reports on October 7’s rape and burning of babies “filthy and disgusting Israeli lies.” He said this even though most of the video footage showing the rapes and murders came from Hamas.
This is a textbook clinical manifestation of a most primitive psychological defense mechanism: denial.
Roger Waters (edited). YouTube screen grab.
Jeremy Corbyn, likewise, when journalists asked him to comment about the thousands of Jewish victims on October 7, refused because that would require pitying them. For clinical anti-Jews, Zionists are not to be pitied as victims because they are the predators in the “Jewish evil” fairy tale playing in their heads. The same day that Corbyn refused to acknowledge Jewish suffering, Rashida Tlaib took the same approach in America when a reporter asked her for a comment: crickets.
For people like Waters, Corbyn, and Tlaib, there is something in their minds that blocks sympathy for Jewish victims of satanic Jew-haters such as Nazis or Muslim Brotherhood members.
For such people, Jews are the enemy, never to be pitied. Millions of Muslims like Ilhan Omar accuse Israel of existing on an entirely different plane of evil from other nations. Many believe Jews, perhaps with the power of mythical wizards worthy of 1001 Arabian Nights, hypnotized the whole world into believing the “myth” of a Holocaust, all to make the world feel guilty and allow them to steal Palestine from the Palestinians. Holocaust denial is rampant in the Muslim world.
Needless to say, this bears no resemblance to the historical record of the Zionist movement, which began decades before the Holocaust. These people harbor in their brains a one-dimensional cartoon perversion of history. No less than the head of the Palestinian Authority, the Fatah criminal Mahmoud Abbas was even awarded a PhD by the antisemitic Soviets for writing a dissertation denying the Holocaust.
The history of baseless Jew hatred is endless. Adolf Hitler believed the Jews in Germany, 1% of the population, were so powerful and hateful that they had the power to “stab Deutschland in the back” during WWI and made them lose the war and then suffer the onerous post-war peace treaty.
And here is Roger Waters denying as an Israeli fabrication what Hamas gleefully and proudly did to thousands of Jews on October 7. Waters himself may not deserve the overall diagnosis of psychosis, though, in this matter, it appears to be an eruption of an isolated moment of psychosis, manifesting as denial of a virtually psychotic intensity.
In a way, Waters thinks like a “Palestinian” whose national narrative is one great perversion of recorded history. The root fantasy of Palestinian Nationalism is the lie that a Palestinian nation lived in the homeland they always called Filistin and that the Zionists suddenly appeared and stole it from them. In fact, there is no record, no evidence, of such a nation ever living in that country with that name or of the Jews stealing it.
Down the corridors of time, there has never been any truth to the lies about Jews as evildoers, e.g., that they control the world economy or the news media or that they are immensely powerful. Osama bin Ladin may even have believed that the World Trade Center in New York City was indeed the center of world trade and that the Jews, in the world’s most populous Jewish city, were in charge.
Fourteen months after 9/11, bin Laden published an explanation for what he did. He wrote that America is Islam’s enemy because it supports Israel when, according to the Koran, the Jews are the greatest enemies of Believers (Sura 5:82).
Indeed, when the Islamic Cooperation Organization recently convened, the keynote speaker declared the greatest problem facing Islam to be neither illiteracy nor endless fratricide, e.g., in Algeria, Libya, Yemen, Syria, Sudan and Iraq, where they never stop killing one another. Instead, the greatest problem is the existence of the geographically microscopic state (compared to the expanse of land Islam rules over) of Israel.
And here is Roger Waters insisting there is no evidence of rape and burning babies. One imagines he thinks the IDF’s 47-minute compilation of horror videos that the rapists and murderers themselves made is a cheap fake too; likewise, Cheryl Sandberg’s “Screams before Silence.”
Ergo, antisemitic thinking is truly a mental disorder because it denies reality, which is the essence of a mental illness. It manifests as unfounded accusations that Jews commit terrible crimes, which gives the anti-Jews license to commit actual horrible crimes against them.
Israeli Member of Knesset Sharren Haskel’s 88-year-old grandmother in Paris was recently beaten by two Arabs, who punched her, breaking a tooth and knocking her to the ground, after which they kicked her. Again, this is an 88-year-old woman. Jew-hatred is a strain of spiritual rabies affecting the human animal and driving the infected to cruelly batter an old woman for the crime of just being a Jew because, to those so infected, all Jews are guilty.
If official Israel would stop insisting that its fight for survival is with the “Palestinians” and has something to do with the absence of a state for them, then Israelis might see more clearly the enemy’s identity. It is not Palestinian Nationalism but Islam, which has Jew-hatred embedded in the Koran and the Hadith, which played out in Islam proudly, over fourteen centuries, “oppressing and humiliating” Jews per the Koran.
The entirety of the “Palestinian” identity is a lie. For a Biblical generation of forty years after WWI, the official Arab position was that there never was such a country as Palestine in Islamic history, and that was true. Not until the 1960s did the lie of a “Palestinian people” emerge. The UN opened for business in 1945, but not until 1970 was there even one resolution referencing a “Palestinian people” as a party to the Arab-Israeli conflict (as that conflict was known inside the UN during the first-quarter century of its existence).
Moreover, Israel’s enemies and the world’s are not even “Islamist” adherents of “Islamism,” two words Muslims themselves never use. They are the tendentious neologisms of pretentious, non-Muslim, Western academics who compromise their scholarly integrity for personal/political reasons.
When Maimonides, in 1148, barely escaped homicidal Muslim butchers in Spain, no Jew called them “Muslim extremists” or “Islamists,” just Muslimin. Likewise, in 1683, when the Turks were besieging Vienna, nobody in the frightened city called them “Islamists.” They were Mussulmener.
In Gaza today, the two main terror gangs are the Muslim Brotherhood/Hamas and Islamic Jihad, with nothing “Palestinian” about these names.
The war against Israel, whether waged by Muslims and non-Muslims, has always been nothing but antisemitism, a mental disorder that manifests as delusions of Jewish evil that does not exist.
Sha’i ben-Tekoa’s PHANTOM NATION: Inventing the “Palestinians” as the Obstacle to Peace is available at Amazon.com in hard cover or a Kindle eBook. His podcasts can be heard on www.phantom-nation.com.
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