Hatred by Willard Gaylin (best autobiographies to read TXT) 📕

would threaten both the security of Jews in the United States and the country itself. That would join the surrogate, the Jews, to the great Satan that really offends it, the United States.

What is special about either Jews or Americans? Nothing. All infidels, all unbelievers, constitute Al Qaeda’s theoretical enemy. But it is difficult to mobilize hatred toward so large and amorphous an enemy. Focus is necessary in a crusade. These two groups represent the most convenient entry points for Al Qaeda’s hatred.

Al Qaeda represents the new community of hatred, as Nazi Germany represented the old. Traditional hatred has always been stoked by rage. And rage has been triggered by fear. Both are the products of feeling humiliated and threatened. Traditional hatred was built on competition for food, land, and survival. The enemy is at our gates; it is them or us. The savage hatred and barbarity manifest between the Iroquois and their enemies, the neighboring and related tribes during the American colonial period, were a product of that special animus often reserved for neighbors and brothers. The enmity was based on a competitive struggle for the means of survival.

The bloodshed in the Balkans was similar, one of feared enemies competing in an enclosed and limited space. Fear and anger went hand in hand. The Palestinian/Israeli conflict can be structured in this way. But not Al Qaeda. Territory is not its goal. Ideology is. And envy, not fear, is the emotion that dictates its selection of an enemy.

Nevertheless, whether the battle is over ideology or territory, the real enemy is always the one within. The real mortification is one’s own sense of personal inadequacy and failure. The hated communities are psychological displacements. For members of Al Qaeda and other anti-Americans, that displacement is dictated by envy. Neither the Jews nor the Americans threaten the religious belief of Islam. At least not by direct evangelical expansionism. The threat to Islamic communities is from the seductive image of a different life visualized through the extended perception of such modern technologies as international television, movies, CDs, DVDs, and particularly the Internet.

The United States is hated, not for the evil it has inflicted, but for its envied achievements, its seductive way of life. Anger is a response to the negative aspects of a culture; envy is a response to the positive. And who better to envy than the United States. The jihad may have been initiated by the mullahs out of their rejection of modernity, which they view as sacrilegious. But the masses have an authentic craving for the comforts and decencies of modern society. Only those with access to electricity romanticize the candle. Iran may have seceded from the modern world under the repressive regime of the mullahs, but Iranian antimodernism barely lasted one generation, even under the constrictive regime of a totalitarian theocracy.

Still, neither evangelical fervor nor envy can sustain a state of hatred. Hatred at its base is always a rationalization. It is a displacement to an identifiable other as the source of our personal miseries. Hatred is a disease, a social disease. And it is highly contagious.

I have heard many say, in defense of Palestinian hatred, that after generations of being kept in squalid refugee camps by their own people, becoming increasingly aware of a different and superior standard of living available to others, feeling frustrated and humiliated by the exercise of Israeli power, Palestinians are “entitled” to their hatred. This is one of the sad misunderstandings of the nature of hatred. Hatred is not entitlement like health care. It is a disease like tuberculosis. It may infect others, but it inevitably destroys the hater, diminishing his humanity and perverting the purpose and promise of life itself. No one is entitled to hatred any more than he is entitled to cancer.

In recent times the civilized European communities and the United Nations have honed their skills at detecting injustice by focusing on “American imperialism” and the “Israeli occupation.” As I do not take any human rights violations lightly, I pay attention to their charges. Still, I am amazed by their peculiar insensitivity—one might say blindness—to the heinous crimes and atrocities committed on the African continent. Their umbrage threshold is very high when dealing with the slavery, abuse of women, child labor, even genocide that are endemic there. Whether this disparity of response is political correctness operating in concert with latent hostility to the privileged populations, or a reverse manifestation of racism that perceives barbarity as a more natural and permissible aspect of black and Arab cultures, I am not sure.

The hand-wringing in the United Nations and the press in Europe over the victims of American and Israeli acts of “genocide” in Afghanistan or the West Bank have so occupied the debates of the world community that the unspeakable war of true genocide in Sudan goes relatively unattended. The people of the Sudan live and starve in makeshift refugee camps in the shadows that lie beyond the astigmatic vision of the world bureaucracies. We can not afford the luxury of standing by. There are no more “local” problems in the area of hatred. We must heed the warning of Nelly Sachs:

You onlookers

Whose eyes watched the killing.

As one feels a stare at one’s back

You feel on your bodies

The glances of the dead.

How many dying eyes will look at you

When you pluck a violet from its hiding place?

How many hands be raised in supplication

In the twisted martyr-like branches

Of old oaks?

How much memory grows in the blood

Of the evening sun?82

14

CONFRONTING HATRED HEAD-ON

Whether through the special creation of God or a radical evolutionary adaptation, we human beings are unparalleled in the world of animals. That gift of freedom is the defining attribute of our distinctiveness. It is the underpinning of both human glory and human agony. It defines our way of life. The gift of freedom demands responsibility. Responsibility justifies moral condemnation and punishment. With knowledge comes good and evil, imagination and dread, anticipation and despair, creation and destruction. This combination of