-last modf 1446 AH, 2024-11-24 16:30 +0100, bit.ly/_nafm [007] index
3min read
By Hasan Spiker, @RealHasanSpiker, Wednesday November 8th, 2023[1]
The original text is unchanged, footnotes are by the web editor.
The War that has ensued in the aftermath of October 7th is the defining event of our generation, and a true turning point for all future relations between Islam and the West.
We witness, in its unfolding, nothing less than the final dissolution of the post-WWII settlement, and of the ensuing Americentric and Eurocentric world order, whose centrepiece was a self-justificatory moral narrative centred on the liberal, democratic West’s virtuous triumph against ‘the paradigm of pure evil,’ Hitler and the Nazis. The core sacrificial victims symbolising the liberal-democratic right to moral leadership were the Jews, slaughtered in the Holocaust but subsequently rising up from the ashes to heroically assert their ‘will to survive’ in the construction of a new nation.
That the very paradigm, indeed the veritable Platonic Form of embattled, irrationally maligned minorities had been ‘rescued’ from the death camps and culturally rehabilitated by the Western powers, became emblematic of the claim that a liberal, proto-Rawlsian Western relativism alone could safely host different minorities by dissolving them into a neutral humanity governed by an ‘original position’, from which vantage point previously fraught differences would finally be resolved exactly by treating the substantive claims of Jew, Muslim, and Christian as equally meaningless expressions of arbitrary, culturally constructed collective will. Yet the liberal order’s great claim to moral leadership is that they are nonetheless protected cultural artefacts of constructed collective will.[2]
In the successful imprinting of belief in the inherent relativity of all culture and opinion upon the masses, the illusion of bewildering self-expressive and self-identificatory diversity in the ‘melting pot’ of major Western societies has been essential. It provided the backdrop to the 1990s West’s ‘universalist’ self-presentation, as alone capable amongst the world’s civilisations of accommodating such pluralism and diversity, because of its unique trans-partisan ‘tolerance’. In turn, this prevailing impression was able to successfully dress the justification for its unquestionable hegemony in the pious raiment of moral self-evidence and necessity.[3]
But following on from a long chain of painful shocks, chief amongst them the War on Terror, the October 7th War constitutes the final deathblow to any vain hope of saving this flagship moral claim of liberalism from ultimate and intrinsic failure; it has, like no event before it, fully exposed liberal secular society’s much-vaunted ‘diversity’ of cultural and intellectual expression, as no more than appearance. Granted, journalistic history is littered with all too great a surplus of opportunistic ‘turning points’; yet the power of the confluence of factors presented by our present circumstance, ensures that ours is quite a different case.
The West’s vacant[4] ratification of the most transparent Isra-lic[19] evil, of arbitrary and unrestrained mass-murder, is for Muslims surely the final nail in the coffin of Western moral legitimacy, at a time in which the West is simultaneously devouring itself in culture wars, and in the frenzied worship of whimsical dysphorias. They no longer heed the wisdom-teachings of their own Book: 'Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.’[5]
Yes, a ‘person of colour’ with an unpronounceable name may be allowed to enter Number 10 or the White House on the unnegotiable condition that he prove an even more intransigent neoliberal[17] than his white mentors; but where are the Sufi Shaykhs or Hindu Pandits in Number 10? It is only that comedic, impossible image that could ever represent the true diversity that liberalism claims. To the contrary, having long forgone the genuine pluralism which the liberal order can no longer rouse itself to affirm even as an ideal, it has at length finally confessed the strict impossibility of its ‘neutral’ position.[18]
Populist movements in Europe and America wish to recreate assertive partisanship for a distinctly Western, even ‘Christian’ culture and identity, all the while doggedly refusing to repudiate the ethical and metaphysical arbitrarist voluntarism that itself guaranteed the giddy 20th century ‘melting of all that was solid’ in Western civilisation.[6]
This ungrounded arbitrarism can only result in the authoritarian imposition of pure will; and the awful truth is that the arbitrarist voluntarism of the Western liberal order is, and always has been, intrinsically authoritarian. And in the sense of impending doom from which the liberal order so clearly suffers, brought on both by the fantasy threat of “Islamism”, and the culture wars, the authorities are finding it increasingly expedient to visibly brandish their latent authoritarian powers.[7]
Now, it is precisely in constituting one of the central pillars of this hidden authoritarian foundation that the importance of Israel lies, as the aggressive emblem and bulwark of the ‘neutral’ liberal order.
By ‘supporting’ Israel, the liberal order mean to say that the existence of that Nietzschean Nihilistan, that Great Secular Nothing called Israel, is a key article of their creed: Created in the heart of the Holy Land in 1948, in the aftermath of the Allies’ precious World War Two, in which they so bravely firebombed Germany into oblivion from thirty thousand feet, while more easily expendable Slavic lives finally overcame the Nazis on the ground: That War which stamped and sealed our entrance into the very anti-ethical world of post-morality that has now culminated in the October 7th War.
For it is that secular Nothing in the heart of the “Middle East” that symbolises the victory of the liberal secular ‘way of life’ of self-interested individualism and arbitrarist hedonism over the illusions of the ‘regrettably-still-backward’, namely, ‘those we tolerated in virtue of our enormous humanitarian sophistication, but can no longer tolerate.’
Of course, Israel is not and never has been a democracy —if it ever had been, the Palestinians would have voted the Zionists out before they ever had a chance to commence their Plan Dalet of ethnic cleansing, their destruction in 1948 of 530 villages and their 50 massacres. But via Berdyczewski[8] and others, the Zionists are fully immunised by their Nietzschean Will-to-Powerism against true and false, or right and wrong.
It is indeed an inescapable fact, however ‘uncomfortable’, that the same post-ethical Will to Power that animated Nazism, now animates Zionism. As the political theorist Eyal Chowers notes, ‘Zionism emerged as a singular mixture of Nietzschean and Marxian themes … Zionism — as an all-embracing revolution — required the profanization of history and a generalized secularization in order to truly free the human sense of potency in the world.'[9]
In addition to this Nietzschean component, the ‘logic’ and ‘ethics’ of Zionism amount to those of Darwinian survival and Spencerian ‘survival of the fittest’; and in the same manner as their Western intimates, in Islam they can only see a terrifyingly unyielding representation of all that they feel compelled to intransigently deny about reality.
Since Israel’s whole constructed existence depends upon a lie, it will fight to the death to defend that lie; and it is an ‘existential’ and hence ‘moral’ exigency for it to annihilate anyone and anything that calls out the lie.[20]
And since the United States and Britain have founded their self-definitional moral leadership of the world upon ‘saving’ the Jews from the Nazi death camps, the survival of their own moral narrative also rests upon propping up the lie, at all costs.
Never mind that the United States and Britain had steadfastly turned countless Jewish refugees away at the outset of Nazi persecution, or that in 1940 Britain had interred Jewish refugees as ‘enemy aliens.’ For in the narrative retrospectively, but nonetheless powerfully and indelibly projected back onto events, the ‘tricky moral quandaries’ of the Second World War, the firebombing of Hamburg, the annihilation of Dresden, are justified as exceptional cases, warranted by the unprecedented genocidal evil of Hitler in destroying six million Jews.[10]
Again, never mind the history itself, which assures us that the deliberate targeting of German civilians in Hamburg and Dresden had precisely nothing to do with a ‘fight against the ultimate evil’ of the Nazi genocide of the Jews;
no, Sir Arthur ‘Bomber’ Harris’s stated aim in sanctioning those horrific crimes, in which over half a million civilians were crushed or burned alive, was to ‘break the spirit of the German civilian population to resist: simply to win the War at all costs. ‘The Government, for excellent reasons,’ Harris said in 1941, ‘has preferred the world to think that we still held some scruples and attacked only what the humanitarians are pleased to call “military targets.” I can assure you, gentlemen, that we tolerate no scruples.’
Indeed, the first ‘area bombing’ targeting civilians in the Second World War was ordered by Churchill, and carried out by the RAF in Mönchengladbach, not by Hitler as legend tells.[11]
These disconcerting inconsistencies in the received moral narrative make far better sense in light of the unpalatable truth that Hitler and the Nazis, and the liberal West and Soviets who opposed him, are all merely so many sides of the same equation. The Holocaust was not an aberration from which ‘true’ Western civilisation is innocent, but one of the worst crimes of post-Enlightenment modernity itself; it was committed by the same people, and the same ideas, the same people who firebombed Hamburg and Tokyo, nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki, who ravaged Vietnam and Iraq, and now serve as funders and steadfast apologists for the Gaza genocide.[12]
Yes, it was post-Enlightenment modernity itself that was the perpetrator of the Holocaust; just as it also perpetrated the chattel enslavement of the continent of Africa, the opium outrages in China, the annihilation of the Native Americans, the starvation and ‘economic cleansing’ of India. Far from representing aberrations, these depravities were each inevitable consequences of the spirit of the Age of Exploration and the subsequent Scientific Revolution, namely the Baconian inversion of tripartite soul and society — wherein intellect was subordinated to spiritedness and power — as well as the subsequent, Humean, Enlightenment, Industrial Revolution progression of the inversion, in which intellect was subordinated to desire and the passions.[13]
And they are no less the inevitable consequences of Luther’s separation of faith and reason, of the extirpation[14] of formal and final causes[15], and secondary qualities from nature, of the Cartesian Split, of ‘I had to deny knowledge in order to make room for faith,’ of ‘Render therefore unto Caesar such things which are Caesar’s.’
For a futile moment after October 7th, the Western powers attempted their own moral resuscitation by again invoking the time-honoured narrative of their moral saviourhood;[21] only for it to fatally backfire this time, and only serve, instead, to demonstrate their terminal moral illegitimacy.[22] Meanwhile, the invocation of the Holocaust has lost its power, for in surely one of the supreme ironies of history, Israel have themselves supplanted their own Nazi reference point of ‘supreme evil’.
Western genocide apologism after October 7th has forever imprinted in our hearts and minds all that makes the declining, flailing post-Enlightenment West so dangerous: its lack of any stable, unnegotiable morality. For anything can be countenanced in that dismal anti-ethics of post-morality, the calculus of survival.[16]
Nov 8, 2023
Footnotes
1a. Source: @RealHasanSpiker
1b.
Video with Shaykh Hasan Spiker reading the above text with Paul Williams from Blogging Theology.
His and Paul's comments were introduced in footnotes: 9, 11, 13, 20 - 22
Has the West Lost its Moral Legitimacy? With Shaykh Hasan Spiker - YouTube: YES, it has!
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artefact: an object made by a human being, typically one of cultural or historical interest.
In the post-modern 'anything-goes' West, religions - especially Islam , the last authentic one, have been turned from living realities of immense beneficence into mere objects (artefacts) defined by the interpretation of the ruling 'liberal' elites, of what a religion is supposed to be, and which role it is supposed to play in human society, in short: as little as possible.
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This show of pluralism and 'universalist self presentation' was fitting when economic parameters dictated it.
This was the case during the decades after World War II, when the West, the United States, Europe, etc were growing economically, and the diversity of a population became the tune of the day, because immigration was necessary and therefore promoted.
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vacant
1 (of a place) not occupied; empty.
2 having or showing no intelligence or interest
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Jesus knew their thoughts and said to them, “Every kingdom divided against itself will be ruined, and every city or household divided against itself will not stand.”
Matthew 12:25
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And so reinventing a new authoritarianism, where 'anything goes' as long as it is not from the truth and nobility of Islam, or from other emancipatory movements.
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See for example, the new definitions of extremism and other silly new definitions of terrorism. See our page
002_A New Definition of Extremism
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8a.
Hasan Spiker: "Berdyczewski of course is a very important early Zionist ideologue and philosopher who represents the right-wing Nietschean branch of Zionism."
8b.
Berdyczewski published in many of the leading Hebrew journals, vigorously attacking all accepted ideological positions and calling for a "transvaluation" – in the Nietzschean sense – of Judaism and Jewish history, and the expansion of the canons of Hebrew literary taste.
Berdyczewski - Encyclopedia.com (Later name-change: Bin-Gorion - not the same as David Ben-Gurion, the Zionist politician)
8c.
Related: Nietzsche's Influence on Jewish Writers, The Atlas Society Ayn Rand, Objectivism
At the turn of the 19th century, there was a renaissance of Jewish literature in Russia, mostly in the Ukraine. This renaissance was a part of the rise of Jewish Nationalism and the establishment of the Zionist movement. The Jewish writers strove to break away from their Orthodox background and to live a secular, earthly life. As pointed out by Chris Sciabarra, it was the time of “The Silver Age” and the Jewish writers were no different from the rest of the Russians in their admiration for Nietzsche.
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9a.
Re: truly free the human sense of potency in the world…
9b.
Hasan Spiker: "Meaning [according to the Ahl al-Kidhāb][23], that pure will ot the 'will to power', that asserting of our will because there is no objective meaning, there is no objective truth, there is no objective morality, we have to assert our indiviual and collective will upon the situation… "
See also: Rabbi Yaakov Shapiro on "Zionist remake of traditional Judaism and the Nietzschen 'will to power'"
001_Zionism Has Nothing to Do with Judaism
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… sounds familiar? It should!
Picture from around 2018 or 2021?
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11a.
Paul: A top British military historian wrote on this question of aerial bombing in the Second World War, both German and British, and the documentary evidence in official archives is very clear: the first aerial bombing which targeted civilian objects during the Second World War was ordered by the British not by the Germans. Then Hitler responded in kind, he copied this in retaliation.
And they also copied the concentration camps from the British.
11b.
In WWII, who started bombing civilian areas?
Source: The Baedeker blitz – who started it? | Second world war | The Guardian
The important point is not who bombed what and why, but who started it all. We did. On the night of 10-11 May 1940 the RAF bombed München-Gladbach without provocation from Germany. The raid did little damage and cost few lives, but it was thought important enough at the time to be kept from the British public because of its doubtful psychological effects. It was only revealed in 1944 when a former Air Ministry official, JM Spaight, wrote a book called Bombing Vindicated, and is not well-known today.
[Note added 19 October 2009: In 1960 the city adopted its present name, Mönchengladbach.]
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Source: Lessons on Genocide From Xinjiang and Gaza - DAWN
Despite a clear U.N. legal definition of genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention—based on "acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group, as such"—why is it that many countries condemning genocide by China are simultaneously defending Israel from such charges, while many of those condemning Israel are also defending China?
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13a.
This inversion of principal values on societies and cultures is called by René Guenon "anti-tradition".
Antitradition And Countertradition
13b.
Re: the inversion in which intellect was subordinated to desire and the passions.
Hasan Spiker / quote: So this is essentially talking about the tripartite soul of Plato, which he locates in the soul and which subsequently possesses a manifestation in society in virtue of the fact that societies are made up of individuals.
So the properly balanced soul possesses three faculties, which is the intellect, spiritedness and desire.
And Socrates and the Republic proves this by saying, with what you would call today a thought experiment of a man who's incredibly thirsty and someone puts a glass of water on the table and says, this is water, but it's a glass of poisoned water. And the man is basically on death's door. He's not quite going to die if he doesn't have a drink of water, but he's in a state of extreme discomfort.
And so what proceeds from this is what ensues here is an inward conflict.
Because the man is desperately thirsty. That's desire. He wants the water. Now, if he didn't know with his intellect, a certain fact, visible fact about the water, he'd go ahead and drink the water right now. But there's something else.
So the faculty of desire wants to attract benefit to itself. It wants to bring benefit to itself. And the faculty of spiritedness, (or more colloquially, the faculty of anger ) wants to ward off harm, wants to keep harm away. So there's a conflict here.
On the one hand, he desperately wants to drink the water. And on the other hand, he wants to keep the harm of the poison away. Now, if it was just those two faculties of spiritedness and desire, he wouldn't be able to make a decision.
The intellect then intervenes and decides, well, if I'm going, my thirst will be quenched for two minutes if I drink the poisoned water, but then I'll die, sadly. So it weighs up these different outcomes, possible outcomes. And it says, well, I'll have to abstain from drinking the water, despite how incredibly thirsty I am.
And Socrates deduces from this thought experiment that there are indeed three quite separate faculties within the soul.
Now, what is this is not just a philosophical, historical curiosity, the tripartite soul became absolutely standard scientific fact, as it were in today's language, in the Muslim sciences, in the Islamic sciences, in the medieval Christian world, in their intellectual output and systems, and in the Jewish world.
So this was absolutely central and important and a fundamental principle, really an unquestionable principle in the traditional world, the pre-modern world, as it were. And so a well-ordered society is one in which, again, the spiritedness, which is represented anger, which is represented by the martial domain or by the what the ruler puts in place in terms of military and police (P: or the Republic or the auxiliaries in the platonic kind of Republic. So you have the philosopher king and the auxiliaries, the army, the defend and its aggressors and so on.)
So then, you know, desire would be represented by the merchant class, those working in agriculture, and so on.
But the point is, and then the intellectual class is most paradigmatically manifest in the person of the philosopher king. And so, but what it represents more broadly is philosophy itself is the love of wisdom, putting everything in its proper place and finding out the true, uncovering the true realities and natures of things.
Now, so these are potencies which are latent in any society, but a society in terms of a hierarchy can be ordered in many different ways. So it can be ordered with the martial component at the top, right. And let's say desires coming after that.
So the main concern, let's say, of this society, it's a very aggressive military society, let's say, like North Korea. And then secondary to that is trade and the economy and so on. And then intellect, ([how the Ahl al-Kidhāb think][23] because we don't believe in objective truth, for example, or we espouse a kind of relativism) comes last.
This is Humeian in the sense that Hume very famously said that reason is and should be and can only be the slave of the passions.
And so society can be ordered in any of these many different configurations. But the properly ordered society is one in which desire is subordinate to intellect, and spiritedness is subordinate to intellect. And spiritedness actually has a type of priority to desire as well.
But when you have a society which is inverted, you get all sorts of imbalances and problems developing in the society.
So certainly the society we live in today is one which enshrines desire at the top of the hierarchy. Everything is to serve pleasure. Everything is to serve indulgence (note: indulgent is willing to allow excessive leniency, generosity, or consideration or indulgent done or enjoyed it as a special treat or pleasure).
And everything is to serve the economy. The economy becomes the most important consideration in the society. Now, the point is that there's been a progression from the pre-modern, fairly universal order where it's understood that intellect governs.
And these other considerations are important, but they have to be subordinate to the important individual, not to negate desires, or spiritedness and that moral sense of right and wrong, but they have to be subordinate to intellect in order to exist in harmony and in a just balance.
Now, many identify Bacon, it's not that everything's contained in a single individual, but he is emblematic of this change that Bacon subordinated the role of intellect to power.
So, intellect and philosophy and knowledge of the world stopped being a means to the contemplation of God, a means to uncovering the true essence and true nature of reality for the greater glory of God, but rather became about to be subordinated and directed towards the mastery of the physical world and reinforcing the power of empire and the power of the ruler and so on via technology, via exploration. And so, this is a very, very significant change.
And then the final stage is the subordination of all to economic production, the industrial revolution, to the entrainment of desire and pleasure as the highest ideals, a hedonism, as it were, of the other societies. /end of quote.
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extirpate: eradicate or destroy completely
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Meaning nothing higher than the senses & and what is left of unguided ratio/ reason.
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Tentative explanation of last sentence:
"For anything can be countenanced in that dismal anti-ethics of post-morality, the calculus of survival," that the liberal/ authoritarian West will do anything for its own survival - when threatened.
See fn 20a
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see for example: What Is Neoliberalism? Definition and Examples
By Robert Longley
Neoliberalism is a political and economic policy model that emphasizes the value of free market capitalism while seeking to transfer control of economic factors from the government to the private sector. Also incorporating the policies of privatization, deregulation, globalization, and free trade, it is commonly—though perhaps incorrectly—associated with laissez-faire or “hands-off” economics. Neoliberalism is considered a 180-degree reversal of the Keynesian phase of capitalism prevalent from 1945 to 1980.
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True social diversity and pluralism was the lived reality in the islamic civilization, and still is in many countries. Counter to what is assumed today, pre-modern civilizations were generally not burdening themselves with the racist mentalities so common in modern times.
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Why Isra-l and not Israel?
The 'el' in the misappropriated name of 'Israel' stands for 'God', however the state of Isra-l is committing the evil works of the Satan (rajim).
(Not all Jewish people of Isra-l are like this, but the mentality of the majority is built on racism, supremacism and hatred.)
The state of Isra-l is a genocidal colonial settler entity, propped up by the US empire, and is bent on technological murder and messianic humiliations, evictions and killings and : on the destruction of the Palestinian people in total or in part.
Therefore this lunatic, fascist apartheid state has to be dismantled, it has ZERO legitimacy.
More: Why Isra-l and not Israel?
And also:
"Free Palestine" is neither a call for genocide, nor a call for mass slaughtering Jews, in the way 'Isra-l' is doing with Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank. A free Palestine means free for everyone, not just some.
Choseness is not entitlement!
Choseness is no permission to break the 10 Commandments brought by Prophet Musa (pbuh).
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20a.
Hasan Spiker: "If the ultimate principle of morality, and conception of the good is pure survival, then an existential threat or existential necessity or exigency, would be a moral exigency."
20b. What lie?
It's a multifaceted lie or a web of lies, but the most important, fundamental lie is that this was "a land without the people for a people without a land."
And that the Jewish people had a right to this land, because there were a few short-lived kingdoms more than 2000 years ago. Which is a logic that if you extend it to any other place in the world, it becomes absolutely absurd, in every possible way.
The original word Palestine, filistiin developed out of Greek and other languages, which was Paletiin. This is actually an older term and it was used before Israel was ever used, which is another interesting fact.
Part of that concept of "a land without the people for a people without a land," was this idea that this was a barren wasteland that had not been cultivated, which is extraordinarily and precisely the opposite.
It was the most richly cultivated area in the Middle East. The majority of Palestinians were farmers and it was a very richly and beautifully cultivated land before the founding of the state of Israel, with a lot of very important cities and a thriving intellectual culture with traditional scholars. So [their slogan from above] it's only pure phantasy, and a straightforward lie.
There are all sorts of ways that they are denying, for example Nakba denial is a huge thing in Israel.
It was [and still is] the official established line that the Nakba never happened. It just didn't take place.
This is the expulsion or ethnic cleansing of at least 750,000 Palestinians in 1948.
And the [Zionist] established political line was that the surrounding Arab nations forced the Palestinians to leave.
Or that they left of their own accord.
And it was a later generation of Israeli historians who categorically proved that this was another total lie.
Related:
Professor Ilan Pappé: Israel Has Chosen To Be A "Racist Apartheid State" With U.S. Support. From 2015 YouTube
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Re: Western powers attempted their own moral resuscitation by again invoking the time-odden narrative of their moral saviourhood.
Hasan Spiker: "Ooh, anti-Semitism is raising its ugly head again and the Holocaust never again. And so forth." But [as the Ahl al-Kidhāb are wont to say:][23] "We stand with Israel because we'll never allow that type of barbarity to come again, to happen again."
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Paul: By which you mean the continued genocide in Gaza presumably, whilst they were invoking the fear of the Holocaust, while one after its own fashion is continuing in the occupied in Gaza!
bombing Gaza 2015
Hasan Spiker: And I mean, we've never, I don't think this has ever happened in the way that it's happening because the scale of barbarity and the depravity of the barbarity and the shamelessness of the barbarity is comparable to anything that we know of in history. Not yet on the scale because there hasn't been enough time. But it's comparable to anything in history. But the difference is this being live streamed to the world. This is the difference. This is the difference.
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Ahl al-Kidhāb: They are people who deny any truth-value for the heavenly revelations, and for whom God the Almighty doesn't seem to count, neither for the individual nor for society as a whole. Their dominant belief is that there is no absolute truth (so that anything will be true if you feel strongly for it, or if it makes you happy), and that those 'old' belief systems are false and therefore should be ignored, disregarded and disparaged, in extreme case fought against.
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