A Macabre Cultural Confession

The recent hostage release by Hamas was turned into a macabre public spectacle which in truth amounted to a projection/confession of their own guilt and savagery.

In an attempt to make sense of his country’s backwardness vis-à-vis the West, the nineteenth century Russian poet and ardent Slavophile — a proponent of his country’s unique path in history — Fyodor Tyutchev wrote:

“Russia can’t be comprehended by mind./She can’t be measured by a common yardstick./One can only know Russia./Only believe in Russia.”

More than a century later, Russians are still prone to evoke these verses whenever something goes awry in their country. Yet I think Tyutchev was wrong — rational foreigners can grasp Russia by making use of their cognitive faculties. Compare it, for instance, to an entity that is wholly alien to reason — the Gaza Strip.

Gazan hostage and human corpse release pageants give a pause to even the most rabid champions of antizionism in the West. The terrorist group Hamas paraded the limping, famished and frightened men and women, and forced them to pose against the backdrop of propaganda banners. And after egging on the menacing crowd against the people who spent five hundred days in their dungeons, they distributed goody bags and even forced one Israeli to kiss his captor.

The coffin transfers were even more macabre — Hamas played cheerful music, audience members turned out to enjoy the occasion with hookah pipes, and children bounced around joyfully. Naturally, Gaza barbarity didn’t stop there — terrorists released the coffins from their possession filled with propaganda materials and without keys.

This level of cruelty is to be expected from the people who orchestrated — and spent a year and a half celebrating — the Simchat Torah Massacre in southern Israel. What’s surprising is that their sadism is not at all cerebral.

The hostage parades were co-produced with the Qatari news conglomerate Al Jazeera. One would hope that the journalists supposedly working for the Arab CNN should be sophisticated enough to realize that an average Western viewer will find the spectacle repulsive.

If the show was intended to convey menacing messages to their neighbors and bring out the most heinous instincts among their own people, it met the mark. Yet explain why the signage behind the captives had English slogans on them. Did the authors of this Hamas/Al Jazeera collaboration think that they could woo first world audiences this way? Sure, over the decades, terrorist organizations have gotten away with quite a few clumsy lies, but when your average English-speaking media consumer can plainly see when a starved hostage is being ordered around by armed captors, Gaza is clearly not winning any friends.

Moreover, your average Western media consumer understands that forensic science can determine cause of death with great accuracy. Gazans did an amateurish job mutilating the corpses of the redheaded Bibas babies which they abducted from Israel alongside their mother.

Israeli experts determined that Gazans strangled the little boys with their bare hands — after which they pelted their dead bodies with rocks in order to simulate what they imagined a death in a bombing would look like. It was an attempt to pass them off as victims of friendly fire and convince Israelis that their current military strategy is counterproductive. Did they really think it was going to work?

Terrorists are notorious for their cheesy attempts to simulate atrocities; and there is actually a term for that — Pallywood. For decades, they busied themselves filming what could pass for low budget slasher flicks, putting garish makeup on their own kids and waving what they claimed to be dead infants in the air.

They had limited success mainstreaming that type of ghoulishness in the West. The triumph of this strategy was the year 2000 al-Dura affair, a poorly staged shooting of a boy, allegedly by the Israeli Defense Forces, that was quickly used as justification for the terror war against Israel.

It’s hard not to be shocked not only by the depravity, but also the sheer stupidity of the theatrics. Some speculate that Gazans committing these atrocities are coming up with diabolical ideas in a state of captagon delirium (captagon being the synthetic stimulant popular in the region). Others point to the high incidence of cousin marriages in Gaza as the root cause of psychotic behavior. However, I’m not interested in the possible causes of reason deficiency, only in the fact that it exists.

A civilized person wants to approach social phenomena logically, comprehended by the mind and measured by a common yardstick. But Gaza, to paraphrase Sigmud Freud’s famous description of the Irishmen, is impervious to logic. Thankfully, we have psychoanalysis.

A common psychological defense mechanism first described by Freud is called projection, typically defined as unconscious displacement of one’s feelings and impulses onto others. It’s an important feature of Gazan mentality — so important that their allies in the free world developed their own language to describe it. Every accusation is a confession is what they say every time Israel provides well-documented evidence of savagery. Then they point to an amateurish simulation of a wartime atrocity to point fingers at Israel.

If the word projection connotes level-headed assessment of the situation, every accusation is a confession is full of burning passion, suggesting that the persons making this particular accusation feel in their bones what it means to act in this manner.

To know this kind of behavior, an outside observer can’t believe every Gazan claim to be factual. A factual people would develop their economy and, as Golda Meir suggested, love their children more than they hate Jews. Instead, their actions speak emotional truth as it relates to the Arab participants of this conflict. Terrorists butchered the Bibas babies in cold blood — and traumatize their own children with never-ending Jew-hating pageantry — because that’s how they feel about the Hebrew race, and they are projecting it on Israel. It seems natural to them that everyone should feel the same — no questions asked.

Unfortunately for them, logic is a necessary compound of moral conduct. Atheists will tell you that society has to be grounded in reason, and religious people believe that God gave us a blueprint for moral behavior when he gave us His laws. Either way, we know that the foundations of our civilization are orderly.

Watching hostage release shows in Gaza, I am in awe of the innocence of it all. Not because they feature corpulent women in full niqabs showering masked militants with rose petals, but because children and young people in attendance always display that nonchalant look in their eyes as if they don’t know good from evil. But they seem to know how to express their feelings towards Jews; and that’s all that matters to them.

Although I don’t believe any society is irredeemable, to ask Israelis to take another chance on genocidal maniacs next door is unfair. Consequently, the only option left is that Gazans should be absorbed by the nations that have supported them over the previous decades.

Photo Credit- New York Post