Islamophobia, antisemitism, AIPAC, and scapegoats

Anyone who tiptoes around and weaponizes virulently racist Islamophobia is engaged in a very dangerous game with the state of our country rising to a Girardian fever pitch of a longing for some lynching, the great American pastime. Why is Islamophobia not given EQUAL concern as antisemitism? It’s that awkward, blatantly obvious inequality that makes young people gnash their teeth when antisemitism is leveraged to enforce mandatory Islamophobia.

Intifada means uprising. Jihad means struggle. The fact that these words always connote terrorism in American political discourse is no less Islamophobic than the trope of Jewish banker conspirators is antisemitic. There is no form of resistance that a Muslim can engage in that isn’t terrorism, because if they kill soldiers attacking them, they are terrorists, and if they aren’t shooting back, they are disposable human shields.

Muslims are not bringing Sharia law to America any more than Pope Leo is shaping the political order with Magnifica Humanitas which no conservative Catholic politician will ever take seriously. Jews as a people do not control our government. Since the Republicans have been trying to gobble up the Jewish vote from the Democrats for decades, AIPAC has had outsized influence on our elected officials and has imposed on them mandatory Islamophobia.

That’s the wrinkle. AIPAC doesn’t have the real power, but they embody the antisemitic stereotype which helps manufacture a racialized scapegoat one faction of the right wing is now in the process of turning on to blame for its own sin. AIPAC wouldn’t have any political power without the end times fetish of white evangelicals and the insatiable appetite of the military industrial complex which has made its fortune off of bombing Muslims.

The real power lies in the evangelical megachurches that worship men in uniform more than the weird brown hippie on the cross they left behind a long time ago. AIPAC doesn’t have any power without the demonic cult of Christian nationalism, and its power is rapidly evaporating in the public consciousness. It will be remembered in shame for centuries.

Because of the tidal wave of rage against AIPAC’s political machinations which wouid create scandal if it were any other racial group, it is imperative to say very clearly that people who blaspheme the name of the holy one of Israel by conspiring to hide truth and murder their ancient sibling Abel do not represent Judaism but rather the tradition of Ba’al, the god of Ahab and Jezebel who justifies whatever is done to conquer and steal land for my people.

All my Jewish friends are the most just, honest, self-aware people I have ever met, so when somebody says the Austrian painter was right because people whose behavior violates every mitzah in Torah are somehow representative of Judaism, they are talking about my closest friends whose courageous integrity is far purer than mine and they have no place in any movement I’m a part of. It needs to be absolutely unacceptable to say shit about all Jews that is very obviously not true of most Jews and entirely unrepresentative of the ancient prophets whose zeal for justice is the core Jewish ethos.

So we need to have thoughtful conversation about the intricate truth of our political reality. Jews need to be safe, Muslims need to be safe. If the safety of one requires the demonization of the other, the devil has trapped us in a demonic mindset that creates devastating mob violence. All the Facebook comments saying “the Austrian painter was right” need to be rebuked with no less wrath than sharia law nonsense and fearmongering about Muslim elected officials.

Everything you do to foment Islamophobia out of supposed solidarity with the Jews in fact feeds antisemitism by creating a wound in the collective consciousness that generates a mob. One mob feeds the hysteria that creates another. This is what Rene Girard showed us about the function of the scapegoat. This is why Walter Benjamin said the mob is the expression of divine wrath against the violation of truth.

The mob expresses divine wrath in its manifestation of Satan the accuser who crucifies Jesus in every scapegoat the mob lynches. Until we decide to stop crucifying scapegoats, we stay in Satan’s world where the victims of mob violence receive the penal substitution of the sins of our rulers.

We are witnessing a very dangerous escalation of competing scapegoat mobs. One mob wants to crucify Muslims. The other mob wants to crucify Jews. And most of the people in both mobs are Christian.

Who will blamed for our sin? That is the eternal question. If we had received God’s grace, we would not need to punish scapegoats for our sins. We crucify the scapegoats given to us by the rulers in their electoral campaigns, Muslims most prominently. who pay for the sins of the Epstein class (which is in no way the same thing as the Jews).

After spending centuries punishing Jews for the sins of the Christian European rulers, we’ve spent the last seven decades punishing Muslim civilians for our mostly Christian nation’s sin, having overthrown their democratically elected governments and created mujahadeen armies to sow the instability that galvanized the brutal authoritarianism we bomb the civilians for suffering under.

We crucify Jesus when we do that. That’s what that is. And when we see it, we are saved from the mob and we join the procession of the crucified, just like Saul of Tarsus knocked face down on the road to Damascus by the voice in the sun crying, “Why do you persecute me?” risking our social status to walk with the despised ones — brown, poor, queer, and strange — fighting for them like Jesus did before he was killed by religious authority.

When we are saved from the mob, we make the world safe for the scapegoats politicians and conquerors used to control their mobs. When we leave the mob, we center the needs for its victims’ safety in our politics so we can learn from the beauty and wisdom they gained from the crosses they have suffered, the despised, rejected lambs we held of no account like stones refused by the builder and tossed into the valley of refuse.

It is among the scapegoats where the lamb is taking her throne. And she will take her throne more and more completely as the world submits to the authority of her beauty. And when her beauty is worshiped instead of the golden calves of war that seduced all the children of Abraham, then the bushes will burn with her presence instead of the fires of sodomite terror.