Heritage and de-demonisation

Heritage and de-demonisation

Ali Azzali

(English translation by Ihsan Mathe)

 

 

‘’We have been evangelized. We have been conquered by Christ. We need help."
Yali Hashash¹

 

British-Israeli journalist of Iraqi origin Rachel Shabi, who has written for The Guardian, The New York Times, The London Times, The Independent, Al Jazeera English and Foreign Policy, and whose book won the National Jewish Book Award in 2009², published an original essay last November entitled Off-White: The Truth About Antisemitism.³ This study, dedicated to the theme of contemporary anti-Semitism and the definition of Jewish identity, examines some crucial mutations of our time, in particular the fact that unconditional support for Israel has "rehabilitated" or "normalised" reactionary parties in the United States and Europe in the name of a "common heritage" defined by the term "Judeo-Christian West". From Donald Trump to Nigel Farage to Marine Le Pen⁴, "this phrase has been taken up by the far-right as a way of demonising Islam,"⁵ writes the author.

The case of the French Front National is paradigmatic. Cécile Alduy, a lecturer at Stanford University, spoke of a strategy of "dédiabolisation" or de-demonisation⁶, that is, ‘’the attempt to wash away the demonic patina from the Front National, now Rassemblement national, the party of Marine Le Pen’’ It is - as Stefania Piras explains in the Messaggero - "an expression coined in the late 1980s by the leaders of the far-right formation themselves in response to the 'disqualifying' and 'demonising' criticisms directed at them."⁷ This "rewriting" strategy consists of several main operations: "elision, addition, paraphrase, and borrowing from the opposing camp"⁸. The process of "normalization" occurs, on the communication level, through a process of "lexical cleaning, silences, and omissions":

"The first notable difference between Marine Le Pen's speech and her father's is the outright elimination of two lexical markers of the far right: anti-Semitism and explicit biological racism. ... There is everything: the silence and omission of the father's racist vocabulary and the recovery of anti-racist values. … Even the deliberate silence of Marine Le Pen on the Second World War, on Vichy and on French Algeria is significant, as is the absence of any anti-Semitic reference in her speech. The birth certificate of 'de-demonisation' is undoubtedly her unequivocal condemnation of the Shoah, described as 'the height of barbarism' in an interview with Le Point in February 2011. In this way, she contradicts Jean-Marie Le Pen's repeated comments about gas chambers as a 'mere detail in the history of the Second World War.'Even better, she presents herself as the bastion of the Jewish community against 'Islamic fundamentalism' and the alleged antisemitism in the suburbs, and defends the Ligue de défense juive during the pro-Palestinian demonstrations of August 2014’’⁹.

Marine Le Pen's rhetoric also reveals the adoption of a "republican and even leftist vocabulary ('social justice', 'big business', 'finance')", repeatedly using the term "freedom". Alduy states that this "cultural liberalism strategy" was borrowed from "Geert Wilders in the Netherlands, who presented his far-right party, called the 'Party for Freedom,' as a bastion of individual freedoms and Western values against an Islam denounced as reactionary, misogynistic, and homophobic"¹⁰.

Author Suzanne Schneider, associate director and lecturer at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research, wrote in The Yale Review about Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán: " Onstage with Hazony in Brussels this past April, Orbán invoked the greatness of Christian civilization to justify his opposition to immigrants who would ‘change the cultural character of this continent.’ He quickly clarified that he has ‘nothing against the Muslims’ and that ‘Islam is a great civilization if you go there’—meaning the Middle East or North Africa. ‘It’s nice—there.’ Never mind, of course, that Islam has been present in Hungary since at least the tenth century, or that Jews made up around 25 percent of Budapest’s population a century ago. Indeed, it requires both historical amnesia and extraordinary chutzpah to sit across the stage from Hazony—an Orthodox Jew whose family hails from Ukraine and Poland—and insist that Europe is a Christian continent. In fact, it only works if your interlocutor is, like Hazony, a committed Zionist who also believes that Jews don’t belong in Europe.’’¹¹ However, during Benjamin Netanyahu's recent visit to Budapest (2-6 April), the Hungarian prime minister corrected his position and defied the arrest warrant issued by the International Criminal Court for war crimes and crimes against humanity. During a press conference at the Buda Castle, Orbán "began by presenting Hungary as 'an island of freedom in Europe' as well as 'the guardian and standard-bearer of Judeo-Christian roots'. He recalled that the Hungarian Jewish community is the third largest in the Old Continent and the one that lives in the best conditions of security. According to him, it is the migrants who are bringing anti-Semitism to Europe, and Hungary is the only nation that is not affected. Orbán then listed the numerous links between Budapest and Tel Aviv, both in the arms industry and in the field of economic cooperation. Without ever mentioning the Pegasus spyware¹² he bought from Israel in 2018 to spy on journalists and political opponents. On the subject of mutual relations on the global chessboard, Netanyahu went so far as to claim that today it is Hungary that defends Israel, both at the UN and in the EU.”¹³

Even towards the International Criminal Court, a "strategy of cultural liberalism" has been adopted, accusing the Hague-based court of being "politicised", which is why "a democratic state cannot be part of it."¹⁴ A similar political discourse is observed today in Italy among the government forces, from Fratelli d'Italia to the Lega. The protection of "Judeo-Christian roots," denied by the "imperialism" of that European Union defined in terms of a “supranational entity headed by supposedly enlightened élites,”¹⁵, represents the program of today's neo-nationalist movements. Asked what he thought "about the anti-Semitic outbursts in Europe", Matteo Salvini replied:

"It is a mistake for Europe to deny its Judeo-Christian roots in its constitution in order to obey the politically correct demands of a certain Left! We need to remember who we are and where we come from. What has been denied by bureaucrats and politicians in Brussels is instead recognised in the Constitutional Charter of Morocco, which lists Judaism as one of its founding cultures and has also introduced the teaching of Jewish history and culture in schools. A Europe that renounces its roots supports extremists and negationists. Fundamental, then, is the defence of Israel, its freedom, sovereignty, legitimacy and right to exist, which is still being questioned, attacked and discriminated against today.’’¹⁶

As for the United States, Steve Bannon, "before becoming a chief mastermind at the Trump White House,¹⁷ ... once wrote a terribly racist movie script warning about the possibility of a future ‘Islamic States of America’ in a bizarre film project that he called Destroying the Great Satan: The Rise of Islamic Fascism in America. The Washington Post reported that the first scene of Bannon’s unspeakably - racist movie opened with a fictitious scene of the US Capitol broadcasting the Islamic call to prayer whilst a crescent and star Islamic flag victoriously flies above the capitol rotunda. This blatantly anti-Muslim movie project imagined a fundamental clash of civilizations between the West and Islam.”¹⁸ 

Similar apocalyptic tones characteristic of fundamentalist Christian evangelicals¹⁹ are echoed in the words of General William G. Boykin, Undersecretary of Defence for Intelligence under President George W. Bush from 2002 to 2007 and and "a radical born-again Christian from the rural Bible Belt of North Carolina.”²⁰ In an interview with CNN, as William Engdahl recalls, he declared: “‘The enemy is a spiritual enemy. He’s called the principality of darkness. The enemy is a guy called Satan.’ He later stated in words that almost verbatim echoed the words, in another context, of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hassan Al Banna: ‘We will never walk away from Israel… Many of us are worried about heaven. Heaven is your reward. You are here as soldiers to take on the enemy.’”²¹.

In the United States, the gradual rise of evangelicalism's influence on politics, coinciding with the Trump administration, has initiated a process of historical transformation of conservatism. This is leading the country towards an era of "evangelical nationalism". Christian Zionism, which historically preceded its Jewish counterpart and is shared by the majority of evangelicals, implies the biblical duty to defend Israel. This responsibility is founded on two fundamental principles. The first of these is derived from the literal interpretation of specific verses in the Book of Genesis. These verses contain the divine promise to Abraham and his descendants: "I will make you into a great nation, and I will bless you;I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing. I will bless those who bless you, and whoever curses you I will curse; and all peoples on earth   will be blessed through you." (12:2-3). At the political level, this means that hatred towards the "enemies" of the present State of Israel (i.e. the Palestinians in specific and the Muslims in general) is perceived as a religious duty, in accordance with the divine promise. The second interpretation is based on the evangelical exegesis of the myth of the "Second Coming" of Jesus. As Victoria Clark explains, the apocalyptic vision that informs the political creed of Christian Zionists holds that "Jerusalem must become Israel's undivided capital and the Muslims' Haram al-Sharif be destroyed and replaced with a new Jewish Temple. The completion of that Temple, they believe, will herald the appearance of an Antichrist who might be a European diplomat or the head of the United Nations, or an Iraqi, for example. For seven years- a period known as the Tribulation, or Jacob's Trouble- the Antichrist will sow havoc and suffering on a cosmic scale. At last, his blasphemous demand that the Jews worship him in that Temple will trigger the Battle of Armageddon, at Megiddo in Israel. All non-born-again Christians- including two-thirds of all Jews- who have refused to accept Jesus as their personal saviour by that point will be slain in the conflagration. Jesus's Second Coming in the heat of that last battle and his subsequent triumph over the Antichrist will be the signal for the start of his thousand-year reign of peace and prosperity from his global headquarters in Jerusalem.’’²² It is important to note that the only winners in this cosmic drama will be the Christians (evangelicals). The fate of those Jews and Muslims who, having survived the conflagration, refuse to convert will indeed be death. "The idea of gathering Jews into Israel so that they can all be converted in an evangelical Christian fantasy-prophecy-whatever does not fit any understanding of the meaning of Zionism. No definition of ‘homeland for Jews’ has that as its end goal. ‘It is straightforwardly an instrumentalization of Jews. They are a tool. Supporting Israel is a tool to bring about the End Times and the rapture into paradise,’” notes Rachel Shabi²³.

With regard to the other front of the Trumpian coalition, made up of the intellectuals and bloggers of the neo-reactionary movement NRx (also known as the "Dark Enlightenment") and their financiers, the magnates of the tech-military sector, the statement by Alex C. Karp, CEO and co-founder of Palantir Technologies Inc., is sufficient: "We are one of a few companies in the world to stand up and announce our support for Israel, which remains steadfast. Palantir stands with Israel.’’²⁴

Rachel Shabi does not limit the reference to the Judeo-Christian heritage to the neo-nationalist front; she also cites Tony Blair, Romano Prodi, Helmut Kohl, Angela Merkel, and Emmanuel Macron, who defined Europe as "a civilization with Judeo-Christian roots"²⁵. The author, following in Arthur Allen Cohen's footsteps^,26 does not recognise any religious, historical, or philosophical basis for this claim²⁷. She rather asserts that: " If anything, the actual shared heritage, historically, is Judeo-Islamic. Judaism is not only about the Hebrew bible but about all the teachings, commentary and interpretation around it – and much of that took place in the Middle East, including the development of the Babylonian Talmud, a core text penned in what is now Iraq. And then there was the Judeo - Islamic heritage forged during Muslim rule across the Iberian Peninsula, then known as Al-Andalus.” It was during the centuries of Islamic rule in the Iberian Peninsula that the period of cultural flourishing, referred to by Jewish sources as the Golden Age, occurred.²⁸

The Israeli historian Shlomo Sand notes: " it may be useful to mention a historical fact that arouses a certain awkwardness among all those who take pride today in belonging to ‘Judeo-Christian’ civilization. The fate of Jewish communities in the shadow of Islam was very different from the often dark fate they experienced in Europe. True, Islam saw Judaism as an inferior religion, and cases of persecution did occur. But on the whole, the Muslims granted Judaism the respect due to an ancient divine faith that, like Christianity, needed to be sheltered and protected by the dominant religion.

 Jews were called in the Koran ‘People of the Book’ (sura 9:5), whereas in the much earlier New Testament, it was said of them: ‘They will fall at the sword’s point; they will be carried captive into all countries’ (Luke 21:24).²⁹

For Christians "it was both incomprehensible and unacceptable that Jews could voluntarily remain faithful to another religion and refuse to recognize that grace had already come to earth in the form of the Messiah. Thus, in the Christian imagination, Jews remained the scions of Judas Iscariot, who had been banished from Jerusalem because of their sins, and they continued to appear as a threat to the faithful in Christ, themselves pure and innocent.”³⁰. For this reason, " prejudices, periodic offensives, mass expulsions, accusations of ritual crime, and spontaneous pogroms did form an integral part of ‘Judeo - Christian’ civilization from its origins to the threshold of the modern age. This religious hatred of the Other, of long duration, formed the conceptual basis for the emergence of modern Judeophobia in the nineteenth century."³¹

Shlomo Sand emphasises how 'Judeophobia' has historically been a fundamental element in the ideological construction of the various national identities of the modern era. "Almost everywhere, the emerging nationalism took from the existing Christian tradition and the deicidal Jew and grafted it onto the figure of the foreign Other, the better to mark the boundaries of the new nation."³²

The Tel Aviv professor identifies "the long century of Judeophobia" in the period "from 1850 to 1950". If Judaism in Music, Richard Wagner's famous article first published in 1850, could be seen as its symbolic official birth date, "the suppression by Pope John XXIII in 1959 of the description of the Jews as heretical and traitorous ( perfidis ) marked its end.”³³ 

Shlomo Sand identifies the reasons for the resurgence of anti-Semitism in Europe from the last decades of the 19th century in the migratory flows from Eastern Europe. And just as "the waves of immigration of Yiddish populations in their time had the effect of crystallising ethno-national consciousness", so today “hostility towards Arab and Muslim immigrants in our own day contributes to characterizing, specifying and sharpening Europe's 'white' and 'Judeo-Christian' identity".³⁴

Similar conclusions are reached by Edward Said, former professor at Columbia University, who states, "hostility to Islam in the modern Christian West has historically gone hand in hand with, has stemmed from the same source, has been nourished at the same stream as anti-Semitism."³⁵

Rachel Shabi identifies the origin of the contemporary idea of the so-called "Judeo-Christian heritage" in other historical and temporal circumstances. She writes: "The idea of a Judeo - Christian heritage really took hold in a secular, political context during the mid-twentieth century as US president Dwight Eisenhower announced in 1952 that the American form of government was based on Judeo-Christian moral values.³⁶ Coming immediately after the Holocaust, this was a way of bringing Jewish immigrants into the American fold with a shared, inclusive identity. For Jewish communities who longed to be absorbed into American society, it held obvious appeal.’’³⁷ The author then quotes Gil Z. Hochberg, a professor of Jewish and Visual Studies at Columbia University: “Within this new fabricated Judeo-Christian alliance, Jews who had quite recently been considered loathed Semitic parasites could finally become almost Christian and almost white.”³⁸

The author goes on to discuss the “bigotry-infused theory” of the clash of civilisations, popularised in 1993 by three main “storytellers”: the American neo-conservative political scientist Samuel P. Huntington and the historians Daniel Pipes and Bernard Lewis. Even in this case, the adoption of the idea of a ‘Judeo-Christian civilisation’ would be based on the sharing of supposedly common ‘values and beliefs’.

As historian David B. Ruderman writes, the term "Judeo-Christian" first appears in a letter from the evangelical missionary Reverend Alexander MacCaul, a member of the London Society for Promoting Christianity Amongst the Jews³⁹, dated October 17, 1821, in reference to Jewish converts to Christianity⁴⁰.

Dominique Rebekah Hoffman, in an essay examining Huntington's thesis,⁴¹ states: " The term he [Alexander MacCaul] coined ‘Judean-Christian’ values was not meant to represent the similarities in beliefs held by the two religions but to describe the relationship between Christians and Jewish converts. David B. Ruderman writes, ‘Converts who left the Jewish fold for Christianity rarely did so on their own but were encouraged or even harassed by clerics who specialized in missionary outreach, among whom were many former Jews’. The term’s evangelist origins still shape how modern Jews view the rise of Christian support for Israel.”⁴² This term, as Hoffman explains, during the last years of the Cold War became "symbolic of traditional American values, in the fight of the West against atheism and Communism," even though " without directly pointing to any specific shared religious, ethical, or cultural values." In 1983, President Ronald Reagan, who took office "during a time of Christian fundamentalism," stated: “I know this may be laughed and sneered at in some sophisticated circles, but ours is a Judeo-Christian heritage, and ours is a loving and living God, the fountain of all truth and knowledge.” In the context of Reagan conservatism, the term has come to stand for values such as family and worshipping the God of the Bible.”

Such an interpretation, however, “does not represent a belief shared by Jews. “Historically, the story of Jews after the diaspora has been a fight for ethnic and religious preservation rather than assimilation to Western identity or belief.” The beliefs of the Christian Zionist minority are not sufficient to "generalize an entire civilization," although "Christian Zionism and support for Israel, both politically and religiously, seem to support Huntington's classification".

Dominique Rebekah Hoffman then quotes Arthur A. Cohen: "Jews regarded Christians as 

at best second-best, and at worst as execrable idolaters; Christians regarded Jews as at best worthy of conversion and at worst as deicides and antichrist."⁴³

The use of the term “Judeo-Christian values” has today been perpetuated "in political and religious circles" by the "interests of President Donald Trump and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu”. Hoffman argues that “Jews do not view their God as being represented or necessarily the same as the Triune God worshiped in Christianity." It is rather "a Western misunderstanding of Judaism and demonstrates the flaws of defining another identity or religious/ethnic group from a Western worldview."⁴⁴

Philip C. Almond, emeritus professor at the University of Queensland, is emphatic: "there is no such thing as the ‘Judeo-Christian tradition.’ It is a modern invention. There always has been a Jewish tradition and a Christian tradition ― or, more accurately, varieties of Jewish and Christian traditions. The term ‘Judeo-Christian tradition’ continues the suppression of Jewishness by hiding the essential differences between Judaism and Christianity, one of which is that each denies the validity of the other. As Rabbi Eliezer Berkovits puts it, ‘Judaism is Judaism because it rejects Christianity, and Christianity is Christianity because it rejects Judaism.’”⁴⁵.

As mentioned above, the instrumental use of the idea of a common "Judeo-Christian" heritage by the National Conservative Front conceals the intention to "demonise Islam" with the hidden purpose of instigating a "scapegoat" mechanism, according to the famous thesis of Stanford professor René Girard.⁴⁶ Rachel Shabi claims that the idea of a common heritage has been transformed, since the post-war period, "in a ‘clash of civilizations’ narrative that defined Islam as the biggest threat to Western development and values."⁴⁷. It was authors such as Samuel P. Huntington, Daniel Pipes, and Bernard Lewis who spread the idea that Judeo-Christian values constitute "a protective shield against a supposedly alien and violent Islam."

This thesis is supported by the words of Ramsey Clark, lawyer and Attorney General of the United States during the presidency of Lyndon B. Johnson. In a 2007 interview with The Hindu, Clark said, "The war on terrorism is really a war on Islam. Most of the politicians are putting it as Islamic terrorists but what they really mean is the threat of Islam. So the idea of the war on Islam is the idea of extermination of a proportion never seen in history at any time. ... The U.S. government’s need for an enemy, its search for new enemies is really a way of uniting the country, covering its real motives and appealing for patriotism that is called the last refuge of the scoundrel. Patriotism is not the real motive. The real motive is domination and exploitation, and to get away with it you have to have a rallying ground, an enemy. That is where the military comes in. The U.S. spends more on arms than all other countries combined. While it is threatening countries with obliteration if they try to develop a nuclear weapon, it is developing a new generation of its own nuclear weapons, its own new rocketry that can hit any place in minutes.”⁴⁸

Shabi comments: "The story of a civilisational clash has been embraced by the far right because it offers up, on a plate with a cherry on top, a means of attacking and scapegoating Muslim communities. At this point, it is impossible to refrain from reminding these Islam - bashing authors, commentators and politicians which religion, historically, persecuted Jewish people across Europe.”

It also highlights how such interpretations are still functional in the geopolitical sphere, in the perpetuation of that Arc of Crisis envisioned by the American political scientist Zbigniew Brzezinski, who served as National Security Advisor during the presidency of Jimmy Carter⁴⁹. This rhetoric should not be seen as a novelty; it was also used by the founder of Zionism, the Hungarian Theodor Herzl, who declared: "We should there [Palestine] form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism. We should as a neutral State remain in contact with all Europe, which would have to guarantee our existence."⁵⁰. In more recent years: "Ehud Barak, former Israeli Prime Minister, would describe the country as a ‘villa in the jungle’. And in 2017, speaking in Paris, then Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu said: ‘We are part of the European culture. Europe ends in Israel. East of Israel, there is no more Europe.’’’⁵¹

The same narrative took on new meaning after the attacks of 11 September 2001. The State of Israel then became a kind of frontline in the war against global terrorism. "Asked in its immediate aftermath about the impact of 9/11 on US-Israel relations, the current Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu responded: ‘It’s very good’, before adding: ‘Well, not very good, but it will generate immediate sympathy.’”⁵². In this way, the political motives of the conflict, related to land and national independence, were reinterpreted in the light of the theory of the clash of civilisations. Shabi comments: "Israeli leaders … claimed that, instead of dealing with Palestinian resistance to violent occupation and dispossession, Israel was battling a local franchise of the global war on terror. In other words, this conflict was not a political one over land, rights or freedom; it was the same clash of civilizations again. … Israeli leaders located their country as a frontline fighter in the war on terror while in the same moment, that war conflated Muslims with terror and stoked waves of anti-Muslim hatred across the West. Small wonder that the Islam-bashing far right began to champion Israel.’’⁵³

The 'war on terror' also provided the justification for the development of a global surveillance and population control system, as Suzanne Schneider, writing about Palantir Technologies, points out.⁵⁴

The same reasons were given in the aftermath of the terrorist attack of 7 October 2023, when "Israel's Minister of Diaspora Affairs, Amichai Chikli, declared that his country was on the 'front line in the battle for Western civilisation.’”⁵⁵

Rachel Shabi recognises a clear geopolitical strategy in the attempt to assimilate and bind "the state of Israel, in its identity, outlook and values, to Europe and to the West." Such identification, however, clashes with the obvious consideration that "the country’s actual geographic location, not to mention that its majority population –factoring in both Mizrahi Jews and its Palestinian citizens– are Middle Eastern."⁵⁶. Such a colonial project therefore requires not only the elimination of the Palestinians, but also " whitewashing of Israel’s population of Jews from Arab and Muslim lands.”⁵⁷ The author then adds a touching personal note: “Coming from an Iraqi-Jewish family I admit I do feel personally affronted by the mythology of the Judeo-Christian heritage, precisely because it papers over a long, creative and meaningful Judeo-Islamic relationship. It is as though none of that ever happened. It is another erasure. It is also abhorrent to see this conjured-up shared heritage used to bash and scapegoat Muslim communities.’’⁵⁸. 

Rachel Shabi concludes the chapter by stating: "Israel is certainly a core issue in US domestic politics, because of those perceived shared values and because of the impact of both Christian Zionist and Jewish pro-Israel lobbies. But if Israel were no longer considered (however misguidedly) a strategic asset in the region by Western governments, an appraisal based on a confluence of military, security and geopolitical goals, it would no longer be shielded as a client state.’’⁵⁹

Footnotes

¹Rachel Shabi, Off-White: The Truth About Antisemitism, Oneworld Publications, London, 2024, p. 122 (digital edition).

² Rachel Shabi, We Look Like the Enemy: The Hidden Story of Israel's Jews from Arab Lands, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2009.

³Rachel Shabi, Off-White: The Truth About Antisemitism, cit.

⁴ Jim Wolfreys, Republic of Islamophobia: The Rise of Respectable Racism in France, Oxford University Press, 2018.

⁵ Rachel Shabi, Off-White, cit., p. 84. "An irrational killer-image of Islam seems to be the favorite one for Western politics and media. We would not enter the arguments on the very creation of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan and ISIL in Syria by Western intelligence agencies. We would not also enter the discussion on the argument that the US plans like the ones for a new Middle East (Washington Post, 2006), for new Crusades (Qureshi and Sells, 2003), and for fulfilling the commitment to Israel’s security (Garamone, 2013) would be left futile without the existence of these groups. However, it is an open secret that these groups act to deny peaceful Islam and to fuel the confrontation of the West against a conception of Islam that merges peace and justice, that is, the lived Islam of peoples. This, interestingly, brings these Islamic gangs into an atmosphere of surprisingly harmonious co - functioning with Western global hegemonic powers represented by the US. These two crushing forces, apparently coming from opposing origins, ironically function in harmony to demonize anything associated with Islam.
This co - functioning can hardly be seen as a mere coincidence. The global regimes of dominance may actively fabricate and fuel such terror mechanisms as a tool of reinforcing their dominance under an Islamic - looking disguise, as they may do under other covers like the pro - Western militia groups in South America and recently the opposition groups in Ukraine. Therefore, the two blades of neoliberal hegemony and irrationalism under the disguise of radical Islam come together against genuine Islamic thought around the world. This once - covert marriage unprecedentedly surfaces as Islamophobia. Considering the triple issues discussed above, it would not be out of place to suggest that the entire Islamophobia enterprise, or “Islamophobia Industry” as Lean (2012) eloquently calls it, is probably based on a broad plot by Western security agencies.” Seyyed Abdolhamid Mirhosseini and Hossein Rouzbeh, Islamophobia as a Global Concern beyond Muslim Communities, Introduction to Instances of Islamophobia: demonizing the Muslim "other", ed. Seyyed AbdolhamidMirhosseini and Hossein Rouzbeh, Lanham, Maryland, 2015, pp.7-8.

⁶Cécile Alduy, Nouveau discours, nouveaux success, in “ Pouvoirs: Revue d'EtudesConstitutionnelles et Politiques”, April 2016, pp. 17-30.

⁷Stefania Piras, Marine Le Pen e la dédiabolisation, perché l'espressione è tornata di moda, https://www.ilmessaggero.it/mondo/francia_elezioni_marine_le_pen_dediabolisation_che_cos_e-8207316.html, June 27 2024.

⁸Cécile Alduy, op. cit., p. 20.

⁹Ibid., pp. 20-1.

¹⁰Ibid., p. 22.

¹¹Suzanne Schneider, How the Radical Right Remade Nationalism, https://yalereview.org/article/schneider-radical-right-nationalism, 22 ottobre 2024.

¹² Pegasus is a “spyware used by governments around the world to surveil and harass political opponents. These include India, Kazakhstan, the UAE, and Saudi Arabia, the latter of which used the tool to spy on Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi before he was assassinated by Saudi agents in Türkiye.

In total, more than 50,000 journalists, human rights defenders, diplomats, business leaders and politicians are known to have been secretly surveilled. That includes heads of state such as French President Emmanuel Macron, Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan and Iraqi President Barham Salih. All Pegasus sales had to be approved by the Israeli government, which reportedly had access to the data Pegasus’ foreign customers were accruing.”. Alan MacLeod, Wiz Acquisition Puts Israeli Intelligence In Charge of Your Google Data, https://www.mintpressnews.com/oogle-wiz-cybersecurity-data-deal/289413/, April 17 2025.

¹³Lorenzo Berardi, Un latitante a Budapest. La Cpi Orbán la saluta così, https://ilmanifesto.it/un-latitante-a-budapest-la-cpi-orban-la-saluta-cosi, 4 aprile 2025.

¹⁴ Ibidem.

¹⁵ Giorgia Meloni, God, Homeland, Family, https://nationalconservatism.org/natcon-rome-2020/presenters/giorgia-meloni/, February 3 2020.

¹⁶ Ariela Piattelli, “Definirmi antisemita? È un’infamia”. L’intervista di Shalom a Matteo Salvini, https://www.shalom.it/italia/a-definirmi-antisemitay-a-una-infamiaa-la-intervista-di-matteo-salvini-a-shalom-b1096483/, June 29 2021.

¹⁷ Bannon has been dethroned by Curtis Yarvin as of today..

¹⁸ Arsalan Iftikhar, Fear of a Muslim Planet, New York, 2021, p. 82 (digital edition).

¹⁹ “By the time George W. Bush became US President in 2001, fundamentalist Christian Evangelicals had become the fastest-growing religious group in America, with churches costing tens of millions of dollars each and membership numbering over 90 million believers. Their organizations had consciously infiltrated the various branches of the US Armed Forces, of the US Congress, and of the Executive Branch of government, much as the Muslim Brotherhood had done in Turkey, Egypt, Syria, Qatar, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and numerous other Islamic countries.

 The turning of a highly vocal and well-organized minority of Christian churches and smaller sects into militant born-again fundamentalists was a radicalization which very well suited the effort of a US military-industrial complex and the US government’s intelligence community in their drive to create an imperial military force willing to sacrifice itself for global holy wars ‘in the name of Christ,’ wars to be waged by those who believed that they were, thereby, seeking after the Good”."William Engdahl, The Lost Hegemon: Whom the gods would destroy, Wiesbaden, 2016, p. 13 (digital edition).

²⁰ "General Boykin was a member of the elite Delta Force special unit, where he led the disastrous April 1980 Iranian hostage rescue attempt. During the 1990s, Boykin served at the Central Intelligence Agency as Deputy Director of Special Activities and was promoted to the rank of Brigadier General. He was later made Deputy Director for Operations, Readiness, and Mobilization and assigned to the Army Staff in the Pentagon. In June 2003, he was appointed Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, where he played a key role in fabricating the fraudulent intelligence alleging proof that Saddam Hussein possessed weapons of mass destruction, the basis on which Congress voted to give the President authority to declare war on Iraq in 2003.” Ibid., p. 14.

²¹Ibidem.

²² Victoria Clark, Allies for Armageddon, Yale University Press, New Haven e Londra, 2007, p. 4.

²³ Rachel Shabi, op. cit., p. 123.

²⁴Alex C. Karp, Letter to Shareholders, https://www.palantir.com/q3-2023-letter/en/, 2 November 2023.

²⁵Rachel Shabi, op. cit., p. 84.

²⁶ "The Judeo-Christian tradition is a myth. It is, moreover, not only a myth of history (that is, an assumption founded upon the self-deceiving of man) but an eschatological myth which bears within it an optimism, a hope which transcends and obliterates the historicism of the myth. As myth it is therefore both negative and positive, deathly and dangerous, visionary and prophetic at one and the same time.” Arthur A. Cohen, The Myth of the Judeo-Christian Tradition and Other Dissenting Essays, New York, 1070, p. ix.

²⁷ "The Judeo-Christian heritage spoken about politically from the postwar period onwards is not actually a thing. It isn’t real, religiously or philosophically or even culturally. In religious terms, it makes no sense at all. Go back to the start of the relationship between these faiths and the ‘heritage’ here was that Christians got super-uppity that Jews would not recognise Christ as the Saviour and so proceeded to demonise and persecute them for it.” Rachel Shabi, op. cit., p. 85.

²⁸ “Working together in Arabic, Jews and Muslims forged incredible advancements in science, literature, architecture, mathematics and music. The period produced still lauded Jewish luminaries such as the philosopher and poet Solomon ibn Gabirol and the rabbi, poet and philosopher Yehudah Halevi. The celebrated philosopher Moses Maimonides is also a product of this age, although he was forced to flee Al - Andalus and eventually settled in Egypt after the religiously intolerant Almohad dynasty took power in 1147. However, the cultural and religious autonomy during this Golden Age of coexistence did mean that Al-Andalus became a centre of Talmudic thought and a region of key Jewish scholarship, which developed not least because of the symbiosis between Hebrew and Arabic. During this same time frame, European Christianity was circulating hate - filled conspiracies about Jewish people, while murdering Jews and Muslims alike in the Crusades.” Ibid., p. 86.

 

²⁹ Shlomo Sand, How I Stopped Being a Jew, London-New York, 2014, p. 35 (digital edition).

³⁰Ibid., p. 36.

³¹Ibidem.

³² Ibid., pp. 37-8.

³³Ibid., p. 38.

³⁴ Ibidem.

³⁵ Edward W. Said, Orientalism reconsidered, Cultural Critique, No. 1 (Autumn, 1985), University of Minnesota, p. 99.

³⁶ "In this way, ‘Judeo-Christian’ became a term that transcended both Judaism and Christianity, thereby uniting them. And so President-elect Dwight Eisenhower could say in 1952: ‘[Our form of government] has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith, and I don't care what it is. With us of course it is the Judeo-Christian concept but it must be a religion that all men are created equal.’” Philip C. Almond, Is there really such a thing as the "Judeo-Christian tradition"?, https://www.abc.net.au/religion/is-there-really-a-judeo-christian-tradition/10810554, February 13 2019.

³⁷Rachel Shabi, op. cit., p. 85.

³⁸Ibidem.

³⁹ “The London Society for Promoting Christianity among the Jews was an Anglican missionary society founded in 1809 [by Joseph Frey, a German Jew converted to Christianity, who arrived in London from Germany in 1801 to prepare for missionary service abroad]. The main objective of the society was to promote Christianity among the Jews. The society's work began among the poor Jewish immigrants of London's East End and soon spread to Europe, South America, Africa, and Palestine. The London Society was the first organisation of its kind to work on a global basis. Yousef Hussein Omar, “Britain’s Position on Establishing the Protestant Church in Jerusalem (1841–45)”, Jerusalem Quarterly 94, note 13, p. 82.

⁴⁰ David B. Ruderman, “Towards a Preliminary Portrait of an Evangelical Missionary to the Jews: the  

Many Faces of Alexander McCaul (1799-1863)”, Jewish Historical Studies​, vol. 47, 2015, pp. 48–69. JSTOR​, www.jstor.org/stable/43855745.

⁴¹Dominique Rebekah Hoffman, Jewish Civilization Samuel P. Huntington Forgot About: A Critique of “Judeo-Christian” Civilizational Values, Bachelor thesis, The Florida State University, 2020, pp. 6-7. (https://repository.lib.fsu.edu/islandora/object/fsu%3A759864)

⁴² Ibidem.

⁴³Arthur A. Cohen, op. cit., pp. xv-xvi.

⁴⁴Dominique Rebekah Hoffman, op. cit, pp. 7-8.

⁴⁵ Philip C. Almond, cit.

⁴⁶ According to Girard, the scapegoat is a "victim chosen in place of others". Where there is a scapegoat, there are no particularly guilty victims, but there is a community that can only agree by uniting against a victim. ... I see the scapegoat as the foundation of religions, which we can define as both natural and cultural. ... Culture, of course, arises from a conflict and resolves the conflict in the lie of the scapegoat, who is considered both guilty and a god; that is to say, he is killed or expelled, and thus violence is accepted, but then he is deified, so that he is at the same time the evil deity and the protector of archaic universes.... Rivalry is the basis of institutions. That is why I believe that the two fundamental institutions of human culture are prohibitions, which consist in not doing what the victim did, and sacrifices, which consist in doing what the victim did: killing oneself or killing the victim to save society. And I believe that it is precisely from the prohibitions, from the ritual sacrifices, that the whole community is reconstituted and that all human communities, all cultures, derive from these two primordial institutions. ... People must unite against this. In all forms of union - nationalist unions, family unions, professional or ideological unions... all are unions against". Interview with Girard on the topic "Identification of a Victim" for the programme "Uomini e profeti."

https://www.teche.rai.it/2016/11/i-concetti-di-violenza-e-di-sacro-nel-pensiero-di-rene-girard/, published on 11 November 2000.

⁴⁷ Rachel Shabi, op. cit., p. 86.

⁴⁸ Marcus Dam, Consumerism and materialism deadlier than armed occupation, http://www.hindu.com/2007/12/17/stories/2007121754781100.htm, 2007 (inactive). Accessible at: https://savitri.in/blogs/light-of-supreme/consumerism-and-materialism-deadlier-than-armed-occupation-by-marcus-dam, December 18 2008.

⁴⁹ "In November 1978, President Carter named the Bilderberg group’s George Ball, another member of the Trilateral Commission, to head a special White House Iran task force under the National Security Council’s Brzezinski. Ball recommended that Washington drop support for the Shah of Iran and support the fundamentalist Islamic opposition of Ayatollah Khomeini. Robert Bowie from the CIA was one of the lead ‘case offi cers’ in the new CIA-led coup against the man their covert actions had placed into power 25 years earlier. Their scheme was based on a detailed study of the phenomenonof Islamic fundamentalism, as presented by British Islamic expert, Dr. Bernard Lewis, then on assignment at Princeton University in the United States. Lewis’s scheme, which was unveiled at the May 1979 Bilderberg meeting in Austria, endorsed the radical Muslim Brotherhood movement behind Khomeini, in order to promote balkanization of the entire Muslim Near East along tribal and religious lines. Lewis argued that the West should encourage autonomous groups such as the Kurds, Armenians, Lebanese Maronites, Ethiopian Copts, Azerbaijani Turks, and so forth. The chaos would    spread in what he termed an ‘Arc of Crisis,’ which would spill over into the Muslim regions of the Soviet Union. The coup against the Shah, like that against Mossadegh in 1953, was run by British and American intelligence, with the bombastic American, Brzezinski, taking public ‘credit’ for getting rid of the ‘corrupt’ Shah, while the British characteristically remained safely in the background.” William Engdahl, A Century of War, London, 2004, p. 171,

⁵⁰Theodor Herzl, Zionist Writings: Essays and Addresses. Volume I, 1896-1898. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Herzl Press, 1973, page. 31.

⁵¹ Rachel Shabi, op. cit., p. 89.

⁵² Ibidem.

⁵³ Ibidem.

⁵⁴ Suzanne Schneider, Stop Calling them Libertarians: How the Tech Right Learned to Love the State, https://www.illiberalism.org/stop-calling-them-libertarians-how-the-tech-right-learned-to-love-the-state/, 10 April 2025.

⁵⁵Rachel Shabi, op. cit., pp. 89-90.

⁵⁶ Rachel Shabi, op. cit., p. 90.

⁵⁷ Ibidem.

⁵⁸ Ibidem.

⁵⁹ Ibidem.