The Hamas terrorist attacks inaugurate a brand new cycle in world history?

And the idols of elite culture and international politics are about to be incinerated in a bonfire of intellectual vanities

Sometimes there are cataclysmic world events that inaugurate a new cycle in world history, and others that simply clarify in the minds that have previously been so obtuse to see clearly what has been building behind the scenes for quite a while.

What happened this past Saturday – October 7, 2023, or what some commentators are calling “Israel’s 9/11” – fits within the latter category.

Unfortunately, the West’s cognoscenti don’t really seem to get it.  David Leonhardt, for example, writing in The New York Times falls back on the most wonted of latter day foreign policy platitudes.

The simplest explanation is that the world is in the midst of a transition to a new order that experts describe with the word multipolar. The United States is no longer the dominant power it once was, and no replacement has emerged. As a result, political leaders in many places feel emboldened to assert their own interests, believing the benefits of aggressive action may outweigh the costs. These leaders believe that they have more sway over their own region than the U.S. does.

Of course, it was only 30 years ago after the fall of the Soviet Union that the same plenipotentiaries that scurry in and out of their mouseholes in Foggy Bottom were proclaiming a new “unipolar” world illuminated from Brasilia to Beijing with the flood lamps of “democratic capitalism”.

We know how that scenario turned out.

What the guys in striped pants, or their ventriloquist dummies who appear regularly on the op-ed pages of the mainstream coastal media websites, fail to appreciate is that history is far more than a “game of thrones” where seizing power within a chaotic struggle among warlords and usurpers is the end-all and be-all of the ongoing human drama. 

Behind the scenes cowers a conflict of far more profound and not-so-transparent forces that both shape our collective destinies and burst out in violence and confusion whenever we have grown lazy in our elite thought processes. 

Samuel Huntington in an epoch-making 1993 essay named this conflict “the clash of civilizations”.  Immediately following the destruction of the twin towers by Al-Qaeda jihadists eight years later and the declaration by the United States of a “war on terror”, Huntington’s argument drew fierce public acclaim while setting off waves of academic criticism.

The so-called “Huntington thesis” amounts to the claim that wars and struggles are not so much between peoples and political entities as between “civilizations” which, in turn, are defined by thoroughgoing cultural identities that have religious beliefs and convictions at their source.

In my own book Globochrist I took Huntington’s position one step even further in arguing that we should not be talking instead about a “clash of revelations” in which certain moral certitudes and views of outsiders intrinsic to these cultures derive from irreconcilable perceptions about the nature of reality that are inscribed rudimentarily in certain holy books such as the Qu’ran or the Bible as well as in the mediating institutions that convey and construe them.

In light of the 9/11 fiasco Huntington’s critics were quick to pounce, however, because it gave too much credence, they asserted, to burgeoning Islamophobia in the West.  The fact that the terrorists who brought down the World Trade Center and flew a second plane into the Pentagon were shouting alahu akbar had nothing to do with their real motives, according to Huntington’s detractors.

Terrorism by definition in the minds of Huntington’s critics has always been a response to political oppression and economic exploitation, even though the 9/11 perpetrators – including the mastermind Osama bin Laden - were well-connected in their home countries and came by and large from affluent families.

The Huntington thesis, however, cannot be so easily dismissed when it comes to the circumstances surrounding 10/7.  Hamas, which won a parliamentary majority in Gaza’s 2006 elections and has retained power through totalitarian control since that time, is unequivocally a militant and powerful Islamic fundamentalist organization supported by Iran that shares a vision similar to both Al-Qaeda and Isis.

The Hamas Charter of 1988 states unequivocally that “Israel will exist and will continue to exist until Islam will obliterate it, just as it obliterated others before it".

Any “two-state” solution is considered by Hamas to be a kind of sacrilege against Islam. Only Muslims will be allowed to live in Palestine. “The Islamic Resistance Movement believes that the land of Palestine is an Islamic Waqf [i.e., “trust”] consecrated for future Moslem generations until Judgement Day”.

Moreover, “there is no solution for the Palestinian question except through Jihad.” 

Article Seven of the Charter quotes the following passage from the Hadith, or traditional sayings of the Prophet: “The Day of Judgement will not come about until Moslems fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Moslems, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him.”

The purported saying of Muhammad has been construed by many interpreters as referring to a final eschatological battle, which is Islam’s version of Armageddon.

In fact, the sanguinary brutality which Hamas showed toward Jewish civilians in its October 7 attack may have signaled in keeping with its own religious psychology the advent of such a battle. 

Soon after the attack video footage emerged of Hamas commander and co-founder Mahmoud al-Zahar proclaiming that Hamas is not only seeking the eradication of Israel, but all civilizations other than Islam.   

In a rant that appeared on MEMRI TV in December 2022 al-Zahar declaimed: “The entire 510 million square kilometers of Planet Earth will come under [a system] where there is no injustice, no oppression, no Zionism, no treacherous Christianity.”

I am neither a prophet nor some intelligence community hanger-on, but the key role of Iran and the mounting evidence that their regional proxies are mobilizing to enter the conflict as well suggest that such an apocalyptic expectation may driving the decision-makers not only in Gaza City, but in Tehran. 

Although Western intelligence at this writing has produced only circumstantial evidence that Iran was directly involved in these particular attacks, Iran’s well-established material and diplomatic support for Hamas over the years makes it likely they played a significant part.

In any case, the Iran-supported jihadists have deliberately poked the eye of what the mullahs casually call the “little Satan” (Israel) to draw the involvement of the “Great Satan” (the U.S.) whereby they believe they can rally the entire Islamic world for the final battle.

That could possibly include terrorist actions against targets within the United States.  Although there is no hard evidence Tehran’s threats to do so after the American airstrike in 2020 against Qassim Soleimeni, its top general in Iraq, a joint hearing of the Committee of Homeland Security of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2012 disclosed that Hezbollah, Iran’s international proxy, “has a presence estimated to be between a few hundred to a few thousand in the 16-country region of Latin America” as well as “in 15 American cities, including four major cities in Canada.”

Iran has also penetrated American academia in an effort to influence government policy-making, particularly the nuclear deal.  The effort, known as the Iran Experts Initiative and exposed in detail by the global news platform Semafor, even involved one Pentagon official.

Iran has also been reportedly at the helm of extensive and sophisticated money laundering operations in partnership with Mexican drug cartels that are active on American soil and use Venezuelan asylum seekers as assets.  

According to sources who wish not to be named this dark money often circulates freely under the guise of real estate investments and sales, payday loans, and contributions to non-profit organizations that remain immune to suspicion by financial investigators.  But they can be easily leveraged to fund terrorist activity when the time is ripe.

Blatant public backing of Hamas by student organizations at elite universities and select social media influencers is a strong indicator that the vaunted ideal of pluralism and civility that in theory is supposed to sustain democratic polity while undergirding the mission of American higher education turns out to be a total fraud.

“Wokeness” has now shown its true demonic face in its glib excuses for the raping and torture of civilians and the beheading of babies.  The casual application common in American universities of fraught and slippery concepts like “settler colonialism” to the historical situation in the Levant is but the latest “new and improved” iteration of such earlier pseudo-intellectual fashions as “scientific racism” that helped justify the Holocaust.

Julian Benda’s harsh criticism of the corruption of Europe’s cognitive elites as enablers of fascism and totalitarianism in his 1927 classic The Treason of the Intellectuals rings more true today than it did in the years of Hitler’s and Mussolini’s rise to power. Benda’s claim that “our age is indeed the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds” is more prescient than it ever was.

It is no mere bagatelle of Biblical fundamentalism to observe the history of the Jews is intimately and inextricably bound up with the destiny of Western civilization.  

Many prominent scholars in recent generation – specifically, the noted Columbia University political thinker Mark Lilla in his best-selling book The Stillborn God – have reminded us that most of our supposedly “secular” politics and morality derive from a broad Christian religious legacy, which In turn remains inseparable from the original Jewish view of human nature and history. 

As the contemporary author Thomas Cahill writes,

The Jews started it all—and by ‘it’ I mean so many of the things we care about, the underlying values that make all of us, Jew and Gentile, believer and atheist…Without the Jews, we would see the world through different eyes, hear with different ears, even feel with different feelings ... we would think with a different mind, interpret all our experience differently, draw different conclusions from the things that befall us. And we would set a different course for our lives.

The shocking, barbaric, grisly, and unspeakable assault on Israeli civilians by Hamas last Saturday has not only divided the world morally and politically.  It has initiated seismic shifts for which even short-term outcomes are no longer readily predictable or imaginable. 

The enemies of liberal democracy, encompassing not only radical Islamism but Russian imperialism and Chinese hegemonism, have their own “grand narratives” as well as long-nourished end-of-the-world scenarios.   

The neoliberal world order, which America’s foreign policy “experts” have slickly defended for generations, is on the verge of crashing and burning.  A reckoning is at hand, and only those who have a clear and keenly conscious fidelity to the mysterious hand that steers the course of history will be able to withstand the future firestorm. 

The idols of our desperate times are withering and melting in the flames.  We must promptly put our petty political preoccupations aside, lest we are just as swiftly smothered in the rubble.