Inventing Reality

Context:

In the latest edition of the magazine, his son, John Podhoretz, has taken up the baton, painting a straight line from Nazi Germany to the Islamic Republic of Iran, with the lament that all this could have been avoided if only the US had listened to papa and dropped the bombs two decades ago.

In the intervening period, the term Islamofascism has been nominally specific: the Islamic State (IS) group, suicide bombers, or those who refuse to stop until they are dead. But once you establish that a category of belief places its holder beyond civil protection, the question of who belongs to that category becomes entirely political.

Indeed, the definition has consistently expanded outward - from IS, to Hamas, to Hezbollah, to the Iranian state, to Palestinian civil society, to anyone who expresses solidarity with any of the above. That’s why Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was able to proclaim before the world’s media that “Hamas is ISIS and ISIS is Hamas”.

Netanyahu himself has spent much political capital in trying to tie together Islam and fascism, claiming in 2015 before the World Zionist Congress that the grand mufti of Jerusalem had given Hitler the idea for the Holocaust. The claim was not merely false; it was a fabrication so brazen that it drew rebukes from scholars worldwide, including Israeli ones.

Netanyahu’s claim was not statecraft, but warcraft: it aimed to establish a connection between Palestinian nationalism and the Holocaust, thus making Israel’s treatment of Palestinians “self-defence” against the inheritors of Hitler’s project. The same infrastructure of language has been under construction for decades.

That infrastructure is now pointed squarely at Iran. A piece published in the Jerusalem Post last August by Catherine Perez-Shakdam, executive director of the advocacy group We Believe in Israel, framed pro-Palestinian protests in western capitals as the opening drumbeats of an Iranian-style revolution, comparing London and Paris today to Tehran in 1979. This is advocacy literature dressed as geopolitical analysis.

Video for context

https://archive.ph/5zQwg

Link to the video https://xcancel.com/i/status/2041461008774865089