In a piece on Kamala Harris’ pastor, contains the following:
At a memorial service for victims of the 9/11 terror attacks held just six days after al Qaeda murdered nearly 3,000 Americans, Brown used the occasion to point the finger at the United States in remarks that, according to the San Francisco Chronicle, “set a lot of people’s teeth on edge” and “left politicians stunned.”
“America, is there anything you did to set up this climate?” Brown asked the audience. “Ohhhh—America, what did you do?”
“America, what did you do two weeks ago when I stood at the world conference on racism, when you wouldn’t show up?” Brown continued, referring to his participation in the United Nations World Conference Against Racism, which the United States and Israel boycotted citing concerns about anti-Semitism.
In my book on the transformations of the Western public sphere at the turn of the last century /millennium (Can “The Whole World” Be Wrong?: Lethal Journalism, Antisemitism and Global Jihad, Boston: 2022), I wrote about the relationship between the UN Durban Conference that concluded on September 8, 2001, and the 9-11 attacks that occurred three days later:
Did the global triumph of demopathic hatred targeting the US and Israel at Durban have anything to do with 9-11?
Not causally. The triple attack plan had been afoot for years. But given the atmosphere at Durban, Osama had every reason to expect that his spectacular deed would resonate both inside and beyond the Muslim world: in his mind, an act of world conversion. When he gave the green light, he took the hate-fest of Durban to new levels, aligning the Muslim and the Progressive narrative of world redemption as a fight against the twin Western evils, the “Big and Little Satans,” the US and Israel. Just as Arafat basked in the eager approval of the world press, so Bin Laden had good reason to expect he too would gain widespread approval (p.49).
Had I known the case of Reverend Amos Brown, I would surely have cited it, since it illustrates my points about precisely the dynamic whereby Durban prepped global opinion to welcome 9-11.
Brown was at Durban and apparently participated with great enthusiasm in the hate-fest against the US and Israel. His remark about America not “show[ing] up” at Durban reflects precisely the view from Kingsmead Cricket Pitch, where radical NGOs demonized the US for slavery 150 years earlier while ignoring among their allies, actual current slavery in the Arab-Muslim world. The US refused to face their condemnations.
Both the US delegation and the Israeli delegation, when they realized how systemically the conference had been packed against them, withdrew in protest. And Amos Brown was there, challenging the US to stand before the dock of this kangaroo court. When he spoke the following week in (already woke) San Francisco, accusing the US of deserving the blow, he illustrated perfectly my conjectured link between Durban and the reaction to 9-11: Durban assured a global audience that would rejoice in this blow against the evil, suffocating hegemon. From British journalists to French “philosophes,” to American radicals, the cry went up: the US had it coming. Bluntly put, Durban had groomed progressives to welcome and celebrate their Jihadi enemies in their most atrocious deeds committed against them. (They had already been doing it about Israel for almost a full year, already.)
In terms of apocalyptic millennial dynamics, Durban marks the formal marriage of Caliphators (those activist Muslims working for the global Caliphate in our day), with the (radical) progressive left, in which both millennial movements, despite their fundamentally opposing visions of the millennium of peace to come differed, joined around a key element of their apocalyptic scenarios, a major boost to their (now joint) revolutionary power. They had both identified the apocalyptic enemy: the two Great Satans that Khoumeini had denounced some twenty years earlier), the US and Israel.
Eric Hoffer wrote in the early 50s:
Mass movements can rise and spread without belief in a God, but never without belief in a devil.
This unholy alliance married pre-modern sadism and post-modern masochism: scapegoating Jihadis could shout: You, the US are the embodiment of racist evil; you, Israel, guilty of genocide.’ And the oikophobic West, emphatically agreed to this attack on their culture. ‘You’re right: our imperialism and racism are the worst in the world and in history. We deserve your hatred.’ In my book I refer to this as Y2KMind: When jihadis attack a democracy, blame the democracy.
After 9-11, many proponents of this approach came out, some penitential – ‘What did we do to provoke their hatred?‘ and some triumphantly aggressive – ‘“America’s chickens are coming home to roost.” When Reverend Brown said, “America, is there anything you did to set up this climate?” he placed himself squarely in the camp of those who “blame the democracy” for the savage hatred of the Jihadis in quest of a global Caliphate.
But in addition to insight into the participation of Brown in the Durban Spirit of apocalyptic mobilization, we have precious information here on the way apocalyptic memes – radical by definition – make their way into the mainstream. Here he was speaking publicly in the USA, among people horrified at what had just happened to their fellow citizens, and uttering the apocalyptic memes in which the US deserved what the Jihadis had just meted out. Under normal circumstances, the grown-ups in the room (what in the Middle Ages was referred to as those saniores mentis – the sounder of mind) would have shut him down and shunned him. But these were not ordinary times. On the contrary, the assembled crowd at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium cheered him on and the alleged grown-ups, Feinstein and Pelosi, spurred to act by a man whose friend had died fighting the jihadis on UA93, left in silent protest.
Explained the politician and LGBT Rights activist, Thomas Ammiano: “What can you say? It was largely a lefty and pro-peace crowd, and Amos was playing to the house.” So here, an LGBT Rights activists assumed that a pro-peace crowd would cheer on a misogynist, homophobic Jihadi attack that killed 3000 civilians. This erratic and explosive history of the “anti-war movement” of the following three years maps perfectly on this Orwellian semantic switch.
But Durban wasn’t just about the US. The other great Satan – Israel – was in for even greater abuse. For those today, in 2024, somewhat bewildered by the seemingly sudden spread of virulent antisemitism after October 7, 2023, consider here its first open expression in progressive circles. Noted Canadian jurist (and then Minister of Justice) Irwin Cotler who was present:
Durban became the tipping point for the coalescence of a new, virulent globalizing anti-Jewishness reminiscent of the atmospherics that pervaded Europe in the 1930s.
He did not refer here to “mere criticism of Israel” but to the melding of Nazi and Jihadi antisemitism in, for example, the poster/tee-shirt that circulated freely:
Here also, the first blood libel since the Holocaust to have widespread success, the lethal narrative of the IDF’s cold-blooded murder of an innocent boy in his father’s arms, dominated the discourse. Muhammad al Durah, carried in effigy by angry crowds was the patron saint of Durban. It was here that the progressive radicals from the West joined in alliance with the Jihadis (who actually did target children) against the “child-killing” Israelis.
Protesters march through the streets during the World Conference Against Racism in Durban, Friday Aug. 31, 2001. (AP Photo/Obed Zilwa)
The sign would more accurately read “Palestine’s Images of Hate” given the status of Al Durah as the still-uncontested icon of hatred of the 21st century. These same crowds bore aloft posters with Arafat, Saddam Hussein, and Bin Laden.
Here we find the major conduit of Nazi-mimetic, Muslim-apocalyptic Jew hatred into the Western public sphere. Copious copies of Mein Kampf handed out including Arabic translations.
Mein Kamp in Arabic taken into Israel by Gazan on October 7, 2023.
It was the emotional charge – we have seen the enemy! – and the sine qua non of the alliance with the Caliphators: anyone who defended Israel – including all those liberal Jews – were enemies of the revolution.
Apocalyptic Movement Goes Public
One of the most important moments in the life of an apocalyptic movement is when it first goes public. For a long period beforehand the movement grows, spreading its radical message among true believers willing to run the risks of embracing such radical goals and ideals. This happens all the time, in every generation, people trying to make apocalyptic sense out of the “unheard of” events of the day. Most die when they go public, either killed by authorities (Jesus), publicly mutilated (James Naylor), hung up at the city gates to die and to remain there as a permanent message to potential radicals singing a (coming) apocalyptic epic.
Those rare millennial movements, which, upon “coming out” and going public, speak to receptive audiences, and gain strength in the public sphere… they have a potent future as a player at least for as long as apocalyptic time prevails. Indeed, these movements have the possibility of “taking” like a forest fire, and then the flames must run their course, riding the human believers to destruction. And in 2000/2001, the voice of Jihad stormed into Western discussions, on the wings of the Palestinian narrative of freedom, demanding respect.
From 9-11 on, the term Islamophobia became an increasingly demanding insistence on silencing any criticism of Islam. What’s good for the goose among oikophobic progressives (their own Christian past), is most decidedly not good for the gander (the Islamic “guest-workers”). Imagine the French committee planning the opening of their Olympics with a depiction of Mohammad on his steed at al Aqsa dressed as a rodeo cowboy. That’s actually less offensive than the anti-Christian depiction they went with, and as unthinkable (with all those threats of terror), as the attacking Christianity was delectably daring.
Here around 2000, a sharp turn in the meaning of our political language “took.” Revolutionary memes entered the public sphere. It was no longer taboo to call Israel Nazis; it was no longer intellectually dishonest to accuse the Israelis of genocide; it was required journalistic practice not to call 9-11 “terror.” It was now permitted, even encouraged, to articulate an apocalyptic discourse that promised salvation once the apocalyptic enemy is destroyed. At the same time there was a massive shift in the Overton window: “liberal” suddenly meant someone who supported a movement whose most prominent feature was Jihadi suicide attacks on civilians.
Later this new approach, like all the zero-sum memes of Palestinian “liberation,” strove for hegemony in public discourse, banning Islamophobic challengers with Zionist tendencies and took over major world organizations like the ICJ in the Hague and the UN, as well as many “human rights” NGOs. And so it has gone worsening in Western “progressive” circles: banning and canceling dissent, for the last quarter century. In the history of 21st century internet cancel culture, Israel is the first and most continuous target of such attacks.
Then came October 7, and the revolutionary forces did not play their Westsplaining role a brave freedom fighters, but rather that of mass executioners competing with the Nazi extermination squads for sadism and malevolence. They revealed the face of the revolutionary forces of the Caliphate in all its beserker glory, amplified by their social media accounts. This revolution will be televised.
Western progressives, after years of insisting that the Palestinians are fighting for dignity and freedom, rather than dominion and genocidal revenge, proved impervious to a reality the Israelis (and many Jews) could not longer ignore. What insued was a catastrophic collapse of civil society in response to the savage violence of Jihad, in which people claiming to be “progressive” engaged in public displays of malice, of moral sadism against Israel and the Jews who support her. It’s now acceptable to treat Jews as if they deserved no empathy, and should get only belated mercy when they are crushed and penitent.
So in 2023, instead of drawing back in horror from the horrible revelation, Western progressives, led by academics, celebrated it, praised it, militated for it. They looked an active cataclysmic apocalyptic movement (historically capable of megadeath, of bringing on the death of tens of millions of people), and many, too many, gave a thumbs. As a movement, they chose a death cult over a culture of life.
And, like Feinstein and Pelosi, those who disagreed with this sudden, startlingly aggressive discourse, silently left, unwilling to directly confront this new and weaponized narrative. So, it has grown. In the years right after 2000 (al Durah, Jenin) some liberals would challenge a claim that compared Israel to the Nazis – a morally sadistic accusation if there ever was one – had entered the public sphere. Today it’s tweeted by global diplomats.
And with such verbal folly, comes the Jew-hatred which has lingered for the longue durée in both derivative monotheistic cultures, always waiting for an excuse to hurt Jews.
Kamala and her Pastor
What to do here? Kamala Harris knows Amos Brown as a wonderful, spiritually inspiring individual. How much did he inculcate his hatreds in her is not, at least at this point, very clear (or even documented). As for him, is he dupe or demopath? Does he really believe that this coalition of Jihadi and progressive forces will indeed have a salvific effect and that when it’s time to take over, the Caliphators will convert to the progressive vision (“Imagine”) rather than regress to the power-politics of the 7th and early 20th centuries?
Or does he recognize the aims and desires that animate his ally, which spell doom for the Jews and the democratic West, and he’s just helping the process take place by talking in Newspeak. Jihad means peace so why wouldn’t peaceniks cheer it on?
But one thing is certain, if Kamala wants to go down in the great history of the ages – and the times have placed her on center stage with a chance to do so – she must extract herself from the cosmopolitan hostility to the US-as-a-nation that at once informs so many around her, oikophobes urging a self-destructive foreign policy on the one hand, and supporting the program of the sworn enemy of the USA as a democracy on the other.
Otherwise, one shudders to think how she will be remembered or who will do the remembering.
Prospects? Not great. But one can always hope. Maybe Emhoff will realize he’s Esther.
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