The discrepancy between the devastated land and the sappiness of the messages of peace and love could be a pretext for one more text saturated with the adjective “Orwellian”.
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In the second month of siege on Gaza, the government of Israel published pictures of the “first ever pride flag raised in Gaza”. In one picture, a smiling guy with a mustache had open arms, holding a rainbow flag with the inscription “In the name of love” (there is an inscription in English and other two languages, one may guess them to be Arab and Hebraic translations). He stood over a devastated land. Far in the landscape, one could see ruins of buildings – one cannot but wonder if those ruins are still standing. After the announcement, the text of the tweet explained it: “Yoav Atzmoni who is a member of the LGBTQ+ community wanted to send a message of hope to the people of Gaza living under Hamas brutality. His intention was to raise the first pride flag in Gaza as a call for peace and freedom.”
The discrepancy between the devastated land and the sappiness of the messages of peace and love could be a pretext for one more text saturated with the adjective “Orwellian”. However, what I think to be quite little noticed or explained is such a junction of the religious right (Protestant and Jewish) and LGBT proselytism. The few attempts of explanation that I have seen came from gay people who sympathizes with the Palestine cause. They label such a practice as “pink washing”: the act of washing an spurious act with the gay flag. The problem with this explanation is that it can account only for the leftist support for Zionism; after all, to the religious right, the gay flag should stain with pink, and not wash, the prophesied State of Israel. While there is a support for Israel which comes from the NGO’s Left, I have never seen an explanation which ascribes the power of the Israeli lobby to those sheer workers of the big capital. Therefore, the pink washing hypotheses cannot account for key sectors which support Israel.
In order to answer to that question, I read The Right Side of History: How Reason and Moral Purpose Made the West Great (Harper Collins, 2019), by Ben Shapiro. He is an American orthodox Zionist jew who owns a conservative media company and is quite pro establishment: while he is a rightist, he is against Trump, and during the pandemic he urged everyone to “follow the science”, i. e., to take the Pfizer’s shots.
The title echoes Trump’s slogan in a modified version: instead of hoping America to be great again, Americans should be proud of another homeland – the West – which, in the past, became great. And as the old tale of the West’s decay (an usual topic for ideologues of Nazism and of scientific racism), came back in our days, Shapiro’s reader can find one more work of this genre, now re-framed and painted with tender colors.
Just swap race for culture. We have now a tale on how the “West” (a monolithic bloc which, someway, encompasses Ancient Greeks and English Puritans) constituted itself as a civilization superior to the others. Such a tale goes on with a short and abrupt explanation for the West’s decay and, in the end, the author exhorts his readers to take back the West’s right path.
As for the tale about the original triumph of the West, Ben Shapiro is a kind of Alfred Rosenberg contrariwise: if the Nazi, in The Myth of the Twentieth Century, ascribed the Aryans’ decay to the fusion with Semitic peoples in a remote past, the Zionist ascribes the West’s supremacy to the fusion of Athens with Jerusalem; i. e., the fusion of the philosophical legacy of the pagans with the biblical legacy of the Semites. Both are supposed to be antagonistic forces that coexist in eternal conflict; however, if this conflict suffers some imbalance that nullifies Athens either Jerusalem, the West falls. Therefore, we have to stay vigilant in order to keep this precarious junction, or else we shall fall into the animality and obscurantism that characterize the non-Western world.
Indeed, Shapiro displays an extraordinary ignorance on everything that does not belong to the so called West – which, actually, is just the liberal Protestant world, and Ben Shapiro racks his brains to connect it to Ancient Greece without tainting with Middle Ages.
I will bring a long quote in order to illustrate his way of thinking: “Those twin notions — those diamonds of spiritual genius [of Athens and Jerusalem] — built our civilization, and built us as individuals. If you believe that life is more than materialistic pleasures and pain avoidance, you are a product of Jerusalem and Athens. If you believe that the government has no right to intrude upon the exercise of your individual will, and that you are bound by moral duty to pursue virtue, you are a product of Jerusalem and Athens. If you believe that human beings are capable of bettering our world through use of our reason, and are bound by higher purpose to do so, you are a product of Jerusalem and Athens.
“Jerusalem and Athens built science. The twin ideals of Judeo-Christian values and Greek natural law reasoning built human rights. They built prosperity, peace, and artistic beauty. Jerusalem and Athens built America, ended slavery, defeated the Nazis and the Communists, lifted billions from poverty, and gave billions spiritual purpose. Jerusalem and Athens were the foundations of the Magna Carta and the Treaty of Westphalia; they were the foundations of the Declaration of Independence, Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation, and Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail.” The quote is from the Introduction.
In the end of the day, if you are a Marxist or a Nazi, you are not a western, because westerns are liberals (they want a very small government). The ascetic cultures from the Orient, known and described by the Greeks from ancient ages, do not exist in Shapiro’s scheme, for everyone who does not live for materialistic pleasures and pain avoidance is a westerner. As everything is a matter of individual mentality, the solution for every westerner evil is at a self-help level: if we do not become aware of “western” values (or rather Puritan values), we shall sink into communism and into the animality of dark-skinned peoples.
Shapiro’s provinciality and historical narrowness is astonishing. He is capable of saying that the US are today “more racially equal than ever before in our history—more equal than any other society in human history. In 1958, just 4 percent of Americans approved of black-white intermarriage; as of 2013, that statistic was 87 percent.” (This quote is also from the Introduction.) How many Brazilians, in a census, would dare to condemn the marriage between blacks and whites? And if we can be generous enough to consider racism and ethnocentrism the same thing, anyone who knows a bit of Ancient History knows that Alexander the Great married Greeks with Persians, and that Rome was made by “mixed” marriages. In western history, segregation is abnormal.
Although Ben Shapiro is an orthodox Jew who integrates the pro-Israel lobby, he, with such a narrow historical and anthropological view, sees the USA as the undisputed top human history. The USA are the proper balance between Athens and Jerusalem, achieved after the “West” got free from Middle Ages and the alleged centralism of Catholic Church.
And now we finally can draw the explanation: since the West is also liberalism (“Athens”), if it would repress the LGBT proselytism for the sake of religion (“Jerusalem”), the balance would come to an end and we would fall into barbarism. So, wherever there is a Pride Flag, there is also liberalism and there can be West. In a region so religious as the Middle East, the symbol of a cross doesn’t mean a great deal to the western man à la Shapiro. On the other side, the rainbow flag indicates that there is “Athens”. But, of course, this “Athens” is just liberalism, and a secular liberalism: for if each religion must be a private issue, the proselytism of non religious lifestyles and values is licit.
Liberalism in the USA has not been always this way. During the Cold War, Islamic fundamentalists in Afghanistan gained sympathy because of their religiousness, which made them great anti-Communists soldiers. The term “fundamentalist” itself is originally applied to US Protestants, and coining the term “Islamic fundamentalism” certainly had some propaganda aim. Nowadays, however, any religiosity disconnected to “Athens” is seen as evil in itself – anti-western.
Surely Ben Shapiro is not a ray in a blue sky. The book I reviewed was published in 2019. This year, the atheist Richard Dawkins, who spent decades representing every religious as a moron, announced that he is “culturally Christian”.
