Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary, and the real possibility that he may become the state’s next senator, marks the maturation of a long civilizational process.
El-Sayed’s father in law is one of the largest facilitators of donations to the Muslim brotherhood in the U.S. Thus, in a country like Jordan or the UAE he wouldn't even be allowed to run for office due extremist ties.
El-Sayed entered the race through the familiar language of class populism: against oligarchy (his official banner), corporate power, elites - and for “the people.”
Medicare for All, campaign-finance reform, opposition to corporate influence, Abolish-ICE, and ending U.S aid to Israel.
Marketing oneself as being anti Corporate Money, Power, Privilege, Foreign influence, oligarchy and the restoration of government to “the people.” is not uncommon in a post Bernie Sanders DNC. The issue is that when populism meets the Muslim brotherhood we may find ourselves in a very interesting place.
The new Islamic political class has conquered parts of the DNC with ease for a few reasons. It's brown, educated, victimized, yet wise enough to raise consciousness to a need of creating a new type of class axis rebelliousness. From an organizational and symbolic perspective it is the very element that inherits the old Jewish vanguard, as the never ending march towards equality continues. Finally it's paid for with middle eastern money.
A certain kind of white progressive embraces the populist-leftist rhetoric. Educated progressives denounce oligarchy while constituting an enlightened cultural oligarchy of their own. Meanwhile minority voters are attracted not by their objection to elites as such, but to a society in which achievement, education, institutional power and cultural authority remain unevenly distributed, and in which many Jews are conspicuously present.
Class/identity resentment and ethnic resentment than become difficult to separate, and the objection to them a great unifier.
But every synthesized construct needs a unifying other. And soon we will find them for “The people” shall be gradually redefined to exclude those suspected of historically possessing too much money, influence, education or historical agency; conspicuously, these elements are not only the enemy of this new Rainbow-Social-Democratic wing that has overtaken the DNC, hurled by young and attractive Muslim Representatives like Omar and El-Sayed, but somehow their unifying other, the Jew (now zionist) is the same other of the former unifying philosophical core rooted in neoplatonism and its theological and class other. Thus, in both cases, be it 19th century Marxism, 20th century post colonialism, American 21st century populist anti-oligarchy, or modern Islamic political theology as a whole - the dividing unifying other, the demiurge, is interestingly a Hebrew father.
El-Sayed’s response to the attack on Temple Israel in West Bloomfield revealed the contradiction at the center of his politics. He did condemn the attack and antisemitism unequivocally. Yet he also invoked the maxim “hurt people hurt people,” discussed the assailant’s relatives (literal a clan of Hezbollah commanders) who had been killed in Lebanon and urged listeners to imagine a world without the airstrike that preceded the attack. He concluded that Americans must condemn both the synagogue attack and “the violence 6,000 miles away.”
El-Sayed insists that Jews must be separated from Israel.
Compulsive criticism of Israel must not be treated as antisemitism, he says.
But El-Sayed reintroduces the connection precisely when Jewish people are attacked in the U.S. The attack on an American synagogue is placed within a causal cycle beginning in the Middle East. Israel’s actions become part of the explanation for violence against Jews thousands of miles away.
So the connection between Jews and Israel is rejected when it supports Jewish sovereignty, but restored when it can be used to rationalize the punishment of Jews in another land.
Israel and the Jews are supposedly separate when the question is Jewish independence. They become connected again when Jews are punished.
This is classical Hegelianism in that the unifying other which is contradicted in the act of defining my own boundaries, is being reimagined to suit the interests of a larger struggle.
The Master Jew may pray, write, remember, suffer and contribute. But now that he is no Master any longer, he may not only not govern others, he may not govern himself.
Jewish mastery of ethics and theology, as well as finance and innovation is the exact reason to why Jewish power most be uniquely treated as a moral contamination. And why national sovereignty is considered legitimate for nearly everyone except the people whose lack of sovereignty repeatedly left them dependent upon the mercy of the cruel. And this is why the world sees the Palestinians as the ultimate victims. Because they have as their Master the ultimate abuser. But this is a deeper exercise.
Because this exercise in anti Zionism (anti Judaism), is the first step in a new utopian universalism.
White intellectuals may identify with this transformation of power fantasy without seeing that the Jews are a big deal in the process, because they imagine themselves enslaved by their own civilization, by reason, science, institutions, hierarchy and the guilt of historical power. Minority activists may adopt it as a rebellion against another form of white authority. The figure of the Muslim insurgent then becomes symbolically useful to both: outwardly marginalized, rhetorically anti-imperial and supposedly capable of outwitting the established order , and actually? The only one brave enough to single the original and common Marxian/colonial/Catholic/worker demiurge - the Jew.
In European radical thought, the fantasy was expressed through the language of masters and slaves, alienation, ressentiment and revolutionary inversion. In Islamist politics, it can acquire an additional religious dimension: Jewish sovereignty is not merely a geopolitical problem but an offense against an inherited vision of godly order.
This neo-platonic German - Arab ideological convergence touches the Jew at the root of all construct in a place British or even French enlightenment would never dare to.
Behind it stands an older German-Arab ideological axis - an alliance of entire peoples, that their intellectuals, regarded Jewish morality, finance, theology or sovereignty as demiurgically intolerable,. corruptive, and anti universal.
What should be done about it is less clear. Israel will survive or fail principally through its own strength. It cannot organize American political life for Americans.
The ultimate problem is therefore not Israel’s.
It is America’s.
America must decide whether its language of equality means that sovereignty should be limited by neoplatonic fantasies, that in all forms, medieval-theological, modern-economic and post modern-colonial somehow wish Jews to exist in defenseless situations.
It must decide whether antisemitism ceases to be antisemitism when translated into the vocabulary of class struggle, anti-elitism and human rights.
And it must decide whether a politics that recognizes the bond between Jews and Israel only when Jews are to be blamed, but denies it when Jews claim independence, belongs in the United States Senate.
For Hitler Judaism was the greatest enemy of the world that needed to be saved from, for its morality.
For Mohammad it was the greatest enemy of the nation for its corrupting of the scriptures and betrayal of the prophet.
For Marx it was the greatest enemy due to its class exploitation and what his mentor Bauer called it's "bourgeois beingness".
Carl Jung defined Hitler as having a "Mohammadian Personality".
Arab socialism, like German socialism, will kill the Jews just like both their political forefathers wanted. America, as in the case with all great ism's, will I have to ask itself whether it's going out on a war against the Jews, Michigan decides first.
