Getting Israel/Palestine Wrong: Lessons From the Clown Carnival That is Rod Dreher’s Mind

How not to analyze geopolitical events, from a deeply confused, angry pundit...

This piece was supposed to be different. I wanted to survey the mainstream press, assemble some of the worst “takes” regarding Israel’s ongoing assault on Gaza, and eviscerate them line by line. It was going to be a critique of the New York Times’ neocon-in-residence Bret Stephens and others like him. I still might write that piece. But while doing preliminary research, it came to my attention that one Rod Dreher, a staple of the paleoconservative right-wing, had, starting on October 7^th, lost his mind over Israel-Palestine, in a way that even I find difficult to fully appreciate. The more I read from Rod, the more I couldn’t look away, and I knew that his lunatic blog would have to become the new focal point for my examination of how political pundits in the United States have openly embraced their utter depravity since October 7^th.

For those who don’t know, Rod is a prominent figure among religious conservatives; especially the hyper-online variety. He started out as a journalist but gained notoriety for his long-running blog at the American Conservative magazine, where his fixations included insisting that the existence of the LGBTQ community was triggering the end of Western civilization, warning of the nefarious activities of literal demons (he once claimed to have witnessed an exorcism, but evidently didn’t think to capture it on his phone), learning in retrospect that his father had been a member of the KKK (which explains a lot, as we’ll see), and – I swear to God I am not making this up – reminiscing about trying to catch a glimpse of a black middle-school classmate’s uncircumcised penis, which he described as a “primitive root wiener” and “monstrous.”

As Rod described it,

I remember the one kid we had in my elementary school class, a black boy who had been born at home, and who was not circumcised. All us boys wanted to stare at his primitive root wiener when we were at the urinal during recess, because it was monstrous. Nobody told us that wieners could look like that. The kid didn’t know why his penis was so strange looking, and neither did we.

Perhaps eventually realizing that this was not a normal thing to write, Rod then attempted to justify it, but succeeded only in digging himself a deeper hole:

Hey, I thought it was funny. More than half the boys in my class were black, and everybody, white and black, but this one kid was circumcised. None of us had ever seen an uncircumcised penis before. It looked very weird to us, like a root (ever seen an uncircumcised wiener?). We used to have to stand at a pee trough at recess, whip it out, and do our business. Little boys being little boys, things were noticed, and comments were made. We thought the kid was deformed…For the record, many years later, I was in an all-male gym shower in the Netherlands, as an adult, and someone asked me in all honesty if I was Jewish, because I was the only circumcised person in this shower full of white men.

[I’ll pause here to allow readers to process what they just read.]

Understandably, Rod has long been a magnet for controversy. This has only increased since his very public embrace of Viktor Orban; Rod recently caused an international incident for blogging about controversial remarks Orban had told him in confidence. Shortly thereafter, “Howard Ahmanson Jr., the heir to a California banking fortune and the sole benefactor of Dreher’s six-figure salary” at the American Conservative, became too weirded out by Rod’s increasingly bizarre posts, and after a 12-year run, decided to pull funding for the blog.

Accordingly, Rod migrated over to Substack. It was at this point when I had to regrettably stop following his musings, unwilling as I was to pay for content which, in all honesty, should be read by a therapist, as opposed to the reading public. Besides, like most leftists, I primarily knew him as a repeat target of the hosts of the Chapo Trap House podcast, who have made something of a career out of reading his work out loud on slow news days, and I could continue to encounter him in this format. Having now read a substantial amount of Rod’s work for this piece in a short amount of time, I can safely say that encountering him in podcast format was a lot better on my sanity vice prolonged exposure to his actual writing. Sort of like looking at Pennywise in his clown form versus staring directly into the Deadlights. Neither are good, but at least you might survive the former without permanently debilitating psychological trauma.

As I’ve said, I took another look at Rod’s work when I found out that he’d been sounding off about Israel-Palestine since October 7^th. Given that Rod has long aligned himself with the supposedly antiestablishment, “crunchy con” wing of the conservative movement, I might have expected him to take a more reasonable approach to the situation than someone like, say, Sean Hannity. How wrong I was.

A manic post entitled “In Fog of War, Facts Don’t Matter” is as good an example as any of the many problems that manifest themselves in Rod’s work – notably, getting important, easily-verifiable facts wildly wrong, and making overtly racist generalizations about multiple groups (while feigning a complete absence of any racial prejudice whatsoever). After pontificating about the bombing of an Anglican-run (not Baptist, as he incorrectly asserts) hospital in Gaza, Rod changes the subject to the many defects of the Arab people. Citing one of his many anonymous friends,[i] in this case a priest operating in the Middle East, Rod laments that Arabs, specifically his friend’s “Arab Catholic parishioners,” are “moved heavily by emotion, facts be damned.” 

Invoking a journalist of dubious reliability, Rod asserts that for Arabs, “shame/honor culture, tribalism, and conspiratorial thinking have undermined their chances to create better lives for themselves, and saddled them with injustice and oppression,” leaving out such trivialities as centuries of British, French, Israeli, and American imperialism. How odd! Not content to stereotype Arabs alone, he drags African Americans into his ramblings, in what has to be one of the most audacious pieces of modern racial commentary I’ve read, outside the Jim Crow unit of my African American history graduate course:

[W]ithin Middle Eastern Arab culture, the ‘truth’ is not understood outside of a particular social and cultural framework. This is true for all human societies, but there’s something about traditional Arab society (and not just Muslim society) that has trained people to accept as social facts only things that have been filtered through shame/honor and tribalism. We can see similar patterns in American black culture, which is also characterized by a shame/honor dynamic (hence the deadly violence among young black males), and an inability of many to come to grips with group failure (it’s always somebody else’s fault).

In another piece, Rod echoes this theme, complaining that European “Muslim immigrants” are prone to “venting onto Jews their own self-hatred at their failures,” and that “Muslims around the world are humiliated by the excellence of Jews, so they lash out.” Rod is quick to insist that “This has nothing to do with genes, and everything to do with culture.” Actually, it has to do with the thinly-disguised racism of the author, and his reflexive desire to shield structural forces (imperialism, racial capitalism) from critique by insisting that racial groups (Arabs, African Americans) and their inferior cultures are the cause of all their problems. If only the Arabs had more eagerly embraced Enlightenment rationality, maybe Israel wouldn’t have gone ahead with the Nakba.

But wait, there’s more! In the same “Fog of War, Facts Don’t Matter” piece, Rod – incredibly – claims that a pro-Palestinian protest at the University of Pennsylvania featured protesters chanting that they wanted “Jewish genocide.” He links to a video purporting to show this. I watched the clip, and was unable to make out what was being said, other than the word “genocide,” but a quick Google search that Rod was apparently too lazy to conduct reveals that his claim is total nonsense. As USA Today and PolitiFact confirmed, the protestors were chanting “we charge you [Israel] with genocide,” a common refrain at these sorts of rallies. Rod apparently misheard this as “we want Jewish genocide,” prompting a descent into panic: “We live in a world in which students marching through that campus to protest against transgenderism (say) would have faced widespread opprobrium and sanction. But students marching through openly calling for Jewish genocide — you watch, nothing will happen. This is the America we have allowed to come into being.”

Such a world has not, in fact, come into being. Because he refuses to adhere to the bare minimum of journalistic integrity – i.e., checking your facts before publishing serious accusations about masses of people – Rod is constantly clutching his pearls over the impeding doom of Western civilization. As here, his fear is usually because he’s completely misunderstood a series of events, or in this case, simply gotten them wrong entirely. Even though this was posted on October 17^th, Rod has not (as of November 20^th) deleted it, or amended it to reflect his error – which is a MAJOR error, especially in a piece whose title laments that “Facts Don't Matter,” and in which Rod has the audacity to accuse Arabs and African Americans of innate, cultural irrationality, before making one of the most egregious errors imaginable.

This is a representative sampling of the quality of writing Rod puts out. Rather than torture my audience with detailed summaries of every piece he’s written on Israel since October 7^th, I’ve chosen to break down his coverage by themes which crop up over and over in his posts, in the hopes that this exercise can teach us something about the way a certain type of pundit views the world.

THEME 1: PROTESTERS ARE JEW-HATING HAMAS SUPPORTERS

Rod blatantly misleads his readers about the context leading up to the October 7^th terrorist attack, by implying that Palestinians in Gaza alone are responsible for their plight: “How many people know what happened to cause the Israelis to build those walls and fortifications? A long campaign of suicide bombings during the Second Intifada (2000-2005). How many people know that the Israelis ceased to occupy Gaza in 2005, dismantled its settlements, and let the Palestinians rule themselves. They elected Hamas.” Rod quite deliberately omits why there were suicide bombings, or an Intifada, in the first place. He omits the context for Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza, which was not due to sudden benevolence on Israel’s part, but rather in order to ensure perpetual control over the West Bank; Gaza was far less valuable from an Israeli settler perspective.[ii] He omits that Israel itself created Hamas because it wanted a less secular, more extreme opponent. Worst of all, he neglects to mention that Israel remains responsible for the conditions in Gaza, since it controls entry and exit of people, food, water, fuel, medicine, vehicles, everything – this is why the strip has long been called an “open-air prison,” and why people like Nelson Mandela and Jimmy Carter have long called Israel an apartheid state, and why it’s shameful to suggest that the Palestinians “rule it themselves.”

Rod is also clueless as to why there has been such a strong negative reaction around the world against Israeli policy. He doesn’t even understand what the protesters are saying. Rod says that “A people that can look at such a thing [October 7^th] and rationalize it away suffers from diseased minds.” One of the most fundamental concepts for anyone hoping to do historical analysis is that understanding the cause(s) of an atrocity is not the same thing as excusing it. Rod not only does not understand the causes of the October 7^th terrorist attack, he is unable to tell the difference between doing so, and pledging loyalty to Hamas. Nor, in any of his writing reviewed for this essay, has he offered a single word for the victims of the Israeli leveling of Gaza – strange, given his ostensibly “pro-life” leanings.

In the same frothing-at-the-mouth manner as other right-wing pundits, Rod insists that hordes of antisemitic, Jew-hating, pro-Hamas terrorist sympathizers make up the bulk of the critics of Israeli policy. In one piece (“The Nazis of Our Time”), Rod refers to “the many images of pro-Hamas protesters in major Western capitals,” adding that the “people you see in Western cities [are] protesting in favor of Hamas” [bold and italics are both Rod’s, not mine].

In “Liberalism’s Last Stand,” Rod makes the wild claim that “people who actually believe in killing Jews thrive unmolested within the British university system,” and that “pro-Hamas militants crowd the streets of London cheering on the burning of Jewish babies in a new Holocaust.” No evidence is provided. He also asserts that “Back in the day, BLM co-founder Patrice Cullors said that Israel must be eliminated for the sake of racial justice.”

She said no such thing. According the hyperlink Rod provided, Cullors said that “Palestine is our generation’s South Africa”[iii] – absolutely true – and, describing her travels there, said that “nothing would’ve prepared me for the level of militarization and the level of violence that we would witness those ten days inside of Palestine. Nothing would’ve prepared me for the ways in which we witnessed people’s terror; people live in terror on a daily basis, and nothing would’ve prepared me for how much clarity I would have on why we have to be a part of Palestinian solidarity.” She did briefly say that “if we don’t step up, boldly and courageously, to end the imperialist project that’s called Israel, we’re doomed,” which, at most, is confused wording, but almost certainly refers to the need to end Israeli imperialism. Nonetheless, Rod concludes from this that BLM is a “racial supremacist organization.” He then goes on to shriek about “the pro-Hamas Jew hatred we’re seeing now” and the “woke-industrial complex,” then alarmingly concludes that those interested in defending “civilization” will “understandably be drawn to a radical-right ideology that is prepared to fight.”

In “Is This The End of Woke?,” Rod claims that “Nearly eighty years after the end of the Second World War, crowds gather on European squares to call for the death of Jews,” and that “Muslim demonstrators (and their non-Muslim leftist allies)…rallied in the streets cheering on the slaughter of Jews.” Rod’s solution to this imagined scenario is to restrict the right of critics of Israel to speak their minds: “I am an advocate for freedom of speech,” Rod insists, “but there are lines that must not be crossed in any civilized society.” Since Rod has redefined criticism of Israel to mean Jew-hatred, he ipso-facto supports restricting free speech for those critical of Israel – i.e., most of the world.

Rod really gets confused when he attempts to locate contradictions among the protesters: “The same people who took to the streets to protest the police killing of a drug addict named George Floyd have no problem with people taking to the streets to cheer on the terrorist killing of 1,300 Jewish civilians in the highest one-day Jewish death toll since the closing of the Nazi death camps.” In addition to his Nixonian, pro-War on Drugs dig at a victim of state violence, Rod reveals that he does not understand yet another very simple concept: that the murder of George Floyd triggered protests against the entire system of racialized, militarized policing, not just one particular victim of it.

Rod goes on to insist that it might be necessary for the US to start another war: “My fear is that the US will have to get militarily involved in the Middle East because the enemies of Israel will open up a two-front, maybe a three-front, war. [emphasis mine] Rod apparently views this as something necessary, as opposed to something that must be avoided at all costs.

“The Islamist Terror & Its Western Allies” makes a series of baffling assertions one after the other: “Jews are once again facing the Einsatzgruppen…portions of the American Left have gone over to pure bloodlust for people they consider their ideological enemies…Europe now knows that is has a substantial portion of death-loving Islamic maniacs living here.” In support of all this, he links to a Guardian article describing the fatal shooting of two Swedes in Belgium by an ISIS inspired Tunisian fanatic. The article clearly states, “The individual claiming the attack said the Swedish nationality of his victims was a motivation, [and] there appeared to be no links with the conflict between Israel and Hamas in the Middle East.” The murder of two Swedes in an incident unrelated to the current situation is thus invoked as evidence that European Jews are up against the 21^st century Einsatzgruppen as a result of the current situation. Rather than talk about the undeniably real instances of antisemitism that are indeed on the rise – largely coming from the right, incidentally – Rod instead selects an example that, quite literally, has nothing to do with his case.

Rod admittedly also frets about the safety of his fellow Europeans more generally: “Europeans are dying, and more will die, either from laxity or from an ideological decision by the Left to permit evils from Islamists and other non-Westerners that they would never tolerate from Europeans and North Americans.” By Rod’s own count, we’re at two dead Europeans. By contrast, this article was written on 17 October, by which time Israel’s assault on Gaza had killed 4,200 people and displaced 1 million more.[iv] Why has Rod not uttered a single word about any of the thousands of dead Palestinians in Gaza? Why is he only concerned about (implicitly white) Europeans? A major clue appears later in the piece, when Rod – and I swear I am not making this up – endorses the Great Replacement theory. Seriously. As he says, “The fact that some violent white supremacists have seized on the Great Replacement concept to justify their evil deeds does not negate its truth.” Despite attempting to distance himself from those white supremacists, he nonetheless insists that “liberal delusion has led to the Great Replacement as a mortal threat to Western civilization.” The apple has not fallen far from the tree with this son-of-a-Klansman.

In “Our Islam Problem,” Rod displays a command of the English language no better than his grasp of the facts when he asks, “How in the name of God did we in the West allow ourselves, nearly eighty years after the first images of the Nazi death camps came to light, are our streets in Western capitals are filled with massive crowds calling for death to Jews? Well, we have.” [sic, sic, sic] “We are a country that is so ultra-sensitive to racism that we went collectively berserk after a black junkie high on fentanyl and resisting arrest died under the knee of a white police officer. But when 1,400 Jews die in the most gruesome ways at the hands of Palestinian Islamist terrorists, tens of thousands of American Muslims and American leftists take to the streets to express solidarity with the terrorists.” Note, again, the utter lack of comprehension that every single protest has been against the murderous Israeli response, not in favor of Hamas terrorism. Also note that this is the second derogatory reference to George Floyd we’ve seen, which when considered alongside the whole “my father was literally in the Klan” thing, suggests some potentially unsettling implications.

In “Kristallnacht Then, Kristallnacht Now,” Rod rants that “all over Europe, and even in some US cities, mobs march in support of the mass murderers of innocent Jews. These mobs are not German National Socialists, but Muslims and left-wing non-Muslims who sympathize with them.” Invoking arch-neocon Douglas Murray (author of such gems as Neoconservatism: Why We Need It), Rod tells us that even “if you support Palestine but not Hamas, you don’t get a pass, for you still marched shoulder to shoulder with supporters of slaughtering Jewish civilians.” Still citing Murray, Rod chooses an interesting analogy for the son of a Klansman: “If the KKK marched for Mom and apple pie, you are still tainted if you, a lover of Mom and apple pie, march alongside them. Nobody would believe you if you said, ‘But I don’t like the Klan!’ And they shouldn’t.” By this logic, we shouldn’t believe Rod when he says that he doesn’t have an ounce of race-hatred in his body!

In another piece, Rod gives us the only real example of a serious, unforgiveable instance of disgusting antisemitic rhetoric. He quotes Bari Weiss, who asserted that “crowds gathered at the Sydney Opera House cheering ‘gas the Jews.’” According to Reuters, in a protest involving over a thousand people, “Unverified footage…featured on Sky News appeared to show a small group outside the Opera House lighting flares and chanting ‘gas the Jews’.” The only video I’ve been able to find does appear to show the vile slogan being used by a not-insignificant number or people. I have to admit, if this kind of open, genuinely evil sentiment were widespread in the way Rod wants me to believe that it is, I’d be inclined to give him a more respectful hearing. The best we can say about this is that the group behind the protest, Palestine Action Group Sydney, was quick to denounce the small number of “vile antisemitic attendees” who had “no place in their movement:” “We are an anti-racist and anti-colonial movement and we refuse to fight racism with racism,” they said. “If you are an antisemite, you are not welcome at our rallies and are not a part of our movement. As we did today, we will ask you to leave and we will continue to do this.” This is the correct response, although they should also take concrete steps to show that they mean it. Rod, of course, doesn’t mention this, not even to dismiss it as insincere.

THEME 2: IMMIGRATION WILL CAUSE EUROPEAN CITIES TO BURN

Rod has long written of his “fear that a lot of European cities will burn,” on the grounds that “Europeans have been complete fools to allow so many Islamic migrants into their countries. What they’re celebrating doing to Jews in Israel today they will celebrate doing to Christians and secular Westerners in Europe tomorrow.”

“We have living among us a large number of people who believe that intentionally slaughtering innocent, defenseless people, even children and babies, is morally justified for the sake of achieving a political goal,” Rod warns. [As an aside, Rod thinks he’s describing the millions of people calling for a ceasefire, but is instead unintentionally describing the exact views of those who support the Israeli destruction of Gaza.] “We have living among us a shocking number of people who despise Jews because they are Jews,” he goes on, “and who would happily see their throats cut. This is not a wild accusation; this is a mere description of what we are seeing online and on the streets of Western capitals and university campuses.” Given that we are not, in fact, seeing such things in the streets of Western capitals, a single incident in Sydney aside, Rod’s “wild accusation” will have to retain that designation until he can demonstrate otherwise.

You will also note that Rod, like just about everyone else who scapegoats immigrants for the problems of neoliberal capitalism, never mentions that imperialist wars (in the case of the Middle East) or CIA coups (in the case of Latin America) are the cause of the problem. In this way, like all good propagandists for empire, Rod obscures the atrocities, then targets their victims for condemnation.

THEME 3: THE LEFT WANTS TO KILL YOU AND YOUR ENTIRE FAMILY!

Rod warns of impending “mobs of the Left’s sacred victim groups tearing you and yours to pieces,” and suggests that we should “read up on the Bolshevik revolution” to prepare for what’s coming.[v] Claiming to be able to read the minds of lefty peace activists like me, Rod asserts that “The only thing these Leftists want to know about the terror attacks last weekend is that the subjects of the attack were Israelis. Whatever the Israelis got, they deserve, on account of being guilty of being an Israeli Jew. This is how the radical Left thinks. You are guilty, or innocent, because of your identity.” I hope that I don’t have to explain that this is not, in fact, how the “radical Left” thinks. Leftist Palestinian-American Columbia professor Rashid Khalidi spoke for the entire left when he said that “Hamas has basically acted in a way involving enormous brutality against the civilians, things that are unquestionably war crimes.” You’d have to look very hard to find someone on the “radical left” who thinks otherwise.

Nonetheless, in “Liberalism’s Last Stand,” Rod warns that “The people who are celebrating the massacre of innocent Jews in the name of ‘liberation’ are the same people who would celebrate the massacre of you, if they had the chance.” [emphasis Rod’s] In “Is This The End of Woke?,” Rod again warns that Muslims and leftists support murdering Jews and “would do the same thing to the rest of us in a heartbeat.” In “Our Islam Problem,” Rod tells us that he doesn’t “want to live in a society in which any population — Muslim, white leftist, anybody — believes that the mass murder of innocent civilians under circumstances like the October 7 (or September 11) atrocities is a cause worth celebrating. They are a clear and present danger to the social order. Not only can liberal democracy not tolerate such people, no decent society can, or should. People who celebrate what Hamas did to the Jews of Israel have the capacity to celebrate doing it to you and me. […]”

Alarmingly, Rod suggests that democracy might not be able to tolerate “these people:” “What are we going to do about this? What can we do about all this? Is it a problem that liberal democracy can solve? I have grave doubts, worse than I ever have had.” The potential implication is that if democracy can’t take care of the Muslims and their non-Muslim leftist allies who support an end to Israeli occupation, perhaps some kind of more violent solution will be necessary.

THEME 4: CHINA IS BRAINWASHING AMERICA TO SUPPORT 9/11!

If, like me, you’re not on Tik Tok, you might be surprised to learn that Osama Bin Laden’s famous (to students of U.S. foreign policy, at least) letter to America “went viral,” with loads of mainly younger people hearing about it and reading it for the first time. As you can see from their reactions, they’re dazed and confused at what they’ve just read, as Bin Laden cited numerous instances of Western imperialism in Muslim countries as the motive behind 9/11. This of course flies in the face of the Bush administration’s “they hate us for our freedoms” lie, which despite being called out at the time by “radical left-wingers” like Ron Paul, remains something ordinary Americans kinda-sorta still believe on some level.

Understanding that imperialist foreign policy generates resentment and eventually “blowback,” as the CIA calls it, is not always taught in schools; I had to learn about it on my own. Having been exposed to the writing of Noam Chomsky while in NROTC, I can empathize with the cognitive dissonance the Tik Tok-ers are going through, and I hope they will use this experience as a jumping-off point to hop off social media for a bit to go read some books.

Rod, on the other hand, is apoplectic. His interpretation of this phenomenon? “The Chinese Communists have created a weapon that compels Americans to cheer for 9/11, the same as people throughout the Arab world did at the time.” That Rod conflates “learning about US imperialism” with “cheering for 9/11” is yet another indicator that he really shouldn’t be writing. As Spencer Ackerman put it in his compelling book on the War on Terror, “because the United States believed itself to be exceptional, it was poorly equipped to understand that the sort of geopolitical, economic, and cultural impact it has on the world would at some point provoke a violent response. Such recognition was too close, for elite comfort, to contending the entirely separate proposition that America deserved such an attack.”[vi] [emphasis Ackerman’s] This “elite discomfort” is a perfect description of the malady afflicting Rod. But with Rod we also get two bonuses: some classic fearmongering about those dastardly communists, as well as the old lie that “the Arab world” cheered for 9/11 (they mostly held vigils, or else trembled in fear at the inevitable US reprisals that they knew were coming). Rod’s writing is like a Greatest Hits album for neoconservatism – with some original tracks thrown in for a new generation. Expressing support for a shutdown of Tik Tok in the US, Rod writes, in bold font, that “The US is allowing China to zombify its own people and turn them overnight into the kinds of monsters who support 9/11.”

Well then.

THEME 5: WE ARE IN A CLASH OF CIVILIZATIONS!

In “Our Islam Problem,” Rod is really on edge: “Gotta say I’m really, really down about what is shaping up very quickly to be a clash of civilizations between the West and the Islamic world.” Quoting yet another anonymous friend, Rod asserts, “You know a few years ago a lot of immediate post 9/11 rhetoric about the confrontation with Islam seemed a bit overblown. Now it seems prescient, maybe even a bit subdued.” No, actually, it’s still overblown, and dangerous, and does nothing other than provide cover for the US elite to have their long-awaited war with Iran.

That Rod invokes the “Clash of Civilizations” thesis shows that, despite his feigned remove from mainstream conservatism, he’s a typical neocon at heart. The “Clash” theory was nonsense from the beginning: as anyone with a minimal knowledge of the Middle East (so, not Rod) knows, the “West” has never been opposed to Islamic extremism – indeed, were it not for the West, Islamic extremism would scarcely exist. Most such extremism originates in Saudi Arabia, whose ruling Saud dynasty forged an alliance with the descendants of Muhammad Ibn Abdul Wahhab (the founder of Wahhabism, the extremist offshoot of mainstream Sunni Islam that Saudi Arabia spreads all over the world with US help) centuries ago, and solidified the creation of the Saudi Kingdom in 1932. The United States has helped keep it in power ever since. As the Lebanese scholar As’ad Abukhalil writes, “the international Islamic fundamentalist movement” was in fact “the brainchild of [Saudi King] Faysal and his American benefactors.”[vii]

Later, the United States eagerly funded, armed, and (through our nuclear-armed Islamic fundamentalist ally Pakistan) trained the Afghan mujahideen, who destroyed the secular Marxist government in Afghanistan, drew the Soviets into a bloody guerilla conflict, and plunged the population into sheer misery, all as US planners had intended. Evangelical Jimmy Carter had no issue with this. The “clash of civilizations” was even harder to discern in the Reagan administration. Reagan’s CIA Director William Casey “was a Catholic Knight of Malta, educated by Jesuits,” who “attended mass daily and urged Christian faith upon anyone who asked his advice.” Casey “believed fervently that by spreading the Catholic church’s reach and power, he could contain communism’s advance, or reverse it.” As Steve Coll observed, “Casey’s religiosity seemed to bind him closer to his proselytizing Islamic partners in the Afghan jihad.” “As his Muslim allies did, Casey saw the Afghan jihad not merely as statecraft, but as an important front in a worldwide struggle between communist atheism and God’s community of believers.” This hugely influential Reagan cabinet official “saw political Islam and the Catholic Church as natural allies in the ‘realistic counter-strategy’ of covert action he was forging at the CIA towards Soviet imperialism.” [emphasis mine] The logic went like this: “Because the Soviets saw all religious faith as an obstacle, they suppressed churches and mosques alike. To fight back, militant Islam and militant Christianity should cooperate in a common cause.” Casey was very emotionally invested in this religious crusade: when he insisted on being allowed to see one of the Pakistani training camps for the mujahedin volunteers, he was shown “a small crew of Afghans training on 14.5-millimeter and 20.7-millimeter antiaircraft guns,” which was enough to elicit “tears of joy” from the CIA Director.[viii]

Reagan meets with his jihadists in 1983. Photo from Andrew Bacevich, America’s War For the Greater Middle East: A Military History.

Hell, Saint Reagan himself saw no conflict between his sincere Christian faith and what the jihadists were doing in Afghanistan. As already mentioned, Israel, surely part of “the West,” deliberately facilitated the rise of Hamas, preferring extremists to a more secular Palestinian opposition. Finally, the United States has more recently cooperated with multiple extremist groups in a failed attempt to topple the secular nationalist Assad government in Syria. As Biden’s National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan put it in 2011 to his boss, then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, “AQ [Al Qaeda] is on our side in Syria.” Where Rod sees a “clash of civilizations” in all this is beyond me.

***

The above has been, if you can believe it, merely a small sampling of the whole. I had to cut it off at some point. While Rod’s views come stamped with his uniquely deranged imprint, they are nonetheless not too far removed from mainstream commentary on Israel’s murderous assault on Gaza – the subject I’d originally intended to write about. It’s not hard to find people at establishment perches like the New York Times making similar insinuations that all Palestinians are terrorists, that left-wing protestors support atrocities, or that arguing that Israeli occupation caused October 7^th is inappropriate and antisemitic. Rod’s pathologies, seen in this way, are the pathologies of American culture writ large. His hysterical shrieks might appear laughable, in addition to vile, when viewed from the liberal mainstream. But so long as that mainstream continues to parrot these sorts of beliefs, even in their more “respectable” forms, the joke will continue to be on them.

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[i] Leftist observers of Rod’s work continue to debate whether or not his seemingly endless parade of anonymous colleagues are figments of his imagination, invoked when necessary to provide support for Rod’s otherwise untenable positions.

[ii] See Ilan Pappe, Ten Myths About Israel, pp. 123-126

[iii] Among many, many others, Nelson Mandela referred to Israel as an apartheid state.

[iv] As of this writing (22 November), the death toll on 10 November was around 11,000, after which the Gazan health ministry and UN observers declared they had lost the ability to count.

[v] Incidentally, contrary to popular myth, the Bolshevik seizure of power itself was relatively bloodless; it was the follow-on invasion of the new Soviet government by a dozen capitalist countries, including the United States, that really led to the rise in violence, but that’s another story.

[vi] Spencer Ackerman, Reign of Terror: How the 9/11 Era Destabilized America and Produced Trump, p. 16

[vii] As’ad Abukhalil, The Battle for Saudi Arabia: Royalty, Fundamentalism, and Global Power, p. 99. Abukhalil’s book is also the most comprehensive and readable introduction to Saudi Arabia for American audiences.

[viii] Steve Coll, Ghost Wars: The Secret History of the CIA, Afghanistan, and Bin Laden, From the Soviet Invasion to September 10, 2001, pp. 92-100Thank you for reading Cut the Cord. This post is public so feel free to share it.