Secularism demands assimilation at the cost of identity

What is the oppression that even the nicer people in the West are engaged in without realising it?

“We don’t talk about religion”, people will remind each other — as though it is the most natural rule in the universe. It is considered a small matter of long-agreed etiquette to help us all get along.

There is some truth in saying many atheists can’t stand being reminded of religious faith, but what does it say about our society? It is engrained and accepted that people of faith shouldn’t express their belief-based opinions in a secular society. Atheists dictate what is and isn’t acceptable to verbally express.

Demand for complete assimilation

A denial and rejection of differences

The demand for full assimilation is the bigger picture, the demand to deny all that leads to differences of thought and behaviour.

The atheists in post-religion secular Europe are in no doubt that the non-atheists are the ones that have to assimilate and that their differences are the fly in the ointment; the thing that would stop us getting along.

The atheists who inherited this norm have no concept nor concern about how one-sided that is. They are also not talking about religion or bringing it out in their life by wearing a cross or hijab to work, so they consider it fair and balanced despite it costing them nothing, but us, a lot.

One secular democratic state for Palestine

It has become particularly obvious just how commonplace the above oppressive mindset is, when it is realised that most of the Palestine sympathisers in the West would suggest a single “secular democratic state” as the solution… as though already agreed.

This is with zero comprehension that it is precisely the cause of Zionism’s existence and would be yet another Western-imposed oppression.

French solution was ordering Jews to stop being Jews

The Jewish people surely haven’t forgotten what drove them out of Europe long before Hitler, and the Muslims should be careful to understand it in relation to the oppression we are now experiencing in the secular West.

The French were the test bed for and perfect example of secularist oppression. Following the French Revolution, Jews were expected to assimilate into “one nation within one state”.

But the atheists were so clueless to the oppression that it was considered a part of the Jew’s emancipation and that a fair solution to the non-Jew’s problem with Jews was Jews having to stop being Jews!

Only the most imaginative Frenchmen understood the problem.

As Jean-Paul Sartre said of the secular democrat,

“No doubt, he proclaims that all men have equal rights; no doubt, he has founded the League for the Rights of Man; but his own declarations show the weakness of his position…

“He recognises neither Jew, nor Arab, nor Negro, nor bourgeois, nor worker, but only man — man always the same in all times and all places.” [1]

Losing that which makes you… you

To assimilate is nothing less than to give up your identity

To assimilate is to remove what makes you that other thing, until you stop being that thing at all.

“The liberal democrat defends the Jew as a man and annihilates him as a Jew.” [2]

And the demand is ever changing, as society changes by the whims and corruption of man.

In short, you can never be done assimilating, until you have utterly abandoned yourself to submissively flow with the Godless secular society.

Many European Jews accepted the demand to give up at least their outward culture in exchange for a measure of liberty. But they came under threat again when more Jews arrived from Eastern Europe — ones who hadn’t received the memo.

The assimilated Jews recognised the danger that these other Jews inadvertently posed to them all:

“Although small in absolute terms, the Jewish community seemed highly visible — in terms of clothing, accent, and religious practice…

“The first opponents of mass Jewish immigration were Jews themselves, members of a largely conservative community and fearful that their well-established position might be threatened by the arrival of impoverished co-religionists from Eastern Europe.

“Jewish organisations took it upon themselves to repatriate those they believed to be unsuitable for residence; and in 1888, the retired Chief Rabbi, 85-year-old Nathan Adler, sent an urgent message to rabbis in eastern Europe urging them to warn Jews ‘not to come’.

“He also told the British consul in Odessa that ‘it is most undesirable that people should proceed here’.” [3]

Zionism a response to impossible demand of Jewish assimilation

Jewish organisations in Britain were turning away Jews that were resistant to assimilation because they knew the request to assimilate was a demand with menace, one in which the hammer would fall on all of them if it fell.

As Theodor Herzl put it in his famous pamphlet, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State),

“We naturally move to those places where we are not persecuted, and there our presence produces persecution … persecuted for the sole crime of faithfulness to their religion.” [4]

Herzl subtitled his pamphlet, Proposal of a modern solution for the Jewish question. The father of political Zionism was clear that the ideology was a response to that impossible demand upon Jews to assimilate into a secular state. And the danger to them all, well proven a few decades later, if they failed to do so.

Unfortunately, the Eastern European Jews had fled Christian Tsarist Russia — where they were expected to convert, die, or emigrate — to an equally inflexible secular system with the exact same expectation. [5]

Herzl again:

“Modern anti-Semitism is not to be confounded with the religious persecution of the Jews of former times.

“It does occasionally take a religious bias in some countries, but the main current of the aggressive movement has now changed.

“In the principal countries where anti-Semitism prevails, it does so as a result of the emancipation of the Jews.

“When civilised nations awoke to the inhumanity of discriminatory legislation and enfranchised us, our enfranchisement came too late.” [4]

Would Israel have existed without persecution of the unassimilated?

To answer the above question, it seems most likely that Israel would not exist.

After all, the Jews didn’t previously want Palestine — they were free to settle there throughout most of the Muslim Era, but chose not to. They wouldn’t consent to go, just because some anti-Semitic early evangelical Christians thought they belonged there.

They were, in fact, compelled to flee not from religious or nationalist extremists but from the very secular system that was supposed to have been an end to all that!

Some Jewish thinkers tried to work with it but, when implemented, it proved just as inhospitable to their inevitable otherness. An embarrassing failure of their lauded new system, that the elites have succeeded in hiding from the public consciousness.

The pivotal point at which Zionism was pushed into the mainstream

Zionism was famously propelled into the mainstream with the Balfour Declaration.

The document signalled an agreement between a Cambridge-educated secular scientist of the British elite, and the successfully assimilated Jewish elites of the type that were already diverting “unsuitable” Jews away from Western Europe.

And a story was, of course, woven around it:

“A crucial aspect of this depiction of the Declaration as a product of British benevolence, as opposed to realpolitik, was that the British had a natural and deep-rooted concern for the rights of Jews and specifically their national restoration, which was an ingrained part of British culture and history.

“Presented in this way, the Declaration was shown to be a natural, almost preordained event.” [6]

You’ll find a display of this in The History of Zionism 1600-1918, a gushing elitist propaganda piece that reeks strongly of “protesting too much” and fresh whitewash.

There was a clear desperation to give a history and credence to the new idea of Zionism, along with selling its benefits to Europeans. And there was a palpable excitement that the Jewish question was finally answered.

All “the great and the good” of the British elite were quoted in firm favour of it. And, if you were a good person — the implication being a good Christian — you would be in favour, too.

But Balfour, at the end of his long introduction, admits to the real reason.

I.e. that Zionism would:

“…mitigate the age-long miseries created for Western civilisation by the presence in its midst of a Body [the Jews] which it too long regarded as alien and even hostile, but which it was equally unable to expel or to absorb. Surely, for this, if for no other reason, it should receive our support.” [7]

Creating Israel was a permanent solution to move out the Jews

After the many previous expulsions from Europe over the centuries — to safety in the Muslim world — Jews tended to drift back. So, the big selling point of this solution was the expectation that it would be final. [8]

Balfour admitted to previously backing the creation of “…a Jewish settlement in East Africa under the British flag” but noted that it was a less than ideal solution.

To read between the lines, that was because it did not have the mythical status required to convince the Jews to really accept it as their natural place of settlement, which they have a religious duty to defend by staying there.

I can only suspect how Chaim Weizmann would have counselled Balfour…

“Send the Jews to East Africa and they will be back.

“Send them to Palestine with a grand myth of returning to their ancient homeland and I promise they will never return to Europe.”

Current events

In defence of that which was never defensible

It all begs the question: is the Western elite’s current intransigent insistence that “Israel must exist” primarily an upholding of the finality of that solution, for their interest in the solution to the failure of secularism, not the interest of Jews per se?

The long-term thinking of the secular elites contains the full and certain knowledge that religious Jews simply will never assimilate into secular Europe.

It is clear secularism hasn’t changed, as the same accusations of wilfully refusing to assimilate are levelled at Muslims. It was enough to be the fundamental motivation 100 years ago, why would we think it is not a fundamental part of the motivation today?

Unspoken reason why Israel must continue to exist at any cost

Secularism could be the unspoken reason which makes sense of the current surprising position that Israel must exist at any cost.

The West — i.e. the Europeans and the persisting European colonies in America and Australasia — are willing to give up their reputation to the degree of participating in a genocide which we can all watch livestreamed on handheld devices; the enormous amount of money; the destruction of every legal body it created to serve its own nefarious interests, and its supposed rules-based order.

Supporting Israel is either still weighing in as self-interest for the reason stated, or it is an uncommon level of generosity from an establishment known for its more typical self-interest.

There is no proof to support the suggestion that Israel otherwise benefits the West in any way commensurate to what it is currently costing.

The killing in Palestine appears an effort of the West — by arming and (if true) providing missile-guiding intelligence — that leaves Israelis to merely pull the trigger.

Could this be a cold-blooded defence of secularism while, at least, it could be said of Israelis that they are backed into somewhat of an existential corner by a secular Western order that expelled them with extreme prejudice and a dispossessed Palestinian people fighting for their land?

So, what is the answer?

Israel is ostensibly a secular state, but it was only created as such for the pragmatic reason of bringing all Jews together without having to first finish their perpetual argument over what Judaism is. There is no contradiction in saying it is “a secular Jewish state”.

Regardless if many think of themselves as some form of “secular Jew”, and leaving aside the many other factors, Jewish Israelis as a collective will never agree to being a minority in a single non-Jewish secular democratic state. This is no matter the reassurances received, whether in Palestine or elsewhere.

In the end, they are all still Jews and many will always expect anti-Semitism to affect them if the power is in someone else’s hand.

West opposes one-state solution as returning Jews threaten secularism

The West sees the Jews returning from Palestine as an existential threat to their secular system and will do anything to protect it.

The reason the West will never back a single-state solution is because, even if it was perfectly safe for Jews, it undoes the “Jewish state” mythology which is supposed to glue the Jews to that land. Many would leave.

These are the big barriers to accepting what we know: that the only system which does not demand assimilation and has proven safe for Jews, in a world where there is no tenable Jewish state, is Islam.

You can imagine how unlikely it’d be that it would be accepted at this time, but it is the only possible solution. And it is entirely credible. In Islam, as well as freedom of religion, there is clear instruction on ending hostilities when our enemy lays down their arms and ceases to oppress us.

Allah (subḥānahu wa ta’āla) says,

“If they withdraw from you, do not fight you, and offer you peace, then Allah does not give you a way against them.” [9]

An orthodox Islamic regime is the only solution

We believe nothing happens to us except that Allah wills it, and we have the teachings on patience, so we have a philosophical framework to remain above emotions and avoid prolonging war by seeking revenge.

It would need to be an orthodox Islamic regime over a nation of firm believers, but enemies in the West are already claiming that any Palestinian state would be “like the Taliban”. They will accuse any Islamic government of “extremism” and interfere — just as they always do — to prevent Islam being recognised as the solution to man’s ills.

The resistance to Islam being the answer will be strong, though we should be used to that. At the least, we should be clear that Western secularism is the problem, not the solution.

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Source: Islam21c

Notes

[1] Jean-Paul Satre, Reflexions sur la question juive (1946) Anti-Semite and Jew, trans. George J. Becker 1976 p.55

[2] Jewish Social Studies Vol. 11, No. 2 (Apr., 1949), pp. 185-187

[3] https://www.thejc.com/lets-talk/the-1905-aliens-act-was-not-the-antisemitic-statute-of-folklore-q856wbgt

[4] https://www.gutenberg.org/files/25282/25282-h/25282-h.htm

[5] Major W. Evans-Gordon, The Alien Immigrant (1903) p.63

[6] James Renton, The Zionist Masquerade: The Birth of the Anglo-Zionist Alliance, 1914-1918 (2007) p.85

[7] https://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/introduction-to-quot-the-history-of-zionism-1600-1919-quot-arthur-balfour

[8] https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/expulsion-and-readmission/

[9] al-Qur’ān, 4:90