The Fruits of Rage, Part I
by Richard L. Rubenstein (March 2009)
[ii] In those societies in which the military caste enjoys dominant status, defeat in war can result in shame so painful that death is deemed preferable.
[v] By contrast, shame is not about specific actions but about myself. In shame I judge myself to be without worth. Put differently, shame is a painful, narcissistic injury in which corrective action is paralyzed and I am left only with an anguished sense of self-contempt.[vi]
According to Lewis, in its heyday the Muslim world saw itself as “the center of culture and enlightenment, surrounded by infidel barbarians whom it would in due course civilize.”[ix] I would add that, at least among Islamists, the same self-perception remains valid today. As Lewis has commented, the struggle between Islam and Christendom has consisted in “a long series of attacks and counterattacks, jihads and crusades, conquests and reconquests” that have lasted for fourteen hundred years. It was not until the failure of the second Turkish siege of Vienna in 1683 that the world of Islam found itself on the defensive vis à vis the world of Christendom.
Particularly humiliating was the fact that Christian empires came to dominate much of the world of Islam. This was equally true of the expansion of the Tsarist Empire in the East and the Western European powers in the Middle East, Africa, India, and Indonesia. In the nineteenth century, Britain, France, Spain, Italy, and Holland divided up much of the Muslim world almost at will. The nineteenth-century efforts of the European powers to secure equal rights for Christians and Jews in the Ottoman Empire were especially galling. The world of Islam had been built upon an hierarchical system of structured inequality in which the religious and social dominance of Muslims over unbelievers was the uncontested first premise. Built into the very structure of Muslim identity was the system of dhimmitude, namely, “the comprehensive legal system established by the Muslim conquerors to rule the native non-Muslim populations subdued by jihad wars.”[x] No matter how brilliant, talented, or wealthy an unbeliever might be, the humblest believing Muslim was regarded as superior to all unbelievers, at least in the eyes of Allah.
Ministry was itself modeled after a similarly named Saudi agency and the Islamic Republic of Iran has its own version of religious police (Arabic, mutaween). One of the worst examples of mutaween abuse occurred in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, on March 11, 2002 when members of the Saudi religious police prevented school girls from leaving their burning school building because they were not wearing headscarves and black robes and were not escorted by a male guardian. Fifteen girls died and fifty were injured in the incident.[xii]
[xvi] The victim, not the rapist, was seen as having brought shame upon the family. While such killings are not officially sanctioned and are not confined to Islam, the official penalties incurred for such crimes tend to be exceptionally light when and if applied. Moreover, honor killing currently appears to be far more prevalent among Muslims than among other faiths.
At the heart of all such behavior there appears to be masculine fear of loss of control, with all that such loss entails for personal identity. This is especially apparent among the kind of men most likely to insist on maintaining such control such as the Taliban. According to Ahmed Raschid:
The social stratum from which the Taliban recruiting base is drawn consists largely of boys and young men at the very bottom of the ladder. As individuals, they are powerless and count for little. As members of the Taliban, they count for a great deal. The very fact that women are subject to their authority infuses their identities with a sense of power otherwise unavailable to them. Few things are as likely to enhance the Taliban sense of power than the power of life and death over another human being.
We need not enter into psychoanalytic reflection about masculine fear of the feminine to explain the need for control over women found in strongly patriarchal cultures. When unable to control their women, some men in traditional societies are likely to experience feelings of impotence and rage. Unfortunately, impotent rage can be sated, if only temporarily, by injury and murder. All too often men deny their impotence by their power to kill.
German Defeat and the Birth of Hitler’s Rage
[xviii] In the early nineteen-twenties, Hitler described his feelings when Germany declared war on Russia and France in August 1914:
For Hitler, the stakes could not have been higher:
[xxiii] On August 4, 1918, he received the Iron Cross, First Class, a rare achievement for a corporal.
Hitler described his reaction upon learning of the way the war ended:
Unable to bear the shame of military defeat, Hitler concluded that Germany had not been defeated but betrayed:
I knew that all was lost. Only fools, liars, and criminals could hope in the mercy of the enemy. In these nights hatred grew in me, hatred for those responsible for this deed.
[xxxiii] In his memoir of the war years, Payer spelled out his fundamental disagreement with Ludendorff:
One could call this [the encounter between Ludendorff and Paver] the pivotal scene in the formation of the stab-in-the-back legend.”[xxxvi][xxxvii]
Neither Hitler nor the World War I German High Command invented the tradition of the ignoble betrayer who in stealth and treachery brings defeat upon the German military. It was deeply embedded in their cultural world. Although more Jews proportionally than their fellow citizens made the supreme sacrifice for what they mistakenly thought was their Fatherland, that sacrifice was invisible to Hitler, the German High Command, and, increasingly, the German public. On the contrary, in October1916, the German High Command ordered a Judenzählung, a “Jew census,” to demonstrate that Jews were less patriotic than what at the time were considered their “fellow Germans.” The findings demonstrated the opposite. Approximately eighty percent of the Jews in the German army served in the front-lines. Over 100,000 Jews served out of a total German Jewish population of 550,000; 12,000 died in battle; 30,000 were decorated for bravery.[xxxix] Disappointed, German military officials suppressed the findings.
The Stab-In-the-Back Legend/Prelude to Genocide
legend had its roots in two powerful traditions, the Nibelungen Saga in which Siegfried, the dragon-slaying hero, is stabbed in the back by Hagen von Tronje, and the New Testament narrative in which Jesus is betrayed by Judas Iscariot with a loving kiss.Apart from its sources in myth and legend, the stab-in-the-back legend gained enhanced credibility in the German Right from the presence of left-wing Jews in the leadership of revolutionary movements that sought to end the war and establish socialist or communist regimes in its aftermath. Although Jewish loyalty to the Fatherland was real, it was all but invisible to right-wing German nationalists. What was visible was the Jewish presence in the Bolshevik leadership and in the left-wing regimes that managed to seize power temporarily in Bavaria and Hungary. For example, on November 7, 1918, Kurt Eisner, a socialist Jewish writer from Berlin, found himself at the head of the provisional revolutionary government of predominantly Catholic Bavaria. After Eisner’s assassination, a number of other Jewish intellectuals, literati, and revolutionaries took highly visible leadership roles in the succeeding revolutionary regimes in Munich.[xliv] At the time, Munich was home to Adolf Hitler and the embryonic National Socialist party.
[xlvii] The stab-in-the back legend thus became a prelude to genocide. If, as the legend asserted, the Jews had, succeeded in bringing down the mighty German nation by treachery and stealth, it was imperative to eliminate them for Germany to achieve success in the coming war.
Defeat and Muslim Rage
[xlix] The treaty set the pattern of Muslim retreat and defeat that continued until the middle of the twentieth century.
As noted above, no defeat visited upon Muslims by unbelievers has ever been as deeply felt as an offense against Muslim honor as the twin defeats inflicted upon the Arabs in the 1948 Israeli War of Independence and the Six Day War of 1967. This has been cogently expressed by the Israeli historian Benny Morris in the concluding paragraphs of his book on the first Arab-Israeli War:
[li] Yet, no attempt to resolve the conflict has ever succeeded.
[lii] Nor were they alone in rejecting peace. The treaty was hugely unpopular throughout the Muslim world. For a time, it resulted in the expulsion of Egypt from the Arab League. Sadat himself was gunned down on October 6, 1981 for having signed the treaty by Lieutenant Khalid Al-Islambouli during the annual parade commemorating Egypt’s “victory” over Israel in the 1973 war. Islambouli, a member of the Egyptian Islamic Jihad movement, was condemned to death by an Egyptian court and executed on April 15, 1982. He has since been widely venerated by Islamists as a shaheed, a witness and a martyr in the cause of Islam. A Teheran street has been named after him.
[liii] This site is an invaluable resource for both the professional researcher and the informed layman.
). The Covenant has been made available on the web in a reliable translation by the Avalon Project of the Yale Law School.[lv] Nevertheless, while accurate, the designation may obscure the degree to which Hamas’s long-term objective, the destruction of the State of Israel and its people, is grounded in an unconditional religious imperative it regards as binding on all Muslims.
[lvi] The Covenant cites a Hadith of Muhammad ibn Ismail al-Bukhari (810-870), the editor-collector of what is considered one of the most trusted collections of oral traditions concerning the life of Muhammad, (810-870). In the Hadith, the Prophet is depicted as declaring “The Day of Judgment will not come about until Muslims fight the Jews (killing the Jews), when the Jew will hide behind stones and trees. The stones and trees will say O Muslims, O Abdulla, there is a Jew behind me, come and kill him. Only the Gharkad tree, (evidently a certain kind of tree) would not do that because it is one of the trees of the Jews.” (Article 7)
[lvii] This is hardly surprising. For those who have experienced or identified themselves with those who experienced defeat, whether Germans after World War I or Muslims after 1948, the claim that defeat came from a deceitful, underhanded secret conspiracy rather than honorable combat mitigated the disgrace of defeat and was a source of enormous consolation.
[lviii] Such beliefs gave a delusional coherence to Germany’s shattering experience of World War I defeat.
[lix] The pamphlet attributed to Emperor Napoleon III the ambition to dominate the world. It contained no reference to Jews or Judaism, but in the last decade of the nineteenth century the pamphlet was transformed into an anti-Semitic tract by an unknown author working for the Okhrana, the Tsarist secret police. The “dialogue” became the “protocols” in 1905, the year of Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War and the first Russian Revolution. In its revised form, the Protocols described an alleged conference of the leaders of world Jewry who claimed that, under the cloak of democracy, they already controlled a number of European states and were close to their ultimate objective, world domination. In his Times article, Graves succinctly described the Okrana’s motives in publishing the Protocols in 1905:
[lxi] Daniel Pipes has described the power of the Protocols as a propaganda tool:
[i] Jim Platt, “Crossing the Line: Anger vs. Rage,” Working@Dartmouth, http://74.125.95.104/search?q=cache:PviYnlwDmTAJ:www.dartmouth.edu/~hrs/pdfs/anger.pdf+%22crossing+the+line:+anger+vs.+rage%22&hl=en&ct=clnk&cd=1&gl=us (emphasis added), accessed September 8, 2008.
[ii] For the analysis of shame and guilt, I am indebted to Michael Lewis, “The Role of the Self in Shame,” Social Research, Vol. 70, No. 4 (Winter 2003), pp. 1181-1189.
[iii] W. Walter Menninger, “Uncontained rage: A psychoanalytic perspective on violence,” Bulletin of the Menninger Clinic, Vol. 71, No.2, (Spring 2007), p. 120,.
[iv] Jim Platt,
[v] Michael Lewis, op. cit., p. 1188.
[vi] Michael Lewis, op.cit., pp. 1188-89.
[vii]Bernard Lewis. “The Roots of Muslim Rage: Why so many Muslims deeply resent the West and why their bitterness will not be easily mollified,” The Atlantic, September 1990.
[viii] Ibid.
[ix] Bernard Lewis, op. cit.
[x] Bat Ye’or, “Dhimmitude Past and Present : An Invented or Real History?,”C.V. Starr Foundation Lectureship, Brown University, October 10, 2002, http://www.dhimmitude.org/archive/by_lecture_10oct2002.htm<font size="2">; See also Bat Ye’or, Islam and Dhimmitude: Where Civilizations Collide, trans. Miriam Kochan and David Littman (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2002).
[xi] A list of Taliban restrictions and mistreatment of women supplied by the Afghan organization by the Revolutionary Associations of the Women of Afghanistan can be found at http://www.rawa.org/rules.htm. On gender discrimination by the Taliban, see Ahmad Raschid, Taliban: Militant Islam, Oil and Fundamentalism in Central Asia (New Haven: Yale University Press,2001), pp. 105-116; see also “Humanity Denied: Systematic Violations of Women’s Rights in Afghanistan,” Human Rights Watch, October 2001, Vol. 13, No. 5, http://www.hrw.org/reports/2001/afghan3/.
[xii] “Fifteen girls die as zealots ‘drive them into blaze.’” Daily Telegraph, March 15, 2002, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/saudiarabia/1387874/15-
[xiii] “Violence against Women and ‘Honor’ Crimes,” Human Rights News, April 6, 2001, http://hrw.org/english/docs/2001/04/06/global268.htm, accessed August 31, 2008; see also James Emery, “’Reputation is Everything: Honor Killings Among the Palestinians,” The World and I Online, May 2003,
[xiv] See James Emery, “Reputation is Everything: Honor Killing Among the Palestinians,” The World and I, May 2003,
[xv] Damien McElroy, “Saudi woman killed for chatting on Facebook,” Telegraph.co.uk, April 1, 2008, http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/1583420/
[xvi] “Jordan: Special Report on Honour Killings,” Reuters Foundation Alert Net, April 18, 2005,http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/
[xvii] Ahmed Raschid, Taliban, p. 111.
[xviii] Robert G. L. Waite, The Psychopathic God: Adolf Hitler (New York: New American Library, 1977), p. 241.
[xix] Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, trans. Ralph Mannheim, (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1943) , p. 161.
[xx] Ibid.
[xxi] Ian Kershaw, Hitler: 1889-1936 Hubris (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999), p. 90.
[xxii] Kershaw, op. cit., p. 92. See also Waite, The Psychopathic God, p. 243.
[xxiii] Kershaw, op. cit., p. 95.
[xxiv] Mein Kampf, p. 202; Kershaw, op. cit., p. 97.
[xxv] Mein Kampf, p. 204-206; Waite, The Psychopathic God, p. 244.
[xxvi] Mein Kampf, p. 205.
[xxvii] Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Culture of Defeat: On National Trauma, Mourning, and Recovery (New York: Henry Holt, 2003), p. 190.
[xxviii] Schivelbusch, Culture of Defeat, p. 197.
[xxix] Michael Geyer, “Insurrectionary Warfare: The German Debate about a Levée en Masse in October 1918,” Journal of Modern History, Vol. 73, No. 3 (Sep., 2001), p. 464 and 467-468.
[xxx] Geyer, op. cit., p. 470. These included Max von Gallwitz and Bruno von Mudra.
[xxxi] Wilson stipulated that the Central Powers would be required “immediately to withdraw their forces everywhere from invaded territories.” He further insisted on “absolutely satisfactory safeguards and guarantees” for the maintenance “of the present military supremacy of the armies of the United States and its allies in the field.” And, Wilson explicitly demanded a new government in Germany because “the nations of the world do not and cannot trust the word of those who have hitherto been the masters of German policy.” The text of Wilson’s replies are to be found in Oliver Marble Gale, Americanism: Woodrow Wilson’s Speeches on the War (Chicago: Baldwin Syndicate, 1918) , pp. 141-144. This book was digitized and made available by Google from the Harvard University Library.
[xxxii] Geyer, op. cit., pp. pp. 475-502.
[xxxiii] Wilhelm Deist, ed., Militär und Innenpolitik im Weltkrieg, 1914-1918 (Dusseldorf: Droste, 1970),Vol. 2, pp. 1338-40<span style="font-size: 9pt">;
girls-die-as-zealots-%27drive-them-into-blaze%27.html<font size="2"> ; see also “Saudi police ‘stopped” fire rescue,” BBC News, March 15, 2002,
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/1874471.stm.
http://www.worldandi.com/newhome/public/2003/may/clpub.asp .
http://www.worldandi.com/newhome/public/2003/may/clpub.asp
Saudi-woman-killed-for-chatting-on-Facebook.html , accessed September 1, 2008.
IRIN/6f6d5166f24330a0e8edcb79796ca5cc.htm , accessed September 1, 2008.
[xxxiv] Friedrich Payer, Von Bethmann Hollweg bis Ebert: Erinnerungen und Bilder(Frankfurt am Main: Frankfurter Societa?ts-Druckerei, 1923), pp. 142-43; I am indebted to Geyer, loc. cit. for this citation..
[xxxv] Deist, loc. cit.
[xxxvi] Geyer, loc. cit.
[xxxvii] Peter Pulzer, Jews and the German State: The Political History of a Minority, 1848-1933 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003), p. 224
[xxxviii]Jacob Rosenthal, ”Die Ehre des jüdischen Soldaten”. Die Judenzählung im Ersten Weltkrieg und ihre Folgen (Frankfurt/Main: Campus Verlag, 2007), pp. 63-89; see also Deutsches Historisches Museum, “Die Judenzählung von 1916,” http://www.dhm.de/lemo/html/wk1/innenpolitik/judenzaehlung/index.html, accessed September 30, 2008.
[xxxix] Bryan Marc Rigg, Hitler’s Jewish Soldiers (Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press), p.72.
[xl] Richard Bessel, Germany after the First World War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), pp. 5-6.
[xli] “The Treaty of Versailles June 28, 1919,” Part VIII, Article 231, Avalon Project of the Yale Law School, http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/imt/partviii.htm, accesed October 4, 2008.
[xlii] Wolfgang Mommsen, “Max Weber and the Peace Treaty of Versailles,” in Manfred E. Boemeke, Grald E. Feldman, and Elisabeth Glaser, eds., The Treaty of Versailles: A Reassessment after 75 Years), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 535.
[xliii] On the Niebelungen tradition, Siegfried and Hagen, see Geyer, op. cit., pp. 506, 517-520; for a discussion of the role of Judas in transforming the Jews into the perennial betrayer of the Christian world, seeRichard L. Rubenstein, After Auschwitz, 2nd ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), pp. 50-51.
[xliv] They included Gustav Landauer, Eugen Leviné, Ernst Toller, and Towia Axelrod. On the red revolution in Munich see Allan Mitchell, Revolution in Bavaria, 1918-1919 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1965); Ruth Fischer, Stalin and German Communism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948); Charles B. Maurer, Call to Revolution: The Mystical Anarchism of Gustav Landauer (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1971); Rosa Leviné-Meyer, Leviné the Spartacist (London: Gordon and Cremonesi, 1978); Richard Grunberger, Red Rising in Bavaria (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973).
[xlv] Wolfram Wette, The Wehrmacht: History, Myth, Reality, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006), pp. 45-46.
[xlvi] John Weiss, The Ideology of Death: Why the Holocaust Happened in Germany, (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1996), pp. 211-212.
[xlvii] Erich Ludendorff, Kriegführung und Politik, 3rd ed.(Berlin: Mittler & Sohn, 1925), pp. 141, 322, 339. For this citation I am indebted to Wette, The Wehrmacht, p. 41.
[xlviii] Adolf Hitler, “My Political Testament,” United States, Office of United States Chief of Counsel for Prosecution of Axis Criminality, Nazi Conspiracy and Aggression, (Washington: Government Printing Office, 1946-1948), Vol. VI, pp. 259-263, Doc. No. 3569-PS, http://www.ibiblio.org/pha/policy/1945/450429a.html.
[xlix] On Lepanto, see Michael Novak, “Remembering Lepanto: A Battle not Forgotten,” National Review Online, http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=YWVhYWJmMDJlNzQwZWFhYWViM2FmNjE3MDY3MjZmZWQ=#more , accessed November 18, 2008; on the Siege of Vienna and the Treaty of Karlowitz, see Bernard Lewis, The Middle East: A Brief Historyof the Last 2,000 Years (New York: Scribner, 1995), pp. 276-277.
[l] See Benny Morris, 1948: The First Arab-Israeli War (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), p. 419.
[li] See the English translation, “The Time Has Come to Say These Things,” New York Review of Books, Vol. 59, No. 19, December 4, 2008,
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22112 .
[lii] Gilles Kepel, Muslim Extremism in Egypt: The Prophet and Pharaoh, trans. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) , pp. 70-71.
[liii] MEMRI’s home page is http://www.memri.org/.
[liv] The Covenant of the Islamic Resistance Movement, 18 August, 1988, The Avalon Project of the Yale Law School, http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/hamas.asp.
[lv] For an analysis of HAMAS as a multi-faceted organization, see Matthew Levitt, HAMAS: Politics, Charity, and Terrorism in the Service of Jihad (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006).
[lvi] On the significance of the relevance of this Hadith for contemporary anti-Semitism, see Andrew Bostom, “Why Islam’s Jew-Hating Hadith Matter,” Front Page Magazine, October 3, 2008, http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=5C31EBDF
-5E89-4572-91AB-EFCF84711E0C . On the theory of the Nazi roots of Islamic anti-Semitism, see Matthias Kuntzel, “Islamic Antisemitism and Its Nazi Roots,” April 2003, http://www.matthiaskuentzel.de/contents/islamic-antisemitism-and-its-nazi-roots. For an informed contrary opinon. For an exchange on this issue between Bostom and Kuntzel, see “Debating the Islamist-Nazi Connection,” Front Page Magazine, January 2, 2008, http://frontpagemagazine.com/Articles/Read.aspx?GUID=1DC2117D
-CFAD-47DF-8042-E51CBAC3DD9E,
[lvii] Constantinople Correspondent of the London Times (Philip Graves), “London Times Publishes an Exposure Showing How They [The Protocols] are a Paraphrase of a French Book Attacking Governmental Abuses Under Napoleon III., Published 1865,” New York Times, September 4, 1921, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=9F05E1DE1431EF33A25757C0A96F9C946095D6CF&scp=1&sq=Protocols&st=p.
[lviii] The Protocols had originally been prepared by the Russian police and given to Tsar Nicholas II to influence policy. Although personally anti-Semitic, the Tsar detected the fraud and refused to use it. See Leon Poliakov, Article “Elders of Zion, Protocols of the Learned,” in Encyclopaedia Judaica, CD Rom edition (Jerusalm: Judaica Multimedia, 1997)
[lix] The text of Philip Graves dispatch to the Times was reprinted by the New York Times, September 4, 1921. See note 74. The complete text of the original Dialogue aux Enfers has been made available on the Internet by Google Books at
[lx] Loc. cit.
[lxi] This is the apt title of an important study of the Protocols, Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion (London: Serif, 2005). The belief that the Holocaust was not only justified but was regarded as an urgent moral necessity is discussed at length by Peter Haas, The Nazi Ethic (Philadelphia: Fortress Press, 1988). Fortress Press is the publishing house of the American Lutheran Church.
[lxii] Daniel Pipes, Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From (New York: The Free Press – Simon & Schuster), p.85.
[lxiii] Louis P. Lochner, ed. and trans., The Goebbels Diaries 1942-1943 (Garden City, NY: Doubleday and Co., 1948), p. 377. The date of the entry is 13 May 1943. German text in Elke Fröhlich, Die Tagebücher von Joseph Goebbels (München: K. G. Saur, 1993), Vol. 2, pt. 8, p. 287 (13 May 1943).
[lxiv] Daniel J. Wakin, “Anti-Semitic ‘Elders of Zion’ Gets New Life on Egypt TV,” New York Times, October 26, 2002, http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9F00E1DE1F3CF935A15753C1A9649C8B63, accessed December 9, 2008.
[lxv] Wakin, op. cit.
Richard L. Rubenstein
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