A talk given at the "Debunking the War on Terror" Symposium on July 14th

The War on Terror Within

1 The more pain we inflict on others the more we become familiar with evil, aggression and brutality. 

1.1  The more cruel we are towards others, the more devastated we are by the possibility that  the subjects of our brutality may also be as nasty as we happen to be.

1.2   According to Freud this is what projection is all about.

1.2.1 Otto Weininger refines it, ‘we hate in others, that which we don’t like in ourselves’ he says.

1.3  As it happens, the dynamic of projection is amplified once the subject of our terror is hopeless and defenseless.

1.3.1 The reason is obvious. The more hopeless the subject of our terror is, the more we are inclined to face our relentless viciousness first hand.

2      Israeli treatment of the Palestinians is a devastating example of the above. The more hopeless and defenseless the Palestinians are, the more vicious the Israeli becomes.

2.1   And yet, the more vicious the Israeli is, the more he or she is horrified by ‘terror’.

3      In reality, the Israelis are actually horrified by their own cruelty which they project onto others.

4      The recent cold-blooded murder of 11 peace activists in the high seas by Israeli Navy commandos was nothing but a shocking exposure of that lethal dynamic. The more ethically transparent, innocent and harmless the humanitarian mission to Gaza is, the more lethal the Israeli becomes.