RUTHFULLY YOURS

https://amgreatness.com/2024/04/27/heroic-doubling-and-supporting-hamas/

Psychologists who have studied violence in young men and especially young men’s willingness to forsake everything they know, everything they’ve been taught, and everything they might otherwise believe about right and wrong, say that there is a set of shared circumstances and “revelations” that link spree killers and self-radicalized terrorists.  Faced with the emptiness of their own lives, isolated from many of their contemporaries, and desperately in search of something substantive to give their lives meaning and purpose, young men—especially young men who find refuge on the internet and in social media—tend to create fantasy lives for themselves, alternate realities in which they not only find the meaning and purpose they crave but do so in heroic fashion.

For more than a decade now, the journalist and editor Robert Beckhusen has noted that the ties that bind spree shooters and self-radicalized terrorists are both numerous and consistent.  Young men confronted by the social and spiritual emptiness of their lives and society default to what is often called “heroic modeling” or “heroic doubling,” which is to say that they take on a symbolic cause and kill not just to slake their own bloodlust but to exact revenge for a whole class of people with whom they believe they find common cause.

Almost exactly ten years ago, just after the spree shooting in Isla Vista, California, Beckhusen interviewed Roger Griffin, a professor of Modern History at Oxford-Brookes University in the UK and the author of Terrorist’s Creed: Fanatical Violence and the Human Need for Meaning.  Griffin explained the phenomenon of “heroic doubling” as follows:

[I]n the mind of the killer, they’re not just killing someone as the sole purpose of the destruction. They’re killing someone symbolic of something more general, which is also meant to send a message to the survivors….

…what happens psychologically—the person has undergone a process whereby a rather confused, pained, ordinary self puts on a sort of mask, which turns them into an actor—or a protagonist—in a personal narrative drama. . . .

In his avatar double, he achieves the ability to run and fight.  I believe that’s a very powerful metaphor for what happens in the process of heroic doubling.  Because the person who’s previously felt impotent and had no agency . . . is made to feel potent and have agency returned to him by adopting this mission.  So in that moment, he becomes a heroic version, or avatar, of himself.

Although the parallels are hardly perfect, over the years, I’ve found this concept of heroic doubling to be a useful heuristic for assessing the otherwise seemingly pointless embrace by American young men—and, increasingly, young women—of foolish, intellectually abhorrent, and often violent ideologies and practices.

https://www.objectivityistheobjective.com/post/one-tenth-of-one-percent

College campuses across America, especially Columbia. Yale, NYU, USC, are being overrun by anti-Israel, pro-Hamas demonstrators. USC has even canceled its graduation ceremony due to security concerns relating to anti-Israel protests. These protesters are responding to Israel’s response to Hamas’ October 7 terrorist attack on Israel where 1,400 innocent Israeli civilians were targeted and murdered by Hamas terrorists, and somehow, these moral geniuses are protesting Israel. They are protesting the country that had their elderly shot in cold blood, their women brutally raped and murdered, and their babies beheaded. The country that suffered those atrocities is being vilified and protested. But this is what Islam does. It twists and vilifies the justified actions of their enemies to their own gain. So, Islamic terrorists attack Israel, Israel fights back, and Israel is painted as the bad guy.

The Muslims completely memory hole the fact that they drew first blood because in their mind, they can do whatever they want with impunity. No one’s speaking about all of the vicious murdering that the Islamic terrorists did. We’re supposed to forget about that, or ignore it, or write it off because those are just extremists, and they don’t represent all of Islam. But where are the Islamic leaders who are denouncing what happened on October 7 in the name of Islam? Why do they refuse to distance their religion from the terrorists? Where is Kareem Abdul-Jabbar? Where is Kyrie Irving? Where is Barack Obama? They are imitating crickets. Every time there is an Islamic terrorist attack, the Muslims in America are not required to stand up and denounce the attack. Only the non-Muslims are warned about Islamophobia. We haven’t even processed the terrorist attack, and we’re being accused of Islamophobia because Muslims targeted another group of people because of their religion. Every white person in America has to denounce white supremacy over and over and over again. We have to denounce slavery that ended 160 years ago, but Muslims are never required to denounce Islamic terrorism that happened the day before. And they never do because many tacitly approve.

This is the way it always works with Islam. Between the 6th century AD and the 10th century AD, the Muslims invaded and took over all of Byzantine Christianity, sacking city after city, town after town, murdering and raping, and giving the people a choice – convert to Islam or die. The Muslims took over all the Holy Lands, and pushed into Southern France and Southern Italy, leaving a river of blood in their wake. We never hear about that, but when the Pope organizes the Crusades to take back the Holy Lands and southern Europe which had been stolen from the Western world by Muslims, the Crusaders are painted as the bad guys. Most of the ancient mosques in the Middle East used to be Christian churches that the Muslims turned into mosques after they conquered that city by force. They never mention all the murdering brutality that the Muslims did which created the need for the Crusaders. But the Crusaders are always framed as the bad guys and Islam is always portrayed as the innocent victims.

The Ottoman Empire is the only empire in the history of the world, that is never taken to task for the mass atrocities that they committed in building their empire.

https://www.frontpagemag.com/how-to-defund-the-leftist-non-profit-empire-behind-the-campus-riots/

There are some very well-researched articles making the rounds connecting the dots when it comes to who’s funding the pro-Hamas campus riots.

Free Beacon’s Aaron Sibarium secured documents showing that the Columbia occupiers were getting advice from Palestine Legal which is funded by the Ford Foundation.

The New York Post had a widely circulated piece connecting the dots to George Soros. I had my own article on the Soros links last week.

Other organizations in play include the Rockefeller Brothers Fund which has extensively backed the anti-Israel movement.

This is not an either/or situation. Most pro-terror orgs benefit from multiple funding sources.

The bigger issue beyond Soros or the Ford Foundation is the work that the David Horowitz Freedom Center has been doing in looking at the rise of radical nonprofits.

The nonprofits involved are casually violating tax regulations with no response from the IRS (which has been persecuting the Freedom Center for 5 years). Some of the worst abuses involve WESPAC, a fiscal sponsor for some of the ugliest players around. (The same incidentally is true of the nonprofits behind the ecoterrorism including the attacks on classical art museums around the world.)

Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), a campus group at the core of the pro-Hamas protests, has local chapters who are funded by student activity fees while its national group is fiscally sponsored by WESPAC.

https://wokecapital.org/freedoms-messiah/

EXCERPT FROM A COLUMN ON BARUCH SPINOZA

Right now, on American college campuses, the Jewish people are under attack, from Arabist antisemites, from ideological/intellectual antisemites, and from nihilistic students with nothing else to believe in and nothing better to do with their time.  Now is, in other words, an important moment to remember that this great nation and the liberties that those foolish students and faculty are squandering are far more seriously derived from Jewish origins and Jewish thinkers than most people are aware.  Ancient Israel helped form all of what is now known as “Western Civilization,” and, as such, also helped form the underpinnings of the United States.  And Baruch Spinoza helped transmit all of that to the Founders in ways that became uniquely and profoundly American.