Difficult, if not impossible, to tackle writing my first column of the year without looking towards 2023. Difficult, if not impossible, not to write the date, which has become a before and an after , from October 7. The pogrom of October 7, 2023 is not another date that marks a break in the geopolitical course of the world. October 7 has considerable global and historical significance but it is also a staggering intimate shock. And not only. It is also a humanist rupture.
This something which was established in Western culture, in its infancy and complexity in the 1960s and 1970s, then popularized and radicalized from the 1990s, to flourish in confidential university circles before becoming popular from the 1990s onwards. 2010 to become the moral poison of today, which I call the kingdom of Wokistan and which Yascha Mounk prefers to call “the synthesis of identity”, is the great issue of our time. It is through the lenses of this identity synthesis that the pogrom of October 7 is seen as an act of resistance and liberation. It is in the name of a strict vision of the world shared between the dominant and the dominated that the rapes, mutilations and torture of Jews (no one is Israeli in this pogrom, all the victims and all the hostages are Jewish) are not denounced, because Israel is considered the last Western colony, because it is necessary to support Hamas, a terrorist organization which feeds on the blood of the Palestinians and whose leaders give their orders comfortably installed in large hotels in Qatar or protected in the Gaza tunnels – which have absorbed international aid.
The breakdown of the pogrom of October 7 tells of the war that begins between the universalist-humanists and the ayatollahs of identity – racial, sexual, religious, ethnic, any identity as long as it is by birth or choice against the nebula of the “norm”, the West, knowledge, biology, science, truth, the past, culture, transcendence. Islamism strengthened itself in the breasts of the identity synthesis to end up merging with it. If the universalists were to lose this decisive battle against the identitarian-Islamist hydra, the humanist war will be lost for generations to come. These are not words: to lose would be to lose the individual rights dearly acquired throughout a history which begins with Athenian democracy, which ensures individual singularity the expression of one’s “self”, which establishes equal rights for all, whatever their political, religious or sexual orientations, which promises this word hated today in the name of Wokistan: progress. (In these moments, I really want to say to the supporters of identity synthesis who think they live in a racist, misogynistic and colonial hell: give back the penicillin!)
After October 7, nothing will be the same
Intimate rupture because there is not a human being who did not react to the pogrom of October 7, who did not feel this unprecedented event with its destructive violence as a day after which nothing will be the same. I am not only talking to you about the intense, pure, legitimate fear felt by the vast majority of Jews in the face of the global and uninhibited resurgence of anti-Semitism. Nor the mortifying and shameful joy of too many Muslims in the face of the massacre of Jews. I’m talking to you about this thing that we humans share: empathy. I am talking to you about the astounding failure of the mirror neurons which govern the empathy of too large a part of humanity which has forgotten to settle in the hollow of its heart to cry over what men are capable of doing to impose their ideological hatred. I am talking to you about the filthy cowardice which has gripped a majority of the media, intellectual and artistic world who preferred to go along with the Hamas terrorists so as not to lose followers stupefied by hatred of the Jewish oppressor.
May courage not fail us in 2024, may freedom resonate as the insurmountable hope, in the name of this thrill which runs through us in the face of the beauty of a body, of a landscape, of a text, of a stroke of paint, a musical note, a camera movement, an Other, an “I love you”.
Abnousse Shalmani, committed against the obsession with identity, is a writer and journalist
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