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Over the last few years, I have engaged in continual dialogue with people across the spectrum of Islam, from Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who left her religious upbringing behind, through to moderates such as Mustafa Akyol and Hamza Yusuf, and even some of the more hardline commentators whose perspectives are popular among Muslim millennials in the UK. 

I have done this because I believe that Jews, Christians and Muslims share more in common than what divides them, and because I know that since there is no such thing as a world without religion, we must do what is best with what we have been bequeathed.

I am in serious trouble this week, nonetheless, because I argued that the authorities in Israel should give the terrorists who invaded their land, torturing and killing their citizens, the hell they most truly deserve.

How could I say such a thing, some argued, while simultaneously maintaining my desire for a rapprochement between the peoples of the Abrahamic tradition? Let us begin that discussion by rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar’s and unto God what is God’s. 

Hamas’s motivation – and Biden’s failure

The attack on Israel by the monsters of Hamas occurred not because Muslims and Jews are destined, by religious necessity, to be at each other’s throats, but because Hamas’s biggest supporters in Iran – a country run by thugs, and deemed so even by its own people – had become concerned that the rulers of Saudi Arabia would continue in their laudable attempts to formulate a productive peace with Israel.

Four Arab countries signed the Abraham Accords, a Trump-era initiative that should have garnered that ex-president, for all his manifold faults, a Nobel Peace Prize (at least in a world where the likes of Barack Obama were deemed worthy of such an honor). Behind the current signatories – the United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Morocco and Sudan – stood the Saudis, without whose tacit agreement no such steps would have been taken, and everyone knew it. Joe Biden and the Democrats had, therefore, an historic and unparalleled opportunity to bring the occasionally-troublesome Saudis formally into the fold soon after they took office, building on the Trump administration’s work. Instead, with miraculous short-sightedness, they alienated them almost immediately, choosing – instead of peace – to deny to the previous President of the United States any honor for his revolutionary breakthrough, one deemed utterly impossible by the blinkered fools who ruled the State Department for decades.

Despite being snubbed so insultingly, and their consequent and justified anger (remember their unwillingness to provide the US with additional oil, when Biden asked, and their recent flirtation with China?) the Saudis had been strongly considering the continuation and extension of the Abrahamic peace process. In consequence, the totalitarian mullahs of Iran – working with Hamas – were driven to desperation, knowing full well that such an agreement would undermine and isolate them fatally. This is the same Iran, by the way, that the Democrats, under Biden, have utterly failed to resist and control, continuing a pattern well-established by the aforementioned Nobel Laureate Obama. 

All this means, therefore, that the Saudis could have been on side two years ago had Biden seized the opportunity, thereby negating Hamas’s (and Iran’s) primary aim in attacking Israel. Instead, he and his fellow Democrats downplayed the significance of the Trump administration’s cardinal achievement just to score the cheapest (and yet most expensive) of political points.

So here we are again, with Israeli and Palestinian blood once again being unnecessarily spilled. 

Social media and fetishisation of bloodshed

One of the most shocking elements of this entire tragedy is how many in the West, particularly on the radical Left, have been championing a cause devoted to naught but violence. As a psychologist, I view this as a phenomenon facilitated by the power, accessibility and irresponsibility of social media, which allows for toxic traits exhibited by a small minority to propagate and proliferate, with none of the usual real-world consequences.

A particular form of psychopathology has been well-detailed in recent decades:  a combination of Machiavellianism (instrumental manipulativeness and deceit), narcissism (inflated false self-esteem and desire for unearned attention and status), and psychopathy (a malignant mixture of criminal propensity, callousness and parasitism). These are collectively known as the Dark Triad. More recent investigators of the structure of the darkest of temperamental propensities found it necessary to add an extra dimension to the matrix: sadism – positive delight in the suffering of others. So today we have the Dark Tetrad. 

Dark Tetrad types fit well into what is known as Cluster B of personality disorders. Those who manifest Cluster B symptomatology have, in addition to their other psychologically and socially dangerous tendencies, the proclivity to claim positive virtue or outright victim status while pursuing their utterly self-serving, grandiose and destructive ends. They lie, cheat, steal, gossip, reputation-savage, brag, claim credit when none is due, and distribute blame to everyone but themselves – all the while pursuing nothing but their own immediate, immature, hedonistic self-gratification, trumpeting their moral virtue and/or brandishing their identity as oppressed innocents. 

It is this narrow, and historically ostracised, behaviour that has been encouraged and facilitated in its distribution by contemporary social media. When such individuals organise – and this happens, from time to time – they threaten the integrity of the entire society within which they operate, hoping to light everything aflame and dance, orgiastically, in the ruins. 

This happened after the French Revolution. It happened in Soviet Russia. It happened in Nazi Germany. It’s happening now, in the West, with the rise of the most demented woke causes.

This warped psychological perspective has an appeal to groups larger than just the core individuals, and in various surreal guises. How else are you to explain the staggeringly incomprehensible spectacle of, for example, ‘Queers for Palestine’ – perhaps the most egregious example of the union of the desire by ‘progressives’ to tear down everything in the West that is worthy, even at the cost of formulating an alliance that would in an instant be suicidal if it ever made itself manifest.

An appeal to Muslims

So that is one way social media enables subtle forms of psychological manipulation within the West. But what about from outside? 

There are many Muslims willing to believe conspiratorial narratives – also spread on social media – about Jewish people. Many of these narratives, if one looks at their source, are deliberately spread by the brutal Iranian regime.

I might inquire of the Muslims who accept such stories: is Iran your idea of a worthy Islamic state? The very Iran whose citizens, Muslims all, have revolted against their psychopathic masters for more than a year (and dreamed about it for much longer than that)? The very Iran whose hypothetically religious leaders have to oppress their own women? 

I would also ask the same Muslims to consider those in the West who have allied themselves with the cause of the Palestinians in the days since the Hamas invasion. Many of those university students and radical professors you see as your allies are Marxists. Remember – the essential and absolute enemy of the communist utopia is the very religious practice you share with your Abrahamic brothers. 

Then there’s the increasingly delusional alphabet brigade of the LGBT ‘community’, foolish and blind enough to assume that commonality of hypothetical oppression is enough to unite it, somehow, with the mullahs of Tehran and the gangsters of Hamas. This is useful idiocy on a scale undreamed of by the most extreme of Leninists and Maoists alike. 

Tell me this, honestly, those of you desirous of genuinely practicing your faith: do you really think you have anything in common with those who have hypothetically sided with you in the West in the past week? And tell me, again, how that alliance is more suitable to your faith than recognition of your Abrahamic commonality with the Christians and the present-day descendants of the ancient Hebrews?

I would argue that the Saudis, and the other signers of the Abraham Accords, have a stark choice in front of them, as do the distributed and various people of the Islamic world. They can allow the thugs, particularly those in Iran and Palestine, to triumph in their propagandistic efforts to prop up their own dismal, miserable and tyrannical states. They can, in consequence, scuttle the new peace treaty signed with Israel, forgo all the obvious benefits for the Muslim world offered by that agreement, and acquiesce to continued rule by the cruelest of hypocrites, misusing faith in the worst possible of ways.

Or they can consider the universal message in Islam, Judaism, and Christianity alike: do not attribute to yourself the virtue of the divine when acting on your own behalf, let alone when acting in the thrall of the forces of darkness themselves.

I plead with those of you reading this in the Muslim world: remove the blindfold (as we should, equally, in the West) and see what is so starkly manifesting itself in the world: toxic ideologies, whether from Iran or pseudo-Marxists in the West. We must all of us turn away from the terrible tempting path of righteous destruction, continue the work already begun in uniting the people of the book, and thereby bring a productive, generous, wise and lasting peace to this benighted but still not-yet-doomed and even potentially wonderful green-and-blue orb. 

We need a transcendental axis to revolve around, to move us beyond a blinkered materialism, to protect us against a foolish populism, and to lift up our eyes to the eternal Heaven, beckoning above us. In the West, we have that – for all the faults of the followers of the creeds, and even, with the creeds themselves as currently understood – in the form of Islam, Christianity and Judaism. We need our Abrahamic faith, lest the hedonistic pagans and worse prevail, and we need to stand, united, behind it. And that is why I am pro-Muslim, but anti the thuggish behaviour we have seen in the past week. And if you are a true follower of Allah, that is the decision that is incumbent upon you, in equal measure. 

And that goes as well for Jews and Christians, too.

You can watch The Telegraph’s most recent interview with Jordan Peterson via this link.

More from Jordan Peterson exclusively for The Telegraph:

- ‘We are sacrificing our children on the altar of a brutal, far-Left ideology’ 

- ‘Trans activism is sexist and delusional’

- ‘Why I love Great Britain’

- ‘Peddlers of environmental doom have shown their true totalitarian colours’

- ‘Twitter is turning us all insane’

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