The Gaza Genocide, Liberal Decadence, and the Lifting of Taboos

A primary reason the Gaza genocide has continued unabated despite its massive unpopularity is due to the system of Islamophobic racism in America.

Israel’s campaign of genocidal terror inflicted on Gaza following the October 7 Hamas attacks has fundamentally re-shaped the system of Islamophobic discourse and power in the West. The genocide has taken place under the watch of the Biden administration which had become known for absorbing and giving support to the popular discontents of the culture-wide reckoning on racial justice following the George Floyd protests, as well as the fallout from the socialist impulses of the Bernie Sanders campaign. As a long-standing centrist, Biden seemingly united the Democratic Party and tamed progressive demands. His administration was coming to be known for ushering in a new era of race-conscious DEI programming across business, academic, and corporate life. But the unwavering support of the Biden administration for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians through weapons transfers and strategic military support—despite the brutality and overwhelming death toll of Palestinians (now over 35,000)—has forced Biden’s progressive alliance to come under serious, if not irreparable, strain.

Despite the widescale diffusion of media propaganda by Israeli Hasbara messaging in the mainstream corporate news media, and the total buyout of American politicians by the Israel lobby, sizable majorities of Americans do not support the Gaza genocide. This contradiction has intensified pressure on the wider liberal intelligentsia and broad sectors of the professional managerial class who are in alignment with the Biden coalition. The Gaza genocide is a tear in the edifice of the progressive political values of this class, a class which frames social conflict through the lens of corporate antiracism, advocacy for minority rights, religious tolerance, and inclusion of the marginalized in their understanding of politics.

A primary reason the Gaza genocide has continued unabated despite its massive unpopularity is due to the system of Islamophobic racism in America. This system can be understood as Janus-faced, composed on one side by what the anthropologist Saba Mahmood calls “institutional Islamophobia”—a form of liberal discrimination that disciplines and sets the terms of Muslim inclusion based on the good Muslim/bad Muslim dichotomy. Put differently, institutional Islamophobia is based on a power of division that separates the good from the bad Muslim according to the very terms of inclusion preached across liberal institutions, whether government, corporate, or educational. Implicit in institutional Islamophobia is the notion that the Muslim can be integrated and celebrated on terms of meritocracy, cosmopolitanism, and religious liberty. Yet the condition of this inclusion is based on a logic of depoliticization and adherence to the U.S. imperial project and its aims. Thus, the very meaning of the “bad” Muslim is political and based on perceived deviations from support for the interests of the U.S. imperial project.

Institutional Islamophobia limits Muslim expression and sets boundaries on the terms of the acceptable or “good” Muslim, but this boundary is always shifting and dependent on the status of the current geopolitical situation. In periods of relative U.S. imperial stability, the Muslim may very well fit neatly within the institutional framework. But Israel’s genocide in Gaza quickly shattered this boundary and the illusion of inclusion in mainstream institutions, particularly those proximate to capital and elite prestige, such as Columbia, Harvard, and Penn. Each of these elite universities, among a growing number of others, have exerted some degree of censorship in response to varying symbolic forms of support for the Palestinian cause. The presidents of both Harvard and Penn resigned amid this climate of censorship and hostility, and dozens of bureaucrats across the NGO sector have been fired or resigned because of this repression and pressure. Numerous artists in the creative industries have had art exhibits canceled and resignations have come from senior editors at major magazines. Nowhere were the contradictions of this repression more evident than in the resignation of liberal MSNBC commentator Mehdi Hasan after the cancellation of his show due to his semi-critical reporting on Israel on the liberal network. The cancellation of Hasan’s show points to the total collapse of the good/bad Muslim dichotomy, which Hasan had valiantly come to embody and define for years. As we indicated earlier, if institutional Islamophobia can be understood as a power based on stabilization and disciplinary inclusion, the post-October 7 situation has resulted in the total implosion of this system.

The Clash Regime

The other face of Islamophobia is what we typically associate with more overt anti-Muslim attitudes, rhetoric, and postures that appeal to civilizationalist frameworks, such as “Islam vs. the West” and Christian supremacist narratives. In the case of Israel and Palestine, this side of the Janus-face unabashedly frames it as a timeless religious conflict driven by archaic identity attachments and vulgar religious impulses. This rhetorical orientation openly encourages a break with institutional Islamophobia and the taboos it places on derogatory and discriminatory speech towards Muslims. Thus, the other side of the Janus-faced system of Islamophobia is what we will call the “clash regime”—a system that is more diffuse than the liberal professional managerial class and composed of what others have referred to as the “Islamophobia network.” The clash regime is an active civil society movement of overt anti-Muslim groups and institutions, some marginal and some mainstream, that is marked by a rhetorical strategy that exchanges in cliches over the “Muslim problem.” It is represented, for example, by Netanyahu’s invocation of the Gazan as “Amalek,” Trump’s establishment of the U.S. Embassy in Jerusalem to appease rightwing Christian fanatics, and Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s recent conversion to Christianity in the cause of a coming “civilizational war.” The clash regime frames the Muslim problem with reference to religious fundamentalist frameworks that portray Islam as inherently violent. Consequently, their civil society groups seek to preemptively ban Sharia law and they find ways to activate citizens to participate in overt anti-Muslim activity.

Where institutional Islamophobia is about stabilization and depoliticization (that is, about integration of Muslims into liberal frameworks), the clash regime is about what Foucault calls “govermentality” as it encourages the citizenry to act on the anger and outrage beneath its rhetoric. As an activating logic, the clash regime frames the situation in Israel and Palestine as driven by purely religious and identarian concerns, and it paints the Palestinian as wracked by wild militancy and terroristic rage. The effect of this rhetoric is strategic: it is meant to convey the idea that mainstream institutions are not doing enough to put an end to the Muslim problem. The clash regime thereby enlists individuals to become engaged in the very imperial project of Israel and the United States and to do so as private citizens.

In a technical sense, Foucault defines govermentality as a harnessing and channeling of individual, communal, and international civic forces that might otherwise be anarchic and self-destructive towards a collective project in service of the interests of the state. It governs what Foucault calls the “conduct of conduct,” or the operations and applications of individuals and mass populations, as well as parts of the body and psyche. Govermentality is a concept that helps to describe the way that citizens enlist in repressive forms of social activity that reinforce state and imperial agendas, but in ways that are not directly internalized by those actors as in alignment with the state’s aims.¹ The growth of grassroots anti-Muslim civil society organizations such as ACT for America in a post-Obama context point to the success of the clash regime as an active grassroots movement that construes of politics in terms of an exaggerated Muslim takeover in all areas of American life, from immigration to Sharia law scares, to terror threats.²

The Israeli genocide in Gaza has collapsed the Janus-face of American Islamophobia by forcing the institutional and liberal edifice to adhere to this more overt clash regime rhetoric. It has forced the political values that otherwise underpin liberal institutional Islamophobia—inclusion, diversity, advocacy for the rights of the marginalized, the promotion of equity, and so on—to be revealed as hollow and decadent. The Marxist philosopher György Lukács develops a theory of decadence as a condition that affects the mood and social affects of the intelligentsia and bureaucratic class in times of imperialism and war:

This Jekyll-and-Hyde character [of decadence] corresponds to the social existence, and hence to the emotional and intellectual world, of this class in a triple sense. Firstly, an oscillation between the most acute feeling for nuance, the keenest over sensitivity, and a suddenly erupting, often hysterical brutality is always an intrinsic sign of decadence. Secondly, it is very closely linked with a deep dissatisfaction concerning contemporary culture: an “unease about culture” in Freud’s phrase, a revolt against it. Under no circumstances, however, would the “rebel” stomach any interference with his own parasitical privileges and their basis in society.³

The third sign of decadence, for Lukács, emerges from within the creative class of the liberal bourgeoisie, and it gives way to “complacent [and] narcissistic” attitudes, as well as what he calls “playful relativism, pessimism, [and] nihilism.” It is important that we draw attention to Lukács’ first sign of decadence in times of imperialism, namely, the “keenest over sensitivity” and “suddenly erupting, often hysterical brutality” as we witness overt acts of anti-Palestinian hate crimes—from the shooting of three Palestinian college students in Maine, to the murder of the 6-year-old Palestinian American boy Wadea Al-Fayoume by his landlord, to the viral video of Stuart Seldowitz, the decorated former Obama state department advisor, and his harassment of an Egyptian food truck vendor in New York.

In a viral video that will no doubt come to mark the contradiction of liberal Islamophobia in the time of the Gaza genocide, Seldowitz is filmed on multiple occasions harassing an Egyptian food truck vendor, threatening the man with statements such as, “if we killed 4,000 Palestinian kids, it wasn’t enough.” Rather blithely, Seldowitz threatens to report the man’s family to the Egyptian secret police so they can torture them and pull their fingernails out. Seldowitz relishes in the annihilation of Palestinians, and yet he is a senior arbiter and leader of the very core of institutional Islamophobia and its values of meritocracy, inclusion, and diversity. This points to the type of decadence Lukács links to the bourgeoisie in times of imperialism. In the video, Seldowitz at one point asks the man if he knows English, and the man responds that he does not. We are left to wonder whether Seldowitz would ever engage in this unhinged harassment if he were speaking to one of his “good” Muslim colleagues at the State Department. In this way, we observe the breakdown in the very institutional system Seldowitz used to be responsible for maintaining; the boundaries of the “good” and “bad” Muslim are now collapsed. The Gazan, like the food truck driver who happens to be Egyptian, are both eligible for annihilation, ridicule, and murder.

Liberal Decadence

We should not analyze Seldowitz’s acting out as a typical instance of resurgent liberal racism; it is an aberration. However, this extreme case points to the collapse and merging of institutional Islamophobia with the clash regime in the context of open genocide. The liberal is overwhelmed by the weight of contradictions and the utter evacuation of any coherence to the values they champion. This decadence in political values is apparent in the hypocrisy of corporate identity politics and DEI discourse being used as a tool by the Israeli legal team in their opening statement at the International Court of Justice, where they invoked the specter of “social media and identity politics” as the reason why Israel is being vilified and demonized as genocidal.⁴

The concept of decadence, as Lukács defines it in relation to imperialism, is a useful framework for understanding the subjective tendency towards overt racist acts when the interests of the imperial project must be furthered, despite their clash with and incoherence within the aims of liberal institutional Islamophobia. In a certain sense, decadence lays bare the imperial interests of the U.S. state project and it reveals what is otherwise covered over as a fetish in American Islamophobia, which is the fact that the clash regime and institutional Islamophobia are different tactics for achieving the same objective class interests. The collapse of this Janus-faced system forces the liberal ruling class to see itself as a class, which, in times of relative stabilization, they otherwise disavow.

Seldowitz’s harassment of the food truck vendor merits further analysis to situate it in relation to the type of overt racism that Adorno and Horkheimer qualified as fascist racism in the early to mid-twentieth century. In Elements of Anti-Semitism (1947), they analyze anti-Semitism in ways that are directly applicable to the collapse in the efficacy of the class enforcement of institutional Islamophobia since October 7. For Adorno and Horkheimer, anti-Semitism emerges in two predominant ways. First, anti-Semitism is understood as a projection of the subject’s misplaced exploitation in capitalist social life. This means that anti-Semitism functions as a veil for the domination of everyday life and the antagonisms of the capitalist division of labor. In this analysis, capitalism creates dejected subjects and the resentments workers experience require outlets for their calamities—that is, the common resentments that capitalist exploitation dredges up calls for objects and targets onto which to project those resentments. They argue that capitalism creates a “subject-less self” that sinks into its own ego as a “meaningless abyss of itself” where “objects become allegories of ruin, which harbor the meaning of its own downfall.”⁵ The Jew thus becomes a screen upon which the bigoted individual projects his or her own resentments, but this resentment has little to do with the Jew (or the Muslim) per se. Adorno and Horkheimer write that “the Jews” stand for that which is prohibited in the modern age: metaphysics and transcendence, nature and diversity. “The Jews” thus come to represent the particularism that has no place within the rational order of society and, thus, their annihilation restores a missing balance.

The second and related form of anti-Semitism occurs when authority lifts the taboos and encourages people to act on their underlying resentments. In these instances, subjects are encouraged to engage in overt, sadistic displays of racist activity. In this more extreme and overt variant, Adorno and Horkheimer define anti-Semitic racism as founded in a moment of opening, typically when the fascist leader lifts the ban on authority and permits subjects to “let loose.” Fascist racism is thus celebratory; it revels and even enjoys transgressing the taboos that liberal values impose on an otherwise dejected citizen.

Adorno and Horkheimer offer a general theory of racism as an effect of the resentments born from class antagonism, alienation, and resentment. These energies can be routed onto specific targets typically by a leader who permits them, or, as in the case of the Gaza genocide, by the complicity of a liberal regime with genocide. The second type of racism they identify is clearly applicable to Seldowitz’s rampage as much as it is to the implicit aims of the clash regime. In the context of today’s Gaza genocide, the entire value sphere of liberal institutional life has been upended—the demarcation lines of the good/bad Muslim dichotomy are both made more incoherent but also clearer: any allegiance to Palestine makes one beyond the pale and thus eligible for disdain, cancellation, and ridicule.

The Gaza genocide has given rise to a liberal racism that no doubt arises from different impulses and leadership structures than 20^th century fascist racism. Its contradictions are driven fundamentally by the emergence of decadence among a class of professional managers and bureaucrats whose alienation is a far cry from the industrial working class that Mussolini and Hitler sought to mesmerize. The collapse of the edifice of liberal Islamophobia in the face of the Gaza genocide has forced the overt clash regime rhetoric to enter the very liberal and progressive spaces where it was otherwise meant to be absent. This new racism is not reliant on the permission granted from an authoritarian leader who has lifted the taboo on overt racism toward the persecuted group, whether Jew or Palestinian as the case may be. It is driven by the decadence born from imperial warfare and senseless genocide.

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Notes

1. Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, edited by Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Miller (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991).

2. The more extreme manifestation of the clash regime can be found in the acts of terrorism against Muslims and those perceived as sympathetic to Muslims in the West, such as Anders Brevik’s mass murder spree in Norway and the Christchurch shooting in New Zealand.

3. György Lukács, The Destruction of Reason, translated by Brian Palmer (London: Verso Books, 2021), 316.

4. ICJ TRANSCRIPT: Opening Israeli Address Denying South African Charges Of Genocide In Gaza, New Matilda, January 12, 2024. https://newmatilda.com/2024/01/12/icj-transcript-opening-israeli-address-denying-south-african-charges-of-genocide-in-gaza.

5. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, translated by Edmund Jephcott. (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2002), 158.