The New Irrelevance of Objective Facts and Rational Thought

Two of my professors at the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies in 1981, were P.J. Vatikiotis and Dr. Abbas Kelidar. They were among academia's greatest minds on the Middle East. Vatikiotis is considered by many to be one of the most important and influential thinkers and writers about Islam and the Arabs. No one was his equal when it came to Egypt.

My most important and informative interactions, however, were with my classmates from the U.K., Iraq, Iran, Kuwait, Libya, and Israel.

With the exception of some of the British students, the Israelis, and a woman from Iran whose family escaped just before the fall of the Shah, I was completely ostracized. These children of the 1980's Arab and Persian Middle East, assumed I was a spy. The only question was whether it was for the CIA or Mossad. They actually told me that was why they would not associate with me. What other possible reason could explain the presence of an American Jew at SOAS?

There was another reason, however: They feared being outed by their fellow students.

It was an open secret that the Iraqi and Iranian governments designated students from those countries to act as "monitors" to spy on their classmates. Inappropriate associations or public statements could result in a student's being recalled to Baghdad or Tehran.

Cavorting with an American Jew simply did not look good on one's permanent record.

The pressure to self-police one's speech and conduct was not limited to the students.

Dr. Kelidar was an opponent of Saddam Hussein. When I asked him why he did not speak out more publicly, he replied that he had a father in Baghdad, and worried that an "accident" might befall his father if he spoke up.

My biggest epiphany, however, came at the beginning of the school year, when an Iraqi and an Iranian student faced off for student body president, at the height of the Iran-Iraq War.

To say they despised one another is not doing their hatreds justice. They could not agree on the weather, the time of day, even the color of their shirts. There was one thing though about which they could agree: Israel was responsible for starting the war between their countries as well as its high death tolls.

They agreed that the Mossad had provided Saddam with false intelligence about Iran's ill-equipped and unprepared army. There was also agreement that the intelligence had convinced Hussein to attack Iran. Similarly, they both stated that Israeli intelligence had given the Iranians misleading intelligence about Iraq's war strategy.

What remained unexplained was why either government would listen to anything Israel said. Both considered Israel an enemy and both sought Israel's destruction.

It was at that moment I saw that to these people, objective facts and rational thought were irrelevant. They seemed driven solely by the blind hate at the core of their respective religious and political dogmas. They appeared to believe whatever they were told without question – no matter how bizarre and outrageous -- because they wanted to believe it.

In short, my classmates and the cultures from which they came genuinely believed that Israelis and Jews around the world, were evil, calculating, and manipulative no matter how illogical and divorced from reality the accusation was.

I thought to myself how remarkable that I lived in a country where the free exchange of ideas was encouraged and facts, reason, and logic were valued tools of persuasion.

Today, sadly, American political discourse today looks more like the 1980 SOAS student body presidential election than the Lincoln-Douglass debates.

At a small recent dinner, my wife and I were out to dinner with another couple when the conversation turned to the Middle East. We all lamented the lack of support for Israel among people 18-35 and agreed that it was in large part due to the failure of our schools to teach history.

At that moment, a woman at the next table who had apparently been listening to our conversation began shouting: "Don't discuss religion or politics. This is a democracy, don't discuss religion or politics." Of course, she totally missed the inherent illogic of her assertion. Apparently, she believed that since this is a democracy, she was free to tell us what we were allowed to discuss in a public setting. Our freedom of speech ended when she disagreed with us.

She accused us of being in the IDF, bombing hospitals, murdering children, and training dogs to copulate with prisoners. She then chimed in with, "How about a two-state solution?"

As we attempted to reason with her, she made sure to tell us that she was "an educated woman." Imagine if she were not.

Like my former Iraqi and Iranian classmates, she believed her blood libels because she wanted to believe them. She seemed prepared to accept these claims on blind faith.

This kind of talk, sadly, is what passes for political discourse today. Objective facts, rational thought, and mutual respect seem to be vestiges of the past.

The current Democratic Party's embrace of antisemites and anti-Israel rhetoric among candidates from coast to coast should come as no surprise. Those candidates are working hard across the country to win the votes of people like the lady at the next table. Perhaps, she is simply an older version of the keffiyeh-wearers who have been protesting on college campuses and in the streets of America's cities since the Hamas massacre on October 7, 2023.

Perhaps this woman's behavior explains why Democrats from all over the country are flocking to Maine to support a nazi-tattooed, avowed communist, who manhandles women, minimizes rape, texts sexual pictures of himself to women who are not his wife, brags about pleasuring himself in porta-potties, and espouses antisemitic tropes as if he is reciting the alphabet. Objective facts seem to mean nothing to these voters.

All that matters is rage.

It seems that there is nothing that this candidate for the US Senate, Graham Platner can do that would cause his party to reject his candidacy.

This willing blindness to objective facts and logical thought explains why Democratic Senate candidate Abdul As-Sayed leads in primary polls in Michigan. He has explicitly directed his staff not to comment on the death of the Ayatollah Khamanei or to be critical of the late cleric for fear of offending Michigan voters. He defends the antisemitic rhetoric of far-left streamer and influencer, Hasan Piker. He "struggles" with the question of whether the Jewish state of Israel has a right to exist.

Objective facts seem to mean nothing; fact-free tropes now seem to be the "opiates of the masses."

Supposed "moderates" such as Congressman Seth Moulton from Massachusetts will not take any money from AIPAC (a/k/a "The Jewish Lobby"), because it is too supportive of Israel.

Objective facts, rational thought, and the presumption of innocence appear to be luxuries some Americans and their elected officials have decided they cannot afford. There is no candidate too extreme or divorced from reality whom they will not endorse so long as they hate President Donald Trump, Israel, and the Jews. Among these Americans, with few notable exceptions, those hatreds alone make these candidates worthy of support.

There are leaders of both major parties who appear to reject objective facts and rational thought. Instead, they embrace, anger, hate, and, it seems, any narrative, no matter how false. That evidently, is their strategy to retake both houses of Congress and eventually the White House.

The far-right wing of the Republican Party is the mirror image of the irrational hate of the Democrats' far-left wing of the party.

It is like listening to my former Iraqi and Iranian classmates.