[...] What is correct about the quoted statement is the reminder of European hypocrisy: the European manoeuvre was indeed to pay for its own guilt with another people’s land. So when the Israeli government spokesman Ra’anan Gissin said in response, ‘Just to remind Mr Ahmadinejad, we’ve been here long before his ancestors were here. Therefore, we have a birthright to be here in the land of our forefathers and to live here,’ he evoked a historical right which, when applied universally, would lead to universal slaughter. That is to say, can one imagine a world in which ethnic groups would continually ‘remind’ their neighbours that ‘we’ve been here before you’ – even if this means a thousand or more years ago – and use this fact to justify their effort to seize the neighbour’s land? Along these lines, a French Jewish writer, Cecile Winter, proposed a nice mental experiment: imagine Israel as it is, and its trajectory over the last half-century, ignoring the fact that Jews came there stigmatised by the signifier of the absolute victim, and thus beyond moral reproach. What we get, in that case, is a standard story of colonisation.

We are thus caught in a Kantian antinomy (though it would be too obscene to call this ‘the antinomy of Holocaust reason’): while any positive reference to the Holocaust amounts to its instrumentalisation, the reduction of any reference to the Holocaust to such an instrumentalisation (i.e. the imposition of total silence about the Holocaust in political discourse) is no less unacceptable.

along the lines of Kant’s notion of the negative use of reason as the only legitimate one when we are dealing with noumenal objects, one should limit its use to a negative mode

[...] Many conservative (and not only conservative) political thinkers, from Blaise Pascal to Immanuel Kant and Joseph de Maistre, elaborated the notion of the illegitimate origins of power, of the ‘founding crime’ on which states are based, which is why one should offer ‘noble lies’ to people in the guise of heroic narratives of origin. With regard to such ideas, what was often said about Israel is quite true: the misfortune of Israel is that it was established as a nation-state a century or two too late, in conditions when such founding crimes are no longer acceptable. [...]

[...] what if what disturbs me is precisely that I find myself in a state which hasn’t yet obliterated the ‘founding violence’ of its ‘illegitimate’ origins, repressed them into a timeless past. In this sense, what the state of Israel confronts us with is merely the obliterated past of every state power.

[...] It is almost attractive to see the first-generation Israeli leaders openly confessing the fact that their claims to the land of Palestine cannot be grounded in universal justice, that we are dealing with a simple war of conquest between two groups between whom no mediation is possible.

Everyone can see the weight of the problems in the relations between Arabs and Jews. But no one sees that there is no solution to these problems. There is no solution! Here is an abyss, and nothing can link its two sides … We as a people want this land to be ours; the Arabs as a people want this land to be theirs.

The problem with this statement today is clear: such an exemption of ethnic conflicts for land from moral considerations is simply no longer acceptable. [...]

The basic meaning of jihad in Islam is not war against the external enemy, but the effort of inner purification.

[...] To perceive the problem as one of the right measure between respect for the other versus our own freedom of expression is in itself a mystification. No wonder that upon closer analysis, the two opposing poles reveal their secret solidarity. The language of respect is the language of liberal tolerance: respect only has meaning as respect for those with whom I do not agree. When offended Muslims demand respect for their otherness, they are accepting the frame of the liberal-tolerant discourse. [...]

Marx’s analysis of the political imbroglio of the French Revolution of 1848 comes to mind.

[...] Isn’t it time to restore the dignity of atheism, perhaps our only chance for peace? As a rule, where religiously inspired violence is concerned, we put the blame on violence itself: it is the violent or ‘terrorist’ political agent who ‘misuses’ a noble religion, so the goal becomes to retrieve the authentic core of a religion from its political instrumentalisation. What, however, if one should take the risk of inverting this relationship? What if what appears as a moderating force, compelling us to control our violence, is its secret instigator? What if, then, instead of renouncing violence, one were to renounce religion, including its secular reverberations such as Stalinist communism with its reliance on the historical big Other, and to pursue violence on its own, assuming full responsibility for it, without any cover-up in some figure of the big Other?

[...] after the outbreak of the First World War, some social Darwinians were pacifists on account of their anti-egalitarian Darwinism; Ernst Haeckel, the leading proponent of social Darwinism, opposed the war because in it, the wrong people were killed: ‘The stronger, healthier, more normal the young man is, the greater is the prospect for him to be murdered by the needle gun, cannons, and other similar instruments of culture.’ The problem was that the weak and sick were not allowed into the army. They were left free to have children and thus lead the nation into biological decline. One of the solutions envisaged was to force everyone to serve in the army and then, in battle, ruthlessly use the weak and sick as cannon fodder in suicidal attacks.

[...] the lesson of today’s terrorism is that if there is a God, then everything, even blowing up hundreds of innocent bystanders, is permitted to those who claim to act directly on behalf of God, as the instruments of his will, since, clearly, a direct link to God justifies our violation of any ‘merely human’ constraints and considerations. The ‘godless’ Stalinist communists are the ultimate proof of it: everything was permitted to them since they perceived themselves as direct instruments of their divinity, the Historical Necessity of Progress towards Communism.

[...] Respect for others’ beliefs as the highest value can mean only one of two things: either we treat the other in a patronising way and avoid hurting him in order not to ruin his illusions, or we adopt the relativist stance of multiple ‘regimes of truth’, disqualifying as violent imposition any clear insistence on truth. What, however, about submitting Islam – together with all other religions – to a respectful, but for that reason no less ruthless, critical analysis? This, and only this, is the way to show true respect for Muslims: to treat them as serious adults responsible for their beliefs.