Lars Hedegaard of the University of Southern Denmark and the Copenhagen Business School reports that
Daniel Karpantschof has written a thought-provoking essay on the origins of modern anti-Semitism. The text is long, but worth reading. I particularly notice that the term Nakba – the catastrophe, when it was launched in 1948, originally had a completely different meaning than the one used by today's Palestinians. I also find it interesting that the land of Israel cannot be described as a colonial power — as the so-called "anti-Zionists" are accustomed to. On the contrary, Israel is the result of decolonization.
Here is the Karpantschof essay, which focuses on Jews, Israel, and anti-Semitism, while also addressing — when you think about it — the assassinations, attempted or otherwise, of Charlie Kirk and Donald Trump, as well as pronouncements by Leftist politicians, campaigners, bloggers, podcasters, harpies, "demented schoolgirls", and other drama queens and Locofocos in places like Virginia and Connecticut, where a mainstream Democratic Congressman Suggest[ed that a] Democratic President Might Assassinate MAGA Republicans. Indeed, in Adieu New York, Lars Hedegaard wrote that
When I see pictures of the Democratic mayoral candidate in New York, the constantly grinning Mohammedan Zohran Mamdani, I think of one of the nicknames that Muslims give to Allah: the smiling killer. Mamdani is almost certain to win the election on November 4, as he is expected to receive about half of the votes cast. New York will thus be the next Western metropolis after London to come under Muslim control. It took the Muslims only a few decades to carry out this fundamental and irreversible social upheaval. What will be the next Western metropolis to fall under Allah's turban? …
Back to the Karpantschof essay:
The Perversion of Morality
By Daniel KarpantschofAn old friend called the other day. We have known each other for twenty years. He said: “Now the war is over — so it's okay for us to talk again.” I had heard nothing from him while hatred of Jews was growing. Not while Carolineskolen, the only Jewish school in Denmark, had increased security guards and children were once again advised to hide their Stars of David, not while red triangles and red lines were being pasted up in marches favoring the Palestinians, and not while the posters on Copenhagen's Store Kongensgade said that it was better to kill a Zionist than an animal. But now that he thought it was all “over,” he thought it was safe to have a Jewish friend again. I hung up the phone and thought that this — this crooked moral compass — had become the disease of our time: The state in which good no longer seeks the truth, but justifies itself through lies. What I later realized was the beginning of what I call the inversion of morality. When reality becomes absurd Days after October 7th, I wrote to Roskilde Music Festival's director, Signe Lopdrup. I suggested that the festival — as a symbol of freedom and community and less about the victims of brutal, bestial terror — should condemn the terrorist attack in which young Israelis were murdered, raped, and taken hostage at the Nova Festival. I added that had it been any other festival, anywhere in the world, the reaction would have been immediate. But there was no response. Not a word. The silence said it all. For at that moment the absurdity became real: It was no longer the violence that determined whether we reacted — but whom the violence affected. [See also Charlie Kirk, etc…] The inversion of morality is when goodness is turned upside down, so that the moral value of an action is no longer measured by its content — but by its sender. It is the state in which guilt becomes virtue, and justice becomes a question of who, not what. The inversion of morality is the moment when we stop judging actions by their nature and instead judge by who does them. That is where the axis of civilization shifts — from ethics to identity, from truth to sympathy. Once the axis of morality has turned, the distortion quickly becomes culture. What begins as an exception becomes the norm. That is where the next phase enters: the perversity of morality. The perversity of morality is when the opposite becomes normal — when man uses morality to justify his own immorality, calling it virtue. It is the state in which empathy becomes selective, where truth is bent for the sake of emotion, and where evil is done in the name of good. Perversity is not the rupture of inversion — it is its afterlife. It is the moment when we stop simply distorting the good and begin to cultivate the distortion as goodness. Where the language of morality itself becomes a tool for justifying the lie. When freedom changed sidesEmma Lazarus wrote: “Until we are all free, we are none of us free.”The American-Jewish poet wrote it not as a slogan, but as an experience. Freedom was not a privilege for her — but a duty. Today her words are on posters and shouted by those who want to abolish the state that was created to give her own people a home. Lazarus wrote about freedom — they quote her to attack it. The language of freedom is now used to deny freedom, and the ideal of justice to justify injustice. This is the perversity of morality in its purest form: When what was once good becomes the servant of evil — and man calls his own complicity a virtue. The inverted colonial history One of the clearest examples of this distortion is the story of the state of Israel. Today Israel is often referred to as a colonial project — as a foreign power imposed on the Middle East by the West. But it is an inversion of both history and truth. Israel was not born of colonization, but of its demise. It was one of the world's first anti-colonial states — created in the wake of the collapse of the old empires. A people, displaced and persecuted for two thousand years, returned to their historic homeland after the colonial powers had withdrawn. Israel is the product of decolonization. Calling the Jews the colonial masters of Israel is not just ahistorical; it is an inversion of history, of morality, and of truth. It is to take the only example of an indigenous people reclaiming their land after millennia of exile and transform it into the narrative of an occupation. When the victims of history's colonialism are made its symbol, what is revealed is not Israel's mistake, but the inversion of morality. The catastrophe that changed meaning When the Syrian historian Constantin Zureiq called the Arab defeat the Nakba in 1948 — the catastrophe — he meant it literally. He wrote that the catastrophe lay not in the defeat but in self-deception: Seven Arab armies went to war to annihilate a newborn Jewish state — and lost. Today, the Nakba means something entirely different. It is no longer a showdown with mistakes and responsibilities, but a narrative of eternally innocent victims. Here we see the inversion in practice: guilt has become virtue. And its result — perversity — is a culture where responsibility is sin, and victimhood the highest morality. The symbol of modern perversity Greta Thunberg has — in her own way — become a mirror of our times. Not as a person, but as a phenomenon: a symbol of a generation that has learned to feel strongly but think weakly. She became famous for skipping school for a cause — there is hardly a better symbol of anti-knowledge. When she posted a picture of a "starving Palestinian," it turned out that it was actually a Jewish hostage held captive by Hamas. When the truth came out, she deleted the post. Not to correct, but to forget. It was not evil, but the perversity of morality — the reflex in which one would rather maintain one's self-perception as good than face reality. Thunberg is not the culprit — she is merely the mirror. A picture of how Western empathy has been blinded by its own reflection. Denmark's mirror Here too, perversity finds its place. According to Denmark's Security and Intelligence Agency (PET) and the Ministry of Justice's 2024 Security Survey, the number of anti-Semitic incidents has increased significantly since October 2023 — from harassment and vandalism to threats and assaults. The Jewish Community warns again that Danish Jews are hiding symbols, changing routes, and avoiding talking about Israel in public. Jews have long been excluded from the joint work on the memorial event for Kristallnacht — an event that was supposed to unite the victims, but instead became a picture of how they are being written out of the history of anti-Semitism, and the Jewish community has had to create its own alternative event. The ultimate manifestation of the inversion of morality — and its final destination, the perversity of morality: Jews excluded from Denmark's memorial event for Kristallnacht. In Copenhagen, some people are running for office on the slogan “Zionists out of town.” Those who post the pictures see themselves as anti-racists — but they repeat Europe's darkest language. The words are almost the same as in 1930s Germany: “Juden Raus!” When a European capital once again sees hatred of Jews as “expression of opinion,” it shows how far we have sunk into the moral dissonance left by the perversity of morality. Movements by guardians of morality, who raise their voices when the world does not agree with their feelings and call it conscience, are seen today, with precisely this erosion. They write declarations, hang banners, shout outside the prime minister's apartment, brace themselves for cycling, cultural events, and singing competitions, and believe that indignation is the same as responsibility. But morality does not need guardians. It needs witnesses. The guardian judges. The witness sees. The guardian wants to own the truth. The witness seeks it. The old guardians, who once stood guard over morality and humanity, have today become guardians of the perversity of morality itself — protectors of the self-righteousness that arises when inversion becomes a system. They defend the illusion of the good, but no longer the good itself. The inversion of morality occurs when the guardian forgets that morality is not a mirror to others, but to itself. The perversity of morality occurs when this forgetfulness becomes culture — when good is distorted so that it justifies its own intolerance in the name of virtue. And here arises what one might call the evil of banality: Not the banality of evil, as Hannah Arendt described it — but its modern inversion. Because today it is not blind obedience that nourishes evil, but conscious, selective distance. A form of moral laziness, in which man adopts a moral inversion because it is more comfortable not to know. Because perversity has taken root. It is no longer the system that makes us complicit, but the moral inversion of convenience. Not totalitarianism, but complacency. Not hatred, but ignorance, selection, inversion. It is the evil of banality: The quiet, cultivated apathy where the inversion of morality is allowed to grow — because no one cares anymore to know the difference between what is right and what just feels right. Because the feeling of right weighs more heavily than the knowledge of right, and many people feel quite strongly and think quite weakly.
