The Rise of Occidentalism

Shalom Chaverim!

The term “Orientalism” is mostly associated with the infamous Columbia professor Edward Said, and became a bedrock of collegiate international relations curriculum. What many might not know is that prior to Said loading the term, Oriental Studies was a rather innocuous pursuit, no different than that of any other such as physics or anthropology.

His book claims the following three things:

1. The first is that Orientalism, although purporting to be an objective, disinterested, and rather esoteric field, in fact functioned to serve political ends. Orientalist scholarship provided the means through which Europeans could take over Oriental lands.
2. Orientalism helped define Europe’s self-image.
3. Orientalism has produced a false description of Arabs and Islamic culture.1

Despite focusing entirely on the Middle East, and ignoring everything else “in the Orient,” Said’s magnus opus has become a key reference point for the Dogmatic Left in their accusation of Western bigotry against the “Global South”. In essence, the white Western world looks at everyone else through the condescending paternalistic eyes of an early 20th Century Orientalist in order to justify their racist, imperialist policies. As a result of internalizing this belief, instead of creating a separate and distinct foreign policy ideology, the Dogmatic Left did what it always does and created one in rejection of the one they’ve created in their heads.

Ask a member of the Dogmatic Left what they believe about how the United States should act on the global stage, and they will undoubtedly pull the string on their back to repeat the handful of lines they know. They are ANTI-imperialist or ANTI-colonialist, but they aren’t really in favor of anything in particular. They don’t have a cohesive idea of what the world should look like, let alone a preference for how the United States should act in order to shape that world. Even their belief that the America should submit completely to the rule of international law — despite the fact that the majority of the world rejects it outright — is in line with their rejection of America. They don’t believe everyone should submit themselves to international law, just the western world. It is this outright rejection of America, and the outright acceptance that not all nations should be subjected to international law that has led me to conclude that they do have a political ideology, and it is based in Said’s explanation of Orientalism.

As described by Said, if the East is the Orient, then the West is the Occidental, and therefore, the mirror image of Orientalism would be “Occidentalism”. Outside of the mainstream, this concept hasn’t been explored as much as its antithesis. However, in the book Occidentalism: The West in the Eyes of Its Enemies by Avishai Margalit and Ian Baruma, they describe the foundational belief of the Occidentalist is that the West might have science, technology, and industrialization, but it also has no soul. It is this foundational belief that has seeped into the minds of so many in western countries, and has become integral to the belief system of the Dogmatic Left — especially those who are white and from western, liberal countries themselves.

When they critique America, a consistent underlying theme is that simply no one cares about anyone; everyone is selfish, greedy, and too individualistic. In addition to this general criticism, many who have had the privilege of traveling to more communal-oriented societies, or even living there for some time, will invoke the communal culture as a referential rejection of America’s rugged individualism. This takes root as a harmless idea that there is in fact another way to live that isn’t the high-octane, capitalist, individualistic society of America. While I’m certainly critical of the extreme nature of our society, and also wish we would adopt some aspects of non-American cultures, I don’t make their fatal mistake. For so many, the harmless idea that there is a better way to do things eventually grows into a whole tree in which not only is this “other way” better but that the American way is objectively bad. The “soullessness” of the Western, capitalist, individualist societies are not just undesirable, but inherently and morally evil.

It is at this point that the Occidentalist can justify anything in the name of fighting on behalf of a culture that is morally superior than the other even when in contradiction to their own personal beliefs. It is this obsession, even fetishization that leads to white women telling Iranian women that the “Women Life Freedom” movement — the one advocating for women not to be arrested, beaten, and hanged for showing their hair — cannot possibly succeed for it would remove the main opposition to American hegemony.

This fetishization doesn’t just seep into the extremely angry, but also the extremely sympathetic. As many Western Leftists were just learning where Israel was on the map in the early days of its war with Hamas, the exaggerated death count courtesy of the Hamas Health Ministry led them to start sympathizing with Palestinians. While those of us who know better wish they had dove into the numbers more deeply, it’s easy to understand how the less informed can look at two numbers, see which one is higher, and naturally sympathize with the population it represents. The result of this reactionary sympathy was a desire to “learn more” about these people since they didn’t know anything about either peoples, and both the mainstream media and social media was happy to oblige.

With absolutely no understanding of where to go, the uninformed naturally turned to Twitter, TikTok, Instagram, and their most trusted sources like the New York Times and Washington Post to start their journey. With far more voices representing the Palestinians (and helpful pushes by Jew-hating editors and social media algorithms), Western Leftists fell down the equivalent of the 4chan rabbit hole and into the incel abyss. Their fetishization with Palestinians has led to the Queer community supporting them despite the fact they would be imprisoned for being “born this way”. Feminists have aligned themselves with the Palestinian cause by not only ignoring what Hamas did to women on October 7th, but also ignoring that 1/3 of Palestinian women have experienced domestic violence and that 19% of marriages in Gaza in 2020 included a girl under the age of 18 as the bride. The moral reprehensible nature of their fetishization is even worse when you remember that they still support Ansar Allah in Yemen who have recorded that 32% of all marriages are with girls under the age of 18 and 9% are with girls under the age of 15.

The rise of this Occidentalist attitude is something we should be concerned with, especially as we see a growing trend of westerners to “revert” to Islam despite it being in contradiction to many of their western values. I don’t say this because there’s anything wrong with Islam as I find many aspects of the religion to be beautiful even if I don’t personally agree with its tenets. Furthermore, I don’t say this because there’s anything with those who genuinely want to adopt Islam as their guiding light as religion is extremely personal. We need to be concerned because of why they are adopting Islam and the consequences of doing so in haste as a part of a trend.

A 2021 report by the Radicalization Awareness Network, to the European Union, argued that converts’ lack of a strong basis for their religion, and a searching attitude that prioritizes meaning, identity, guidance and mental peace, can “lead them to consider radical beliefs if they are more suitable for their inner needs.”2

If people are adopting Islam not because they actually believe in the faith holistically, but because they are trying to show solidarity with the Palestinian cause or, even worse, just to “stick it to the west”, then we are at risk of seeing higher rates of radicalization amongst our citizens. It should also concern many about how some of these “reverts” could face possible backlash inside of their new Muslim community as they try to fit the square peg of their Western values such as gender equality into the round hole of gender inequality that inherently exists inside of Islam.

This is ultimately the problem when people decide to forge their political identity through a reactionary framework. Instead of determining what their foundational beliefs are about what a society should look like, they accept anything that is “anti” whatever they hate, which invites contradiction into their own lives. In this case, they have determined that Orientalism is what they should hate, and so they simply decide to adopt whatever is “anti-Orientalist”. The great irony of this reactionary framework is that Edward Said himself said that this was not his solution. Perhaps they should’ve finished his book:

“Above all, I hope to have shown my reader that the answer to Orientalism is not Occidentalism.”3

1 Windschuttle, K. (1999, January). Edward Said’s “Orientalism” revisited. The New Criterion. Retrieved from https://newcriterion.com/article/edward-saids-ldquoorientalismrdquo-revisited/

2 Roy, J. (2023, December 1). On TikTok, an unlikely call to Islam emerges. New Lines Magazine. https://newlinesmag.com/reportage/on-tiktok-an-unlikely-call-to-islam-emerges/

3 Said, E. W. (1978). Orientalism (p. 328). Pantheon Books.

This essay was written by Z.E. Silver, who publishes the newsletter, “Gam V’gam.” He is a political and cultural commentator focused on politics both in the U.S. and abroad, with an emphasis on Jewish peoplehood, antisemitism, and Israel. Find him on X @z_e_silver. Follow his Substack here.