Historian Laurent Guyénot, author of From Yahweh to Zion, returns to discuss his two most recent articles, “The Disraeli Enigma” and “The Cursed Nation and the Temple of Satan.”

Excerpts from the transcript:

Laurent Guyenot: I'm not fighting against Christianity and I'm definitely not fighting against Jesus. I feel Jesus is an incredibly inspiring heroic figure. “Jesus is a Palestinian.” We need Jesus. I'm not trying to deny the importance of Jesus as a central figure in our civilization.

But my priority now became to understand Israel. And I became convinced that you cannot understand modern Israel if you don't understand that modern Israel is the same as ancient Israel. And that's a big disagreement with Christians (who say) “modern Israel has nothing to do with the people of ancient Israel, who were holy people. Yes, they wanted to genocide the Amalekites, but that's because the Amalekites were really, really, really bad.”

I'm fed up with these kinds of things. I feel Netanyahu wants to genocide the Amalekites exactly as Moses wanted to genocide the Amalekites. And I feel it's really way too late now to start to defend ancient Israel. Ancient Israel is just as demonic as modern Israel. And if you don't come to the point of realizing this, you just cannot understand what Israel is. You think “it's because they're Zionists, they're not real Jews in any way, they're Ashkenazi Jews.” And you find all kinds of excuses to protect the essence of Israel.

The essence of Israel is in the Bible, is in the Torah. I don't especially want to burn the Torah, but I want to put it in a museum or in a library together with Homer and this kind of thing. It's an interesting book, but I definitely don't want anything to do with it as the story of God choosing the Jews. I don't believe God chose the Jews. If I talk to Christians, I want to help them to find a way to get out of this dilemma.

And one way, I suggest to them is (to ask): Did Jesus really claim to be the Messiah? Because it doesn't really matter. You say, well, there's the true Messiah or the military Messiah. In any case, if Jesus said, yes, I am the Messiah, that means he stands within the paradigm of the chosen people. Because if God sends the Messiah, that means He needs the holy people and so on. From the historical perspective, that of historians of Jesus, it's debatable. because there is this, notion of the messianic secret. Sometimes Jesus sounded like he said, yes, I'm the Messiah, but don't say it, don't tell it to anyone—which of course, from the historian's point of view, means that he didn't say “I'm the Messiah.” It's the disciples who said he was the Messiah after he died. It's very simple ogic that leads us to conclude that, in fact, Jesus rejected the title of Messiah.

So we can say we can basically become Marcionist. That's why I offer to the Christian the only way you can get out and start to save Christianity. Because if you continue to worship ancient Israel, you are worshipping the Devil. If you think Yahweh is God, you are confusing God with the Devil. So the only way you can get out of this catastrophic situation is to understand that Jesus is not the Messiah. Jesus is a guy who is like Socrates, a guy who is completely 100% loyal to the truth, to what he saw as true, to the point of sacrificing his life.

In a few days, we will have the anniversary of the self-immolation of Aaron Bushnell. I was thinking about this today. I felt I have to write something.

Jesus was like that. He could not stand to see this evil society. He spoke out or — he's not like Aaron Bushnell, but the impulse to be totally, 100%, in harmony with what you believe, you know, and going all the way: That's what Jesus was. So he was destroyed. He is precisely the saint, the patron saint, of people like you and me. Or at least we should try to imitate him in the sense of fighting against Israel to the point of being ready to pay the price.

Jesus, by the way, was crucified not by the Jews, but by the empire. They use the empire to destroy their enemy.

So I get carried away. But what I wanted to say fundamentally is that I feel it's wrong to defend ancient Israel. It's wrong to excuse Moses for having to kill the Amalekites. Now, everybody can see what is Israel. So you have no excuse any more. And we hear Netanyahu say “the Gaza people are Amalek.” We have no more excuses for the Torah. We have to go to the root of the problem. The root of the problem is the Torah.

Kevin Barrett: There is an alternative between orthodox Christianity, which embraces the so-called Old Testament or Torah as an inerrant holy book—at least traditional Christians do that—and the Marcionite position, which is basically your position, which is that the God of the Old Testament is the Devil.

And that third position alternative is the one that I, of course, adhere to. It is based on the Islamic interpretation that, number one, the Torah or Old Testament has been distorted by the human transmitters, namely the Jewish cognitive elite. They turned a series of the divine revelations that had been given to try to guide this deeply misguided tribe back to the straight path, but they kept rebelling. They're the most stiff-necked, obdurate, basically evil, let's face it, satanic group of people ever.

For Muslims the record of the Jewish people that comes down in the Torah and then is totally revised by the Quran gives us the image of a people who are not good people. No Muslim would ever defend the ancient nation of Israel, far from it. We see the ancient nation of Israel as a deeply troubled and misguided nation that got prophetic revelations attempting to bring it back to truth and justice. But instead of accepting the message of truth and justice, that is, the message of God, who is truth, al-Haqq, the Jewish cognitive elite took their metaphysical chops—and maybe not just a kind of a logical, rational understanding, but a kind of mystical ability. And they turned it to black magic, to evil. In other words, they were getting the message that should have guided them back to the straight path. And they kept rebelling against it satanically. And then when they wrote down their book, they changed the message. And so, yes, indeed, you do have plenty of demonic influence coming through that book.

So that third position then would still see Jesus as a divine prophet, and maybe in a sense, the Messiah prophet, the one who totally clarifies what's been at stake through the entire Torah, which is the truth of God, God's truth, coming through prophets, and being expressed to a deeply evil people to try to give them one more chance to straighten up. And the only sense in which they're privileged or chosen is that they've been given so many chances, but all it does is give them more chances to damn themselves.

So that's the Quranic view and that's my view.

Well, that's not my view, Kevin, as you know, but I understand and I’m willing to dialogue. But basically, my view now is that this whole prophetic tradition is bogus. And all eschatology…I feel eschatology is meaningless. I don't understand Hegel very well, but I feel like I'm a Hegelian. I feel there is meaning in history, but it has nothing to do with the Abrahamic tradition. I believe in God very strongly, but I try more and more to separate myself from the tradition considering God as a person who chooses some people or other, or who speaks, gives orders, gives laws and these kind of things. At my age, I have to follow my spiritual intuition, and it tells me to run away as far as possible from that and try to re-understand the Greco-Roman cosmic God of the Stoics, the understanding that God is everything. God is...God is not a person outside that you can relate to, person to person, and you can pray to him (as a person).

That's the Islamic view too, though. The Islamic view is identical with that. It (the Islamic view) is like with the Godhead in Christianity as opposed to the personal God. That's another thing Islam corrects: Misguided anthropomorphism of God as some human male patriarch. That's not the view in Islam. Ar-Rahman ar-Rahim, the first two tangible characteristics of God in Islam, come from a root that has to do with the womb. And rahmah, mother love, is the root. So if anything, if you had to pick male or female, you would go with female because absolute ...

Laurent Guyénot on Disraeli & The Cursed Nation