Mark David Chapman & 'Palestinianism': The Case for a New DSM Designation - Narcissistic Identity-Appropriation Disorder (NI-AD)
The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) is the American Psychiatric Association's (APA's) definitive catalogue of mental disorders and illnesses. It is TGE go-to for mental health professionals seeming to spot, diagnose, and treat psychoses of all kinds.
As a catalogue, it is of course no more static or incontestable than are psychiatry and mental health practice themselves. Hence it evolves, gradually but steadily, over time as new maladies are encountered, old maladies are understood in new ways, and the notion of mental health itself develops with the knowledge and considered understanding of the community.
The last full revision of the DSM, completed in 2013, gave us its fifth edition, the DSM-5. The last addition short of new edition, the DSM-5-TR, came in 2022. In this spirit, I wish to propose here a new addition to the present edition.
This addition ought not to be scientifically controversial, even though one example that inspires my diagnosing the psychopathy - what Einat Wilf first dubbed 'palestinianism' - might be. For my proposed new diagnosis simply combines into one synthesis two already-named and well-known diagnoses.
I name it Narcissistic Identity-Appropriation Disorder. I have encountered multiple non-notorious cases of this disorder, hence am surprised that it isn't already named. I am yet more surprised given just how conspicuous and egregious the two WIDELY KNOWN cases are - viz. those of the aforementioned 'palestinianism' on the one hand, and of John Lennon's murderer Mark David Chapman on the other.
If you read the new 'palestinian constitution' put out by the Palestinian Authority ('PA') last February, and consider it alongside the behavior of nearly all 'palestinianists' of the past five or six decades, you'll see at once a strange, as it were alchemically combined manifestation of BOTH the two diagnosable disorders already named by the DSM to which I alluded before.
The first already-recognized pschopathy is the version of Schizoid Personality Disorder (SPD) that only imperfectly (we'll come back to that) fits Chapman, who appropriated for himself the identity of Lennon before murdering him - apparently that he might all the more plausibly think himself 'the REAL Lennon' without cognitive dissonance.
The other already-recognized psychopathy is the more familiar Narcissistic Personality Disorder (NPD).
Symptomatically, the two disorders, SPD and NPD, overlap. But because Chapman manifested symptoms of NPD mixed with his symptoms of SPD, and because in 'palestinianism' both illnesses ALSO fuse into a single psychosis, I think my proposed 'Narcissistic Identity-Appropriation Disorder' ('NIAD') not only warranted, but urgently needed.
Let me explain after first providing three quick contextualizing observations that will prove heuristically helpful...
First, it should be borne in mind that there was no literally no conception of a 'palestinian people' or 'palestinian identity' in the contemporary sense prior to the late 20th century. The pseudo-identity was cobbled together, out of components of Jewish identity, by islamists bent for theological reasons on reversing the 19th and 20th century renewal of Jewish self-determination achieved in the Jewish homeland then occupied by islamist colonial-settlers after the 'Arab Conquests' of earlier times (Google that).
Because 'national liberation movements' were all the rage (pun intended) in the 1960s and most islamists already had states by then, islamists wishing either to re-subjugate or to ethnically-cleanse the Levant's Jews altogether invented a new 'nation' whose 'liberation' they could claim still awaited achievement, this as a cover for their aim to exterminate Israel itself.
Prior to this time (again, the 1960s), Arabs inhabiting the Levant simply called themselves 'Arabs,' with the term 'Palestinian' meaning literally 'Jewish inhabitant of British Mandate Palestine,' a territorial designation that had no counterpart in the Ottoman period before the British Mandate commenced in 1920.
('Palestine' is an old Roman name, introduced to humiliate the Jews whom Rome tried to ethnically cleanse from their homeland 2000 years ago. It derives from the name of the Jews' ancient enemies the Philistines - a Greek people. The British re-introduced the name in imitation of the Romans, to whom they fancied themselves successors when they still had an empire. You can read any map from before, then after, 1920 if you'd like to verify any of this. The relevant Ottoman province for the 400 years prior to British conquest subsumed the presentday Levant in a much larger Vilayet called 'South Syria.')
Second, it should also be borne in mind that 'palestinianist' is not the same as 'Palestinian,' any more than 'islamist' is 'Islamic' or 'christian nationalist' is 'Christian.' I write here of two absurd and almost extensionally equivalent ideologies that amount to extreme mental illnesses, not any actual ethnic or religious category.
Finally third, it will bear noting that my particular focus in mentioning the new February PA 'constitution' will be on Articles 1, 3, 4, 10, 12, 22, and 42. These together render the mentioned 'constitution' indistinguishable from the hamas 'covenants' of 1988 and 2017, and hence indicate both that Israel still has no 'national' 'partner for peace' with any formation or locus of collective agency that could be called 'the palestinians,' and that 'palestinianism' is indeed a bona fide psychotic condition afflicting both major entities that purport to act in the name of 'a people' - a condition that is the group-version of Mark David Chapman's individual condition, and that should have its own name as a blend of the already DSM-designated SPD and NPD psychopathologies.
Now to the grounds of my diagnosis...
Start with Chapman's rendition of SPD. Chapman, notoriously, called himself 'John Lennon,' wore hair and clothing in imitation of Lennon, learned and routinely sang and played on guitar only John Lennon's songs, and even married a Japanese woman whom he apparently hoped would be his own Yoko Ono. In the end, as noted above, he murdered the real John Lennon, the 'logic' apparently being that there could only be one Lennon and this must be him. (A particularly grotesque intensification, perhaps, of the Freudian 'Oedipal' face of Harold Bloom's 'anxiety of influence' discussed in a prior post.)
Now compare palestianism. Palestinianists claim that the Jewish homeland is exclusively THEIR homeland. Jewish indigeneity in that homeland they claim for themselves too. They also, of course, claim the Jewish capital, Jerusalem, as exclusively THEIR capital. In addition to all of this, they claim all of Israeli culture and cuisine as theirs and, because they are identity-thieving islamists in addition to identity-thieving palestinianists (these two identities are virtually one and the same), they routinely traffic in such absurdities as the claims that Abraham, Moses, and even Jesus were 'really,' in fact, 'palestinians' (not to mention 'Muslims').
Finally, and most Chapmanian of all, they call for and execute on the literal liquidation of the entire Jewish people, all while of course blood-libelously claiming genocide-victimhood for themselves, and while displacing the actual catastrophe of the Holocaust ('Shoah' means 'catastrophe') with an ersatz 'nakhba' (yep, 'catastrophe') literally of their own making. (It was they who simply rejected the UN partition plan for British Mandate 'Palestine,' patterned on that for British 'Raj' India into India and Pakistan, and launched a combined internal and external war of extermination against Israel - just as it's been they who have launched literally every war since.)
If you find yourself feeling incredulous here, you are far from alone. But please take care about that to which you ultimately attribute your incredulity: I beseech that you actually read the mentioned PA 'constitution' and hamas charters, which you will instantly see are quite unashamedly islamist, arab-ethnostatist, Jewish-erasist and Israel-eliminationist. The particular provisions that I specified are all that you need read, unless you would like to continue on to the later, more misogynistic and homophobic bits. (Please: just google 'new palestinian constitution.')
Moving from Chapmanian SPD to NPD, the current DSM highlights 6 principal symptoms: extreme envy; a tendency to ignore or downplay the achievements of others; an exaggerated sense of entitlement; significant empathy deficit; a tendency to be exploitative; and a proclivity to grandiosity, including the grandiosity that is claiming the achievements of others as one's own.
It isn't hard to spot all of these sorry symptoms among palestinianists. You don't appropriate the identity of another unless you envy the victim of your attempted thievery in the extreme. Nor do you refuse to acknowledge others or their achievements (like the Jewish People and their astonishingly innovative and productive nation) unless you're either pathologically jealous or misclaiming the identity or achievements in question as your own. And of course if these miscredited achievements are highly impressive (as Israel's are), you will be manifesting grandiosity too when you mendaciously claim they are yours.
As for entitlement, here perhaps Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., echoing his father Robert F. Kennedy (murdered by 'Palestinian' Sirhan Sirhan in 1968 after the 1967 Middle East war) put it best when he called 'the palestinians' the 'most coddled people on earth.' If for example you compare the palestinianists' own special UN agecy UNRWA to UNRRA and UNKRA, its counterparts founded at roughly the same time in Europe and Asia but disbanded within several years after resettling their (many more) beneficiaries unlike UNRWA, you might see that Kennedy has a point.
And, unsurprisingly, UNRWA's sorry record is very much the product of a hopelessly exploitative 'movement' that is parasitic not only on 'the world community,' but on the very people it claims to 'represent' while literally stealing from them, brutalizing them, and 'human-shielding' behind them each time they try again to put on a Holocaust 2 or Pogrom 1000. Such people of course lack all empathy too. They are narcissistic sociopaths.
In the end, then, it is hard not to see all of this as profoundly, irredeemably sick. And not only pathologically so, but quite literally murderously and self-destructively so.
Is there a cure? Surely. But my guess is that mainly it's only the younger and future cohorts can be reliably saved en masse. And that means removing them from the 'custody' of their current abusive 'parents' - hamas, the PA, and UNRWA alike.
This is yet one more reason I call on the APA to name and add NIAD to the DSM. In general, one cannot solve a problem until one names it and diagnoses it.
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