Part 1.
A home is demolished, a protester
dies and gunships hover overhead as placard waving innocents face off an Israeli
juggernaut. A picture really is worth a thousand words. Its accuracy is of no consequence. Winston Churchill made it simple for us when
he said “A lie gets halfway around the world before the truth has a chance to
put its pants on”.
After the 6-Day War of 1967 David
and Goliath magically reversed their roles. I say ‘magically’ because the
status quo remained unaltered while slowly and methodically only the perception
radically changed. Success and a fundamental inability to appreciate the threat
posed by a public opinion war camouflaged the corrosive effect that mounting
criticism had on Israel and
by extension, Israel’s
supporters. That Israel became
an excuse for resurgent antisemitism is not relevant to renewed public prejudice.
It was not enough to change
Israelis into a nation of Goliaths. In order to humiliate supporters and
Israelis alike; in order to foreclose debate, the Israeli became the
‘Jew.’ Israel encouraged it, they were
wrong to do so. It made it easier to
isolate them and to polarise the Diaspora.
Israel
then became the Zionist entity and because the focus in Israel had shifted from the pioneer
era to economic expansion, defending Zionism (as a unifying force for social
cohesion) was forgotten in the scramble for wealth. Prosperity was not a unique Israeli goal. Israel joined a
Western cultural battleground. Maybe
the only difference was that Israel
had failed first to resolve its national identity or the strategic threat to
its national security.
To conflate Jew, Zionist and
Israeli into one monolithic virus has made the task of opposing Israel even easier,
particularly if you are Jewish. An
identity that is built on the negation of a part of that identity demonstrates
both commitment and 'sacrifice'. To be a
vociferous and Jewish Uncle Tom legitimises prejudice.
Zionism, like democracy is always
easy to blemish because unlike totalitarian ideologies it is easily
misunderstood. In its simplest form
Zionism is the right of Jews to self-determination in their own homeland. But to others, successfully labelling a
people with a word they are not interested in understanding makes easy work of shifting
the meaning from a blessing to a curse. This is how from bathing in our
virtuous birth our public perception changed and we returned to a much more
familiar, sinister historical portrayal as devil with horns.
That we permitted our enemies to
dominate the media is our crime. That we continue to allow the pro-Palestinian,
Arabist version of past and present history to be unchallenged is to blithely march
towards extinction. The irony is that if
we successfully challenge our enemy they will accuse us of controlling not just
the media but everything else; if we fail to challenge them we are still accused
of controlling society. This is the classic fascist tactic that ensures we are
damned with either course of action. That is their genius. Do you have any suggestions how we can fight
them?
There is more than one type of
fear. We are frightened to shout out
loud our history of physical loss and we are reluctant to demand an end to
prejudice even as it infests our society. Rarely are our enemy forced to defend their
tactics or their deceit. The intelligent bigot attempts to soothe our fears
while we accept that the racist will despise us and work to undermine us
because they are the living proof of our multicultural virility.
What we should be doing is
attacking every ‘misinterpreted’ diatribe our enemies make. The Palestinian
Spokeswoman, Hanan Ashwari gave us a 2013 Passover gift when she accused us of
blood libel. It is a timely reminder
that co-existence is not part of the deal that the Arab world desires. Every lie is one more stone thrown at our
window, one more drop of poison in our well. We should neither forgive nor
forget State sanctioned libels because they create a legacy that crosses the
generations.
The only way to stop this
debilitating struggle is to assault the senses as they have done and to shame
the Left and their Liberal allies for their complicity in this antisemitic
conspiracy.
Part 2.
Fact 1. The Arab world, and that includes the Palestinians, have
persecuted Jew and non-Jew alike since Muhammad appeared just 1,400 years ago.
Fact 2. The Arab world and that includes the Palestinians commit
cultural genocide against us. They steal
our past, they violate our present and there is no reason to believe they do
not intend to extinguish our future. A simple example is the claim that the
Jewish Jesus was a Palestinian (Muslim); another, is that having ethnically
cleansed East Jerusalem of its Jews they now state at every opportunity that
‘the Jews’ are trying to ‘Judaize’ Jerusalem.
This is a term that was used by the Nazis. The people that have adopted this epithet
have no shame.
Fact 3. The Arab world and that includes the Palestinians never
apologise for their lies. In fact, with the complicity of the international
media (and the United Nations) they have made a virtue of deception and an
ethic of dishonesty. If no shame attaches to the most heinous of crimes then dishonour
becomes something with an entirely non-Western meaning.
Here are the failures of Western understanding
and of Jewish propaganda (if we may use such a term):
We cannot appreciate that a lie
is a relative term and that to repudiate deception is to dishonour honour. An Arab who kills a female child for being
raped has committed the murder of a child in our Western eyes only.
We have accepted despotism as
part of our democratic fabric even as it contaminates our democratic political
narrative and pollutes our education system. When values are relative to the
place of ones birth or ideology then they lose their universal significance and
this undermines the basis for our legal system.
To defeat an enemy you must first
understand their tactics and second (when possible) use them as they have. There can be no peace while the Western press
is dominated by a pro-Palestinian narrative because it encourages Arab and
therefore Palestinian lies.
We, of all people should
remember that the greater the lie the easier it becomes for the next generation
of fascism's foot soldiers and their intellectual betters (on the extreme Right
as well as the Left) to erase our right to life.
It is our biggest shortcoming, and that is propaganda. We don't allow ourselves to stoop to their level, we don't use our victims of terror to gain world sympathy, rather, the entire nation weeps silently but together, and very often, our overzealous democracy shoots us in the proverbial foot. And that's the nature of this country! What can you do? It's frustrating, but the truth.
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