The more things change…

By Ted Belman

Arabs play offense while Israelis play defense. Nowhere is this more evident than in the field of propaganda.

But first I want to look at the negotiations. Can anyone tell me what the Israelis are demanding? I’m waiting.

On the other hand, the Arabs are demanding the holy city in Jerusalem, the Green Line as the border and the “right of return”. It seems Israel is always struggling to meet their demands in part, hoping it will suffice. No such 
struggle on the part of the Arabs; just the reiteration of their demands. They have a sense of entitlement, while the Israelis have a sense of indebtedness. That’s no way to win a ball game.

The Arabs always rejected the State of Israel and in the seventies made a conscious decision to convince the world to do likewise. So, they began a propaganda war to demonize and delegitimize Israel and Zionism. The infamous Zionism is Racism resolution at the UN was the first volley.

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David Matas, famed human rights lawyer from Canada, in his excellent book Aftershock, written in 2002, reviewed the attacks on Jews and Israel throughout the world, and asked: How could this happen sixty years after the Holocaust? He answers:<
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“The root cause of the revival of antisemitism is anti-Zionism. Zionism is the expression of the right to self determination of the Jewish people. Anti-Zionism, by definition, denies and rejects this right by denying the right to a state by the Jewish people. Anti-Zionism is a form of racism. It is the specific denial to the Jewish people of the basic right to which all people of the world are entitled.<
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“Israel exists because of the Holocaust, because of anti-Semitism and as a place of refuge for Jews fleeing persecution, for the cultural survival of the Jewish people and their right to self-determination, because of the ties of the Jewish people to the land of Israel, and because of international acceptance and recognition. The logic of anti-Zionism requires attacking each and every one of these reasons for the existence of Israel.”<
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Thus, the Holocaust is denied or trivialized and the creation of Israel is discredited as Western colonialism or a “mistake”, if you will. In addition, the Arabs have created a narrative to compete with the Jewish narrative. The Arabs deny that both the First and Second Temples were located at or near the Temple Mount. In their narrative, they have the roots and rights in and to the land and the Jews have virtually no connection to it. They also deny the peoplehood of the Jews, while at the same time claiming their own and their right to self-determination.<
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Beyond that, Arabs attack the Jews for all the worst crimes known to man. Their charges are not at all based in reality. It doesn’t matter if there is any evidence to support them, nor that they are outrageous or perverse. They will distort facts or fraudulently present “facts” to support their allegations. They also misrepresent the law in order to more easily conclude that Israelis have committed a crime, or better still, a war crime.<
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The list of “crimes” include: perpetrating genocide or another holocaust; ethnic cleansing; the commission of war crimes for disproportionality; intentionally killing innocents; and creating an humanitarian disaster. Anti-Zionists are relentless in stigmatizing Israel as an Apartheid state, so that they can create a worldwide movement to delegitimizeIsrael similar to the movement that undermined the real Apartheid regime, South Africa. And to do this, the reality and the nature of the Apartheid regime are distorted and falsified.<
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Anti-Israel lies also include the following:<
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1. the occupation is illegal;<
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2. the settlements are illegal;<
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3. Judea and Samaria are Palestinian lands;<
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4. Israel is the aggressor ;<
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5. Jerusalem is holy to Islam;<
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6. the Arabs support a two-state solution; and<
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7. the Jews want to take over the world pursuant to the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.<
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David Matas and others have convincingly debunked all of these lies. But the Arabs follow the Nazi Goebbels’ dictum to a ‘T’:<
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“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”

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The phrase “the big lie” was also used in a report prepared during World War II by the United States Office of Strategic Services in describing Hitler’s psychological profile:<
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“His primary rules were: never allow the public to cool off; never admit a fault or wrong; never concede that there may be some good in your enemy; never leave room for alternatives; never accept blame; concentrate on one enemy at a time and blame him for everything that goes wrong; people will believe a big lie sooner than a little one; and if you repeat it frequently enough people will sooner or later believe it.”
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This, too, Arabs follow carefully. Its only natural, since Haj Amin al-Husseini, the father of militant Palestinian Arab nationalism, a previously unknown concept, was a close confidant of Hitler and asked of him to acknowledge the Arab right “to settle the question of Jewish elements in Palestine and other Arab countries in accordance with the national and racial interests of the Arabs, and along the lines similar to those used to solve the Jewish question in Germany and Italy.”<
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Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.<
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What the Israeli government must do is to challenge every one of the anti-Jewish lies at every opportunity. That’s what its PR should be about and not about the babes on the beach. That is playing offense.<
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