Israel must finally wake up and stop letting its enemies win on the propaganda front.
Joseph Goebbels, the Third Reich’s minister of propaganda, was undoubtedly more dangerous to the world and to the Jews than the Führer Adolf Hitler. The reason is that Goebbels knew how to spread lies which would be accepted as facts and how to convince the majority of the Germans of the necessity of their criminal acts in favor of the future of the “thousand-year old Reich.”
There is no doubt that Israel’s enemies have studied Goebbels’ doctrine very well. For decades, they have been spreading lies about the Jewish state and about its allegedly criminal acts, and have slowly managed to convince quite a few Westerners, who in most cases aren’t even aware of the facts.
Unfortunately, Israel failed to realize on time the extent of damage caused by this false propaganda to the state and to its interests, and missed the opportunity to respond aggressively and thwart many attacks. In fact, to this very day Israel’s governments have failed to introduce a clear and efficient plan to ward off initiatives by organizations like BDS, which has been active on campuses in the United States and in other Western countries for a long time now.
Now the Palestinians and their supporters believe they have found a new front, more important and more popular than a boycott on products from Israel – sports. “Let’s make sure that Israel is expelled from the different unions and from the Olympic Committee,” Jibril Rajoub told his people and partners in the struggle. But the first attempt to harm Israel through a suspension from FIFA failed, and Rajoub was forced to drop his proposal and return to Ramallah with his tail between his legs.
Despite this achievement, Israel must finally move to an organized and coordinated counterattack and try to convince the world that the Palestinians’ arguments on most issues, if not on all, are nothing but a blatant lie rooted in Goebbels’ school. Because despite the defeat, there is no doubt that FIFA was just the first attempt, and it’s time for Israel to wake up and stop letting its enemies win on the propaganda front.
@ babushka:
BB, you are totally correct in your short analysis of antisemitism across the ages and around much of the world. The BDS movement is merely antisemitism wearing a tactical cloak of deception.
No campaign of hasbara or any other form of propaganda is likely to prove efficacious in reversing the BDS campaign or any other form of antisemitism. In fact, Israel and the Jewish nation must move beyond mere tactics of defense, which rarely work in halting or otherwise overcoming sustained enemy propaganda, and concentrate instead on strategic build-up of power for the Jewish state and the Jewish nation whose future is in its hands.
Power in this case is directly tied to the necessity of expanding the size of the Jewish state through sustained population settlement and annexation, and the government of Israel must be prepared to demonstrate the capability of its armed forces not only to defeat but to completely destroy and enemy aggregation with threatens the State of Israel. Because, in the end, power means the capability of destroying enemies before they destroy you.
In previous comments, I have cited evidence from the Israel Ministry of the Interior that the Jewish populations of the annexed lands around Jerusalem and of Area C of Shomron and Yehuda, which, under terms of the Oslo Accords are totally under Israel’s control, now exceed 750,000. Assuming a population growth rate of 4 per cent per year — which has been exceeded in many recent years — that Jewish population will double to 1.5 million in only18 years. With a 6 per cent annual growth rate, which in fact could be sustained if the Israeli government made the policies and provided the resources necessary, that Yesha and annexed Jerusalem population of1.5 million Jews could be achieved in only 12 years.
Nor would this move entail the need to permanently add overwhelming numbers of enemy Arabs to the population rolls of the Jewish state. All but a small percentage of the 1.6 or 1.7 million Arabs of Shomron and Yehuda live in 7-8 large cities which make up Area A.
Israel must in fact control and largely settle all the land west of the Jordan River and the Arava Valley south of the Dead Sea, for obvious and permanent purposes of national state defense — a fact that is obvious to anyone who understands that the conflict of the Jewish state with the Arab and Islamic civilization is more or less permanent, unless and until Islam were to undergo some sort of fundamental reformation which would change Islam into some sort of Sufism that can tolerate other civilizations and their belief systems.
But beyond that, purposeful population settlement and annexation would in fact serve as a permanent example of the kind of power that Israel and the Jewish nation can indeed exercise, showing the world that if anyone within reach of the State of Israel chooses permanent war against the Jewish state and the Jewish nation, the result will be even more territorial expansion of both.
Arnold Harris
Mount Horeb WI
Truth is wonderful, but anti-Semitism is pathological. Believing that telling the truth will offset Jew hatred presupposes that history’s pogroms occurred because Jews were insufficiently candid.
Fight the good verbal fight, but ultimately Jew hatred can be defeated only through physical coercion. The Holocaust did not happen because European Jews failed to present the Gentiles with an eloquently logical rationale for our survival. It happened because we were unarmed.