*Harris Zvi Green
Repeat a lie often enough and it will be believed.
This tactic has always been a key ingredient of the propaganda strategies created by totalitarian regimes to justify their ideologies. Success of this technique is achieved by confining the argument to a few key issues and then repeating them over and over again. It was used to great effect by Josef Goebbels, the Propaganda Minister in Nazi Germany. Communist regimes in the Soviet Union and China also used this technique extensively to delegitimize the opposition to their regimes.
So why do they do what they do? They do it to demonize and delegitimize the target group so as to justify using the most outrageous and inhumane methods to completely eliminate the target group.
After failing to destroy Israel on the battlefield, the Arab world has resorted to using the technique of repeating lies with unrelenting intensity to demonize and delegitimize Israel thereby challenging her right to exist as the national state of the Jewish people. Instead of fulfilling their roles as the watchdogs and protectors of national and human rights, many governments and international agencies fanned by the media have become accessories to this crime. Shoddy reporting standards, the obsessional quest for sensationalist headlines coupled with ignorance of documented history have contributed to an erosion of facts that only a few decades ago were considered indisputable.
Social media platforms enable the effective dissemination of these lies within seconds. The public domain is flooded with them and hundreds of millions of uneducated people are subjected to relentless indoctrination and brainwashing. They call it Electronic Intifada. And so the lies are believed and become gospel despite the historical evidence to the contrary.
But repeating a lie often enough doesn’t make it the truth.
Some examples. The apartheid myth, the equating of Zionism with colonialism, the denial of the rights of the Jewish people to their historical homeland and the claim that the State of Israel was created by the international community at the expense of an indigenous Palestinian population out of a feeling of guilt for the Holocaust.
Having grown up in South Africa at the height of the apartheid regime, I can assure my readers that none of the evils of South African apartheid exist in Israel. Such apartheid does, however, exist in the Arab world and, more specifically, in the Palestinian Authority.
Palestinian President, Mahmoud Abbas, is on record as saying that the future Palestinian State will be free of Jews. Furthermore, the Palestinian Authority considers the sale of land by Palestinians to Jews as treason. If they make it to court before being lynched, those defying this ruling can be sentenced to death. This puts the old South African Group Areas Act in the shade.
Arab countries have systematically been discriminating against and persecuting their Christian minorities. The Christian population in the Palestinian controlled areas has dropped to 1% of the population. In Bethlehem alone, over the past 20 years, the Christian population slumped from 20,000 to 7,500. At the beginning of the 20th century, Christians made up 20% of the population of the Middle East. Today they comprise a meagre 4%. Over the past few years, 100,000 Christians in Arab countries have been killed annually. In Iraq alone, more than 77% of the Christians have fled since the year 2000, in addition to the thousands killed and expelled. Two million Christians lived in Syria. Today, they are less than 250,000.
Never mind the discrimination. This is ethnic cleansing and genocide but neither the relevant UN agencies nor the media make a big deal of it. Why? Probably because it doesn’t sell newspapers.
Racism is fundamental to classical Arab ideology. It claims the French and Russian revolutions, colonialism and both world wars were engineered as Jewish Zionist conspiracies. It also claims the Freemasons and Rotary clubs are Zionist fronts.
As a Jew, I am denied entry to almost every Arab country. Is this not apartheid?
To call Israel an apartheid state is as disrespectful to those who suffered the dehumanizing horrors of apartheid as it is to those who built and maintain the only democracy in the Middle East. Black South Africans should be concerned by the hi-jacking of the horrors of apartheid by the Arab world to fuel their racist propaganda machine.
The claim that the State of Israel was created by the international community at the expense of an indigenous Palestinian population out of a feeling of guilt for the Holocaust is historically incorrect.
For centuries, the entire Middle East was part of the Ottoman Empire. During this time, none of the Arab states in the area or Israel existed as sovereign states. The Balfour Declaration made in 1917, stated that the British government, who at that time was responsible for the interim administration of these areas, viewed with favor the establishment of a national homeland for the Jewish people.
Since the exile of Jews from the Land of Israel some 2,000 years ago, there has always been a Jewish presence in the Land of Israel. Jewish immigration accelerated in the early 1880s and was followed by further waves of Jewish immigration. Were it not for the ban on Jewish immigration to the Land of Israel imposed by the British to appease the Arabs in the period leading up to and during World War II, the Jewish population in 1947 in this area would have been considerably greater than it was.
The Bible is certainly the most universally accepted historical document. Both the Old and New Testaments state repeatedly that the Land of Israel was promised by God to the Jewish people some 4,000 years ago. King David established Jerusalem as the capital of Israel 3,000 years ago. William Albright, an archaeologist of international repute wrote “there can be no doubt that archaeology has confirmed the substantial historicity of Old Testament tradition.”
The lies being disseminated by the Arab propaganda machine attempt to deny the historical rights of the Jewish people to the Land of Israel. But this is the land where our patriarchs, Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, lived and interacted with the same God we worship today. This is where they are buried. This is where the visions of our Prophets, Isaiah, Jeremiah and Ezekiel were inspired. This is where we built our Temples. This is where our language was born. This land and its seasons have been sourced in our century-old prayers long before the advent of Islam. To deny this is contrary to the fundamentals of Judeo-Christian tradition.
Sadly these facts don’t hold water with the spin doctors of the Arab world and their accomplices. They’ve declared a Jihad on the history books and they’re taking a major part of the disinterested and apathetic masses with them.
They may be kidding you but they’re certainly not kidding me.
*Harris Zvi Green – Born and educated in Cape Town, South Africa, Harris Green graduated with a Bachelor of Commerce degree from the University of Cape Town (UCT) in 1968. He served as the Chairman of the Students Jewish Association (SJA) and was an active member of the National Union of South African Students (NUSAS) and an outspoken critic of apartheid. Shortly after completing his studies, Harris immigrated to Israel and pursued a career as a senior financial executive at various Israeli hi-tech companies. These included multi-national medical device and communications companies. Most recently, he worked as an independent consultant to a number of start-up companies preparing them for venture funding and co-operative alliances with international companies. Harris’ interests include sport and international affairs. He is a prolific writer. His articles have been published as op-eds in various newspapers and blogs.
