Propaganda Puts Us All on the Front Lines | The American Spectator

As Victor Davis Hanson recently pointed out again in a recent podcast, the war in Vietnam was lost in the politics in America, not on the battlefields of Vietnam. Despite decades of evidence that Communist victory results in death, immiseration, and the forced flight of millions, Americans had wide-spread optimism that a new age of democracy and peace would dawn, the impatiently awaited Aquarian Age. 

The waves of boat people who chose to throw themselves on the mercy of the seas rather than stay under their new overlords changed my own mind about the war that I had opposed. 

Those who, like the Communists, worship at the altar of power, learned a different lesson: in a conflict with Western democracy, a superior military can be overcome by astute manipulation of the democratic politics.

The Vietnam War was also the time when what we now call the Palestinian cause was adopted by the Soviets as their own. We exited the Vietnam War into the chaos of the energy crisis and oil boycott, the rough wake of the Yom Kippur War. This was the beginning of the spawning of the Left’s OmniCause—all of their disparate issues rolled into one juggernaut designed to roll over and crush any discussion or debate on the whole agenda.

Most of those Arab states that took part in the oil embargo are no longer supporting the goal of pushing the Jews into the sea. A growing number have made peace with Israel or are planning it, and feel free to explore the merits of peaceful, even cooperative, relations.

However, among those who remain enamored with the idol violent power — Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, et al, have upped their proficiency in the art of manipulating the democracies to their advantage. Over the years of the Hamas regime, every Israeli response to their endless attacks has resulted in the emission of a frothy bilge of false data, manipulated and mislabeled photos, and major staged melodramas, all aimed at dominating Western media. And as the devotees of OmniCause have a hand on the controls of major swaths of Western culture, the fabrications are given all the sophisticated packaging that modern media are capable of. They sell these repackaged crude lies as debate-ending Powerful Truths.

One typical example is from a familiar delinquent, the NY Times. A steady retailer of the lies of the Hamas rump regime, they within the week featured a photo of a small boy whose misshapen body spoke unmistakably of severe ill-health. It was meant to awaken disgust and anger for what the article portrayed as the cause of this boy’s misery — Israel’s supposed starvation of the Gazan populace. Revulsion is pay dirt for propagandists. Overwhelmed by disgust, the rational mind turns it all over to emotion, the goal of all hucksters, whether of used cars or of a repackaged terrorist regime desperately trying to make its way to a future of endless October 7’s. Legacy media runs cover, keeping that goal out of sight until the disgust is so great that extermination will be embraced as the only fit response. 

The particular photo at the head of the Times article was speedily revealed as anything but shut-up proof of Israeli-run starvation. Aside from the fact that the family members shown in the photo showed no signs of starvation, it turns out the child was dealing with a tragic disease, information easily available for those vaguely interested, if not in the whole truth, at least of maintaining the appearance of objectivity. This was so egregious that it forced the Times to make a public retraction, albeit late and minimalist. Sadly, it gives no evidence of rethinking of the Times’ long-established role as an eager purveyor of the lies of the Destroy Israel front.

 Brian Flood of Fox News wrote of the Times’ photo:

The photo’s caption noted the boy was “born healthy,” and the accompanying story about the hunger crisis in Gaza reaching “new and astonishing levels of desperation” focused on Palestinians dying from starvation. Among them was Mohammed Zakaria al-Mutawaq, an 18-month-old whose father was “killed last October when he went out to seek food,” according to the Times.

Social media users quickly noticed that Mohammed was the same boy who had previously been featured by other media outlets because he was living in Gaza with a significant preexisting disorder, a fact that was not mentioned in the Times’ viral front-page story.

After ignoring requests for comment for multiple days, the Times finally addressed the major omission on Tuesday with an editors’ note.

Eitan Fischberger, reporting in the Wall Street Journal July 31, brings all the evidence one needs to know that this is simply the Times’ MO. He writes of another child used as a poster boy for the starvation blood libel, Osama al-Raqab. When the unit of the IDF that coordinates humanitarian aid tried to set the record straight, Fischberger tells us of the response:

“Dr. Muneer Alboursh, director of the Hamas-run Gaza Ministry of Health, who tweeted that Israel was trying to ‘mislead public opinion by claiming that he was suffering from other illnesses, not hunger’ and that ‘what is happening is not propaganda, but a real famine.’

Yet according to Cogat [the humanitarian aid group in the IDF] — and previously confirmed by the boy’s mother to the Associated Press — Osama actually suffers from cystic fibrosis. On June 12, Israel coordinated his evacuation to Italy, along with his mother and brother, so he could receive medical treatment. “Tragic images rightfully stir strong emotions,” the Cogat post said. “But when they’re misused to fuel hatred and lies, they do more harm than good.”

An understatement. For this is indeed today’s version of the medieval blood libel. First employed in England, the blood libel metastasized throughout Europe, a case even being tried in czarist Russia shortly before World War I. The finding (or planting) of a dead Christian child led to blaming the Jews for executing the child to drain his blood to use as the secret sauce in the unleavened bread of the Passover matza. Result: revulsion and then violence.

There was never evidence for this. Nor did it ever make any difference that the Passover matza contains only flour and water and that consumption of any blood, of any animal let alone of a human, is forbidden by Scripture.

But no one was on a search for truth. What the retailers of blood libel wanted was a result. The terrible charge led to executions, expulsions, and mass murder. The logic of this libel led to and justified a ridding of all Jews, which in England took place one hundred years later, the first country in the Middle Ages to expel its Jews. 

It was soon followed by many others. And it did not end with the Middle Ages. Czarist Russia, home of many blood libels, had a plan under Alexander III called the One-third, One-third, One-third Plan — through all the means available to the autocracy, to make life so miserable for Russia’s Jews that one-third would emigrate, one-third would convert, and one-third would starve. (Only the first goal was accomplished — in Alexander’s reign began the massive emigration to America of the forebears of the great majority of today’s American Jewish community.)

And Nazi Germany raised the bar to its greatest height.

But though the Nazi realm was crushed, its heirs live on and carry forward its methods and aims.

The goal of Hamas and all other groups in the orbit of Iran’s mullahs is the same — ridding the land of Israel — and preferably all lands — of their Jews. And they know they will be aided by the venal, lazy, or merely ignorant ranks of the OmniCause in the West.

With this sordid blood-libel reality, Hamas and the OmniCause do what has worked so well for them — it projects its own offenses onto the victims. The ones they have spent their lives attempting to drive out or murder — they are the ones guilty of genocide. 

The blood libelers expect that polite, coddled, and lazy Westerners do not have the stomach or the will to fight even a propaganda war. And they have been largely correct — they have been winning the war by default.

Expecting more of the same, a tsunami of propaganda still rolls out from OmniCause’s evangelists over the West. Every day the absurd casualty figures offered by the Gaza Ministry of Health are parroted by legacy American media as if they were the product of sound methodology and judicious review. University professors embrace conformance to the latest catechism of the OmniCause. Gone are the Socratic method, inductive reasoning, and empiricism. The goal: inducting a generation of college students into cultural totalitarianism. The method: whatever lie is most efficacious.

In this war on the West and all it stands for, we are all on the front lines. Our response must be adequate for the enormity of the stakes. As ever, those who stand against the ideals of democracy and of the best of the heritage of Athens and Jerusalem believe that our self-effacement before a higher truth is an exploitable weakness. Those who do not realize yet the evil of those who hope to lead us into civilizational suicide are not yet adequate to the severity of the challenge.

But we still have our memory and the examples it preserves of those who roused our forebears to victory against the avatars of violence and death in their days. When a previous generation in the West was nearly lulled to sleep by their contemporaries’ propaganda, some had the courage to buck the tide. They found the voice to rouse civilization to the fight that could no longer be ducked if it would survive. And the West learned from them how to wake up their own lion’s heart, and despite terrible losses, they at last obliterated Hitler’s nightmare Reich. 

At a dark moment, March of 1941, when Britain and its Dominions alone still defied Hitler, Australia’s prime minister, Robert Menzies, visited Winston Churchill to talk over issues of the war. Menzies kept a diary, and he reported what he saw and felt there with Churchill. 

Menzies wrote of the problem posed by Socrates against the Sophists. Arguing for a point one already has accepted as a premise does not lead to the discovery pf truth. Such talk will only yield truth accidentally, for its goal is not finding truth at all — why look for it if one has it?

But confronted with Hitler, no conversation could yield truth. It is not time to play Hamlet. Like the prince, one would only find that by following abstractions, the chance to bring about a good outcome would be lost. In a civilization’s struggle for life, it is resolve and courage that are the keys. 

In Menzies own reflection in his diary:

Reasoning to a pre-determined point is mere advocacy, but it becomes something much better when the conclusion is that you are going to win a war and that you’re damned if anything will stand in your way.

Churchill’s course is set. There is no defeat in his heart.

If we follow this example in the fight with today’s Hitlerians, we may find like Churchill that we are in the midst of something extraordinary. As Churchill put it to Menzies during that visit:

Why do people regard a period like this as “years lost out of our lives” when beyond question it is the most interesting period of them? Why do we regard history as of the past and forget we are making it?

Good questions. We have the heart and the memory to answer them well. And not to stop until we have expunged hate’s bloody stain. 

READ MORE from Shmuel Klatzkin:

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