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The Media War Against Israel Print E-mail
Written by Victoria Radin   

Propaganda, The Fuel of Fear and Hatred

It has been said that the first casualty of war is Truth.1  That is why it is important for Christians to sort out the facts from the fiction being reported in the news media concerning the wars between Israel and her neighbors, Hezbollah (Lebanon), Hamas (Gaza), and the "Palestinians". In the 2006 "Second Lebanon War", Hezbollah reveled in their self-proclaimed victory over the ‘mighty’, previously undefeated, Israel. However, having suffered severe losses, far in excess of those suffered by Israel, one must ask, “What was their victory?” Hezbollah’s victory was in the fact that they won the media war, having been able to use international news broadcasts as a vehicles of propaganda against the nation of Israel, turning themselves from the aggressors to the victims in the eyes of the world. The ability to manipulate the news media in this way did not happen overnight, but has been practiced methodically over many long years against Israel.

 Their media blitz is confirmed by the fact that the many staged media ‘events’, falsely showing the ‘barbarous’ acts of warfare supposedly perpetrated by Israel against an ‘innocent’ Lebanese civilian population did irreparable damage to Israel’s image worldwide, even after it was proven that many if not most of the incidents were faked or were grossly exaggerated. These same tactics continue to be used by the Palestinians today in their struggle to erase even the memory of Israel from the anals of history. Those in the media who still love the truth, though, touched on the obvious root of this worldwide media fraud:

“Much of the most [inflammatory] media coverage of this war seems to have been either staged or fabricated. The big question is why the Western media would perpetrate such institutionalized mendacity…the big answer is that the Western media transmit the lies of Hezbollah because they want to believe them. And that's because the Big Lie these media tell, and have themselves been told, about Israel and its place in history and in the world today has achieved the status of unchallengeable truth.” 2

It has been reported that in a number of Muslim nations today, Adolph Hitler’s manifesto, Mein Kampf, is a best seller. They have been studying Hitler’s strategies for many years and have thus mastered the art of propaganda, the fuel of fear and hatred. Adolph Hitler, knew the value of propaganda in steering his nation and the nations of the world in the direction of his choosing. Hitler’s chief propagandist, Josef Goebbels said:

"The essence of propaganda consists in winning people over to an idea so sincerely, so vitally, that in the end they succumb to it utterly and can never escape from it." 3

Hitler’s wartime propaganda included the following ‘wisdom’:

“To whom should propaganda be addressed? ... It must be addressed always and solely to the masses. …The receptive ability of the masses is very limited, their intelligence is small, their forgetfulness enormous. Therefore, all propaganda has to limit itself to a very few points and repeat them like slogans until even the very last man is able to understand what you want him to understand.” 4

Hitler believed, like the radical Islamic-fascists of today, that focusing on one major enemy, namely the Jews, could unite his nation. Films, books, newspapers, speeches and rumors were used to demean and stereotype the Jewish people, just as is done in Muslim nations today. At the same time, propaganda was also used to deceive and mislead the outside world.

Author Aaron Delwiche writes, “Propaganda can be as blatant as a swastika or as subtle as a joke.” 5 He points out:
“Propagandists love short-cuts––particularly those which short-circuit rational thought. They encourage this by agitating emotions, by exploiting insecurities, by capitalizing on the ambiguity of language, and by bending the rules of logic. As history shows, they can be quite successful.” 6

Hitler and Stalin, as well as Muslim nations today, have employed such techniques to foster fear and mistrust in the minds of non-Jews by influencing their passions through vivid, emotionally suggestive words and pictures that are distributed to grateful news correspondents across the globe.

The major area of propaganda that has been “repeated like a slogan until even the very last man is able to understand what [the Muslims] want understood” is the revisionist history of the Middle East being espoused by the Palestinians and other Muslims. Contrary to what is being said, it was the State of Israel that was left with only a sliver of land from the original Palestinian Mandate to create a Jewish homeland, not the so-called Palestinians. This obvious fabrication, having been repeated endlessly like a slogan, has now been accepted as unquestionable truth by the Arab Palestinians and, indeed, by much of the world, who are largely ignorant of the actual history of the Middle East. The land captured from the Ottoman Turks during WWI was partitioned into the newly formed Arab/Muslim nations of Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, Iran, and Saudi Arabia. Then, in 1922, when King Abdullah was forced out of Saudi Arabia, England and France portioned off and additional 78% of the Palestinian Mandate intended for the Jews and formed another country – Trans-Jordan, today Jordan.7

Another area of propaganda that has been repeated like a slogan is that the Palestinians have ‘owned’ the land since the seventh century. Joan Peters, a former White House consultant on the Middle East, in her award-winning book, From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine, painstaking researched the history of the Holy Land’s population. She concluded that the Arabs took the Jews’ land rather than the opposite. She found that most of the so-called Palestinians arrived from many other countries within the last 80 years, whereas, Israel has maintained a continual presence in the Land for 3000 years.8  This is confirmed by the fact that there were some 50 different languages spoken among the Arab population in pre-1948 Palestine.

Propagandists also repeat the lie that the Palestinians are only reacting to Israel’s occupation of Palestinian lands after 1967. However, in 1947, before Israel became a State, Arab statesmen declared their resolve to destroy Israel by all possible means. They made public their program for the forcible prevention of the establishment of a Jewish State. From the 1920s through the 1940s9, long before the 1967 war, the Arabs rioted, attacked Jewish settlements, and randomly murdered scores of Palestinian Jews.10 It is clear that the Palestinian Arab objective that was voiced in 1947 has not changed; they are still calling for the total destruction of the State of Israel.

Muslim terrorists take advantage of the fact that the Israelis target only the terrorist perpetrators, taking great care to avoid injury to civilians. Knowing this and the value of media-manipulation, the terrorists often use civilians as shields, being assured that there will be a worldwide outcry when the Israelis even accidentally kill a child or a non-combatant. However, when the Muslim terrorists deliberately and continually target civilian Israeli Jews, it is described in the press as merely ‘tactics of the weak who are utterly frustrated’, calling the terrorists, “freedom fighters”.

To demonstrate how thoroughly the anti-Israel propaganda has permeated the world, one needs only to look at the UN, a fragile, weak union of the 188 member-nations, most having an obvious anti-Israel bias. Of all member countries, only Israel is denied the right to belong to any regional group in order to qualify to be on the UN Security Council. Of its 175 total resolutions, 97 have been against Israel (more than half). In the General Assembly, the cumulative number of votes cast with or for Israel has been 7,938, while against Israel, 55,642.11   While Israel is continually cited for human rights violations in the U.N., no mention is made, nor are resolutions passed against Muslim nations responsible for the torture and martyrdom of literally hundreds of thousands of persecuted souls around the globe.

It is common knowledge today that Muslims (in every country) are taught to HATE from their earliest, most tender years––to hate the Jews first, Christians next, then all Westerners and non-believers of Islam (i.e. Infidels). Even Arabs who call themselves Christians are taught this anti-Christian principle of hate. We cannot be worshiping the same G-d, as some people would have us believe, because our G-d is Love and He says that hatred is equal to murder. Since Christians obviously worship the same G-d as the Jews, it is surprising that any Christian could take the posture of supporting those who fervently hate the followers of the One True G-d.

It is G-d’s command and His wisdom to “pray for the peace of Jerusalem and seek her good” (Psalm 122:6-9), proclaiming, “O L-rd, save Your people, the remnant of Israel!” (Jeremiah 31:7). Taking any other position is taking a stand against the expressed will and purpose of G-d.

“And it shall happen in that day that I will make Jerusalem a very heavy stone for all peoples; all who would heave it away will surely be cut in pieces, though all nations of the earth are gathered against it.” (Zechariah 12:3)

Barukh Ha Shem (Blessed is the Name of the L-rd)

1 U.S. Senator Hiram Johnson, 1917

2 http://www.iris.org.il/blog.html

3 http://www.historylearningsite.co.uk/propaganda_in_nazi_germany.htm

4 http://www.swan.ac.uk/history/staff/pritchard/propaganda.html#War%20Propaganda%20(Extracts)

5 http://www.students.sbc.edu/mckinney03/gmm/propaganda.htm

6Dr. Aaron Delwiche, Propaganda Analysis, Propaganda Critic Web site, School of Communications, Washington University

7 http://christianactionforisrael.org/un/stillbirth.html

8 Israel My Glory magazine, Vol. 61, Number 1, January/February 2003, Who Took Whose Land?, pp13, 41

9Israel My Glory magazine, Vol. 61, Number 1, January/February 2003, The War of Independence, p10, 11

10 Ibid

11http://christianactionforisrael.org/un/stillbirth.html

 
 
 
 
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