The art of lying about Israel
Even debunked slander leaves a stainIn the first quarter of the last century, a soon-to-be-influential communications strategist wrote that “the grossly impudent lie always leaves traces behind it, even after it has been nailed down, a fact that all expert liars in this world and all who conspire together in the art of lying know only too well, and for this reason they stop at nothing to achieve this end.”
For centuries, Jews have been the targets of such lies. I’ll mention just three.
Beginning in the 12th century, Jews were accused of kidnapping and killing Christian children to use their blood to make matzo for Passover.
During the plague of the 14th century, Jews were accused of poisoning wells and rivers.
In the early 20th century, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” fabricated by the Russian secret police, claimed Jews were secretly plotting world domination.
These lies sparked massacres, pogroms and, even after they were debunked, enduring Jew hatred.
Today, one tiny nation-state has a Jewish majority. I’ll mention just three lies now being told about Israel.
Despite the incontrovertible fact that the roughly 2 million Arab citizens of Israel enjoy freedoms and rights unavailable to Arab citizens of Arab countries, Israel is slandered as an apartheid state.
Despite the incontrovertible fact that no nation in history has ever supplied so much food to an enemy population during wartime, a war initiated by Hamas, the Israelis are accused of engineering famine in the Gaza Strip.
Despite the incontrovertible fact that the population of Gaza is tenfold what it was in 1948, Israelis are accused of committing genocide. “Genocide,” a word coined in the early 1940s by Raphael Lemkin, a Polish Jewish lawyer, implies the intentional and systematic destruction of a “genos” — a race, tribe or people.
He obviously had in mind what the Nazis were doing to the Jews of Europe.
Hamas, in its charter, vows: “Israel will exist until Islam will obliterate it.”
Accusing Israelis of genocide is a particular kind of lie known as an “inversion.” Hamas and its supporters accuse Israelis of the crime they have long pledged to commit and were committing on Oct. 7, 2023. They know that vilifying the victim as the victimizer will invariably deceive sizable audiences.
NPR, the BBC, CNN, Sky News, The Guardian and Piers Morgan are among the media outlets that have participated in this inversion by citing the International Association of Genocide Scholars and its “resolution,” passed on Aug. 31, that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
As they could easily have discovered, the International Association of Genocide Scholars is a bogus organization.
It conducts no research. It produces no journals or original reports. Salo Aizenberg, a board member of HonestReporting, revealed that, until last week, anyone, using any name, could become a member of the association for just a $30 contribution.