Lies, damn lies and Haaretz

"As it goes with Israel, so it will go with all of us."

Photo by Raimond Klavins on Unsplash

Last night I received an excellence piece on the Israel-Palestine conflict written by my friend, Anonymed. You can read his thoughtful take on the conflagration below.

While I have moved the bulk of my writing on the Israel-Palestine conflict over to my personal Substack, The Turn, I still feel it is of consequential importance to deliver the type of Middle East analysis Anonymed has provided. Canadians are typically not up to speed on the finer details. This means that the relentless propaganda generated and disseminated by Hamas and other Islamic terror groups, is not immediately recognized and dismissed, as it should be.

Middle East Propaganda is tricky. It is emotionally manipulative to the extreme. It has the power to shut down our critical faculties, to inspire the disgust that all good humans feel when confronted with what we perceive as violent injustice, or the killing of innocent lives. But the perception, the facts, indeed the nature of the situation, has been vastly distorted. What is worse, legions of Westerners have unhesitatingly taken to the streets, credulous of antisemitic terroristic hate propaganda, and in a bizarre and mis-guided effort, believe they are on the right side of history as they promote what they feel is justice and peace.

But they are wrong. Pro-Hamas supporters have set up their protests in proximity to residential Jewish areas in Toronto, Canada. Even though this sort of targeting of Jews, who may or may not be supporters of Israel, was in past generations easily seen as hate motivated, antisemitic, and un-Canadian, the current crop of mostly Islamists, activists and students do not seem at all to consider the implications of their actions. Imagine a Jewish family peacefully living in a Jewish neighborhood. They have friends and family members in Israel who were killed or captured by Hamas on October. 7th. They are traumatized and in deep mourning. And now they have a mob of terrorist supporters outside their home chanting “from the river to the sea,” and calling for intifada against the Jews as the “only solution.” Chilling. Disgusting. Shameful.

Therefore, becuase of the boundless ignorance of Canadians concerning all things Israel (this of course does not extend to regular Woke Watch Canada readers), I will continue to post the truth about the conflict in these pages. For new readers, or anyone interested in going further down the Israel-Palestine rabbit hole, please consider taking in my eleven thousand word deep dive analysis called, The Case for Israel.

Lies, damn lies and Haaretz

By Anonymed (an anonymous Canadian Doctor)

It ought to be clear by now that Israel’s enemies lie as a matter of course. In the Muslim world in particular, those for whom conspiracy is an everyday currency now unironically present themselves as the last defenders of scrupulousness against a wave of “Zionist” lies. 

The neologism “gaslighting” is far too trivializing (and contemporary) for the chutzpah on display. Perhaps “taqiyya” or “kitman” is closer to the mark, but this would mean ascribing a kind of strategic intelligence that I’m not prepared to concede. Regardless, the bile coming out of the region (and at rallies across the West) is a putrid combination of Holocaust denial and rank blood libel.

It’s an open question for me whether the glee with which western media, academia and NGOs parrot the talking points of an openly genocidal terror group is a bug or a feature, but for the Muslim world, this kind of fatuousness is how the sausage is made. 

Some of this is surely ignorance. Many will recall the findings from the United Nations’ 2002 Arab Human Development Report, which included the devastating assertion that more books are translated by Spain into Spanish in a single year than the Arab world has translated into Arabic since the ninth century. While there are undoubtedly bright and capable individuals all over the Muslim world, figures like this bely a profound civilizational incuriosity. However, much of this behaviour hints at something else. Something instinctive - a predictable product of a culture (and perhaps a religion) that still lives by Machiavellian principles, and one for whom victory, in this life and the next, is thought to be preordained. This goes a long way to explaining how wealthy Muslims educated at the London School of Economics (for example) still talk and think in the ethical terms of the Seventh Century and why one’s odds of becoming a suicide bomber positively correlate with education and socioeconomic status.

It’s a loaded term, but the “misinformation” permeating this conflict makes the COVID-BLM era look like a good faith daily briefing. Our societies have become used to an endless weaponization of words whose meanings no longer hold any water - racism, hate, white supremacy, woman. But this kind of Motte-and-bailey has been taken to new heights in the current conflict. Reality is quite literally being flipped on its head; the contradictions on offer sufficient to boggle any mind naive enough to try to sort them out: like 9/11 before it, the October 7 massacre was simultaneously celebrated as a great victory for the Arab and Muslim world and dismissed as a false flag operation to justify domination of the meek and victimized followers of Muhammad; Israel is routinely condemned for committing a genocide (including before the current war) in Gaza despite the population in the enclave growing at the same rate as that of Israel proper; the wanton slaughter of innocents is justified as a response to occupation even though the Gaza Strip was evacuated in 2005 (and would have been left unblockaded were it not for the rise of Hamas); and Israelis are accused of devaluing Palestinian lives while Hamas demands three Palestinian prisoners be released for every innocent hostage it holds. 

I used to spend a lot of time parsing the arguments of “both sides” of this conflict. There is always a grain of truth to any grievance, and I try to give each side their due. The problem with doing so in this case, however (as the last two months have made crystal clear), is that one side is playing a different game. Israel is not above pushing its narrative or its own kind of propaganda, but, like other countries with a free press and a separation of powers, blatant lying is difficult and subject to diminishing returns. As with other western countries, at its best Israel holds itself accountable for its own mistakes. The Palestinians and their supporters, however, are rarely acting in anything like good faith. Indeed, the very concept of good faith appears foreign to them. The idea that one might hamper one’s own chances of doing so, by adhering to childish notions of scrupulousness, is alien to them. The goal is to win. The ends justify the reams (of rockets).

Many will balk at the suggestion that this is a religious war. We have been told since its inception that this is a struggle between a nation and a would-be one - a problem of dividing one land between two peoples. But few in the western public appear to understand just how religious the Muslim world truly is. They are living in a different time. Those of us of a secular bent are accustomed to looking down on hyper-religious subgroups in our societies with a combination of pity and fear - they are an anachronistic anomaly, a relic of a delusional past. In the Muslim world that past is ever-present. In the United States, where Christianity has more purchase than elsewhere in the West, secular elites routinely sound off about the encroachment of fascism from the evangelical right. I’m an atheist by any definition and I share some of this concern, but anyone fretting about the otherworldly motivations of the religious right while simultaneously ascribing material motivations to the likes of the Palestinians are either lying or have never spent time in the Muslim world. As far as I can tell (and multiple polls would concur), the most devout Christians in the West are about as religious as the average Muslim. To say this is an impediment to intercultural flourishing is a special kind of understatement.

All that to say, Islamic supremacism runs right through this conflict. It explains the fanatical and intractable hatred for the Jewish state, as well as the complete lack of care about the means by which this conflict is fought. It explains the suicide terrorism, the willingness to sacrifice martyrs by the thousands, the level of depravity and cruelty with which Jews are treated, and, I think just as consequentially, the willingness to lie about the impetus for all of the above. It’s not an accident that the Palestinians and their allies, by and large, do not seem to care one iota about objective truth. If they did, they would recognize that, while they have undoubtedly suffered, they are not the (only) victims here. To the contrary, more often than not, they have been the aggressors. They, or at least their “side”, has attacked Israel over and over with genocidal intentions, and lost. In the Yom Kippur War of 1973 (to pick just one of the Palestinian/Arab wars of extermination), Egypt, Syria, and fighters from a dozen other nations surprised Israel with an unprovoked attack that put the Jewish state on its heels. Not since the 1948 War of Independence had the future of Jewish state been so precarious. Even the United States only agreed to resupply Israel after specific conditions were agreed to. However, after being momentarily blindsided, Israel proceeded to hand the aggressors their Jew-hating hind parts (yet again). By any standard, the story was one of overwhelming Israeli resilience and breathtaking competence (yet again). But how is this conflict viewed in Egypt, do you think? To ask the question is to answer it. It is celebrated with a national holiday glorifying their “victory.” To put this in perspective, this is the equivalent of me sucker-punching someone in the face, getting completely beaten up in response, and then celebrating my achievement every year for the rest of time. It’s madness.

The behaviour of Israel’s enemies is a window into a different psyche. Only a supremacist culture, completely impervious to self-reflection or the lessons of history, would expect to be rewarded for repeatedly failing to commit the genocide they so crave. To apply western standards of discourse and intellectual honesty to this situation is a recipe for insanity. When it comes to Israel, everyone lies about everything. There are lies about ancient history, about recent history, about comparative history, and about religious history. Defeat is framed as victory, aggressor is recast as victim, and, as always, the Jews are slandered by their current enemies with the labels of their past tormentors - the Israelis are the new “Nazis”, the genociders, the ones running a concentration camp. These types of lies are disgusting but they are regular fare in the Jew-hating Middle East. But there is another type of lie that is perhaps more pernicious - those that originate with Israelis themselves. They come from a source that is all but foreign to Israel’s enemies - self criticism. 

The late Daniel Patrick Moynihan was right to observe that reports of human rights abuses perpetrated by a state are always inversely proportional to their actual occurrence. Because Israel has a raucous free press, even in wartime, it faces substantial criticism - some justified, some unhinged, some frankly seditious - from within. Even in (relative) peacetime and with (marginally) less duplicitous enemies, homegrown slander can be a big problem. For example, the Chinese and the Russians have made much hay out of western societies’ self denunciations vis-a-vis racism. Who are they to criticize the Chinese treatment of Uyghur Muslims when American cops are indiscriminately murdering black citizens in the street? Canada’s enemies, too, must wonder how they got so lucky whenever our insipid prime minister denounces his own country for perpetrating an “ongoing genocide” against its Indigenous citizens. Again, who are we to talk if we’re overseeing such crimes? The difference for Israel, as October 7 emphasized, is that its so-called decolonization movement wants something more than a land acknowledgement and a few six-figure DEI contracts.

Which brings me to Haaretz. The well-known far-left rag was my first exposure to Israeli media, (which is to say, I first learned about Israel from people who detest it). The paper is something akin to the Toronto Star or, in the United States, perhaps The Nation. It remains attached to reality, but, as with any rope fraying under tension, the threads become fewer with each passing minute. It is the place you will find hysterical claims about the fascism of the very society which tolerates their borderline sedition. Such publications are an inevitable byproduct of a society with a free press and I would defend against any censor their right to publish whatever gibberish they wish. But they’re destructive even at the best of times. In times of war, when the future existence of the state is on the line - their rhetoric is borderline suicidal.

The most egregious lies are the ones rooted in truth, and in a region so comfortable with the malicious distortion of reality, it has been Israel’s homegrown nihilists who have arguably done the most damage to her cause. The most pernicious lie since the October 7 massacre is that it was in fact the Israeli army, and not Hamas, that was responsible for the majority of casualties on that fateful day. Even before Hamas terrorists had finished dragging Holocaust survivors across the border into Gaza, the world’s antisemites were already screaming “false flag” and blaming the Jews for their own slaughter. Hamas was simply conducting a “military operation” and wanted a few hostages to exchange for its own imprisoned innocents. Civilian deaths were caused by Israeli gunships adhering to the army’s “Hannibal doctrine.” Anyone killed by Hamas was merely caught in the crossfire. Israeli claims of mass butchery and rape were fabricated. The video and audio evidence was doctored. The testimony of captured Hamas operatives coerced. 

This grotesque narrative was already being spun by jihadis and their useful idiots before the bodies were counted. But then, they were given a gift, courtesy of the ever-disloyal Haaretz. The paper published an analysis of the massacre at the Nova music festival which claimed that, indeed, some of the party-goers were likely killed by Israeli friendly fire as the IDF attempted to thwart the terrorist incursion. Now, this is very likely true. No doubt while fighting to repel a platoon-sized invasion of religious fanatics some number of Israelis were killed in the crossfire, including by Israeli weapons. But while it’s true that any reporting of any nuance will be used by Israel’s enemies to discredit it in the most heinous ways (a recent lawsuit launched by survivors of Nova against the IDF for failing to help them in time was recast as Israeli civilians suing because they were murdered by their own soldiers), outlets like Haaretz use “exposes” like this to bolster their leftist anti-regime credentials. Claims are left hanging, without context, just waiting to be plucked by the members of the Mein Kampf book club. It wouldn’t change the nature of Israel’s detractors, but if Haaretz could very easily have added the context that of course any friendly fire was an accident and, as Alan Dershowitz constantly reminds viewers, any hostage killed in an attempt to rescue hostages is the fault of the hostage taker, not the rescuer responding to an impossible situation. That Haaretz conveniently and consistently fails to do this makes them perhaps the most dangerous of liars. They are trumpeted as an inner-sanctum source, unearthing the true machinations of the evil Israelis. As a result, they become a major component of what amounts to a global blood libel against the Jewish state.

Times are tough (and other platitudes), but it gives me some consolation that many appear to be waking up to this layer cake of lies, and have begun to draw the only conclusion one can: the enemies of civilization lie about everything without compunction. It’s always worse when it comes to the Jews, but it’s never just about them. Those at the helm of DEI, BLM, “antiracism”, “decolonization” and every other nihilistic grift that has been forced down the gullets of good and decent people are liars, and belong where they stand - firmly with the jihadis and the Islmaists on the other side of a very stark line in the sand. There is no talking to such people. Not because they won’t talk, but because all they do is talk - into the ether and without a care in the world for any truth outside of their tribal motivations. Author Sam Harris has often framed human conflict management as a choice between conversation and violence. When the talking stops, the thinking goes, violence may seem like the only means by which to settle a dispute. This is intuitive enough, but when one side views conversation purely as a means of manipulation, as opposed to a tool of understanding and dispute resolution, then we may have no choice but to save our breath (and sanity) and meet these thugs on the field. Israel has faced this reality for decades. October 7 dispelled any remaining notion that negotiation with those who wish you harm is either possible or desirable. They have decided, once and for all, to end this. The time is nigh when the rest of us will have to make a similar decision - be manipulated or prepare for war. I wish it weren’t the case, but, as Eric Hoffer once wrote, “as it goes with Israel, so it will go with all of us.”

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Thanks for reading. For more from this author, read Harm Seduction: Addiction, abstinence and the misery we enable

Also, for more evidence of the ideological indoctrination in Canadian education, read Yes, schools are indoctrinating kids! And also, Yes, The University is an Indoctrination Camp!

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