Today, social media can invert reality. It's not "a terror group hides behind civilians" but "Israel slaughters children." Hamas has perfected it, and the world swallows it whole.
The first obligation is to win on the battlefield. If you kill enough of the enemy, they will stop fighting. The winner of the military conflict gets to write the history books. Jews should stop worrying about being loved. Just imagine how much worse it would be if Israel lost the war. There would have been no aid if the roles were reversed.
Absolutely 100%. Israel is never allowed to win. As soon as it is attacked the calls for a cease fire begin, which is just a code word for Hamas to begin to restock the tunnels. Israel knows this, but has gone along to get along.
One of the first things Israel needs to do is withdraw from the UN. The United Nations is basically a stand in for Hamas or any other terror group when Israel is concerned. They will rejoin when ALL countries represented agree to Israel's right to exist. The double standards are not only unfair, they have kept the world from understanding the reality of life in the Middle East.
I agree Israel needs to fight to win but it can also begin the war against the rampant cancerous propaganda that has been so effective against it. This includes educating AMERICAN Jews, who too often speak against Israel's best interest. Any references to "apartheid" "colonialism" and "genocide" must be immediately rebuffed by Israel. Call out the networks that maintain the double standard.
Israel can do both - WIN the war and educate the world in a much more aggressive fashion.
It's the evil coalition of social media and indoctrination on the college campuses that is capable of shifting support from the true victim to the fraudulent claims of the perpetrator. That coalition is united in its evil and irrational support of Hamas. That coalition is funded by Qatar and by China.
One of the most important reasons why so many charismatic authoritarian dictators rose to power in the 1930s was the brand-new medium of television—which put their faces constantly in front of millions of people for the first time ever in human history.
But they *didn't* and now we have a whole lot more information on how these things work -- and their subcomponents, from incipience.
Glad some of us are sticking to the truth, close as possible. Decisions must be made based on stark reality, *not* based on trying to live inside the seductive panorama created by our own wishful thinking and encouraged by articulate creators or varied, but closely aligned, versions of more comfortable alternate realities.
We have to stay strong in all of this -- not reactive, which plays right into what the enemy envisions and plans for us -- but steadfast.
That's my best assessment as of the evening of the first night of Chol HaMoed Sukkoth, 5786.
I want to believe the hostages will be home Shabbos B"H. And: While pre- visualizing that and praying for it, I also cannot *know* that until I see it as accomplished fact.
Better pray also that Hamas does NOT, before returning both whatever remaining hostages and the remains of the deceased, butcher whomever has managed to stay alive thus far B"H. That's been a pattern and I pray for these people's safety before whatever plays out in what we're being told is the "endgame" (chess metaphor, here) that's supposed to be completed this Shabbos. Sorry to be so verbose on this point and not phrase it in a more positive way, but it *does* seem dire from here and -- for myself -- it's important to not drop my guard in a rush of relief over what hasn't yet happened.
May this ongoing waking nightmare end, much as possible, G-d willing very soon.
This is a good analysis. Propaganda is a potent weapon. The quality of political and moral leadership shouldn't be discounted, either. Churchill and Roosevelt prevailed in part because their messages overcame Axis propaganda, regardless of the technology involved.
Thanks to Barack Obama's Iran Deal, his insistence that there be 'daylight' between the US and Israel, his history with a pastor whose sermon was "G-d Damn the United States", and his fascination with graduates of the 1960's Weathermen, the stage was set for mass inversion of reality and morality. What we are seeing now is a perfect storm of morally blind leadersihp combined with world-shaking developments in communications technology.
If the press behaved during World War II as they do today, the US Government would have thrown them in jail or put them against a wall and shot them for treason.
I read this excellent article by Lucy when it first came out! Hamas has the greatest propaganda machine in human history with social media. They can make the mainstream press, international organizations and NGOs and millions of gullible people around the globe believe whatever they want. If Hamas said that the sky is purple or the moon was made out of cheese, the leftist and Jihadist morons in the West and CNN would believe every word of it. The Nazis wish they had all the resources Hamas has right at their fingertips. Every country including Israel, does propaganda. But no one does it better than Hamas. They’ve convinced the world Israel is committing a completely made up genocide, that Bibi is the new Hitler, that Israel is the new Nazi Germany, and that the Gazans are purely innocent victims of the big bad white settler colonist Israelis. Can you imagine if Nazi Germany would’ve had social media? Goebbels would’ve had a field day with that. They’d do all they could to make the Allies look like war criminals purposely murdering civilians, cover up the Holocaust, make American and British soldiers look like savage butchers while portraying German soldiers as kind and humane to POWs and the people of the occupied countries, exaggerate how many civilians were killed in Allied air raids and accuse the Americans and the British of committing genocide.
It’s been a deadly weapon for Hamas and their allies and has been used to spread antisemitic conspiracy theories. People are easily convinced sheep, that’s what Hamas’ success proves. Remember the “hot Houthi pirate” trend? That’s another example of the effectiveness of propaganda. What the morons who believe that don’t realize is the Houthis aren’t romantic freedom fighters heroic battling western imperialism and Zionism, they are Islamist pirates who fire rockets at civilians, use child soldiers, throw young boys in prisons with grown men, steal humanitarian aid, abuse women and girls, abuse children, brought back slavery to Yemen, kidnap African migrants and force them to deal drugs, imprison, flog and murder LGBTQ+ people, take hostages, and use civilians as human shields. The Houthis are demons! Their not heroes! Same with Hamas and Hezbollah! These groups aren’t fighting for the liberation of Palestine, their fighting to build a global caliphate and spread radical Islam from Brooklyn to Bhutan. Israel needs to fight back in the PR war and do a better job reaching out to young folks in the West!
Lucy, I’m curious about your comment in this piece that propagandists first target children. What is your basis for saying this? Have any historians demonstrated that? Or theorists said as much? Did Goebbels make any statement about the utility of targeting children?
Yes i believe there’s a strong historical basis for saying that propagandists target children first. Totalitarian and ideological movements have always understood that the surest way to secure long-term loyalty is to shape minds early, before critical thinking or independent identity develop. Historians have documented this extensively. In Nazi Germany, for instance, Goebbels famously said that “whoever has the youth has the future.” The Hitler Youth and League of German Girls were central to the regime’s project, and school curricula were rewritten to instill racial ideology from the earliest grades. The Soviet Union did the same through the Young Pioneers and Komsomol, organisations designed to indoctrinate children with communist doctrine from primary school onwards. Lenin openly stated that “give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” Mao’s China did the same during the Cultural Revolution, mobilising young students to enforce ideological purity, even against their own parents and teachers.
Scholars like Jacques Ellul (Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, 1962) and Edward Bernays (Propaganda, 1928) have also written that propaganda is most effective when directed at the “plastic mind,” before independent reasoning has formed. It’s an observable historical pattern: every movement that aims to reshape society starts with the young, because they are the most receptive and the least sceptical.
Headline is so true!
The first obligation is to win on the battlefield. If you kill enough of the enemy, they will stop fighting. The winner of the military conflict gets to write the history books. Jews should stop worrying about being loved. Just imagine how much worse it would be if Israel lost the war. There would have been no aid if the roles were reversed.
Absolutely 100%. Israel is never allowed to win. As soon as it is attacked the calls for a cease fire begin, which is just a code word for Hamas to begin to restock the tunnels. Israel knows this, but has gone along to get along.
One of the first things Israel needs to do is withdraw from the UN. The United Nations is basically a stand in for Hamas or any other terror group when Israel is concerned. They will rejoin when ALL countries represented agree to Israel's right to exist. The double standards are not only unfair, they have kept the world from understanding the reality of life in the Middle East.
I agree Israel needs to fight to win but it can also begin the war against the rampant cancerous propaganda that has been so effective against it. This includes educating AMERICAN Jews, who too often speak against Israel's best interest. Any references to "apartheid" "colonialism" and "genocide" must be immediately rebuffed by Israel. Call out the networks that maintain the double standard.
Israel can do both - WIN the war and educate the world in a much more aggressive fashion.
It's the evil coalition of social media and indoctrination on the college campuses that is capable of shifting support from the true victim to the fraudulent claims of the perpetrator. That coalition is united in its evil and irrational support of Hamas. That coalition is funded by Qatar and by China.
One of the most important reasons why so many charismatic authoritarian dictators rose to power in the 1930s was the brand-new medium of television—which put their faces constantly in front of millions of people for the first time ever in human history.
No ‘might’ about it, they would have won.
Chas v'sholom (G-d Forbid).
But they *didn't* and now we have a whole lot more information on how these things work -- and their subcomponents, from incipience.
Glad some of us are sticking to the truth, close as possible. Decisions must be made based on stark reality, *not* based on trying to live inside the seductive panorama created by our own wishful thinking and encouraged by articulate creators or varied, but closely aligned, versions of more comfortable alternate realities.
We have to stay strong in all of this -- not reactive, which plays right into what the enemy envisions and plans for us -- but steadfast.
That's my best assessment as of the evening of the first night of Chol HaMoed Sukkoth, 5786.
I want to believe the hostages will be home Shabbos B"H. And: While pre- visualizing that and praying for it, I also cannot *know* that until I see it as accomplished fact.
Better pray also that Hamas does NOT, before returning both whatever remaining hostages and the remains of the deceased, butcher whomever has managed to stay alive thus far B"H. That's been a pattern and I pray for these people's safety before whatever plays out in what we're being told is the "endgame" (chess metaphor, here) that's supposed to be completed this Shabbos. Sorry to be so verbose on this point and not phrase it in a more positive way, but it *does* seem dire from here and -- for myself -- it's important to not drop my guard in a rush of relief over what hasn't yet happened.
May this ongoing waking nightmare end, much as possible, G-d willing very soon.
This article is terrifying and observably true.
I agree! I’m sure in the event of another WW social media would be shut down, for that very reason!
This is a good analysis. Propaganda is a potent weapon. The quality of political and moral leadership shouldn't be discounted, either. Churchill and Roosevelt prevailed in part because their messages overcame Axis propaganda, regardless of the technology involved.
Thanks to Barack Obama's Iran Deal, his insistence that there be 'daylight' between the US and Israel, his history with a pastor whose sermon was "G-d Damn the United States", and his fascination with graduates of the 1960's Weathermen, the stage was set for mass inversion of reality and morality. What we are seeing now is a perfect storm of morally blind leadersihp combined with world-shaking developments in communications technology.
If the press behaved during World War II as they do today, the US Government would have thrown them in jail or put them against a wall and shot them for treason.
I read this excellent article by Lucy when it first came out! Hamas has the greatest propaganda machine in human history with social media. They can make the mainstream press, international organizations and NGOs and millions of gullible people around the globe believe whatever they want. If Hamas said that the sky is purple or the moon was made out of cheese, the leftist and Jihadist morons in the West and CNN would believe every word of it. The Nazis wish they had all the resources Hamas has right at their fingertips. Every country including Israel, does propaganda. But no one does it better than Hamas. They’ve convinced the world Israel is committing a completely made up genocide, that Bibi is the new Hitler, that Israel is the new Nazi Germany, and that the Gazans are purely innocent victims of the big bad white settler colonist Israelis. Can you imagine if Nazi Germany would’ve had social media? Goebbels would’ve had a field day with that. They’d do all they could to make the Allies look like war criminals purposely murdering civilians, cover up the Holocaust, make American and British soldiers look like savage butchers while portraying German soldiers as kind and humane to POWs and the people of the occupied countries, exaggerate how many civilians were killed in Allied air raids and accuse the Americans and the British of committing genocide.
It’s been a deadly weapon for Hamas and their allies and has been used to spread antisemitic conspiracy theories. People are easily convinced sheep, that’s what Hamas’ success proves. Remember the “hot Houthi pirate” trend? That’s another example of the effectiveness of propaganda. What the morons who believe that don’t realize is the Houthis aren’t romantic freedom fighters heroic battling western imperialism and Zionism, they are Islamist pirates who fire rockets at civilians, use child soldiers, throw young boys in prisons with grown men, steal humanitarian aid, abuse women and girls, abuse children, brought back slavery to Yemen, kidnap African migrants and force them to deal drugs, imprison, flog and murder LGBTQ+ people, take hostages, and use civilians as human shields. The Houthis are demons! Their not heroes! Same with Hamas and Hezbollah! These groups aren’t fighting for the liberation of Palestine, their fighting to build a global caliphate and spread radical Islam from Brooklyn to Bhutan. Israel needs to fight back in the PR war and do a better job reaching out to young folks in the West!
Lucy, I’m curious about your comment in this piece that propagandists first target children. What is your basis for saying this? Have any historians demonstrated that? Or theorists said as much? Did Goebbels make any statement about the utility of targeting children?
Yes i believe there’s a strong historical basis for saying that propagandists target children first. Totalitarian and ideological movements have always understood that the surest way to secure long-term loyalty is to shape minds early, before critical thinking or independent identity develop. Historians have documented this extensively. In Nazi Germany, for instance, Goebbels famously said that “whoever has the youth has the future.” The Hitler Youth and League of German Girls were central to the regime’s project, and school curricula were rewritten to instill racial ideology from the earliest grades. The Soviet Union did the same through the Young Pioneers and Komsomol, organisations designed to indoctrinate children with communist doctrine from primary school onwards. Lenin openly stated that “give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.” Mao’s China did the same during the Cultural Revolution, mobilising young students to enforce ideological purity, even against their own parents and teachers.
Scholars like Jacques Ellul (Propaganda: The Formation of Men’s Attitudes, 1962) and Edward Bernays (Propaganda, 1928) have also written that propaganda is most effective when directed at the “plastic mind,” before independent reasoning has formed. It’s an observable historical pattern: every movement that aims to reshape society starts with the young, because they are the most receptive and the least sceptical.
If the Jewish had it we wouldn’t even consider that possibility. Right? 🇺🇸🦅👀
Tens of thousands of Jews fought with the Allies against the Nazis, ever heard of the Jewish brigade?