Programmed to Hate Israel
It's not activism. It's a 100-year propaganda war. The Nazis invented the "genocide" lie about Jews, and the Left revived it.
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This is a guest essay by Nicole Lampert, a journalist and commentator.
You can also listen to the podcast version of this essay on Apple Podcasts, YouTube Music, YouTube, and Spotify.
On October 7, 2023, even as Hamas was still rampaging its way around southern Israel — murdering, raping and taking civilians as hostages — in the UK, plans were already afoot to come out in support of the attacks.
Radical preacher Haitham al-Hadded, later described by the BBC as a “highly respected imam” and a favourite in UK mosques, put out a video on YouTube saying of the fighters: “We urge you to stay updated with the news and think of various ways to support them, whether politically or through lobbying and media exposure. Be prepared for mass demonstrations to support them.”
Those mass demonstrations were already being organised by the Palestine Solidarity Campaign with the Metropolitan Police Service logging the first request for a national demonstration against Israel on October 7th around 1 pm.
On October 9th, they had their first demonstration and a few days later their first march. Separately, members of parliament were being lobbied on mass to push for the government to “immediately withdraw UK financial and military aid from Israel.”
Unofficial large demonstrations, including outside the Israeli Embassy in Kensington, started the night of October 7th. Elsewhere in the country, in areas with large Muslim populations, fireworks were set off.
The Hamas massacre launched, according to figures released by the Community Security Trust, the most significant wave of antisemitic hatred in decades. There was a record spike on October 7th and 8th, something the former Jihadist turned anti-extremist Hussein Abubakr Mansour later described as a way of people participating “symbolically in the pogrom.”
By October 10th, university towns were papered in pro-Palestine posters put out by the Socialist Workers Party. One, in Manchester, featured a Palestinian holding a weapon and said, “Victory to the Palestinians: Why It’s Right to Resist Israel.” It advertised a public meeting at the nearby Quaker’s Friends Meeting House. The church group, which is meant to be pacifist, later cancelled the meeting under public pressure.
Meanwhile, Muslims such as anti-extremist expert Ghaffar Hussain found that on his social media accounts, he was suddenly being sent content of pro-terror material. He believes it is because he has a Muslim-sounding name.
“Immediately after October 7th,” he said, “my social media feeds were inundated with pro-Hamas content that was promoting and endorsing terrorism. I can imagine how that would have a radicalising effect on those susceptible to hate narratives. All loss of life in a war is tragic but often is framed in a way that suggests all Jewish people are complicit. In this way, social media platforms are actively fermenting this unrest.”
If it felt like there was a pro-Hamas campaign ready and waiting for the October 7th attacks, that was because it was. And for the last two years, including on the anniversary of the October 7th massacre, we have seen those libels become every more shrill. And they are repeated and repeated and repeated.
The Israeli PR campaign has been risible in its efforts to defeat the lies, but when you look at what is stacked against it, how long this propaganda war has been prepared for, it is hardly surprising.
For centuries, both the European and Arab worlds have been fed a diet of hatred against Jews. In Europe this started with religious ideas of Jews killing Jesus and then came the invention in the Middle Ages in England of the blood libel: the idea that Jews want to kill Christian children. In the Middle East, separately, Jews, like Christians, were “other.” They were to be treated as second-class citizens, dhimmis, who had to pay special taxes for their own protection.
Nazi ideology helped bring the antisemitism of those two worlds together. The genocide claim — which permeates social media, universities, and media outlets like the BBC — was one started by the Nazis, even as they were committing genocide against Jews.
“The idea of Jews wanting to commit genocide against Muslims first appeared in Nazi propaganda for the Arab world,” said Dr. Daniel Allington, a King’s College London expert on extremism who wrote the recently published Counter Extremism Group paper, Islamist Antisemitism: A Neglected Hate. “The Nazis wanted to get the Arabs on side, and working with the Mufti in Palestine, he broadcast this idea throughout the Middle East. Even as the Holocaust was going on, the Nazis and their Arab collaborators were promoting the idea that the Jews were going to carry kill all of the Arabs. When people today echo that idea of genocide, they may not realise it, but they are repeating Nazi propaganda.”
The idea continued to take hold within the Middle East as Israel beat back Arab armies and created a modern state in 1948. The genocide libel was picked up by the Soviets in the 1950s and 1960s; they saw how antisemitism could be a disruptor within the West. While the Holocaust officially meant the discrediting of Nazi-style antisemitism, the Soviets saw how it could used as long as it was given a different name: anti-Zionism.
Former Israeli Member of Parliament and expert in contemporary antisemitism, Dr. Einat Wilf, says much of the anti-Zionist-style antisemitism we see in the UK is the result of Soviet propaganda which has been disseminated in Western leftist circles for decades.
“It’s called the placard strategy — you see it on placards,” she said. “It is basically based on the simple equation of Israel with every evil word it rests on. So imperialism, colonialism, apartheid, racism, ethnic cleansing, genocide, Nazism. These words are chosen not because they bear any relationship to reality but because they are essentially associated with evil.
The propaganda strategy is brutally simple: Equate Zionism — and by extension, the Jewish state — with evil. Sometimes it’s a slur-filled placard, sometimes just a Star of David. A former Soviet operative once explained how this works: Keep the message simple, repeat it endlessly, and attach it to prestige. Prestige, he said, paralyzes judgment. That’s why the Soviets infiltrated institutions like the United Nations, universities, and human rights organizations — to make anti-Israel ideas sound respectable.
The result was devastatingly effective. “Zionism equals racism” became gospel right after the UN declared racism itself unacceptable. With the backing of an automatic anti-Israel majority — the so-called Red-Green Alliance of Soviet and Islamist states — the propaganda machine ensured that, as legendary Israeli diplomat Abba Eban quipped, even a resolution claiming Israel flattened the earth would pass overwhelmingly.
Israeli officials call the way Hamas propaganda is disseminated “UN washing.” Hamas claims how many people have been killed by the IDF (never saying whether or not they were militants). The UN then repeats the claim. It is then disseminated by news organisations around the world, such as the BBC. The UN imprimatur gives the propaganda the “prestige” title.
But it is not just the UN. This red-green propaganda has been disseminated for decades through universities, which are now educating the people who run the country, the media, and the establishment. All of them, whether they know it or not, have been soaked in anti-Western propaganda, which has been focused on hatred of Israel.
Einat worries about just how far the placard propaganda is now going post-October 7th: “There are now placards about how the world has to be cleaned up with the Star of David put in a dustbin. Society is going through a mass psychosis which is once again calling for the elimination of the Jews.”
In the lead up to October 7th, we saw these separate movements: Nazis, Soviets, Islamists, Western social media algorithms — and, to a lesser but growing extent, the Far-Right — work separately and together because antisemitism is the great connector. Which is why opposing groups are willing to overlook their differences on this.
Sunni and Shia Muslims go to war against each other, but extremists in both camps are determined to wipe out Israel. For the Shias the destruction of Israel will fulfil a messianic prophecy of the return of the 12th prophet; for the Sunni Islamists, of which the Muslim Brotherhood is a big part, Jews should have no power over what is deemed part of the caliphate lands. Both groups see the destruction of Jews as the path to utopia.
They aren’t the only ones. In the West, with Marxism in the doldrums, the Far-Left latched onto Islamic antisemitism as a way to create the revolution they still crave, and part of that was led by UK groups.
In 1994, a Socialist Workers Party Committee member named Chris Harmen wrote an influential booklet, “The Prophet and the Proletariat.” Based on the Trotskyist idea of creating broad coalitions, it argued that socialists in the UK should work with Islamists because both were against Western imperialism.
“He said these guys are really good at fighting imperial powers, and if we work with them, the younger members of the Islamist movements will see that revolutionary socialism is right and join us,” said David Toube, an expert in antisemitic extremism.
In the UK, working alongside the Socialist Workers Party, we see the Muslim Brotherhood. An organisation banned in many Muslim and European countries, the UK is — extraordinarily — one of its global hubs. Hamas is a Muslim Brotherhood organisation.
Lord Walney, a former Labour Member of Parliament, is the government’s former advisor on political violence and disruption, and has been working on this extremism for years. His work for the government has been ignored for too long. He hopes that the murder of Jews on the streets of Britain and the increasing violence of the pro-Palestine demonstrations will finally force the government to wake up to the huge undercurrent of issues driving this antisemitic campaign.
“You can see from the silence or even potential hostility from these voices towards the idea of a ceasefire of this so-called genocide that people don’t actually want it to end,” he said. “What is extraordinary is how this movement has percolated through society. I saw it through my work with trade unions, and now being pro-Palestine has become a cloak of the Left: You have to wear it to be a good person.”
“You see it in the arts, in the ‘gardeners for Palestine.’ To be accepted in society, you have to agree with the Palestinian cause. The actions of journalists, such as in the BBC where they appear more likely to trust Hamas figures than IDF ones, show just how mainstream this is. The UN is looked at as a romantic democratic institution, but the fact that so many of its employees took part in the October 7th should have finished it off.”
Walney argued that there needs to be a fundamental reset and look at how we have got here.
“In Britain, we need to turn over a new page. We need to recognise the pernicious effect of the Muslim Brotherhood. We need the Charity Commission to investigate faster where our money is going,” he said. “Most of all, there needs to be a political commitment to talk about what is going wrong.”
Much of the Jew-hatred in Europe these days is coming from England which will soon, in my estimation, because just another part of the world-wide Caliphate because the Brits have lost their way and the people, aside from a few protests, are being led willingly down the path to Islamic Hell by their government.
Excellent and depressing article. But very well done. In 2 years, I have not been able to get through to a SINGLE person that I have known. Not with logic, facts, videos, historical analysis, documents etc. They simply are not interested.