Posted on 01/22/2018 6:30:19 AM PST by MarvinStinson
Review: 'Industry of Lies: Media, Academia, and the Israeli-Arab Conflict' by Ben-Dror Yemini
"Seventy years after the Holocaust, which saw Nazi Germany propaganda turn the entire Jewish people into a monster threatening the world, a new industry of lies has arisen. … But this time it is not the goose-stepping Nazis pushing the lies. It is liberal-minded academics, intellectuals, and human rights activists."
So writes Ben-Dror Yemini, an Israeli journalist and former opinion page editor of Maariv, who thoroughly debunks these defamations in Industry of Lies. Israel has often been accused of forcibly evicting the Arabs from Palestine in 1948 in what the Arabs term the Naqba or "catastrophe."
Yemini not only shows this is nonsense (the Arabs mostly fled at the behest of their own leaders), but he describes the Jewish Naqba—a forcible eviction that actually happened—in which some 800,000 Jews were driven from Arab lands and their property stolen.
While debunking accusations that Israel practices apartheid, Yemini talks about Arab apartheid, which Arabs practice against their Palestinian brethren. Arab countries from Egypt to Lebanon force Palestinian Arabs into ghettoes, deny them citizenship, and restrict their employment, all to keep the refugee problem alive for use as a weapon with which to bludgeon Israel.
Yemini points out that huge numbers are killed annually in conflicts around the planet, while the world barely notices. But although the relative contribution of the Israeli-Arab conflict to violence and to the number of refugees worldwide is marginal, Israel "has mysteriously become ‘the most dangerous country to world peace.' The focus on it is nothing short of obsessive."
Yemini painstakingly examines the most outrageous slanders. Take Nobel laureate Jose Saramago's disgusting claim that "what is happening in Palestine is a crime we can put on the same plane as what happened in Auschwitz." Most would wave this remark away as the ravings of an unhinged anti-Semite.
Yemini calmly looks at statistics in this supposed new "Auschwitz," including life expectancy, infant mortality, literacy rates, education, even access to clean water. And his numbers come from organizations that can scarcely be accused of pro-Israel bias—UNESCO, the U.N., the World Health Organization among others.
What they show is that the lot of Palestinian Arabs has improved dramatically since Israel took over the territories in the Six Day War. Then the average life expectancy of a Palestinian Arab was 48; in 2000, it had jumped to 72. In terms of education, a 2006 World Bank Report found that "the Palestinians are the most educated population in the MENA [Middle East North Africa] region," with a 91 percent adult literacy rate. Before Israel took over there were no universities. Now there are 10 with an additional 20 community colleges.
Israel set up these universities, though it gets no benefit from them. Those university degrees allow Palestinian Arabs to join faculties abroad where they can spread variations on the "Big Lie."
The author emphasizes academia's role in defaming Israel. He lines up the usual suspects, like Noam Chomsky, Richard Falk, Judith Butler, and Ilan Pappé, the last of whom Yemini holds responsible for "introducing the libel of ‘genocide' in describing Israeli policies."
These are not fringe characters at tiny colleges but major academics with large followings. Of John Mearsheimer, coauthor of the feverish The Israel Lobby and U.S. Foreign Policy, and Juan Cole of the University of Maryland who said Israel's actions in Gaza were second only to that of the Belgians in the Congo, Yemini writes: "They embody the web of falsehood that is taking over the study of the Israeli-Arab conflict, and are providing the fuel for a much larger impetus to demonize Israel and ultimately isolate and destroy the country."
The lies are winning and anti-Zionist and anti-Israeli propaganda exactly parallels the trajectory of Nazi propaganda. And we know where that leads.
bmp
Of course they are, because they have successfully harnessed the energy of the loudest, most visible, and most entitled population in the entire western world, namely the millennial Social Justice Warriors.
I started calling out SJW anti-semitism YEARS ago, and got called a liar, a concern-troll, and lost nearly all of my so-called ‘friends’ almost overnight... Yet I have NOT been proven wrong.
I saw it as early as 2005, when my alma mater became the fifth university in the world to host Israeli Apartheid Week.
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