[Peace-discuss] Review of Last Night's Program in anti-Semitism

[David Green]

This unattributed review has been disseminated:
  
The PBS TV show, "Anti-Semitism in the 21st Century," that just aired
tonight in the United States, was a very sohpisticated piece of 
pro-Israel
(hence anti-working class) propaganda. There were a lot of talking 
heads. One was
Tony Judt, who wrote an article in the New York Review of Books a few 
years ago
that _advocated_ (http://www.nybooks. com/articles/ 16671) , for the 
first (and
virtually only) time in the 21st century establishment press, a 
one-state
solution to the Palestine conflict. But, revealingly, the idea that it 
is
_wrong _ (http://newdemocracy world.org/ state.htm) for there to be a 
Jewish
state in Palestine did not see the light of day in this documentary. If 
Tony Judt,
in his taped interview, expressed his one-state solution belief, it 
was
edited out.

The Nakba was mentioned (with old film footage of Palestinians leaving 
their
homes), but it was framed not as the crime of ethnic cleansing that it 
was,
but rather as "a result of war." This is the standard Zionist framework 
that
dismisses the criminality of the ethnic cleansing by waving a magic 
wand over
it and chanting "war justifies all," as if a war for an unjust cause
justifies the crimes carried out in its name. The fact that the 
Zionist forces
had carried out half of the ethnic cleansing of 1948 before any Arab 
government
had even sent an army into the conflict was not mentioned. Nor did the
documentary mention that brutal discrimination against Palestinians 
inside the
Israeli Green line exists today.

There was even a talking head who focused on the true point that Arab
leaders use anti-Jewish and pro-Palestinian rhetoric to divert away 
from
themselves the anger of their own people against the oppression 
carried out by
anti-democratic Arab rulers. But the implicit framework here was that, 
since
Arab rulers have this ulterior motive for their anti-Israel rhetoric, 
therefore all
criticism of the existence of a Jewish state in Palestine has no merit 
and
reflects only irrational anti-Jewish hatred or cynical manipulation of 
the
masses.

Another talking head, Rashid Khalidi (the Edward Said Professor of 
Arab
studies at Columbia University), made the very good point that it is 
profoundly
wrong to focus primarily on a criticism of the manner in which some 
Arabs
express their opposition to Israel--even if the criticism has 
merit--when the
primary focus should be on the injustice, itself, that Arabs are 
opposed to.
This excellent point was, however, weakened and essentially 
neutralized by the
fact that when Khalidi gave examples of the fundamental injustice, he 
only
used examples of what Israel does in the occupied territories, 
implicitly
allowing the overall theme of the documentary.

Thus, this documentary went out of its way to deal with many of the 
facts
and arguments that we and other anti-Zionists rely on, and to frame 
them in a
manner that undermines and obscures their significance so as to 
neutralize
them. This technique also gave the documentary a sophisticated tone 
that made
it seem to be not propaganda at all because, after all, it was 
presenting,
supposedly, all of the various viewpoints on a complex issue.

This is a very effective method of propaganda. Unlike propaganda that 
works
by explicitly saying the intended message, which inevitably sounds 
like crude
propaganda, it is far more effective to deliver the propaganda message 
not
by what is said but by what is not said. People exposed to this 
sophisticated
type of propaganda typically do not evern realize that they are being
propagandized. They think they are being "educated" by objective and 
impartial
experts. In this case, what was never said in the documentary was that 
there
should not be a Jewish state in Palestine, and that it is not 
anti-Semitic to
oppose the existence of such a state.

The net effect of this documentary was to tell its audience that Arabs 
are a
people who are increasingly irrationally anti-Jewish, and Jews, though 
not
always in the right, are nonetheless increasingly threatened by 
growing
"anti-Semitism" (ie anti-Jewish hatred), and therefore have every 
reason to
defend their Jewish state. Nowhere did the documentary explain that 
Israeli leaders
depend on anti-Jewish/ anti-Jewish [garbled --ML].

Nowhere did this documentary even hint that there
is an implicit alliance between the Arab and Jewish upper classes to 
pit
"their people" against each other to control them, and that this is the 
source
of the irrational ethnic/racial hatreds that may exist in the world, 
over
which the producers of this documentary merely shed crocodile tears.

--J[]


 	
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