I Spy With My Little Eye, Something Beginning With… Weaponized Nazi Propaganda Against Israel
Part 4
Preamble
For over sixty years, Israel has had its fair share of enemies and adversaries. One of the most prominent weapons used against the Jewish state has been propaganda. As demonstrated in the first three articles, it was used based on anti-Jewish propaganda developed by the Nazis, and used extensively by the KGB and Arab states to damage the country’s standing in the world. One of the most common tactics used was Inversion of Reality. From Israel’s history to the manufacture of the Palestinians as an ethnicity and people in the 1960’s, to the separation of Zionism from Judaism to try to bypass antisemitism, Nazi propaganda was and continues to be used to turn the world’s media and western society against Israel.
Modern observers have identified this method and described it as an “inversion of reality,” an “intellectual confidence trick”, “reversing moral responsibility”, or “twisted logic.”
Because such libels have been used so often and without being challenged for over half a century, they’ve slowly gained acceptance. Since inversion of reality constitutes the basic principle of current anti-Israel propaganda, it’s important to understand what it is and how it works.
This propaganda method is a product of Nazi Germany. It is authoritarian both in its methods, particularly the use of the schizophrenic myth, and in the absolute solution it advocates. It completely denies all of Israel‘s claims and leaves no room for introspection and compromise.
Israel and the Media War - The History
Nazi propaganda and its use both against the Jewish people as well as to justify the crimes against them and the Holocaust have been studied widely up until the 1980’s. During the late 1980’s when the Soviet Union was nearing its collapse, the world of academia stopped focusing on it, believing that the world was heading towards a more democratic global society. But since the early 2000’s, the study of Nazi propaganda and its spread across regions and into institutional mainstream became more popular.
With the signing of the Oslo Accords on September 13, 1993, many actually believed that anti-Israeli propaganda would cease. (Kevin Coogan: Dreamer of the Day. Francis Parker Yockey and the Postwar Fascist International (New York: Autonomedia, 1999))
Much of the Western world wanted to suppress much of the anti-Israel and antisemitic propaganda and its existence because they felt that it was necessary in order for the world to move forward from its darker past. (Ibid)
Drawing attention to the problem became politically incorrect and sometimes dangerous for those who wished to advance in the academic world. (Klaus Faber, Julius H. Schoeps, and Sacha Stawski, eds., Neu-alter Judenhass: Antisemitismus, arabisch-israelischer Konflikt und europäische Politik (Berlin: Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, 2006))
Marc Bloch, who was an eminent historian and medievalist, in his famous book, The Historian’s Craft, explained that proving the existence of a falsehood wasn’t enough. If one wanted to truly learn from a lie, one needed to know the perpetrator and understand their motives:
“But to establish the fact of forgery is not enough. It is further necessary to discover its motivations, if only as an aid in tracking it down. So as long as there is any doubt about its origins, there is something in it which defies analysis and which is, therefore, only half-proved.” (Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, tr. Peter Putnam (New York: Vintage Books, 1953))
But how did the “Big Lie” come to be? How was it able to be created, disseminated, and used so effectively that it would alter the perception of reality?
Defining the Issue
Most members of Israel’s political elite believed that the country’s problem is public relations, but they’ve struggled to accept it when confronted with a media war. So to first identify the issue, it is necessary to first define its components.
According to Prof. Philip M. Taylor, director of the Institute of Communications Studies at the University of Leeds,
“One of the tactical tools of ideological warfare is propaganda, which has been defined simply “as an attempt to influence the attitudes of a specific audience through the use of facts, fiction, argument or suggestion-often supported by the suppression of inconsistent material-with the calculated purpose of instilling in the recipient a certain belief, values or convictions which will serve the interests of the source, by producing a desired line of action.”” (Philip M. Taylor, “Propaganda from Thucydides to Thatcher: Some Problems, Perspectives and Pitfalls” (1992))
We can then add to this the statement of Dr. Joseph Goebbels that “propaganda as such is neither good nor evil. Its moral value is determined by the goals it seeks.” (“Goebbels on Propaganda,” Der Kongress zur Nürnberg 1934 (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Frz. Eher Nachf., 1934), 130-41)
It highlights that the ends justify the means. But we should be asking if in certain cases the very means can be morally defective.
For the past century, propaganda has been one of the most powerful weapons of war, and its effects have been devastating. So much so,in fact, that many authoritarian regimes have been genocidal.
Historian Jeffrey Herf describes the rationale behind propaganda in Nazi Germany’s war against the Jews:
“If sheer repetition, in public and private contexts, can be taken as proof of belief, then it appears that Hitler, Goebbels, Dietrich [Director of the Reich Press Office], their staffs, and an undetermined percentage of German listeners and readers believed that an international Jewish conspiracy was the driving force behind the anti-Hitler coalition in World War II…. They certainly acted as if the Final Solution was Nazi Germany’s punishment of the Jews, whom the Nazis found guilty of starting and prolonging World War II.” (Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Herf, Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 270-71)
In his written work, Herf gave several chilling examples of the link between propaganda and genocide, namely, Hitler’s annual speech to the Reichstag of January 30, 1939, which presented what became the core Nazi narrative of the coming conflict:
“I want today to be a prophet again: if international finance Jewry inside and outside of Europe should succeed in plunging the nations once more into a world war, the result will not be the Bolshevization of the earth and thereby the victory of Jewry, but the annihilation of the Jewish race in Europe!” (Ibid., 51-52)
In addition, Herf referred to Hitler’s New Year’s address to the nation on January 1, 1940 which contained the imputation of genocidal war aims to Nazi Germany’s enemies, especially the Jews:
“The Jewish-capitalist world enemy that confronts us has only one goal: to exterminate Germany and the German people….” (Ibid., 64-65)
Ernst H. Gombrich explained that the ultimate aim of Nazi propaganda was “the imposition of a paranoiac pattern on world events” in the form of a “paranoiac myth.” (Ernst H. Gombrich, Myth and Reality in German Wartime Broadcasts (London: University of London, The Athlone Press, 1970) p14-22)
According to Gombrich, this procedure represented the “core of the technique”:
“This is the final horror of the myth. It becomes self-confirming. Once you are entrapped in this illusionary universe, it will become reality for you, for if you fight everybody, everybody will fight you, and the less mercy you show, the more you commit your side to a fight to the finish. When you have been caught in this truly vicious circle there is really no escape. Compared with this effect, the principle of advertising and mass suggestion in war propaganda may almost be called marginal.” (Ibid., 23)
Inversion of reality as a tool of media wars, with its paranoiac state of mind, still continues to the present day. It’s vital to know the different iterations of propaganda, but most fail to understand the historical context. It was in this sense, for example, that the French researcher and philosopher Pierre-André Taguieff applied the term “absolute anti-Semitism” to describe the post-1967 outlook of the so-called “Palestinians”.
He wrote that for them, “Zionism, then, is a new ‘Nazism’ threatening to dominate and destroy the whole human species…. Thus, in a context where Western elites never tire of calling for the avoidance of ‘Islamophobic’ utterances, the head of the Islamic Center in Geneva, Hani Ramadan, coolly denounced ‘the genocide being organized against the Muslims.'” (Pierre-Andre Taguieff, Rising from the Muck, trans. Patrick Camiller (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004), p62-69)
It’s worth noting that Ramadan’s story line is nearly identical to that of Nazi propagandists. Both presented themselves as targets of a Jewish conspiracy, and the potential outcome of their “logical process” to use Hannah Arendt’s expression was genocide.
Although both have inverted the truth, their assertions contain an additional feature which is disturbing and dangerous: the inversion of morality which leads to criminal behavior and violence without constraint. (Fishman, Media War against Israel, 2007)
Melanie Phillips, a British journalist, cited an article by Leo McKinstry, a Belfast-born author and journalist who frequently wrote for the Daily Mail, Daily Express, and Sunday Telegraph.n McKinstry identified the inversion of reality in British public discourse with regard to Israel and called it by its real name:
“In a remarkable inversion of reality, Israel has become a pariah state because of its determination to defend itself. A grotesque double standard now operates, where murderous Arab terrorists are hailed as “freedom fighters” yet Israeli security forces are treated as fascistic thugs. No nation has been more demonized than Israel. One recent survey across Europe revealed that Israel is now regarded as “the greatest threat” to world peace, an utter absurdity given that Israel is actually the only democratic, free society in the Middle East. But such a finding reflects the strength of the hysterical anti-Israeli propaganda that fills the airwaves of Europe. No matter how much this anti-Israeli feeling is dressed up as support for Palestine, it is in fact profoundly antisemitic….” (“The Monstrous Inversion,” January 6, 2006, www.melaniephillips.com/diary/?p=1100)
Inversion of reality in political warfare may also be used against non-Jews. Its use in December 2006 caused a sharp diplomatic clash between the governments of Poland and Germany when “a group representing Germans expelled from present-day Poland after World War II filed a lawsuit at the European Court of Human Rights, seeking restitution of their property.”
In December 11, 2006, Polish foreign minister Anna Fotyga condemned the German claims as “an attempt at reversing moral responsibility for the effects of World War II, which began with the German attack on Poland and caused irreparable losses and sufferings to the Polish state and nation.” (Mark Landler, “German-Polish Ties Plummet to New Low; Post-World War II Treaty Is Challenged,” International Herald Tribune, 22 December 2006)
Inversion of Reality: The History
When researching inversion of reality as a propaganda weapon, it’s clear that the Nazi perfected it. They took pride in their accomplishment but credited the British for showing them the way. During the Great War, British propaganda had successfully encouraged the desertion of Central Powers troops from the frontlines and demoralized the public at home. Hitler, for his part, highlighted the British use of atrocity propaganda and bemoaned that Imperial Germany never understood the importance of propaganda and those who dealt with it were incompetent. (Fishman, 2007)
The British, under the leadership of Lord Northcliffe, proprietor of The Times, were the first to exploit the advances of mass media and advertising in order to target mass public opinion rather than the elite. (Philip M. Taylor, British Propaganda in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 27-29)
Their objective was to “reveal to the enemy the futility of their cause and the certainty of allied victory.” (Ibid. 23)
This led them to devise a number of propaganda tactics such as targeting messages to the civilian population in order to undermine its support for the government. (Campbell Stuart, Secrets of Crewe House: The Story of a Famous Campaign (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1920))
It was used to break up the Habsburg Empire by fomenting sedition among its peoples. British propagandists first coined the term “national self-determination” as a weapon of political warfare. (Taylor, British Propaganda, 56-57)
The British often employed atrocity propaganda. Their most remarkable accusation was that Imperial Germany created a “cadaver exploitation establishment”, the so-called Kadaververwerkungsanstalt, for the production of soap. British atrocity propaganda demonized the enemy, but after the war, the public felt duped. It left a residue of skepticism, betrayal, and a mood of postwar nihilism. Although this approach worked in the short term, it opened up a Pandora’s Box.
On the eve of World War II, the memory of atrocity propaganda provided a compelling argument against American intervention on the side of Britain and contributed to the denial of compassion to the Jews in their moment of dire need. In the United States, where isolationist sentiment ran strong, influential politicians accused the British of having “tricked America into war.” Furthermore, when, in the 1930s, Nazi Germany began to perpetrate major atrocities, many refused to believe the reports.
In The Case for Auschwitz, historian Robert Jan van Pelt reported that:
“The American magazine the Christian Century, which in 1944 had still chided American newspapers for giving much attention to the discoveries made by the Soviets in Maidanek-claiming at the time that the “parallel between this story and the ‘corpse factory’ atrocity tale was too striking to be overlooked”-had to (hesitantly) admit in 1945 that it had been wrong, and that the parallel with “the cadaver factory story of the last war” did not hold. “The evidence is too conclusive…. The thing is well-nigh incredible. But it happened.” (The Christian Century, as quoted by Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002) p133)
After the liberation of the concentration camps, General Dwight D. Eisenhower arranged for visits of American delegations to bear witness to the greatest atrocity of all time. (Ibid. 134)
Nazi Propaganda Theory
During World War I, the British disseminated propaganda over a finite period but stopped hostilities were concluded. Fearing that Britain’s wartime propaganda machine would be turned against him, Lloyd George quickly dismantled it. (Taylor, British Propaganda, 231)
Nevertheless, World War I paved the way for the rise of totalitarian dictatorship. It not only undermined the traditional order in Russia, Austria-Hungary, Germany, and Italy, but also “hastened the development of the industrial arts, weapons, communications, and management which facilitated the totalitarian thrust.” (Carl J. Friedrich, “The Rise of Totalitarian Dictatorship,” in Jack J. Roth, ed., World War I: A Turning Point in History (New York: Knopf, 1968))
Hitler and Goebbels claimed that it was the British propaganda that produced the original “Big Lie,” but they exploited this breakthrough for their own ends. They adopted a version of history which embodied the schizophrenic myth that presented Imperial Germany as the innocent victim of British duplicity. A few citations from Vol. 1, Ch. 6, “War Propaganda,” of Mein Kampf, published in1925 and 1926, reveal Hitler’s grasp of the methods of war propaganda. According to his account, the British spread specific lies, namely, the accusation of atrocities and that “the German enemy” was “the sole guilty party for the outbreak of war.” Later in the same chapter, he analyzed their methods and commented on cost effectiveness:
“All advertising, whether in the field of business or politics, achieves success through the continuity and sustained uniformity of its application.”
Here, too, the example of enemy war propaganda was typical, limited to a few points, devised exclusively for the masses, carried on with unrelenting persistence. Once the basic ideas and methods of execution were identified as correct, they were applied throughout the whole War without the slightest change. At first the claims of the propaganda were so impudent that people thought it insane. Later, it got on people’s nerves, and in the end, it was believed. (Fishman, 2007)
After half a decade, a revolution broke out in Germany and its slogans originated in the enemy’s war propaganda. In England they understood one more thing… that this weapon can succeed only if it is applied on a mass scale, but that success more than covers all costs. (Eberhard Jäckel, Hitler’s World View: A Blueprint for Power, trans. Herbert Arnold (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981))
Hitler explained in Mein Kampf that it really was more worthwhile to tell big lies rather than small ones:
“In the big lie there is always a certain force of credibility; because the broad masses of a nation are always more easily corrupted in the deeper strata of their emotional nature than consciously or voluntarily; and thus in the primitive simplicity of their minds they more readily fall victims to the big lie than the small lie, since they themselves often tell small lies in little matters but would be ashamed to resort to large-scale falsehoods. It would never come into their heads to fabricate colossal untruths, and they would not believe that others could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously….” (Mein Kampf (James Murphy translation, 134))
The Big Lie would characterize Nazi propaganda, and although the Soviet Union would later adopt this method, their techniques of misrepresenting reality, based on vernacular thinking, were essentially different. Doublespeak was not to be found in the Nazi dictionary. (Media Wars, 2009)
The Big Lie as an Authoritarian Tool
Having the means of controlling the whole environment, and projecting their messages both domestically and abroad, the next generation of authoritarian regimes could lie as long as their power held out. They were able to transform what had originally been a defined big lie into reality. The difference between the mass propaganda of World War I and the fictional reality of the authoritarian state was in orders of magnitude.
Political scientist Carl J. Friedrich explained that:
“… the totalitarian breakthrough occurred in 1926-27 when the first Five-Year Plan was adopted. It was this plan that undertook to force the pace and to bring about almost immediately a radical transformation of the economy. Thus, the masters of the Soviet Union were the true originators, the innovators who invented and perfected, in its various details, totalitarian dictatorship-the secret police techniques, the mass communication controls, and more especially, the centrally planned and directed economy.” (Friedrich. 57)
The Bolsheviks were the first to adopt the practice of propaganda in peacetime. Shortly afterward, Hitler emulated them.
Hannah Arendt described how authoritarian propaganda constructs a sustained, competing fictional world of untruth, with its own internal logic. One could identify the big leap from the inversion of truth to the inversion of reality. Nazi propagandists took the idea of the Big Lie and prolonged its duration to create a new reality based on the paranoiac myth which Gombrich described:
“Their art [of the authoritarian leaders] consists in using, and at the same time transcending, the elements of reality, of verifiable experiences, in the chosen fiction, and in generalizing them into regions which then are definitely removed from all possible control by individual experience. With such generalizations, totalitarian propaganda establishes a world fit to compete with the real one, whose main handicap is that it is not logical, consistent, and organized. The consistency of the fiction and the strictness of the organization make it possible for the generalization eventually to survive the explosion of more specific lies-the power of the Jews after their helpless slaughter, the sinister global conspiracy of Trotskyites after their liquidation in Soviet Russia and the murder of Trotsky.” (Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd ed. (New York: Meridian, 1958), p361.)
Omer Bartov, in his study Hitler’s Army, showed that the deep penetration of the paranoid myth in German consciousness. He explained that the Wehrmacht was really a critical part of German society. During the invasion of Russia, when it became obvious that Germany could not win the war, propaganda gained an almost religious dimension as a binding force for the soldiers. Under the harsh conditions in mid-July 1941, a Wehrmacht noncommissioned officer wrote home, producing a document which reveals the absolute and genocidal effects of Nazi propaganda:
“The German people owes a great debt to our Fuehrer, for had these beasts, who are our enemies here, come to Germany, such murders would have taken place that the world has never seen before…. What we have seen no newspaper can describe. It borders on the unbelievable, even the Middle Ages do not compare with what has occurred here. And when one reads the “Stuermer” and looks at the pictures, that is only a weak illustration of what we see here and the crimes committed here by the Jews. Believe me, even the most sensational newspaper reports are only a fraction of what is happening here.” (Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p106)
Bartov explained that this soldier’s perception was a striking inversion of reality, which ascribed the unprecedented brutality of the Wehrmacht and the SS to their victims, and was the most characteristic feature of the German soldier’s “coming to terms” with his actions in the Soviet Union…. It is precisely this distorted perception of reality which gives us the measure of success of Nazi propaganda and indoctrination.(Fishman, 2007)
Bartov’s remarkable study showed how the paranoiac myth of Nazi propaganda was so powerful that its logical consequence was an inversion of morality. Even after Germany’s defeat, its effects were so pervasive that some Nazi veterans continued to mouth these fictions in order to justify their own criminal deeds. (Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), p140-141)
Inversion-of-Reality against Israel to the Present Day
During the first postwar decades, inversion of reality and the Big Lie appears to have fallen into temporary disuse, with one notable exception.
Prof. Arnold Toynbee delivered a lecture in Montreal in January 1961 in which he “compared from a moral standpoint, the attitude of Israel to the Arabs in 1947 and 1948 with the Nazi slaughter of six million Jews.” The ambassador of Israel to Canada, Yaakov Herzog, read this statement in the Montreal newspapers and challenged Toynbee to a debate which followed on January 31, 1961, at McGill University. (Misha Louvish, ed., A People that Dwells Alone; Speeches and Writings of Yaakov Herzog(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975))
During the 1960s, and particularly after the Israeli victory in the Six Day War in 1967, the Soviet Union and its allies in the Arab world reintroduced some of the old propaganda themes. Israel’s victory represented a humiliation to the Soviet cause and posed an internal danger because it shook the foundations of authority. Domestically, it heartened the minorities in the Soviet Union, not least the Jews. Having suffered a major reverse, the Soviet Union and the Arab countries decided to use political anti-Semitism as a means of shifting world attention from their defeat. They endeavored to delegitimize Israel, to brand Israel as the aggressor, and to bring about its isolation.
Some elements of the new propaganda campaign were:
The accusation that Israel was the aggressor in the Six Day War and denial of its right to self-defense.
The passing of UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, “Zionism is racism,” on November 10, 1975, which gave the standing of international law to a proposition totally based on the inversion of reality. This resolution transformed Zionism, the Jewish national movement, into the embodiment of evil by equating it with the depravity of Nazi Germany.
The drafting of the PLO Covenant in its various versions of 1964, 1968, and 1974. This document claimed that justice was totally on the Palestinian side and that Israel had no standing at all.
The Hamas Charter of 1988.
The unprecedented assault on Israel at the end of August and beginning of September 2001 which took place at the UN Conference in Durban.
Both the Arab world and the Soviet Union used inversion of reality as a method and drew on the idiom of Nazi propaganda. The transfer of this expertise cannot be traced in detail because documentary information is incomplete. It is known, however, that many Nazi fugitives found refuge in the Arab world.
From 1953, Egypt absorbed some two thousand of them. Some worked in Nasser’s secret service and administered concentration camps. Others were involved in the design and construction of rockets. (Jennie Lebel, Haj Amin ve-Berlin (Haj Amin and Berlin) (Tel Aviv: by the author, 1996), 210-13)
Among this population were specialists in anti-Semitic propaganda. From Egypt, they disseminated anti-Semitism and the doctrine of Holocaust denial in the Arab world and beyond. Writing in 1967, historian Kurt Tauber described the contemporary situation in Nasser’s Egypt:
“….In addition to Gestapo and SS skills, there are also other capabilities that appear to be in great demand on the Nile. Former Goebbels trainees, initially under the supervision of the late Johann von Leers, are playing – we are told – an important role in Nasser’s anti-Jewish and anti-Zionist propaganda apparatus. In this connection we hear the names of Werner Witschale, Baron von Harder, Hans Appler, and Franz Buensche. But Gestapo, SS, and espionage backgrounds do not hamper access to attractive careers in the Egyptian propaganda ministry. Walter Bollmann, Nazi espionage chief in Great Britain before the war, later, as SS major, engaged in anti-guerilla and anti-Jewish operations in the Ukraine, Louis Heiden, an SS official who was transferred to the Egyptian press office during the war, Franz Bartel, an “old fighter” and Gestapo officer, Werner Birgel, an SS officer from Leipzig, Albert Thielemann, a regional SS chief in Bohemia, Erich Bunz, SA major and expert on the Jewish question; and SS Captain Wilhelm Boeckler, participant in the liquidation of the Warsaw Ghetto – all are reportedly engaged in anti-Jewish propaganda on behalf of Nasser….” (Kurt P. Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika; German Nationalism since 1945 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1967) II, 1115)
Matthias Küntzel described a major outcome of the Egyptian propaganda project:
“This penetration of the Egyptian postwar institutions by a band of national-socialistically oriented opinion makers could only contribute… to the fact that, even to the present, [knowledge of] German crimes against the Jews hardly entered the Egyptian public consciousness. For nearly fifty years the delusion has been dominant in the Egyptian media that the Holocaust at no time in the Twentieth Century was anything more than a pretext, which might constantly be put forward to justify Israel’s existence….” (Matthias Küntzel, Jihad und Judenhass: Über den neuen antijuedischen Krieg (Freiburg: ca ira, 2002), 50-51)
Johann von Leers (Kurt P. Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika, II, 1269)
Because issues of historical continuity, and particularly the transfer of ideas, and are a matter of importance, special mention should be made of Prof. Dr. Johann von Leers (1902- 1965). He was one of the most important ideologues of the Third Reich and later served in the Egyptian Information Department.
In April 1938 von Leers was named professor at the Friedrich-Schiller University in Jena, and his area of expertise was “Legal, Economic, and Political History on a Racial Basis” (Rechts-, Wirtschafts- und politische Geschichte auf rassischer Grundlage). He mastered five languages: English, French, Spanish, Dutch, and Japanese. As a young man he participated in the nationalistic youth movement Adler u. Falken (Eagles and Hawks), where he formed a lifelong association with Heinrich Himmler. He was one of the early members of the Nazi Party, and in 1929 Goebbels made him his protégé. (Ulrich Nanko, Die Deutsche Glaubensbewegung: Eine historische un soziologische Untersuchung(Marburg: Diagonal, 1993))
Von Leers had been a committed member of the German Movement of Faith, a project under Himmler’s patronage whose purpose was to “free Germany from the imperialism of Jewish-Christianity” by creating a new pagan religion to take its place. (Karla Poewe, New Religions and the Nazis(New York and London: Routledge, 2006)).
An Israeli researcher found indications that, in cooperation with a certain Friedrich Lamberty-Muck who advocated polygamy, von Leers became one of the initiators of a plan to increase the Aryan race through breeding, an initiative which Himmler enthusiastically adopted and subsequently resulted in the Lebensborn project.
Von Leers was the expert in Jewish affairs. An open advocate of genocide, he was one of the most radical anti-Semitic publicists of the Third Reich. The Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim explained that von Leers took the position that “states harboring Jews were harboring the plague, and that the Reich had the moral duty and by the principle of hot pursuit, the legal right to conquer such countries, if only to wipe the plague out.” (Emil L. Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought(Bloomington and Indianopolis: Indiana University Press, 1994))
In a communication to Fackenheim, historian Erich Goldhagen explained “that whereas of course the bacilli idea was common among Nazis, von Leers had the unusual distinction of not bothering to veil his call for mass murder in euphemistic language.”
After his death, “his widow who shared his views, returned to Germany, where she embarrassed Neo-Nazis by defending Hitler’s ‘extermination’ of the Jews openly, instead of classifying it among his ‘mistakes.”
Von Leers possessed undeniable talent and applied it to construct an ideological foundation for National Socialism and Islam based on their shared hatred of the Jews. He continued this endeavor in Egypt after the war, and his efforts were welcomed and reciprocated. (Jeffrey Herf, “Convergence: The Classic Case, Nazi Germany, Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism during World War II,” The Journal of Israeli History 25: 1(March 2006))
Herf reports that in December 1942, von Leers published an article in Die Judenfrage, a journal which belonged to the anti-Semitic intellectual world, entitled “Judaism and Islam as Opposites.” As the title indicates, the author’s perspective is Hegelian, presenting Judaism and Islam in terms of thesis and antithesis. This essay also reveals the ingratiating National Socialist perspective which von Leers projected on the Islamic past as well as the intensity of his hatred for Judaism and Jewry.
The following passage is part of the original text. I’m especially grateful to Prof. Herf for sharing this remarkable document, parts of which he first published in paraphrase with direct citations:
“Mohammed’s hostility to the Jews had one result: Oriental Jewry was completely paralyzed. Its backbone was broken. Oriental Jewry effectively did not participate in [European] Jewry’s tremendous rise to power in the last two centuries. Despised in the filthy lanes of the mellah [the walled Jewish quarter of a Moroccan city, analogous to the European ghetto], the Jews vegetated there. They lived under a special law [that of a protected minority], which in contrast to Europe did not permit usury or even traffic in stolen goods, but kept them in a state of oppression and anxiety. If the rest of the world had adopted a similar policy, we would not have a Jewish Question [Judenfrage]…. As a religion, Islam indeed performed an eternal service [to the world]: it prevented the threatened conquest of Arabia by the Jews and vanquished the horrible teaching of Jehovah by a pure religion, which at that time opened the way to a higher culture for numerous peoples ….” (“Judentum und Islam als Gegensaetze,” Die Judenfrage, Vol. 6, No. 24 (15 December 1942): 278, quoted and paraphrased by Herf, The Jewish Enemy, 181)
For his part, the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem, Haj Amin al-Husseini in his conversation with Hitler of November 21, 1941, and his radio broadcasts contended that Jews were the common enemy of Islam and Nazi Germany. (Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 101-05)
The ex-Mufti frequently went on tour to encourage the Balkan SS Muslim units, and the Axis radio stations faithfully covered these visits. During his broadcast of January 21, 1944, he proclaimed:
“The Reich is fighting against the same enemies who robbed the Moslems of their countries and suppressed their faith in Asia, Africa and Europe…. National Socialist Germany is fighting against world Jewry. The Koran says, “You will find that the Jews are the worst enemies of the Moslems.” There are considerable similarities between Islamic principles and those of National Socialism, namely in the affirmation of struggle and fellowship, in the stress of the leadership idea, in the ideal of order. All this brings our ideologies close together and facilitates cooperation. I am happy to see in this division a visible and practical expression of both ideologies.” (Maurice Pearlman, Mufti of Jerusalem: The Story of Haj Amin el Husseini (London: Gollancz, 1947), p64)
After the war, von Leers lived incognito in Italy until 1950 when he fled to Argentina, where he served as editor of the Nazi monthly Der Weg and entered into close contact with Adolf Eichmann. After the fall of Peron in 1955, he moved to Cairo where he served in the Egyptian Information Department. Encouraged by the ex-Mufti who was also living in Egypt, he converted to Islam and assumed the names Mustafa Ben Ali and Omar Amin Johann von Leers.
Von Leers sponsored the publication of an Arabic edition of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, revived the blood libel, organized anti-Semitic broadcasts in numerous languages, cultivated neo-Nazis throughout the world, and maintained a warm correspondence encouraging the first generation of Holocaust deniers, one of whom was Paul Rassinier. (Les amis de Rassinier, p2-13)
One source reported that von Leers was the first, before the KGB, to launch the idea of a separate Palestinian nationality as part of the wider war against Israel.
In addition to the professional obligations of his day job, Johann von Leers was “active as the contact man for the organization of former members of the SS (ODESSA) in Arab territory.”
It is reported that his old friend, Haj Amin al-Husseini, secured his post as political adviser in the Egyptian Information Department, but another source suggests that a political officer at the Egyptian embassy in Buenos Aires recruited him.
When von Leers arrived in Cairo, the ex-Mufti, Haj Amin, publicly welcomed him: “We thank you for venturing to take up the battle with the powers of darkness that have become incarnate in world Jewry.” (Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites, p207)
If today’s Arab anti-Israeli and anti-Jewish propaganda strongly resembles that of the Third Reich, there is a good reason.
East-Bloc
An immediate consequence of Israel’s victory in the Six Day War was the unleashing of a virulent campaign of state-sponsored anti-Semitism in the East bloc. According to Stefan Possony, an American strategist and specialist in East European affairs, Komsomolskaya Pravda published the real message of this propaganda on 4 October 1967:
“Zionism is dedicated to ‘genocide, racism, treachery, aggression, and annexation… all characteristic attributes of fascists.”
Leon Poliakov also identified information in this text which its Soviet author took from a 1957 pamphlet published at the time Johann van Leers was in charge of anti-Semitic propaganda in Egypt. (Poliakov, De l’antisionisme, p147)
Indeed, there are reasonable grounds, circumstantial and textual, to support the view that Nazi propaganda themes were transmitted directly from Egypt to the East Bloc, particularly the DDR.
On September 6,1968, Dr. Simon Wiesenthal held a press conference in Vienna where he accused the German Democratic Republic for its use of language identical to the Nazi era in its condemnation of Israel. The title of the publication which he distributed on this occasion was, The Same Language: first for Hitler – now for Ulbricht.
In this well documented publication, Wiesenthal and his staff identified thirty-nine Nazis with excellent credentials who found their way into the service of the G.D.R. (Die gleiche Sprache: Erst feur Hitler – jetzt feur Ulbricht; Pressekonferenz von Simon Wiesenthal am 6. September 1968 in Wien(Bonn: Deutachland-Berichte, 1968))
Some were extremely well placed. Not surprisingly, one of the tools of propaganda which they used was inversion of reality, accusing Israel of being the aggressor.
J. H. Brinks, in his essay “Political Anti-Fascism in the German Democratic Republic”, wrote that there was no ideological impediment to prevent the cooperation between Communist party members and National Socialists, as they had once been allies. (J. H. Brinks, “Political Anti-Fascism in the German Democratic Republic,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol 32, No. 2 (April 1997): p214)
That is, until Hitler invaded the Soviet Union. Nevertheless, there remained positive feelings in favor of Russian-German friendship which were based on considerations of history and geography. For example, after the First World War, in 1922, Weimar Germany concluded the Treaty of Rapello which took Bolshevik Russia out of diplomatic isolation. This treaty became the forerunner of subsequent military and political arrangements.
For example, Chief of the Army Command, General Hans von Seekt, “arranged for exchanges of military instructors, the manufacture of weapons [such as aircraft, heavy artillery, tanks, and poison gas] forbidden to the Germans by Versailles, and close cooperation in other military fields.” (Charles W. Thayer, The Unquiet Germans(New York: Harper, 1957), p115-116)
Charles W. Thayer, an American career diplomat who served in Germany shortly after the war, recounted that some of the great German industrialists nostalgically remembered that Russia had once been a major market and they hoped one day it might again come back to life.
After the war, some ultra-conservatives and unrepentant Nazis remained convinced that historical and geographical reasons made Russia a natural ally, and these transcended the fact that it was under Communist rule. Members of this school of thought held that for reasons of traditional policy dating back to Frederick the Great, Russia should be an ally, and, that if reunification were ever to be, its good will would be of critical importance. Von Leers belonged to this group. (William Stevenson, The Bormann Brotherhood (London: Arthur Barker, 1973), p127)
The real statement of the Soviet party line took the form of a short book titled Beware Zionism! Essays on the Ideology, Organization, and Practice of Zionism.
Its author was given as Yuri Ivanov, a party Central Committee specialist on Zionism, and at the beginning of 1969, the Moscow Political Literature Publishing House (Krasny Proletary) distributed this pedantic book of some 173 pages in an edition of seventy-five thousand copies. It was priced to move at a modest 27 kopeks. (Yuri Ivanov, Ostorozno: sionizm! As cited by William Korey, Russian Antisemitism, Pamyat, and the Demonology of Zionism (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995), p20)
William Korey wrote: “The voice of the official Soviet Authority was not disguised. It spoke clearly through Pravda: ‘From the pages of Yuri Ivanov’s book emerges the true evil image of Zionism and this constitutes the undoubted importance of the book.” (Pravda, 9 March 1969, as cited by Korey, Russian Antisemitism, p21)
Beware Zionism! is interesting with regard to its antisemitic content. Its thesis, based on the Protocols, was that world Jewry possessed ubiquitous control of world politics. Indeed, the structure and content of Beware Zionism bear a remarkable resemblance to Johann von Leers’ book, The Forces behind Roosevelt [Kraefte hinter Roosevelt] which he published in Berlin in 1942. (“Antisemitism in the Russian Area,” Plural Societies, 5:4 (Winter 1974), p59)
The language of Komsomolskaya Pravda, in contrast, represented a change of direction toward a major inversion of reality compressed into slogans, such as “Zionism is racism.”
Bernard Lewis reported the use of these new slogans at the World Conference of the International Women’s Year held in Mexico City in late June and early July 1975. He noted that: “the ‘Declaration on the Equality of Women’ issued on that occasion repeatedly stresses the share of women in the struggle against neocolonialism, foreign occupation, Zionism, racism, racial discrimination and apartheid.” (Bernard Lewis, “The Anti-Zionist Resolution,” Foreign Affairs, October 1976, p54)
The New Antisemitism in Europe.
With France’s change in diplomatic orientation in favor of the Arab cause, and as a consequence of its great influence in Europe, anti-Israeli information steadily gained currency. Historian Bat Ye’or remarked that the Second International Conference in Support of the Arab Peoples, held in Cairo in 1969, was a turning point for Europe.
Its chief objective was to “demonstrate hostility to Zionism and solidarity with the Arab population of Palestine.”
British historian Arnold Toynbee and French Arabist Jacques Berque participated in this event.
It did not take long for the cold winds to blow. At the end of 1968, Bertrand Russell published an open letter to Wladyslaw Gomulka, first secretary of the Polish Communist Party, protesting the outbreak of state-sponsored anti-Semitism in Poland. Russell bluntly likened this new anti-Semitism to that of Nazi Germany and used the term “twisted logic” to describe the method of inverting reality:
“Over the past eighteen months in Poland, the Press, the secret police and the Government have instigated anti-Semitism quite deliberately. By some twisted logic, all Jews are now Zionists, Zionists are fascists, fascists are Nazis, and Jews, therefore, are to be identified with the very criminals who only recently sought to eliminate Polish Jewry….” (Bertrand Russell, “Open Letter to Wladyslaw Gomulka,” World Jewry, Vol. 11, No. 6 (November-December 1968), p8)
The Soviet Union spread several other fictions in its new propaganda war against Israel. One of these was the accusation that Israel was the aggressor in the Six Day War. Probably the very first observer to identify and describe this distorted logic was Prof. Richard Pipes of Harvard University. He called it a “successful technique employed by Moscow to turn the tables on the opponent by confusing the real issues at stake.”
Pipes explained that, normally, when a state is aggressed and succeeds in defending itself, it sets its terms in the negotiations which follow. Redress indeed may include taking possession of some of the aggressor’s territory:
“In the peace settlement which results, the defeated party usually has to make concessions to the victor, possibly, territorial ones…. The peculiar feature of this conflict is that whereas the real issue at stake is negotiation between the belligerents, Soviet propaganda has managed to make the main issue appear Israeli withdrawal from the territories occupied in the course of the war. Thus, a matter which should be part of the final settlement of the conflict becomes a precondition of negotiations leading to a settlement. Whatever one’s feelings about the substance of the Israeli-Egyptian dispute, one cannot but admire the adroit use of an intellectual confidence trick to turn the tables on an opponent and shift the burden of recalcitrance from oneself to the other party.” (Richard Pipes, “Some Operational Principles of Soviet Foreign Policy,” in M. Confino and S. Shamir, eds., The U.S.S.R. and the Middle East(Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press, 1973), 19-20)
The Covenants
When discussing the developments of this era, one must include the PLO Covenant in its different versions from 1964 onward. It provided a codified ideological statement which embodied Palestinian myths and claims. At first it did not have much impact, but later, particularly after 1973, it became the PLO credo. (Friedman, 2007)
It needs to be noted that Ion Mihai Pacepa, a former chief of the Romanian secret service who came over to the West, disclosed that:
“… in 1964 the first PLO Council, consisting of 422 Palestinian representatives handpicked by the KGB, approved the Palestinian National Charter, a document which had been drafted in Moscow. The Palestinian National Covenant and the Palestinian Constitution were also born in Moscow, with the help of Ahmed Shuqairy, a KGB influence agent who became the first PLO chairman.” (“From Russia with Terror,” interview of Ion Mihai Pacepa by Jamie Glazov, 1 March 2004)
Prof. Yehoshafat Harkabi was probably the first to recognize the importance of this document and carefully analyzed its content and language. In the introduction to his publication of the text of the PLO Covenant, Harkabi stated in his commentary that the absoluteness of the PLO inversion of reality was inherently totalitarian:
“The Palestinian movement claims absoluteness and “totality”-there is absolute justice in the Palestinian stand in contrast to the absolute injustice of Israel;…right is on the Palestinian side only; only they are worthy of self-determination; the Israelis are barely human creatures who at most may be tolerated in the Palestinian state as individuals or as a religious community…; the historical link of the Jews with the land of Israel is deceit; the spiritual link as expressed in the centrality of the land of Israel in Judaism is a fraud; international decisions such as the Mandate granted by the League of Nations and the United Nations Partition Resolution are all consigned to nothingness in a cavalier manner.” (Y. Harkabi, The Palestine Covenant and its Meaning (London: Vallentine, Mitchell, 1979), p12-13)
The PLO Covenant is core to our understanding of today’s Palestinian Authority. The fact that Yasser Arafat refused to amend this document, even though he pretended to do so in the presence of President Clinton on December 14, 1998, is the best indication of his real intentions. (Khaled Abu Toameh, “Kaddoumi: PLO Charter Was Never Changed,” Jerusalem Post, 23 April 2004)
Similarly, the Hamas Charter of 1988, the text of which may be found on the Internet, Küntzel traced its distinctive inversion of reality to Nazi sources:
“The renewed impact of Nazi-style conspiracy theories becomes particularly obvious if we take a look at the Charter of the Muslim Brotherhood of Palestine, otherwise known as Hamas. Created in 1988, the Charter pointedly makes use of the antisemitic rhetoric of the ex-Mufti of Jerusalem which he had adopted from the Nazis. According to this Charter, “the Jews were behind the French Revolution as well as the Communist revolutions”. They were “behind World War I so as to wipe out the Islamic Caliphate… and also behind World War II, where they collected immense benefits from trading in war materials and prepared for the establishment of their state”. They “inspired the establishment of the United Nations and the Security Council… in order to rule the world through their intermediaries. There was no war anywhere without their [the Jews] fingerprints on them”. The original text of the Charter is clearly stated in Article 32, in which it states that the intentions of the Zionists “[have] been laid out in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and their present conduct is the best proof of what is said there.” (Matthias Küntzel, “Islamic Antisemitism and Its Nazi Roots,” Antisemitism International ([SICSA] 2004): p47)
The importance of these charters has not been anywhere near enough appreciated. Nevertheless, the myths which they encompass have become part of the fictional, paranoiac, and coherent worldview which Arab propaganda has imposed on reality.
The Evil of the UN- “Zionism Is Racism”
On November 10, 1975, the Soviet Union and its allies passed UN General Assembly Resolution 3379, “Zionism is racism,” which transformed an antiSemitic slogan into an internationally accepted “truth”. (Alex Grobman, Nations United (Green Forest, AR: Balfour Books, 2006), p37-48)
Rabbis Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman explained that “the term ‘racism’ was coined in 1936 to rally scientific and political opinion against Nazi doctrines of ‘Aryan superiority’ over Jews and other alleged untermenschen.” (Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman, “Through a Glass, Darkly: Durban and September 11th,” Midstream, November 2001)
According to the original meaning of the term, “racism” denotes one of the great abuses of Nazism. Thus, to compare or equate Zionism with racism represents a serious accusation and inversion of reality.
Although Resolution 3379 was finally rescinded on December 16, 1991, and the Soviet Union passed into history just ten days later (December 26, 1991), the damage to Israel’s cause was considerable. By diminishing a complicated issue to just a slogan, this libel, which inverted reality, prevented rational discussion of the actual problems of the Middle East.
In an era of mass media, when the study of the past has become almost nonexistent, slogans such as “Zionism is racism” have taken the place of facts. They have penetrated the popular mainstream expression and the consciousness of credulous mass audiences.
Israel’s enemies made many accusations during the years following Resolution 3379, and for a time they spared Israel another massive assault on its legitimacy.
This changed with the UN World Conference against Racism which took place in Durban, South Africa, from August 28 to September 8, 2001. Durban became the scene of anti-Semitic and anti-Israeli speeches and agitation of a ferocity unknown since the 1930s. (“The Durban Debacle: An Insider’s View of the UN World Conference against Racism” Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, Vol. 26, No. 1 (2002))
One of the most blatant acts perpetrated by the UN itself which highlighted its past, present and future antisemitism and anti-Israel bias perfectly was the fact that they printed off and handed out widely thousands of copies of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a booklet that had been proven 80 years earlier to have been a hoax. I wrote extensively about this Durban event in Part Two, but this event more than any before it and after epitomized the dishonesty and complicity of the UN with both Nazi and Communist anti-Israel crimes and propaganda, and the bias in favor of the Arab world in their antisemitic crusade against Israel. (Lewis, “Anti-Zionist Resolution,” p54)
Some of the main players who joined this effort were the UN high commissioner for human rights and secretary-general of the conference, Mary Robinson, as well as Yasser Arafat, Hanan Ashrawi, and Farouk Kaddoumi for the Palestinian Authority, Ahmed Maher and the Arab Lawyers’ Union for Egypt, Farouk al-Shara for Syria, and the Iranian delegate. (Alan Rosenbaum, “Learning Lessons from the Antisemitic Durban Conference,” The Jerusalem Post, July 1, 2021)
Others included the representatives of the NGOs, the European Union, the United Arab Emirates, Pakistan, Cuba, China, Sudan, Iraq, Chile, Jamaica, Finland, and South Africa. (Ibid)
Squarely in the tradition of “Zionism is racism,” the Durban Conference made ample use of the inversion of reality. Indeed, the NGOs called “for the reinstatement of the UN resolution equating Zionism with Racism” and “the complete and total isolation of Israel as an apartheid state.” They condemned “Israeli crimes against humanity, ethnic cleansing, and genocide.” (Anne Bayefsky, “The UN World Conference against Racism: A Racist Anti-Racism Conference,” American Society of International Law 96 (2002))
This message was essentially the same as those of the 1960s and 1970s cited above. It fitted in well with the statement of Komsomolskaya Pravda of October 4, 1967, and the “Declaration on the Equality of Women” of the 1975 World Conference of the International Women’s Year. (Farah Stockman, “Women’s March Roiled by Accusations of Antisemitism,” New York Times, December 23, 2018)
Repetition of the same message, even over decades, remains one of the known characteristics of modern mass propaganda.
The significance of Durban is yet to be fully appreciated, particularly because the malicious intentions of its sponsors-Egypt and the Palestinian Authority, which are supposedly at peace with Israel, as well as the United Nations, and those of Iran, have not been fully acknowledged. Their excesses even surpassed Resolution 3379.
At one time, those who advocated reinstatement of the original “Zionism is racism” resolution argued that opposing Zionism was not antiSemitic. Now, after Durban, all pretenses vanished. AntiSemitism in the name of “Palestinian” justice became acceptable.
A condition of “convergence”, to use Jeffrey Herf’s term, had been reached. That is, AntiSemitism and Anti-Zionism merged, probably for the first time since the Nazi era. (Lewis, “Convergence: The Classic Case, Nazi Germany, Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism during World War II.”)
According to Anne Bayefsky and Rabbis Cooper and Brackman, some of the propositions which found expression at Durban were:
Denial of antiSemitism as a human rights issue of our time.
Acceptance of antiSemitism in the name of fighting racism.
“Antisemitism is not a manifestation of contemporary racism.”
Recognition of the “Palestinian” people as victims of Israeli racism.
Expropriation of the term Holocaust.
Approval of terrorism, or “armed struggle”, as a means to combat racism.
Exclusion and isolation of the Jewish state in the name of multiculturalism. (Bayefsky, “UN World Conference,” p65-74; Cooper and Brackman, “Through a Glass,”)
Premeditated Intent
Shortly before his death, French statesman Georges Clemenceau met with a friendly representative of the Weimar Republic who raised the question of guilt for the outbreak of World War I. He asked Clemenceau, “What, in your opinion will future historians think of this troublesome and controversial issue?” He replied, “This I don’t know. But I know for certain that they will not say Belgium invaded Germany.”In his time, “the Tiger” enjoyed a sense of certainty which has since disappeared. (Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Viking Press, 1954), p239)
How many people still remember that in June 1967, Israel, in an act of self-defense, foiled the plans of the real aggressors? These were the Soviet Union which encouraged the Arab states to foment a crisis, Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt who built an alliance with King Hussein of Jordan and Hafez al-Assad of Syria for the purpose of annihilating the Jewish state. And how many remember that the Egyptian blockade of the Straits of Tiran in May 1967 was an act of war? (Isabella Ginor/Gideon Remez, Foxbats over Dimona. The Sovjets’ Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day-War (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2007))
A large part of the purpose of this article is to consider the lie as a form of evidence, and to the extent possible to identify its origins and the motives of those who propagated it. For more than half a century, inversion of reality has been the essential characteristic of a media war against Israel and has caused considerable harm. Its basic untruth rests in the accusation that Israel is the aggressor.
The purpose of this lie is to negate the legitimacy of the Jewish state, to deprive Israel of its sovereign right to defend itself, and to justify future aggression against Israel and violence against Jews in the Diaspora. This propaganda method descends directly from the paranoiac myth of Third Reich, which framed world Jewry as endeavoring to destroy Germany and its people. It is authoritarian in its method and in the “absolute” of its logical consequence. It completely rejects Jewish nationhood and all of Israel’s claims. And it leaves absolutely no room for introspection and compromise.
Following the same strategy which the international community applied against South Africa, the long-term strategic objective of Israel’s enemies is to destroy the Jewish state incrementally, even if it takes decades. In the context of the media war, their choice of means reveal their ultimate goal.
For its part, Israel has a strategic need to defend itself on the battlefield, but in order to exercise this sovereign right, it must effectively safeguard its legitimacy in the forum of public opinion. Accordingly, Israel must first recognize the type of war in which it is engaged and then formulate an effective strategy based on solid information. (Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), Book I, Chapter 1, item 27, p88-89)
It would be a huge error to overlook the moral implications of this problem. As noted above, Goebbels asserted that: “propaganda as such is neither good nor evil. Its moral value is determined by the goals it seeks”. Because the technique of inversion of reality rests on the violation the truth, it leads to an inversion of morality and moral responsibility.
Consequently, this method is inherently flawed, because one cannot use lies in the service of a “Greater Truth” without becoming a liar. In most cases, when one lies in the cause of some “Greater Truth,” the so-called “Truth” may well turn out to be another lie. Inversion of truth and reality can never serve a morally beneficial purpose.
Can a cause have real virtue if it can be advanced only through the use of untruths? Beyond the specific circumstances, inversion of truth constitutes an assault on empirical and rational thought, the foundations of modern culture. If this assault succeeds, there is a danger that language will be debased and society will regress to a condition of confusion and immorality.
There is, therefore, an urgent need to expose the lies which have become part of the media war and to discredit those who spread them.
End of Part 4
References
[1] E.g., Leon Poliakov, De l’antisionisme a l’antisémitisme (Paris: Calman Levy, 1969) [French]; Institute of Jewish Affairs, Soviet Antisemitic Propaganda: Evidence from Books, Press and Radio (London: Institute of Jewish Affairs, 1978); Robert Wistrich, Hitler’s Apocalypse: Jews and the Nazi Legacy (London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 1985); Bernard Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites (New York: W. W. Norton, 1986).
[2] Klaus Faber, Julius H. Schoeps, and Sacha Stawski, eds., Neu-alter Judenhass: Antisemitismus, arabisch-israelischer Konflikt und europäische Politik(Berlin: Verlag für Berlin-Brandenburg, 2006), 209-10 [German]. Carmon wrote:
[3] Marc Bloch, The Historian’s Craft, tr. Peter Putnam (New York: Vintage Books, 1953), 93.
[4] Philip M. Taylor, “Propaganda from Thucydides to Thatcher: Some Problems, Perspectives and Pitfalls” (1992), https://ics.leeds.ac.uk/papers/vp01.cfm?outfit=pmt&requesttimeout=500&folder=25&paper=48.
[5] “Goebbels on Propaganda,” Der Kongress zur Nürnberg 1934 (Munich: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, Frz. Eher Nachf., 1934), 130-41 [German]
[6] Jeffrey Herf, The Jewish Enemy: Nazi Propaganda during World War II and the Holocaust (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 270-71.
[7] Ernst H. Gombrich, Myth and Reality in German Wartime Broadcasts (London: University of London, The Athlone Press, 1970), 14, 23.
[8] Pierre-Andre Taguieff, Rising from the Muck, trans. Patrick Camiller (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2004), 62.
[9] www.thefirstpost.co.uk/atoz.php.
[10] “The Monstrous Inversion,” 6 January 2006, www.melaniephillips.com/diary/?p=1100.
[11] Mark Landler, “German-Polish Ties Plummet to New Low; Post-World War II Treaty Is Challenged,” International Herald Tribune, 22 December 2006.
[12] Philip M. Taylor, British Propaganda in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1999), 27-29.
[13] Campbell Stuart, Secrets of Crewe House: The Story of a Famous Campaign (London: Hodder & Stoughton, 1920), 64.
[14] Taylor, British Propaganda, 56-57.
[15] The Christian Century, as quoted by Robert Jan van Pelt, The Case for Auschwitz: Evidence from the Irving Trial (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), 133-34.
[16] Taylor, British Propaganda, 231.
[17] Carl J. Friedrich, “The Rise of Totalitarian Dictatorship,” in Jack J. Roth, ed., World War I: A Turning Point in History (New York: Knopf, 1968), 53-54.
[18] “Hitler on War Propaganda from Mein Kampf, Volume One: A Reckoning, Chapter VI: ‘War Propaganda,'” Phil Taylor’s Website, https://ics.leeds.ac.uk/papers/vp01.cfm?outfit=pmt&folder=715&paper=2499.
[19] Mein Kampf (James Murphy translation, 134), as cited by Wikipedia sv, “Big Lie,” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big_Lie. The original German of this passage occurs in Book 1
[20] Friedrich., 57.
[21] E. H. Carr, Propaganda in International Politics(Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), 13.
[22] Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism, 2nd ed. (New York: Meridian, 1958), 361.
[23] Omer Bartov, Hitler’s Army: Soldiers, Nazis, and War in the Third Reich (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 106.
[24] Misha Louvish, ed., A People that Dwells Alone; Speeches and Writings of Yaakov Herzog(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1975), 21.
[25] “Toynbee visits Egypt,” Washington Post, 8 April 1964.
[26] Jennie Lebel, Haj Amin ve-Berlin (Haj Amin and Berlin) (Tel Aviv: by the author, 1996), 210-13 [Hebrew].
[27] Kurt P. Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika; German Nationalism since 1945 (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1967) II, 1115.
[28] Matthias Küntzel, Jihad und Judenhass: Über den neuen antijuedischen Krieg (Freiburg: ca ira, 2002), 50-51. [German]
[29] Description of Kurt P. Tauber, Beyond Eagle and Swastika, II, 1269.
[30] Robert S. Wistrich, Who’s Who in Nazi Germany (London: Routledge, 1995), 153.
[31] Schaul Baumann, The German Movement of Faith and Its Founder Jakob Wilhelm Hauer (1881-1962), doctoral dissertation, Hebrew University, 1998, 241, n. 49.
[32] Karla Poewe, New Religions and the Nazis(New York and London: Routledge, 2006), 25.
[33] Schaul Baumann, Die Deutsche Glaubensbewegung und ihr Gruender Jakob Wilhelm Hauer (1881-1962), trans. Alma Lessing (Marburg: Diagonal-Verlag, 2005), 171, n. 358. [German]
[34] Emil L. Fackenheim, To Mend the World: Foundations of Post-Holocaust Jewish Thought(Bloomington and Indianopolis: Indiana University Press, 1994), 184.
[35] See: Jeffrey Herf, “Convergence: The Classic Case, Nazi Germany, Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism during World War II,” The Journal of Israeli History 25: 1(March 2006), 66-79.
[36] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mellah.
[37] “Judentum und Islam als Gegensaetze,” Die Judenfrage, Vol. 6, No. 24 (15 December 1942): 278, quoted and paraphrased by Herf, The Jewish Enemy, 181.
[38] Gerald Fleming, Hitler and the Final Solution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), 101-05. This chapter describes the ex-Mufti’s visit to Hitler on 21 November 1941 and contains the protocol of their discussion.
[39] Maurice Pearlman, Mufti of Jerusalem: The Story of Haj Amin el Husseini (London: Gollancz, 1947), 64.
[40] Lebel, Haj Amin, 212.
[41] Les amis de Rassinier.
[42] Bundesarchiv-Findmittelinfo.
[43] Wistrich, Hitler’s Apocalypse, 176.
[44] Lewis, Semites and Anti-Semites, 207.
[45] Mikhail Heller and Aleksandr M. Nekrich, Utopia in Power: The History of the Soviet Unionfrom 1917 to the Present, trans. Phyllis B. Carlos (New York: Summit Books, 1986), 670:
[46] Stefan T. Possony, Waking Up the Giant(New Rochelle, NY: Arlington House, 1974), 473.
[47] Poliakov, De l’antisionisme, 147. According to Martin A, Lee, the title of the pamphlet in question was, “America – A Zionist Colony.” Martin A. Lee, The Beast Reawakens (New York: Routledge, 2000), 168.
[48] Die gleiche Sprache: Erst feur Hitler – jetzt feur Ulbricht; Pressekonferenz von Simon Wiesenthal am 6. September 1968 in Wien(Bonn: Deutachland-Berichte, 1968).
[49] See particularly: J. H. Brinks, “Political Anti-Fascism in the German Democratic Republic,” Journal of Contemporary History, Vol 32, No. 2 (April 1997): 214.
[50] Charles W. Thayer, The Unquiet Germans(New York: Harper, 1957), 115-116 and 193ff and Richard Pipes, Russia under the Bolshevik Regime (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 228.
[51] William Stevenson, The Bormann Brotherhood (London: Arthur Barker, 1973), 127.
[52] Yuri Ivanov, Ostorozno: sionizm! As cited by William Korey, Russian Antisemitism, Pamyat, and the Demonology of Zionism (Chur, Switzerland: Harwood Academic Publishers, 1995), 20, n. 20.
[53] Pravda, 9 March 1969, as cited by Korey, Russian Antisemitism, 21 and n. 21.
[54] Stefan T. Possony pointed out that variants of the conspiracy allegation represent an “overlap” of “rightist” with communist antisemitism.
[55] For the use of slogans in Soviet propaganda, see Joel Fishman, “The Cold-War Origins of Contemporary Antisemitic Terminology,” Jerusalem Viewpoints, No. 517, Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs, 2-16 May 2004.
[56] Bernard Lewis, “The Anti-Zionist Resolution,” Foreign Affairs, October 1976, 54.
[57] Bat Ye’or, Eurabia: The Euro-Arab Axis(Madison/Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2005), 44.
[58] Bertrand Russell, “Open Letter to Wladyslaw Gomulka,” World Jewry, Vol. 11, No. 6 (November-December 1968), 8.
[59] Richard Pipes, “Some Operational Principles of Soviet Foreign Policy,” in M. Confino and S. Shamir, eds., The U.S.S.R. and the Middle East(Jerusalem: Israel Universities Press, 1973), 19, 20.
[60] “From Russia with Terror,” interview of Ion Mihai Pacepa by Jamie Glazov, 1 March 2004, www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/Printable.asp?ID=12387.
[61] Y. Harkabi, The Palestine Covenant and its Meaning (London: Vallentine, Mitchell, 1979), 12, 13.
[62] See Khaled Abu Toameh, “Kaddoumi: PLO Charter Was Never Changed,” Jerusalem Post, 23 April 2004.
[63] www.palestinecenter.org/cpap/documents/charter.html.
[64] Ibid., as quoted by Matthias Küntzel, “Islamic Antisemitism and Its Nazi Roots,” Antisemitism International ([SICSA] 2004): 47.
[65] Alex Grobman, Nations United (Green Forest, AR: Balfour Books, 2006), 37-48.
[66] Abraham Cooper and Harold Brackman, “Through a Glass, Darkly: Durban and September 11th,” Midstream, November 2001, 2.
[67] For Mary Robinson’s consistently partisan role, see particularly Tom Lantos, “The Durban Debacle: An Insider’s View of the UN World Conference against Racism” Fletcher Forum of World Affairs, Vol. 26, No. 1 (2002) and reprinted by the Institute of the World Jewish Congress (Jerusalem, 2002).
[68] Anne Bayefsky, “The UN World Conference against Racism: A Racist Anti-Racism Conference,” ASIL Proceedings (2002): 67.
[69] Lewis, “Anti-Zionist Resolution,” 54.
[70] “Convergence: The Classic Case, Nazi Germany, Anti-Semitism and Anti-Zionism during World War II.”
[71] Bayefsky, “UN World Conference,” 65, 74; Cooper and Brackman, “Through a Glass,” 2.
[72] Hannah Arendt, “Truth and Politics,” in Between Past and Future (New York: Viking Press, 1954), 239.
[73] See: Isabella Ginor/Gideon Remez, Foxbats over Dimona. The Sovjets’ Nuclear Gamble in the Six-Day-War (New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 2007).
[74] Michael Howard and Peter Paret (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), Book I, Chapter 1, item 27, 88-89.
[75] “Goebbels on Propaganda.”