This sentiment is ruthlessly exploited, in the US as well.
Israel has a military commitment to the US.
It is opinion in the same way that it is my opinion Israel has no defense treaty obligations to the US and IDF forces have never served as troops allied to the US.
**Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East. **
You did not ask that the propaganda had reached informed Americans. The request was for claims that were “widely believed”. It is.
Further, there has never been a time when Israel was the only democracy in the M-E. For your interest, the variant that has evolved is “only country in the middle east that is democratic and similar in values to the US”
On reflection I must concede this is true. Today several news sources publicise that the US refused Israeli requests to overfly Iraq for an attack by them on Iran.
“Would those airliners have been hijacked if we were not perceived by the arab world to be blindly supporting Israel?”
On the other hand I don’t believe this to be a correct balance of the evidence. In a number of places it is plain that support for Israel is key reason for the hijacks.
No question Osama hates Israel and wants it gone…completely gone. But the support the US shows to Israel is by no means Osama’s prime motivator. More to him it is just another piece of the pie on why the US and Israel must be destroyed.
Even if it was provable that 9/11 was solely because of US support of Israel… so?
Does that really mean we should stop supporting Israel?
Should that dynamic carry through for other things, or just Israel?
If there are terrorist attacks, is the correct course of action really to figure out what the terrorists want, and give it to them as quickly as possible?
If there were more abortion clinic bombings in the US, should we criminalize abortion immediately, for example?
Or is the argument simply that we should reward terrorists as long as their grudge is against Israel?
You ever wonder what Hamas has for a lobbying organization? Think it’s paid for by the Saudi wahabis or by Iran?
I think the argument is that Israel is so horrible that whatever terrorists do, it’s okay, because they’re weaker than Israel. And whatever Israel does to them, it’s wrong, because they’re hiding behind innocent people, and also, they’re stronger than the terrorists. What should be dones is that Israel should arrest the terrorists by walking into the Palestinian territories and hauling them out.
Me, I think a three state solution maybe has potential. Also, I think that if the Palestianians were to actually work their asses off, in ten years, they’d be indepedent.
Five congress men voted no and something like 27 made a no vote in regards to a backing resolution. 800 Israeli protesters in Israel have been arrested in anti war demonstrations. There have been anti Israel demonstrations in many countries. Israel does not have the backing that it appears here and in our news.
This is a total aside, but how did “propaganda” become a dirty word? People seem to use it as a synonym for “disinformation” - which it is not.
For many subjects it is difficult (to say the least) to find anyone who does not have some particular POV, or at least appears to, to someone else’s POV.
Providing truthful information as a means of influencing opinions is indeed propaganda. Any debate is propaganda. Any political campaign or political discourse in the public sphere involves propaganda.
Dismissing something as “propaganda” is a non sequitur. Show that it is false or provide what you believe is missing and therefore why a site is misleading. But dismissing a source because they have an identified POV seems silly.
No it is not. Hitler wanted to get rid of all the Jews and in the early days of the Third Reich, Jewish emmigration was permitted and encouraged. Leter he switched to extermination, but the point is that he wanted his Lebensraum to be Judenrein.
In any event, the “exterminate the Jews” sentiment is strong among certain of Israel’s enemies. For example, there is a video on the internet of a pro-Hamas demonstration where you can clearly hear the crowd chanting as follows:
Apart from the Munich atrocity there were also the airline hijacks and murders of airline passengers,the machine gunning of a check in line of people at an airport plus a non terrorist action from our M/E friends in OPEC ,the oil embargo of Holland.
This is quibbling with the edges of meaning in the statements:
Opposition to Israel is a continuation of the Nazis. &
Israel has a military commitment to the US.
A twisted reading of those statements can make parts of them look less untruthful. Yet there is no rational way they can be twisted enough to be satisfactory true statements. The plain facts reject it.
**Israel is the only democracy in the Middle East.
**
Again, you asked for propaganda that was and I quote "widely believed."Don’t you know the rule that states of mind are not susceptible to cites? If you want to argue that North America is not affected by Israeli propaganda because people disbelieve the Israelis, feel free. “Only democracy in the Middle East” turns out 30,000 hits on google, so a lot of people are saying it. Perhaps they and everyone who hears them knows it has never been true? BTW its falsity is not opinion, it is fact.
Be upfront with your argument: “Americans are not affected by the Israeli propaganda because they always knew it was lies.”
Ah. It is presenting one side of a debate that may have another side to be presented. I see now why that is enough for anything so tarred to be dismissed as not worthy of hearing.
In reality, if you disagree with the goals of the presenter it is propaganda; if you agree it is speaking truth to power or something similar.
Oh, I have no doubt there can be and is propaganda that is benign. I think we can say it crosses the line when it ceases to use information that is true.
In the current discussion the propaganda is not benign. brazil84 specifically asked for some that was not true. Supplied.
In fact, I did not originally state that the propaganda of the Israelis was all untrue, merely that it was pervasive.
Secondly, Palestinian Media Watch. Do you think, if asked that Palestinians would agree it is a “Self Portrait of Palestinian Society”? That’s what its banner claims. It is not fit to be read any further than that.
How unfair! They provide official PA/Hamas sermons and television broadcasts, showing what they think in their own words, and that makes your distortions that much harder. Can’t they just be good Jews and not fight back?
Your deceptive apologia for the modern ideological descendants of the Nazis becomes much more difficult if the facts are known. Of course you’d advise people to avoid the facts. I believe your traditional dodge is, at that point, to claim that the Palestinians are stupid and infantile and unable to differentiate between “Israel, Judaism and Jews”. Ya know, like Hamas explicitly does in its charter showing that when they talk about Jews, they mean (gasp!)… Jews.
Or I suppose you could brag about having me on your ignore filter some more, but at least your apologia doesn’t have much of a chance at tricking honest observers if they look at the facts themselves.
There’s a big difference between the two, since there is clearly strong sentiment among many Hamas supporters to, at a minimum, evict Jewish people from the area of Israel. On the other hand, generic opposition to Israel doesn’t necessarily imply a desire to make the area Judenrein.
I have my own rules of debate, and one is that you cannot weasel, i.e. pretend that you said something different from what you actually said. If you are abandoning your earlier statement, please just say so.
Your choice.
Again you are weaseling. Here is what you said before:
Being an “ally” doesn’t necessarily mean having a military commitment, which I understand to be something in the nature of, for example, a mutual defense treaty.
Kindly stop weaseling and we can continue the discussion. Your choice.
That’s not necessarily true, since states of mind could be shown by polls, or even maybe a few mainstream newspaper articles.
I am not making such an argument. Another rule I have is that you can’t debate by means of attacking strawmen. Please do not state or imply that my argument is that North America is unaffected by Israeli propoganda. Obviously, as with the parties to any other controversial issue, Israel (and its supporters) advocate for Israel’s position and that advocacy can be expected to influence some peoples’ opinions.
Here is the snippet from your original statement which started this exchange:
North America has been irredeemably saturated with Israeli propaganda. While none of it is true …
As DSeid rightly points out I have neglected to mention the half-truths and misdirections falling within the set of Israeli propaganda in North America. Apart from that omission the statement stands.
Your statements take you no further than previously, attempting to find truth in the claims put about by contorting the meaning of words beyond recognition. There is no need to add any more than I stated previously. Without anything new this discussion is completed.
As to my summaries of the earlier statements, those are fair and made in good faith. The original forms needed attention to their presentation and were re-presented as proper sentences.
Secondly, Palestinian Media Watch. Do you think, if asked that Palestinians would agree it is a “Self Portrait of Palestinian Society”?
It is no “self portrait” and knowingly so. The site is aggressive in its goals and its disdain for truthfulness.