A New Blood Libel Endlessly Repeated Declan Mansfield
https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/israel/2024/04/a-new-blood-libel-endlessly-repeated/
One of the defining features, possibly the crucial, most existential characteristic, of intelligence, is the ability to distinguish one thing from another. This is true in every aspect of our lives. A car is not a horse. The sky is not a mountain. Taylor Swift is not Led Zeppelin – and Israel is not committing genocide in Gaza. That this needs to be said is not an indictment of our education system, or society, or contemporary politics, or social media, or not being breast fed as a child. It’s simply a statement of fact, because people who score between 25 per cent and 75 per cent on the bell curve of intelligence, the average Joe or Josephine Soap in other words, do not generally have an inclination to understand and distinguish why W. H. Auden’s poetry is superior to the comic verse of Pam Ayres, or why the value of something, as Oscar Wilde said, is different to its price, or why perennial worth is better than this month’s hyped fashion, or why there is a difference between being ‘merely clever’, as Wittgenstein said, and being intelligent.
Moreover, and this is an age-old problem articulated by philosophers as diverse as Plato and Heidegger – average minds are easily swayed by the cultural zeitgeist, by arguments from authority (whether from priests, politicians, ‘experts’ or celebrities), and especially by public opinion. They fall, regularly, for every contemporary trend. Look, for example, at the uncritical attitude and acceptance, from the majority, to the Covid-19 measures.
People with average intelligence are decent, kind, trustworthy, extraordinarily capable in ways that leave more intelligent people scratching their heads in admiration, not the least bit lacking in street smarts, and know implicitly what is good for themselves and their families, (especially when government policy negatively affects their wallets). What they are not, though, is particularly interested in abstract thought.
The impact of intelligence on politics and culture has become clear in recent months. People who six months ago couldn’t spell anti-Semitism are now parroting the most harebrained anti-Semitic delusions, without knowing much about Jews, Israel, Arabs, Islam or the modern history of the Middle East. In the words of Heidegger, people ‘fall’ into the ‘they’.
Antisemitism, though, is a hydra-headed beast, which, like a chameleon, changes its colours in different environments. A millennia-old antisemitic trope is the blood libel, the claim that Jews kill Christian children touse their blood in Passover matzohs. The blood libel has become secularised in recent decades, with accusations that Israelis, read that as ‘Jews’, are sadists murdering Palestinians in pursuit of a policy of genocide. The source of these lies are Islamic extremists, or their ‘anti-Zionist’ allies in the West, who spread propaganda that is a mixture of traditional Islamic antisemitism and Nazi ideology. The latter, it should be noted, greatly influenced the Muslim Brotherhood, the organisation that spawned Hamas.
The ease, though, with which a majority of people’s perceptions can change is instructive. The moral and intellectual poison of the most recent iteration of antisemitism, anti-Zionism, (the modern blood libel), was disseminated by the far left after the Soviet Union withdrew its support from Israel following the Six Day and Yom Kippur wars, became pervasive on the internet, and has culminated in South Africa, that paradigm of good governance and equality before the law, accusing Israel in the International Criminal Court (ICC) of genocide.
A depressing indictment of contemporary culture, and a window into the zeitgeist, is that something which was taught to generations of children on the long-running American children’s show Sesame Street is now a lost skill: ‘One of these things is not like the other, and one of these things is kinda the same’. The thing that’s not like genocide is Israel’s war against Hamas, and the things that are similar to genocide, although they should more accurately be described as war crimes, were Hamas’s brutal, stomach-churning murder, gang rape and mutilation of innocent Israeli civilians on October 7.
Propaganda, to be clear, works its magic using narrative and spin to explain complicated events. Simple stories or, for many people, songs and chants which depict the world in black and white and people as purely good and irredeemably evil, are easily understood. It is the uninformed, though, who are most likely to fall for unsophisticated dichotomies. People with average intelligence comprise 50% of the population. It’s not that this demographic is incapable of understanding complex ideas, although that is usually the case, it’s that they find anything other than sex, music, drugs, movies, alcohol, and sport boring. Panem et circense (bread and circuses, as per Roman poet Juvena) is the totality of their lives.
The dominant cultural trope about the Gaza War, which was created by a corrupt, at worst, and a naïve, at best, media, is the relentless perfidy of Israel.
Who, though, other than someone completely uninformed about the decades-long conflict in the Middle East, for example, would believe anything that Hamas says, especially their statistics about the dead and injured in Gaza? It took the Israelis months to determine how many people went missing or were killed on October the Seventh, yet Hamas knows the death toll of Palestinians in Gaza as soon as they switch on a computer. And extraordinarily enough, remember the blood libel, there are always large numbers of children cited as victims. Germans, to put the situation in context, don’t blame the Allies for their dead in World War Two; the Palestinians are hypocrites blaming Israel for casualties in a war that Hamas started.
Accusing Israel of genocide is the intellectual equivalent of believing that charity cures poverty, the ‘Do they know it’s Christmas’ fallacy. The majority of people, the average 50 per cent, who donated money to Live Aid, or those who state that Israel is committing genocide against the Palestinians don’t read books about economics, or sophisticated histories about a century-long conflict in the Middle East that is culturally distant from their own lives. They are fed information about Israel on the nightly news and from propaganda videos on the net, and they have no idea whether what they are watching is true, partly true or disreputable nonsense. Contemporary antisemitism, the latest iteration of the world’s oldest hatred, then, is a social contagion of the uninformed.
Believing that charity can cure famine, is good-hearted naivety. Falsely claiming that Israel is committing genocide is the epitome of evil. And evil, as Socrates said, is an absence, often of intelligence. A cat is not a helicopter. The truth is not subjective. And war, especially one imposed on Israel by a fundamentalist cult of radical Islam, is not genocide. Learn, for all our sakes, to tell the difference.
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