Howard Epstein: Public Diplomacy of Israel: HASBARA AND 9/11
Hasbara (הַסְבָּרָה) is the Hebrew word used universally in lieu of a mouthful such as “public diplomacy of Israel” or, more colloquially, “Israeli PR”. Israelis and Jews everywhere consider it to be lamentably incompetent and ineffectual. They may be right but I suggest that the best PR that Jewish brains, talent, flair and money could provide would have the same outcome. And there are just two reasons for it: antisemitism – the longest hatred – and 9/11. You don’t need another discourse on the former but we could usefully dwell on the latter.
There are, from time to time, events about which commentators say, and people everywhere instinctively feel, changed the world forever. The Wall Street Crash, Pearl Harbor, the assassinations of JFK and Martin Luther King, and the 16 other American traumas about which I wrote in Traumatised Nation: How America Got To Be So Violent, and then, for Anglo-Jewry, there was Dunkirk and the Blitz, the Yom Kippur War and the assassination of Yitzchak Rabin.
All those are eclipsed by the events of one day, just over 22 years ago: 9/11. It happened almost a generation ago but we are just beginning to feel its long tentacles wrapping themselves around our throats in these days of horror.
The Simchat Torah Pogroms occurred three weeks ago, and our depression at the way non-Jews – not all but many …. too many – instinctively buy into not our narrative, our hasbara, but into that of our sworn enemies, is just the latest manifestation of the impact that 9/11 had on the psyche of the western world.
Why, you might ask, are Western politicians, media, and security forces reluctant to criticise, much less condemn, Islamic terrorism?
Why do the BBC and Sky TV pay lip service to “militants” rather than calling the butchers and torturers of Hamas by their true name: terrorists?
Why do all media outlets give equal time to the full-time prisoners of Hamas, the people of Gaza, rather than its tormented and bloodied Jewish victims?
Why is there a disinclination to call out Moslem communities for failing to condemn the vile, inhumane and bestial conduct of their co-religionists?
How did Asian grooming gangs roaming the streets of Telford, Rochdale, Rotherham, Oxford, Newcastle, Huddersfield and Bradford (the city that instigated the fatwa declared on Salman Rushdie), operate to the rape and complete degradation of indigenous English girls for many years without police action, despite the irrefutable evidence of what was going on? Why did the police tiptoe around the issue for a decade or more?
Why are politicians craven on these subjects?
Why has it taken the earthquake of Simchat Torah to cause some of them, and by no means all, to call out Islamic terrorism for what it is?
The answer is 9/11. The West watched as the two 110-storey World Trade Center towers consumed themselves. Unconsciously, perhaps, the authorities and the masses internalised a new reality: that the Islamists had an enemy that was implacable, merciless, and omnipotent. The perpetrators came from abroad – but wait. They are all around us. In every Western country, there are tens, hundreds, of thousands of Moslems – the same people who wrought such horrors upon us.
Now, I am not suggesting that every Muslim is an evil Islamist but not only is there a dangerous sub-class in every society (Israeli football culture has produced the Ultras and La Familia, of whose activities we are ashamed), and in every societal group between 1% and 4% are psychopaths (yes, in every society) but there is another factor at work. As with the “Arab Street”, en masse, these young, over-libidinous and often underemployed men, look for outlets for their anger, and their leaders have never sought to elevate their culture.
This, especially after 9/11, is what spooks politicians, the media and the police. We have seen most recently the vast crowds of Hamas sympathisers brought together in an instant to demonstrate against Israel and the Jews. But it is not new. The Stop the War Coalition (“StWC”) has been active here since 2003 – but only to stop the forces of the West from making ground, often seeking to take back lost ground. The other war with which we live, from which we suffer only economically so far, in Ukraine, has been waged by Russia, with no street protests from the StWC.
How satisfying it must it be to recruit to rail against Jews, and the “colonial enterprise” that is, allegedly, Israel!
Rather than risk a Day of Rage in the UK, France or America, appeasement rules. After a little lip service to the victims of Hamas’s pogrom, it’s business as usual. Jews have to walk in fear because the authorities and the media quake at the thought of antagonising those who are protected by the fearful memories of 9/11.
Speaking of appeasement, in 2014, as a genuflection to the forlorn hope of delaying Iran’s acquisition of the atomic bomb, Obama sent the Mullahs in Tehran, the world’s greatest exporters of terror, $400 million. In cash. Another $1.3 billion soon followed. That’s appeasement at a level beyond Adolf Hitler’s wildest dreams. “Uncle Joe” Biden, now calling the shots in the Israeli war cabinet, released a further $6 billion – but has recently called upon the stakeholder, Qatar, not to release it. After all, with two aircraft carrier groups standing off the Israeli/Lebanese coast, that money would be applied to making swarms of drones that might quickly result in large numbers of body bags marked “US Navy Department”. (While the body bags might have been Israeli, it did not seem to matter so much.)
Cynical? Moi? Dear reader, cynicism is sadly, in our times, realism. We are confronted by a demographic that, while containing large numbers of people of goodwill, are not the children of the Reformation (signifying the end of the Middle Ages and the beginning of the early modern period in Europe) nor of the Enlightenment (that gave us the Age of Reason, typified by rigorous scientific, political and philosophical discourse). Their communities are in the grip of the lowest common denominator, as surely as the Arab Street controls the power bases from Morocco to Riyadh.
The shadow of 9/11 holds us all in its grip. Loosening it might only come about if the Iranian Islamic Revolution suffered a mortal blow. Cutting off the head of the snake – or securing absolute surrender as Churchill and Roosevelt demanded of Germany and Japan – would do it. But the cost was 50 million fatalities in Europe and some 30 million in the Pacific theatre. No one is going to risk anything like that just to save a few million Jews.
We wait (at this writing) for the phony war to end and for redemption for Jews everywhere, for the Israeli people, for the failed leaders of Mossad and Shabak, and for the failed government of Netanyahu (formerly self-promoted as “Mr Security”) by the Israel Defence Forces. May God protect them as they protect us.
© Howard Epstein, October 2023 – www.howard-epstein.com
