The purpose of propaganda is to make some people think that other people aren’t human.
Aldous Huxley, the British philosopher, said that. So true were his words, I started my book The Hidden Hand with them.
Propaganda comes with differing names: agitprop, disinformation, fake news, falsehoods, frauds, lies. Whatever it is called, whatever the circumstances, that is always its intent – to denude other humans of their humanity.
Showing indifference towards the suffering of others isn’t propaganda, per se , but it’s always the ultimate objective of propaganda. Cruelty is the point.
Examples of that abound, on all sides. Just on Friday, there was New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez laughing during the reading of names of the victims of 9/11. After the Twin Towers fell, President Donald Trump bragged that he now owned the tallest building in downtown Manhattan .
Propaganda facilitates cruelty and hate. Two dates in history testify to the efficacy of propaganda in the modern age: Sept. 11, 2001, when Islamic terrorists murdered 3,000 innocent people, and Oct. 7, 2023, when Islamic terrorists murdered 1,200 innocent people.
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Hundreds killed by Islamic terrorists
There have been (too many) other days like those.
Nov. 13, 2015, in Paris, when 130 were killed. July 7, 2005, in London, when 52 were killed. Nairobi in 1998, Madrid in 2004, Paris again in 2015. Hundreds, all killed by Islamic terrorists.
But Sept. 11 and Oct. 7 are important not just for the lethality of the terrorism, or the number of people who tragically lost their lives. They are significant because propaganda has sought to invert the reality of those dates: turning the victims into the perpetrators, and the perpetrators into victims.
Oct. 7 saw 1,200 men, women, children and babies slaughtered in Israel by Hamas – along with 250 kidnapped, 200 women and girls sexually violated, and thousands more grievously wounded. While those crimes were still underway in tiny towns along Israel’s border, a global propaganda campaign commenced.
Propaganda campaign claimed Jews profited from atrocities
In Arabic, the campaign depicted Israelis as the ones who killed their own people, so as to justify the war that would commence weeks later. It claimed that Jews profited from the atrocities, and that Israelis had desecrated holy Muslim religious sites.
Later, in English, that Jews were evil. That Jews were racist and too powerful, and that the Holocaust was a hoax.
The propaganda campaign mostly worked. By the end of October 2023, there had been thousands of protests against Jews and the Jewish state around the world – including one at a major intersection in Mississauga, Ont., on the very next day, celebrating the massacre.
And, of course, countries like Canada have now recognized Hamas-ruled Palestine– and repeatedly punished Israel.
JUST NOW: Mississauga, Ontario after dark.
— Efrain Flores Monsanto 🇨🇦🚛 (@efloresmonsanto) October 8, 2023
A truck of young men cheering in support of the Hamas terror attack in Israel waving Palestinian flags. pic.twitter.com/QoHINKWpKV
Jews, who had been the victims of Oct. 7, were transformed into fascistic, white supremacist supporters of a genocidal apartheid state – and oppressors of a powerless racial minority. That happened within a matter of days, and has only gotten worse in the weeks that followed.
Sept. 11 was the same. On that day in Jerusalem and the West Bank – as in the celebrations in far-away Mississauga, years later – Palestinians celebrated the al-Qaeda attacks.
They exalted the slaughter of those they considered to be subhuman, which is a pathogen for all propaganda: to kill humans or – at least – our collective sense of humanity.
My friend and colleague Tal-Or Cohen Montemayor tracks all of this for her indispensable NGO, CyberWell.
Says she: “Twenty-five years after terrorists hijacked planes and turned them into weapons, there are still active efforts online to hijack the story of 9/11 itself. Antisemites and extremists use the attention around the 25th anniversary to push false conspiracies, shamefully attempting to turn a moment of remembrance into a vehicle for sowing conspiracy and discord – blaming Jews and Israel for one of the largest Islamic terror attacks in history.”
She continues: “Their goal is not only to manipulate one of the darkest hours in modern history as fodder for additional hatred and disgust of Jews and Israel, but to provide a ready-made mental framework for blaming Jews whenever new tragedies occur.”
Which is what propaganda does: shift blame from the perpetrator to the victim.
Tal-Or concludes: “The anniversary of 9/11 should be about the people who were killed, the first responders who bravely ran toward danger to save others. Instead, those spreading antisemitic conspiracies online try to hijack the narrative and use the anniversary itself to amplify hatred and distrust.”
That is indeed what they are doing, folks. And we owe the victims of Sept. 11 and Oct. 7 – and all the victims, everywhere, all the time – a promise that we will push back against the lies and the propaganda.
Because our side has the better story, you know.
Our side has the truth.
– Kinsella is the winner of a Canadian Jewish Literary Award for his book The Hidden Hand