[S.T.D.]

http://www.melaniephillips.com/articles-new/?p=789

As we all know by now, Israel has lost the battle for public opinion in the west. Even the Israel government is now acknowledging this fact. Israel and its defenders have been outclassed and outmanoeuvred in a war of the mind being waged on a battleground it never even acknowledged it was on.

Calls for more and better hasbara, however, are meaningless if the message or narrative promoted by Israel and its defenders misses the point of the attack being waged upon it. And it does miss that point, by a mile.
You cannot resist or overcome a threat unless you first understand its nature.

The first thing to say is that this phenomenon is characteristic not just of the media animosity or economic or academic boycotts. It goes across the intelligentsia and political class, spreading well beyond the normal suspects on the left into the mainstream middle-classes.

In Britain, the universities, the established church, the theatrical and publishing worlds, the voluntary sector, significant elements within the Foreign Office, members of Parliament across the political spectrum, as well as the media have overwhelmingly signed up to the demonisation and delegitimisation of Israel.
The scale of this phenomenon is nothing short of a multi-layered civilisational crisis.

The west is experiencing a total inversion of truth evidence and reason. A society’s thinking class has overwhelmingly subscribed to an immoral, patently false and in many cases demonstrably absurd account of the Middle East, past and present, which it has uncritically absorbed and assumes to be true.

In routine, everyday discourse history is turned on its head; logic is suspended; and an entirely false narrative of the conflict is now widely accepted as unchallengeable fact, from which fundamental error has been spun a global web of potentially catastrophic false conclusions.

This has led to a kind of dialogue of the demented in which rational discussion is simply not possible because there is no shared understanding of the meaning of language. So victim and victimiser, truth and lies, justice and injustice turn into their precise opposite.

This madness is being promulgated through a global alliance between state and non-state actors – diplomats and journalists, politicians and NGOs and websites. Many of these are waging war not just against Israel but against the west.

There are two preconditions for an effective fightback. First is to form effective structures of resistance. Those structures, however, depend in turn on a correct understanding of the nature and scale of what we are up against.

So far, the structures are not in place, and more important still, what Israel is up against is grossly — and fatally — underestimated and misunderstood.

The problem is that we are dealing with a pathology — to which we nevertheless respond as if it were rational behaviour.

What’s happened is a pattern of thinking in the west which turns reality upside down. Remarkably, this in turn echoes a very similar inversion of reality within the Islamic world, where such inversion has a theological base.
Because Islam is considered perfect, its adherents can never do wrong. All their aggression is therefore represented as self-defence, while western/Israeli self-defence is said to be aggression.

So in this Orwellian universe the enslavement of Muslim women is said to represent their liberation; democracy is a means of enslavement from which the west must be freed; and the murder of Israelis is the purest form of justice.
Furthermore, this is overlaid by the phenomenon of ‘psychological projection’ in which the Islamic world not only denies its own misdeeds but ascribes them instead to its victims.

So while Muslims deny the Holocaust, they claim that Israel is carrying out a holocaust in Gaza. Antisemitism is central to Jewish experience in Europe; Muslims claim that ‘Islamophobia’ is rife throughout Europe.

[Slonopotam845]

I wish we could go on the offensive instead of counter attacking all their accussations.

I'd hire only marketing minds that could think outside the box and can generate that emotional empathy that would get people hating Palestinians.

I'd expose all of them for the scum they really are.

If only I had the resources. What a think tank operation we could make.

[Lillie_Steins]

It's so strange that the penny hasn't dropped. Why can't the western fools cant see the connection between the Islamic terrorists in Israel and the ones in Europe. Do they think that they are a different creature?
They are all funded by the same fanatics who are obsessed with bringing down the western democracies before the oil runs out.