The Distorting Powers of Suggestibility
and their Psychohistorical Origins
Since the beginning of the
latest clash between Israel and Hamas on July 8, European Muslim groups and
some European leftists have engaged in violent protests aimed not only at
supporting Palestine (or as in the case of a demonstration in The Hague, but in
calling for the destruction of the Jews.
“Slash their throats,” Muslims chanted in a July 26 pro-Palestine event
in Paris. “death to the Jews.:” In The Hague a group of mostly Dutch-born
youths of Moroccan background repeated the noew familiar refrain: “Hamas,
Hamas, all Jews to the Gas,” along with new ones: “Itah ya Yahud” (slaughter
the Jews”) and “Khaybar Khaybar, ya-Yahud.”[i]
Abigail R. Eisman, or the headline writer at The Algemeiner, chose to designate the
source of these murderous chants as “Europeans”, not only because some of the
participants in the anti-Israeli/pro-Palestinian rallies and riots were
actually leftist Europeans and
Dutch-born Moroccans, but because the vast majority of the mobs were
unassimilated migrants (legal or illegal) now living in The Netherlands and
other parts of Europe. Though we might quibble at the categorizing of these
persons, there is more historical ambiguity in the source of their ideological
or religious slogans: into the mix of calls for the destruction of Israel and
death to all Jews flow two main currents, on the one side, archaic anti-Semitic
slanders and lies, not least the Nazi Final Solution, and on the other,
Koranic-based demonization of the Jews as the implacable enemies of Muslims,
Mohammed and Allah. Given these two main
contributing factors to the hatred expressed by increasingly large and frequent
rallies throughout Western Europe, North America and elsewhere in the world, it
is possible to say that the latest Israel-Hamas conflict does not lie at the
root of the matter, no more so than the more than a half-century-long conflict
over the State of Israel as a Jewish/Zionist entity and the Arab and Muslim
peoples who claim this same territory as their ancestral homeland, or at least
since 19547 or 1936 or earlier in the twentieth century. The hatred of Jews, for both the Europeans
and the Islamic enthusiasts, lies much deeper.
It is virtually a constituent of their mythical and psychological
identities. It is, indeed, the dung heap
of history which fertilizes all other hatreds—of the other and of the self.
The
Phantasmagoria:
Media
Suggestion, Public Gullibility and Intellectual Dissimulation[ii]
It was all done with smoke and mirrors: eerie music, darkened
atmosphere, magic lanterns, and days of expectation. It began late in the eighteenth century,
while everyone was in a state of terror, anxiety and enthusiasm—all those
changes in so few years, that was the French Revolution of 1789, just too much
to take in. It was a form of showmanship
to draw the crowds in, make them climb down winding stairs by candlelight, to
pass through slippery, shimmery cloths hanging down, and then to hear singing
and moaning from a distance, to see images projected on to clouds of smoke,
familiar faces of the ancient Romans, recent glimpses of the leaders of the
Revolution, tempting visions of erotic dancers; and the close pressure of
everyone else, equally excited and excitable.
This was the phantasmagoria.[iii]
Later it would be elaborated by the first motion pictures shown by
Georges Melies, a master magician, the created techniques of stop-gap
photography, superimposed pictures, disap-pearing figures, split-screen
characters, mixtures of real life and fantasy, passions roused by background
singing and music, dancing letters forming and unforming words, a whole new
world of illusion and self-induced delusion.
And eventually there would be talking films, television, and the whole
symphony of digital trickery and hypnosis.
Our world seen through a glass darkly, in enigmas. The loss of the
ability to discriminate between history and fiction. Gaza produced by Pallywood.
A phantasmagoria, once an actual stage show to play on people’s
anxieties and fears by teasing their senses into emotional excitement, has now
become a massive effort to induce a demonized version of Israel and the Jewish
people in general. All the old images of
anti-Semitism have been fitted out with digitalized bells and whistles, so that
it is made to seem that Israel is the cause of all the world’s troubles, and
that the innocent and utterly vulnerable Palestinian people, above all
frightened children and old screaming women, had become the embodiment of all
our guilt for centuries of persecution of the “other” and shame for our
helplessness in the face of war.
Can you argue with that? Seeing
is believing, isn’t it? It doesn’t
matter that it is more than a century and half since we learned that
photographs can lie, and that reality itself (as opposed to the Truth of
science and logic) is a social construct, or rather, a cosmetic art. Nor does it matter that we know perfectly
well how delightful it is to scream with fear in a darkened movie theatre when
3-D horrors are seemingly thrown in our faces.
Nor that, no matter how many times we see the same tricks, or the same
actors not very subtly playing different roles and wearing different make-up
dying and coming back to life in new films, or the same props and scenery
trucked out again and again, audiences can be duped when they are told this is
a street in Gaza, this is a school run by the UN, this is a mosque where people
take shelter: we simply don’t notice the weapons stored along the walls of the
hospital, the tunnels built under the floor of a private house , the young boys
racing along street with guns and intimidating anyone who tries to run
away.
Hostile, prejudiced and mesmerized journalists solemnly intone the lies
they are forced to speak, although a few, finally out of harm’s way, back in
Italy or France, do reveal that they have not only seen the evidence of
Hamasniks executing their political enemies—that is, anyone who refuses to
become a human shield—but also photographed the rockets fired by “militants”—in
other words, innocent civilians under the age of twenty, or perhaps a few dozen
years older—that fall short, as apparently a quarter of them do. And why do the newspaper editors or the
directors of television networks not show those pictures, interview those
people who are not professional supporters of Hamas, or speak to the parents of
Israeli boys shot by “children” who emerge from tunnels and shoot them on
Israeli soil, as more than half the victims of this conflict have been? It doesn’t make good copy. The function of the news now is confirm
prejudices, and deepen sentimental states of feeling so as to alleviate the
guilt and shame of not responding the ethnic cleansing of Christians from Mosul
and a hundred other cities in Iraq, Syria, Nigeria and so on. If we show the wrong images, they must say to
themselves, these pious venders of entertainment on the six o’clock news, we
may not be allowed to go in for more pictures tomorrow. Business is business.
And yet we cannot blame viewers who are horrified and disgusted by the
sight of mothers and children killed or wounded amongst the ruins of war. It is
no pleasant sight. Our human compassion
cries out for their pain and suffering.
But we have to stand back just enough before we assign blame here or
there, exaggerate the meaning of what we are supposedly seeing, or even believe
all that we see and hear. In books
written during the first two years of World War I and edited by well-meaning
authors, musicians, artists and philanthropists, the shock of destruction and
death on a massive scale was too much to bear, the myths of one side devouring
the babies of the other accepted, not as metaphors of the grotesqueness of
battle—with new kinds of weapon, such as airplanes, poison gas, and the whole
melding of blood and mud in trench warfare—but as literal statements. At times, too, the writers were aware that
they were forced to shift gears radically, replacing the caricature of the
Russian barbarian with that of the Prussian savage; but no one was ready to
adjust their vision sufficiently to see events in the long-run of history. Poor little Flanders was being ground into
the mud. Simple farmers were crushed by
the machinery of battle. Later, too, a
generation further on, newsreels churned out propaganda, some of it based on
true events, and Blitzkrieg was matched by carpet bombing of cities filled with
civilians refugees. The account of
twenty thousand (at least) innocents killed during the D-Day invasion did not
come into focus or the Allied liberation of Europe mighty have to be called a
war crime, as almost happens with the double atomic bombing of Nagasaki and
Hiroshima. War is hell. But as the last survivor of the American crew
that flew over those Japanese cities recently said, sometimes you have to do
terrible things to avoid even more horrendous things.
The fog of
war. Smoke and mirrors. The phantasmagoria. It is sometimes necessary.
But the concerted effort by some now to bamboozle and
befuddle the public by making the good guys into the bad guys is
unconscionable. The concept of
justifiable or a defensive war is brushed aside, as though the enemy were not
an enemy at all, though it is recognized as ISIS or the Taliban or Al-Qaida
elsewhere, but a passive body of victims.
Partisans and supporters of Hamas are given much airtime to vent their
fury and their tears, with no one questioning their authority or sincerity.
Incomplete passive constructions fly by, as though things just happened,
without anyone causing them. Statistics
are often made up—or repeated holus bolus from the previous Israeli invasion of
Gaza, when a similar vile attempt to blacken Israel’s integrity and moral caution
overwhelmed political discourses. Now,
however, what is added is nothing less than a world-wide sequence of
pogroms—synagogue burnings, street thugs beating up Jews on the street, wild
hate-speech married to violent actions in city after city.
[i] Abigail R. Esman, “Europeans Call for the Death and Gassing of Jews.
Again” The Algemeiner (6 August 2014)
online at http://www.algemeiner.com/2014/08/06/europeans-call-for-the-death-and-gassing-of-jews-again. The
allusion to Khyber is to an event in the
life of the Prophet when “Mohammad slaughtered and enslaved hundreds of Jews,
including women and children,” which is shouted, according to Esman, as a
warning that “we are coming for you”.
[ii] This was first published as “The Phantasmagoria: Media Suggestion,.
Public Gullibility and Intellectual Dissimulation” Family Security Matters (3 August 2014) http://www.familysecuritymatters.org/ publications/the-phantasmagoria-media-suggestion-public-gullibility-and-intellectual-dissimulation
[iii] Norman Simms, “The Phantasmagoria of Anti-Semitism and
Anti-Zionism” Mentalities/Mentalités 24:2 (2010) 52-64.
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