Explaining This Mess During a Brief Intermission in Propaganda

January 16, 2009 The Watcher Emeritus The Council Has Spoken! 4

This week’s winning submissions both focus on the hostilities between Israel and the Gaza strip. Without coincidence this has been a prevailing topic of discussion at the Watcher’s Council and across the internet for a third week in a row

Joshuah Pundit puts his take on the political motivations behind both sides and explains why here and why now.

Big Hollywood takes on the propaganda war as is being waged by leftist excuse makers for Islamic terrorism. Robert Avrech steps all the way back to a film that was produced in 1965 called The Battle of Algiers to draw comparisons between then and now.

let’s be clear, the film is a work of leftist propaganda, beautifully crafted, to be sure, but a film that seeks to justify Islamic terror by proposing that the French were so brutal that the Algerians had no choice but to resort to unrestrained terror.

If this sounds familiar to you then you’d be correct. The mainstream media today is every bit as narrow minded when it comes to justifying the reasons behind modern day terrorism.

When homicide terrorists first struck in Israel, spokesmen for Fatah, Hamas, Hizbullah and the slick terrorist network, Al Jazeera, immediately claimed that the, ahem, powerless Palestinians, had no choice against the brutal and inhuman Israelis.

In short, Jewish victims—the murdered, the maimed and the psychologically broken—were blamed for the bloody Islamic atrocities.

Director Gillo Pontecorvo was an assimilated Italian Jew from a wealthy family. But like so many secular Jews, he was drawn to the fanatical religious cult of Communism. The Battle of Algiers is his penultimate work of cinematic propaganda. It’s right up there with Nazi filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s fawning documentaries Triumph of the Will and Olympia, which elevated Hitler and Nazism to the status of pagan Gods. Riefenstahl’s finely crafted films helped set the stage for the Holocaust by promoting the notion of a Aryan master race destined to cleanse and rule the world.

[…]

The Palestinians are a lucky people.

Because their enemies are Jews.

Any other foe, especially other Arabs, would have wiped them off the face of the earth a long time ago.

Both winning entries in this week’s contest are a must read. We can not win the war against terror if we can’t defeat the fallacies that have been created and fostered by leftists sympathizers that are invariably enemies of the United States and it’s ally in Israel.

Winning Council Submissions

Winning Non-Council Submissions