Challenging the Media's "Alternative Facts"

Fear about "alternative facts" or "fakenews" is one of the major themes alarming the media and general publictoday, as it is rightly seen as a form of deceptive propaganda motivated toinfluence opinion. For Jewish communities around the world, propaganda deployed to foster hate ishardly breaking news. Although the method of delivery changes as technology progresses, the endproduct is always the same. Prior to the advent of the printing press, Jewishcommunities suffered from hateful stories and gossip circulating towns andvillages and preached by religious leaders: "The Jews kidnapped aChristian boy to make matzah"; "The Jews poisoned our wells";"The Jews killed Jesus."

And on it went.

Poisoned news propaganda became much easier with the advent of the printingpress well into the 18th and 19th centuries. Newspapers, magazines and bookseasily began to circulate hateful depictions of Jews. It became easier todistribute drawings of 'hooked nosed' Jews with a devilish grin. Publishing andcirculating forgeries like the Protocols of the Elders of Zion and hatefultracts like Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf was simple. The Nazis advanced "fakenews" through the work of propagandist Joseph Goebbels, who perfected theuse of radio, film and mass circulated newspapers to sow antisemitism, hate andintolerance. It was in fact Goebbels, the Nazi mastermind of news manipulation,who stated that if you tell a lie often enough it becomes the truth.

Fake news led to the murder of six million Jews and millions more. It set theworld aflame with hate. Fake news then led to Holocaustdenial - both state sponsored from the likes of Iran and through therise of white supremacism. 

Over the last sixteen years - starting with the international Durban, SouthAfrica conference "against hate" in 2001, we have seen a ramping upof fake news against Israel, including accusations that it is an"apartheid state"; that it is a "Nazi State" and that theJewish people, bereft of a historic presence in the region, simply don't belongthere. As technology changed again with the advent of the Internet, fakenews against the Jewish people has become even more prevalent and more easilydispersed. 

I was, however, particularly surprised to find such facilemanipulation of the facts in a generally fair and objective newspaper like theGlobe and Mail. Jewish communities across Canada are bewildered by thepublication of onearticle stating that Israel is "occupying" a city consideredfor more than 3,000 years as the holiest of holy places in the Jewish faith,and anotherthat only admits grudgingly, as an afterthought, that Jerusalem hasreligious and emotional significance to the Jewish people. It is an articlethat considers politics alone. No mention of the profound, millennia-longJewish attachment to Jerusalem is cited or discussed.

This is an astonishing level of rhetorical bias for a paper thatis considered 'Canada's newspaper of record'; In the space of two briefcolumns, the entire history of the Jewish people has been questioned. Therepeated dispossessions and the resulting Diaspora of the Jewish people simplyno longer exist. The most egregious example of cultural appropriation - when amosque was built right on top of the holy temple of the Jews in Jerusalem, isnot questioned. The prohibition against Jews praying at this holy site whenJordan ruled the territory is never mentioned. The fact that this site - theholiest site in all of Judaism - was used as a garbage dump when Jordan ruledthis territory, is disregarded.

Historical revisionism or casual oversight, which foster the sort of"alternative facts" that we all find so alarming, aim to erase theJewish people from our own history. It represents the type of easy manipulationof the truth which Goebbels would have been proud to pen. Sadly, despite itscrude hostility, it is nothing new; the Jewish people have borne the brunt ofthis "fake news" for much of our history.

But there is nothing stronger than the truth. It is up to each one of us tore-educate our community and our friends, and to counter falsehoods about usand about our history before it is too late. I encourage you to share the truthwith as many friends as possible.  

Shabbat Shalom!

Avi