My latest: the propagandist’s useful idiots

GENOCIDE IS NOT KOSHER.

That is what the sign said, all-caps.  If not for who was holding it, and if not for where it was being held up, the sign would have been the sort of casual anti-Semitism that is seemingly everywhere, these days.

And this needs to be said: the sign was objectionable not because it was critical of the government of Israel. Every single Jew this writer has spoken to, in recent months, is critical of the ultra-conservative government led by Benjamin Netanyahu.

All of them, publicly or privately, blame Netanyahu for permitting Hamas to flourish, and for being unprepared for Hamas’ barbaric assault on October 7.  Every one of them looks forward to Netanyahu being gone after the war. Polling in Israel overwhelmingly shows the same thing.

No, the sign was bad because it explicitly associated genocide (the most serious crime extant) with an important religious precept (the kashrut dietary laws of the Jewish faith).

And what made the sign even worse was this: it was being held up by a child, perhaps six or seven years old, a few feet from a cenotaph in Picton, Ont., this past Saturday. A cenotaph dedicated to those Canadians who gave their lives fighting Naziism.

Who does that? Who gives a child a sign like that – knowing full well that the child does not understand what is either genocidal or kosher – and tells them to stand in a scared place, in a driving cold rain on the Jewish sabbath, to act as a propaganda tool? Who does that?

And what about the actors who showed up at the Oscars, on the very same weekend, wearing pins with the bloody red hand? For them, that question would be different.  We know who decided to wear the pins: Billie Eilish, Jessica Chastain, Richard Gere,Cate Blanchett and Mahershala Ali. Others, too.

They are (arguably) adults, and they made the decision to wear lapel pins bearing the bloody red hand.  Being big stars, being paid obscene amounts of money to pretend to be someone else, we presume they were the ones who decided to display a hand covered in blood for all the cameras to see.

But did they all know what it means?  For those of us in the Irish diaspora, we know very well what it means: it is the symbol of a warrior, covered in the blood of the warrior’s vanquished enemy.  In Ireland’s North, the Red Hand is capitalized, and has been appropriated by both sides in serial campaigns of murder, for decades.

In the Israel-Gaza context, the red hand is an explicit reference to a photo from a lynching and bloody dismemberment of Israeli soldiers by Palestinians during the intifada in 2000. It is a celebration of murder.

Was that what Billie Eilish and others were celebrating? Did they – like the little kid with the anti-Semitic sign in far-away Picton, Ontario – know what they were saying?  Maybe, maybe not.  But the corrosive effect remains the same.

It is propaganda, yes.  But it is inarguably worse than that: it is holding something up to signal that someone else – in this case, Jews – are inferior.  Are bad.  Are worthy of detestation.

The holding up of awful signs, the wearing of awful pins, is happening a lot, these days.  And that is important.  Because, through repetition, hate is made routine.

In Sander van der Linden’s remarkable 2023 book, Foolproof: How Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity, that sad truth – how evil, per Hannah Arendt, is made banal – is discussed.  Writes van den Linden, a Cambridge social psychology professor:

“Belief in the truth of a claim goes up as a function of repetition.  In others words, the more often you hear a statement, the more ‘true’ it sounds.  This has become known as the illusory truth effect.”

So, real journalism gets dismissed, over and over, as “fake news.” Crowds chant “stop the steal” about elections that were free and fair.  Jewish civilians, wherever they are, however innocent they may be, get falsely accused of “genocide.” Over and over and over.

Hate propaganda becomes effective not when it is said just once.  It becomes effective when it is repeated, endlessly.

Just ask one of the pioneers of the most notorious anti-Semitic campaigns in history, Nazi propaganda minister Josef Goebbels.  Like he said:

Repeat a lie often enough, and it becomes the truth.