| Then said Satan: This besieged one, how shall I overcome him? He has courage and ability, he has weapons and imagination. So he said: I shall not take his strength, nor muzzle nor bridle him. Nor soften nor weaken his hands, only one thing I shall do; I shall dull his brain and he will forget that he is in the right." So wrote the Israeli poet, Natan Alterman, in his poem, Gone like a Dream. He was expressing his deep anxiety over the weakening resolve and steadfastness of the Jews of Israel and of the Diaspora in their support for the reconstituted Jewish state. For long decades, in the face of unrelenting Arab Muslim hostility and aggression, the Jews were imbued with a deep conviction of the rightness and righteousness of their cause. Many still do and fight against an unremitting and hostile world that would consign Israel to the abyss, but far too many today have fallen away and been seduced by an overwhelming onslaught - not of military might - but by a war of ideas, however false and twisted those ideas are. The success of those lies has sapped the will of many and confused many more. We have all heard of the Big Lie theory that was so successfully enunciated and practiced by Adolf Hitler's propaganda minister, Josef Goebbels. The theory essentially posits that people will believe in a lie if it is big enough and repeated enough times. Goebbels knew that most people had a scant understanding of a situation but when they heard the same lie repeated again and again they would begin to accept unquestionably what was being told to them. Goebbels put it this way: "The rank and file is usually much more primitive than we imagine. Propaganda must therefore always be essentially simple and repetitious. The most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly … it must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over." The Muslim Arabs have learned this lesson all too well for they have succeeded in doing what years of Arab and Islamist warfare and terror have failed to do. They have isolated the Jewish state as never before and won millions around the globe to their cause by demonizing Israel with the Goebbelian technique of the Big Lie theory. Arab Muslim spokespersons have become adept at smoothly repeating a few enormous lies, often wrapped in pseudo-emotion, that coerces so many uninformed but well- intentioned listeners who then fall for them – hook, line and sinker. A typical technique by such Arab Muslim propagandists is to create a lie and deliver it with conviction. As soon as the lie is exposed for what it is, the Arab or pro-Arab propagandists merely moves on to the next big howler. And so it goes - an endless and unashamed armory of pernicious falsehoods masquerading as facts. And in the court of public opinion, the victim of those manufactured myths, Israel, now becomes the victimizer to so many people and is further marginalized and demonized. Leftists and Marxists rush to embrace the cause of the Arabs, who call themselves Palestinians, seeing through a dark mirror a warped comparison of the successful and creative Jewish state with Lenin's attack on capitalism - and if the Jewish state is surrounded by self-oppressed and failed Arab societies, all the better. Add to this Ionesco like 'Theater of the Absurd' a mainstream international media, which eagerly loves to be manipulated by Arab and Muslim regimes, and you have a perfect storm. This then is the metaphysical challenge to Israel as it resists both the violence of overt Muslim Arab physical aggression and the equally diabolical violence of the poisoned pen and mendacity of the misspoken word. The old aphorism goes: 'Sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never harm them.' Oh! But they do. And the Arab Muslim world has learned, just as Josef Goebbels knew, that if you lie about a people and bear false witness against them, you prepare them for an extermination that millions around the globe will willingly accept and excuse. Satan is busy. He hates the light of Israel. He hates the creativity, the progress and the freedoms that Israel, like America, spreads throughout the world. He enjoys the ultimate absurdity that spews from the Islamic Republic of Iran as the Ayatollah and his crazed mullahs call the United States the 'Great Stan' and Israel, the 'Little Satan.' Oh, how delicious that irony is to the real Satan. But the dark forces of Arab and Islamic hate know that they will not prevail if they fail to extinguish the flickering candle of light in the world. Israel is that candle and will surely endure despite a hostile world's quest to snuff it out. As it says in the Apocrypha: "I shall light a candle of understanding in thy heart, which shall not be put out." Victor Sharpe is a freelance writer and author of the acclaimed four volumes of Politicide: The attempted murder of the Jewish state. | 
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