If You Can’t Beat Them, Blame Them

Yesterday, a radical Islamist terrorist from Saudi Arabia plowed his car through a German Christmas market, killing five people and wounding more than 200. Yet, the reaction on social media was sickeningly to call him “a diehard Zionist who hated Islam“.

Unfortunately, there is nothing new under the sun here, as it is an age-old pastime of antisemites to blame the Jews for everything that goes wrong (i.e., the infamous Blood Libel) or even that Jews control the world itself.

As an example, already in this week’s Torah portion of Vayeshev, we see that when Jacob’s son, Joseph, was sold into slavery. He was appointed overseer of Potiphar’s house, and when Potiphar’s wife tried to seduce Joseph but was rebuffed by him, she turned it around and blamed Joseph (Genesis 39:14):

She called to the people of her household and said, ‘See he (Potifar) brought a Hebrew man to ridicule us. He came to me to lie with me, and I cried with a loud voice.’

This pattern of the perpetrators blaming the victims repeated itself after the October 7, 2023, Hamas terrorist attack on Israel. Hamas terrorists invaded and killed over 1,200 men, women, and children in the most barbaric fashion and took another 200+ hostages into Gaza. Yet, as soon as Israel rose up to defend herself, the terrorists and their “useful idiot” sympathizers initiated the “blame game” attempting to turn the table by blaming the Zionists (i.e., Jews). More than a year later, they still follow their Iranian-sponsored talking points continuously, baselessly declaring that the Zionists are “baby killers” and are committing “genocide” on the Palestinians.

What we are seeing is a version of Nazi chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels’ Big Lie, where:

If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.

Similarly, with the Iranian terrorist proxies (Hamas, Hezbollah, the Houthis, and more), if you commit jihadi terrorist atrocities against Israel and the West and call it “resistance” or “Intifada” over and over again, then you are purportedly not an evil terrorist any longer, but rather a freedom fighter hero.

We saw the same thing with Israel always wanting to have peace with their Arab neighbors, but the corrupt Palestinian leadership continuously rejecting it. In fact, it was Israel from the very beginning that accepted the 1948 United Nations Partition Plan while the Arabs refused it outright. Immediately, five Arab nation armies invaded and tried to kill all the Jews there. However, when they were defeated, they resorted once again to lying saying that it was the Jews’ fault for trying to “steal” the land—even though the Jews have lived in Israel, ‘the Promised Land.” since the time of Abraham in 1800 BCE!

Fast forward to the reaction after radical Islamists attacked America on 9/11, hijacking four commercial airliners, crashing two into the World Trade Center towers, and another into the Pentagon. The attack was orchestrated by Osama bin Laden, the leader of the terrorist organization Al Qaeda, which had previously declared war on the U.S. back in 1996. Fully 19 identified Al Qaeda terrorists died in the attack itself; bin Laden was hunted down and killed in 2011, and other Al Qaeda leaders involved were captured, interrogated, and imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay. Regardless of these proven facts, many Jew-hating conspiracy theorists still spread the falsehood that Jews, Israel, and/or the Mossad were behind the attack.

From Potiphar’s wife in the Bible to the Hamas terrorists, this is a tried and true strategy: if you can’t beat them, then blame them!  As Napoleon said hundreds of years ago:

History is a set of lies agreed upon.

With radical Islamists and their brainwashed supporters, the spreading of fake news and propaganda (like with the Nazis) is part and parcel of their terrorist strategy to brutally and violently take what they want, when they want, including a global Caliphate governed by Sharia law, and to cover it up with an endless series of lies they tell themselves and the world.