Mr. Cohen, This Is Your Wake-Up Call

I feel great pride in Israel’s military successes since October 7. Hamas has been destroyed. Hezbollah has been decapitated. The Assad regime in Syria toppled.  Iran’s so-called “Axis of Resistance” is in tatters. For so many Jews, our fears for Israel’s survival have given way to confidence in Israel’s strength.

But make no mistake, feelings of relief are premature. There’s another war that’s just as important, and it’s not going well. In this war, the undeniable successes of Israel’s enemies keep accumulating and they risk overwhelming us.

Aldous Huxley understood propaganda. He wrote, “The propagandist’s purpose is to make one set of people forget that certain other sets of people are human.” We, of all people, cannot allow ourselves to forget where the dehumanization he mentions can lead.

Vladimir Lenin also understood propaganda. He wrote, “We can and must write in a language which sows among the masses hate, revulsion, and scorn toward those who disagree with us.” We must recognize that this is exactly what Israel’s enemies have been doing.

They have waged a propaganda war against Israel and the Jewish people for decades, and we have failed miserably in fighting it. Maybe we were so used to the world’s indifference and its antisemitism that we pridefully told ourselves we don’t care what the world thinks. Maybe we thought we were somehow above wrestling with pigs in the mud. Maybe we thought the truth should and would prevail on its own.  Whatever. The reality is that we are losing badly and, if we don’t turn things around, the consequences could be fatal.

What does our failure look like? It looks like near daily demonstrations throughout the West where tens of thousands parade their certainty that Israel is an oppressive, settler-colonial project designed to steal from and subjugate or kill the poor, brown-skinned indigenous Palestinians, and that all Jews everywhere are complicit in this crime. It looks like Australian crowds chanting “Gas the Jews!” outside the Sydney Opera House on October 8, before Israel had even responded to Hamas’ attack. It looks like 35 Harvard-affiliated organizations releasing a letter blaming Israel alone for Hamas’ barbarity, also on October 8. It looks like Jews being hunted in a pre-planned attack in Amsterdam, while the Western world gullibly accepts the fiction that Israeli hooligans brought it on themselves. It looks like leading US universities where virulently antisemitic professors are entrusted to teach Jewish history, the same professors who post on social media their enthusiasm for terrorist attacks on Jews and delight in sharing antisemitic memes that would make Hitler blush. It looks like the ever-bolder attacks on Jewish-owned businesses, Jewish schools, and ordinary Jews throughout the West. It looks like the repeated fire-bombing of Canadian synagogues, while the Canadia Prime Minister continues to give license to anti-Semitic rage. Most of all, it looks like the growing anger and aggression toward Jews everywhere.

It looks like this because the propaganda machine of Israel’s enemies (and those who hate Jews wherever they live) has been relentless. Year after year, decade after decade, we have shrugged and accepted its existence and the grim toll it takes.

What did we do when Arab elites reframed the complicated events of 1948 as a “Nakba” wrought by the Jews against the poor, helpless Palestinian people? What did we do as this false narrative became the foundation of worldwide anti-Israel movements? Not enough.

What did we do when the KGB recruited a young Egyptian named Yasser Arafat and helped define a Palestinian national identity for the sole purpose of destroying Israel? And what did we do when Arafat spent decades marketing the idea of a distinct Palestinian people oppressed by Israel and only seeking freedom and self-determination, when we all knew his true objective was the destruction of Israel?  Not enough.

What did we do as the United Nations became the cesspool of anti-Israel hate that it is today, issuing 171 resolutions (between 2015-2024) against Israel, a pluralistic society and the only democracy in the Middle East, while issuing only 77 against all other nations in the world combined, including so many brutal, repressive autocracies? Not enough.

What did we do as UNRWA openly taught lies and Jew-hatred to generations of Palestinian children? What did we do with the truth that UNRWA employees were Hamas terrorists? Not enough.

What did we do as Palestinian leaders rejected or sabotaged every sincere peace offer since 1948, including repeated offers for an independent Palestinian state, while claiming in every case to be victims? Not enough.

What did we do as the Palestinian Authority funneled billions of dollars in international aid to the personal accounts of Arafat, Abbas, and others, and funded its ‘Pay-to-Slay’ program that establishes a significant financial incentive for Palestinians to kill Israelis? Not enough.

What did we do as regional Arab leaders, many of whom are US allies, continually vilified Israel, spreading absurd lies about Jews only as a means to divert their own people’s dissatisfaction to a convenient, external enemy? Not enough.

What did we do as Qatar donated billions to buy influence with US universities, far more than any other foreign country? What did we do as Qatar provided hundreds of millions of dollars to Hamas and a safe haven to its leaders? Not enough.

What did we do as anti-Israel activists secured their grip on America’s leading educational institutions, then set about indoctrinating our children in their irrational, neo-Marxist, hateful ideology? Not enough.

What did we do as Islamic terrorists rebranded their murder, rape, and inhuman torture of Jews as resistance? And what did we do as liberal Westerners fully embraced this morally abhorrent nonsense? Not enough.

What did we do as even legitimate and warranted criticism of Islamism was beaten into silent submission by disingenuous cries of Islamophobia? What did we do with the fact that Islamist terrorism was responsible for more than 56,000 attacks worldwide and some 205,000 deaths just between January 2013 and April 2024? Not enough.

What did we do as anti-Israel and anti-Jewish thugs assaulted Jews on college campuses, on the streets of our cities, and everywhere else they could find Jews?  Not enough.

What did we do as the anti-Israel educational elite rewrote nearly every Wikipedia entry about Jews and Israel to distort the truth and outright lie about history? Not enough.

Not enough because the frequency and boldness of every one of these things continues to grow. Can we count on our political leaders to stand up for us? What we’ve seen so far is Western leaders, with their well-practiced serious expressions, stating that antisemitism is unacceptable. But these are insultingly empty words.  They take no action. They hold no one accountable.

Where will this lead? Perhaps it just leads to further ostracism of Jews, further harassment and assaults, further declines in Ivy League acceptance rates, further discrimination limiting job offers and promotions, further weakening of political support for Israel … and the roots of antisemitism sinking deeper, securing greater purchase, and increasing the risks that worse will happen in the future. This appears to be our best-case scenario.

Do we think there’s no real consequence to the anti-Israel, Jew-hating indoctrination of our younger generations? Max Planck once said, “Science advances one funeral at a time.” He knew that people don’t easily change their beliefs. Not many slave-owning Southerners in America rejected their racism and embraced equality after the Civil War. Not many Nazis rejected their antisemitism and acknowledged the humanity and human rights of Jews after World War II.

We’ve allowed our younger generations to be taught lies and hatred, not just at Ivy League universities, but now throughout our educational system. We should recall another quote by Lenin, “Give me just one generation of youth, and I’ll transform the whole world.”

It’s happening. According to a January 2024 study by the ADL, Millennials in America on average agreed with 5.4 out of 11 anti-Jewish tropes presented to them.  By comparison, Baby Boomers agreed with 3.1.

Like Lenin, Joseph Goebbels understood the permanence of propaganda’s effects.  “The essence of propaganda consists in winning people over to an idea so sincerely, so vitally, that in the end they succumb to it utterly and can never escape from it.”

Overall, the ADL study found that 24% of Americans agreed with at least 6 out of the 11 anti-Jewish tropes. By comparison, a similar study in 2020 found that only 20% of Americans met that standard.

The point is that our enemies’ propaganda is working. We can see it every day in the news. We can see it in studies like the one conducted by the ADL. If things continue on the current trajectory, we won’t be faced with a little more discrimination, we’ll be faced with something much worse.

We need to wake up! Things don’t magically get better all by themselves. We need to combat the misinformation that’s poisoning people’s minds against Jews and Israel before it’s too late.

Winston Churchill, speaking to the House of Commons in 1935, said, “Want of foresight, unwillingness to act when action would be simple and effective, lack of clear thinking, confusion of counsel until the emergency comes, until self-preservation strikes its jarring gong – these are the features which constitute the endless repetition of history.”

This is where we are. Self-preservation is striking its jarring gong. Decades of allowing our enemies to control the narrative, to spread hateful lies, and to rewrite history has done incalculable damage. That cannot be allowed to continue. Their lies and propaganda cannot continue to go unanswered. We have to speak up. We have to champion the truth. We have to call out the lies and the liars. And we better do it now, and hope it’s not already too late.