Oct 7, Dawn French and the dark arts of amnesia and illusion
Who – apart from Jews and Israelis – is still talking about October 7 (or who was talking about – again apart from Jews and Israelis – before Israel’s air-strikes knocked Gaza into the long-grass of news? And who is (or was before those Iran strikes) talking about the hostages, of whom 22 are believed to be still alive?
It seems that the world – apart from Jews and Israelis – was suffering a severe bout of collective amnesia over the worst slaughter of Jews since the Holocaust (an atrocity which, if committed on the same scale in the USA would have seen the deliberate slaying of some 48,000 people, including thousands of babies and children).
The event that started a terrible, tragic war (1,200 people – including babies and infants –deliberately slaughtered, with many of the victims burned alive, beheaded, sexually mutilated, and 200 more –again including babies and infants – kidnapped, some never to return alive) was all but erased.
This “forgetting” was achieved by the natural human tendency for memory to fade, blended with the dark art of induced amnesia in which Palestinian spin-doctors – assisted by a compliant (if not actively hostile) media – ruthlessly exploit the process of “News.”
Palestinian spin-doctors know – as everyone working in “news” knows – that there is a finite amount of time in which background or “history” will be incorporated in reports and that no matter how heinous, traumatising and relevant to what ensues any event/incident/attack is, it will simply vanish. And then we have the way that news organisations habitually frame reports on the Mid-east to minimise – or sometimes ignore entirely – threat and harm to Israel. So when any terrorist atrocity is perpetrated against Israel, it may or may not be reported. But if it is too big to ignore and is reported, it will rapidly become history/ context which, as discussed, will quickly vanish. But Israel’s reprisal (possibly following multiple provocations), will be reported allowing Palestinians and their apologists to frame it as “gratuitous” aggression that may handily also be used to “justify” a subsequent Palestinian terror attack. Those clever spin-doctors also know that there is a voracious appetite for new “news,” so they fill the void with fabrications in the knowledge that at least some would be reported as “news.” So alongside silence about Oct 7 and the hostages, there was a tsunami of negative stories about Israel, which shamefully – and rather too often for it to be entirely coincidental – turned out to be false.
This amnesia or “forgetting” –alongside the illusion of Palestinian “victimhood” created by media distortion and dissemination of that Soviet-fabricated narrative – has been a powerful tool for deception for 40 years. But now let’s see how amnesia and “forgetting” could also help, say, British actress Dawn French – or “Dawnie” as I prefer to call her.
“Dawnie” has the mellifluous voice you hear in ads for Marks & Spencer food (which, incidentally, is also sold by Ocado, the UK pioneers in online food shopping). So, anyway, “Dawnie,” who has a Palestinian flag on her bio, has clearly fallen for the fake narrative which ignores every inconvenient truth as well, of course, as ignoring all documented history, treaties, etc, and which also conveniently forgets that Arab powers were trying to annihilate Israel for 19 years before they had the pretext of “Occupation,” and for 50 years before they had the excuse of Bibi Netanyahu. She made a deeply offensive video dismissing the Oct 7 slaughter and then issued an apology which not only carried a Palestinian flag, but clearly assigned equivalence – moral and every other kind – to a nation defending itself from, literally, existential threat and the terrorist entity which invaded, slaughtered and abducted 1,400 civilians on Oct 7.
The video led to a firestorm on social-media and elsewhere, and the “apology” threw petrol on the flames. Presumably “Dawnie” has been told by “her people” – and probably M&S – to keep her head down and her lips zipped, and everyone will forget. “Forgetting” and Amnesia will ride to her rescue as it did for Hamas. There is a certain irony to the fact that Israel’s air-strikes on Iran will have helped with the “forgetting,” as the Jews and the unindoctrinated have greater concerns than the misguided views of a woman who makes a living pretending to be other people and is clearly incapable of understanding complex geo-politics.
So while M&S (and Ocado, presumably) hope that if “Dawnie” keeps her head down and her lips zipped, everyone will forget, I am telling them that amnesia is not so easily induced in those of us with minds and memories. We will remember that the founders of M&S – the people who made the business the High-Street leviathan it is today – gave unconditional support to Zionism and the Jewish state, and knew Israel was not a coloniser, or an apartheid state, nor any of the other pejorative epithets the pro-Palestinians hurl at it in a bid to delegitimise it.
So we will resist amnesia. We will keep talking about the savagery of Oct 7 and we will keep reminding M&S (and Ocado) that it is unacceptable for their brand to be associated with someone whose views could be considered antisemitic and who appears to be opposed to the existence of the Jewish state.