Guest post by DaveM
“How can I help seeing what is in front of my eyes? Two and two are four.”
“Sometimes, Winston. Sometimes they are five. Sometimes they are three. Sometimes they are all of them at once. You must try harder. It is not easy to become sane.”
“There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.”
–George Orwell, 1984
Motley Crue, in their autobiography “The Dirt: Confessions of the World’s Most Notorious Rock Band,” write about their time with Ozzy Osbourne.
The Crue were no strangers to partying hard but even they couldn’t get close to the Prince of Darkness when it came to excess.
Ozzy once had taken acid every day for a full year just to see what it was like. I once watched Al Manar every day for a full year in Damascus just to see what that was like.
I think Ozzy and I would probably get on really well; it seems we’ve got a lot in common. Yet it’s when you get back to the UK that things start to get really weird:
People marching and chanting “We are all Hezbollah now”.
Hezbollah MPs getting invites to Parliament.
“It will be my pleasure and honour to host an event in Parliament where our friends from Hezbollah will be speaking. I’ve also invited friends from Hamas to come and speak as well.”
Habibi sheds light on what Syria and Hezbollah are really about by linking to the Syrian drama series “The Diaspora” first aired on Hezbollah’s Al Manar channel and subsequently on Jordan’s Al Mamnou’. (The Jordanian government did step in and stop its broadcast.)
It ran for about 25 episodes and various clips are translated here. We see that the Jews have used the blood of Christian children to make matzos; they started WWII and assisted Hitler with the Holocaust (which may or may not have happened), and fooled every last one of us into believing that Protocols isn’t real but a hoax.
So I bet you all want to know how this ends. Well, allow me. That’s the Al Manar logo on the top right hand side of the screen.
[SCENE: Rothschild and the various nefarious individuals convene a meeting to end World War II.]
Rothschild: “World War II will end just like all the other wars, Yahweh’s revenge and a Jewish victory. For such a long time we’ve witnessed and enjoyed the Jewish victory. However now we must begin the process of Jewish revival.
Person: “Excuse me, but before we start the revival process and end World War II, there’s the small matter of Japan which we have to resolve. I know it seems strange focusing on Japan as they’ve lost millions of lives just like everyone else. But we’re doing this because they went to war with China in order to fight against us, the Jews. Even their own delegate acknowledged this.”
Rothschild: “I’ve got a group in America to pressurize President Truman, for the first time ever, to use atomic bombs against the Japanese.”
Second Person: “What are atomic bombs exactly?”
Rothschild: “Tomorrow you’ll know full well.”
[Montage of B52 dropping atomic bomb on Hiroshima with the Star of David superimposed. Rothschild and his colleagues toast the “Jewish victory”. The montage segues into a series of killings and massacres which took place during the 1948 War of Independence. They include the bombing of the King David Hotel, the bombing of the Government House in Jaffa, Haifa, and the Deir Yassin massacre.]
This short clip took me ages to translate because I couldn’t quite believe what I was hearing.
So I checked it, rechecked and checked it again. This went on for hours. Some part of me was desperately hoping I’d made a mistake, as surely nobody would permit something this crass to be broadcast. Wrong again.
First, in the closing montage naturally there’s no mention whatsoever of the atrocities from the Arab side such as the Haifa Oil Refinery massacre, the bombing of the Atlantic and Amdursky hotels on Ben-Yehuda Street or the ambush at Sheikh Jarrah. That would kill the self-pity narrative stone dead.
Second, the Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party is in absolutely no position to give any lectures on morality when it comes to massacres. Hama was just one of many.
Third, this makes it perfectly clear that Hezbollah are not a “resistance” or a “liberation” movement as some like to proclaim and the Arab Ba’ath Socialist Party don’t have a “plan to save Syria”.
Their position is perfectly clear now. This isn’t about opposing Israeli foreign policy. It’s simply Jew-hatred and violence.
What’s really frightening and depressing is that this, in one form or another, is what most people in the Arab world actually believe. This is the prism in which they view every war with Israel. After all who’s going to spend all the time, effort and money to make a 25-part series knowing nobody’s going to watch it? Where’s the sense in that?
Even comparatively liberal stations such as Al Arabiya recognise this and can’t afford to alienate their viewers; hence their coverage of the Gaza war being so at odds with their usual reporting.
I can’t think of any other explanation.
These views are widespread for two main reasons. Firstly, they get told this narrative every single day of their lives. It gets repeated, reinforced and repeated again, often quite implicitly, in the newspapers, on TV, in the schools, in the mosques. It becomes extremely difficult to break free from.
I left Northern Ireland in 1996, yet I still carry some residual suspicion towards Catholics. So what chance has anyone indoctrinated by 30-plus years of antisemitic totalitarianism got?
These views are also popular because it’s very easy and comforting to blame someone else for everything that goes wrong. If there’s a shadowy all-powerful group controlling the world then you’re pretty much off the hook and don’t have to take responsibility for anything.
Dictatorships are extremely stressful places to live; people will grab at anything which offers at least some sort of relief. It doesn’t matter how crude or dangerous it is. If I were in that position I’d have done exactly the same.
I did meet some people in the Arab world who rejected this way of seeing the world, but they had to be very discrete. And there are those who courageously speak out against it.
Yet it’s Westerners like Corbyn, Galloway, Short and people in the FO who engage with the extremists while isolating the reformers; and who go to Arab countries and stick their heads in the sand, denying the uncomfortable truths which are right in front of their own eyes. They have absolutely no excuse.
They really need to look at themselves and at what they’re doing. This also goes for the Middle East editors of national newspapers who write gushing stories on Syrian drama serials without any reference to “The Diaspora”. That’s either bad research or cowardice. You decide.
This isn’t some one-off anomaly which somehow slipped through the net.
Only recently Hamas’s Al Aqsa TV have been broadcasting something very similar.
Learning Arabic is hard work; you end up seeing a lot of stuff you really rather wished you hadn’t. Once seen it can never be unseen. You want to tell people about it, but you can’t because it would be too uncomfortable for them.
You’re dealing with a set of reference points here that most people do not know about. Nor do they want to, as it would mean pulling the rug out from under their feet. I wouldn’t have believed any of it had I not seen it myself.
At the end of the day, I chose to enter that world. They didn’t. It’s up to them to find out for themselves if they want to. But most don’t. That’s very frustrating.
“Your worst enemy, he reflected, was your nervous system. At any moment the tension inside you was liable to translate itself into some visible symptom.”
–Orwell, 1984
