One would hope that elements of the rhetoric emanating from pro-Palestine activists swarming the streets of New York, London, Berlin, and campuses across America and Europe would cause even objective observers to wonder whether Newspeak has become the lingua franca.
As George Orwell explained, Newspeak is a language that is characterized by complex thoughts being reduced to simple terms to produce simplistic meanings.
In a June 1946 essay, he expanded on that, noting that “when the general atmosphere is bad, language must suffer... if thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought.”
A figure in his Nineteen Eighty-Four novel makes clear what will happen, so relevant to today: “literature of the past will have been destroyed... not merely changed into something different, but actually contradictory of what they used to be.”
Those elements of revolutionary linguistics need to be recalled if one wishes an explanation of why the Brooklyn Museum and some its directors have become targets of the packs of roaming militants. How could they possibly justify attacking cultural institutions or, as an example, “The Nova Music Festival Exhibition,” one devoted to humanism, on Manhattan’s Wall Street?
At the Within Our Lifetime website, I found a page titled, “Why We Protested Nova: Confronting Zionist Propaganda and the Manufacturing of Consent for Genocide.” WOL is led by Nerdeen Kiswani, CUNY Law School graduate and, in 2022, its infamous commencement speaker, who announced the intention to “create networks and programs within the CUNY Jewish population to... unlearn Zionism so they may form their own Jewish identity.” It is the prime mover of many of the pro-Palestine surges of rampage.
In answer to that self-posed question, WOL would want us to believe that “the Nova music festival was a rave next to a concentration camp,” a camp called Gaza. Gaza has been enclosed by a wall “erected to isolate Gaza from the outside world in 2005.” Moreover, “the Israeli Occupation Forces launches missiles into the strip regularly.”
Kiswani belittles the suffering that was Nova and instead directs attention to “why is no one talking about the Israeli occupation forces gunning down their own people and burning down cars with the missile strikes? Or the fact that they killed many hostages in Gaza? The exhibit is pure propaganda.”
She prevaricates, fabricates, and for her, the exhibition serves “only one purpose: to make this level of colonial violence acceptable to the US public.” And to top this all off, in a June 12 post on X, she wrote, “Imagine there was a museum dedicated to the slave owner ‘victims’ of slave rebellions? Or nazi ‘victims’ of Jewish resistance? That’s what the nova exhibit is. That’s why cultural institutions must be confronted.”
Gaining allies
Most of us truly do not presume or even imagine that pro-Palestine propaganda totally inverts history and fact, invents comparisons, and has no problem voicing hateful and spiteful speech. What is at work here is not just corrupting a narrative by falsifying events, but that the ultimate purpose is to gain allies. This is intersectionality at work.
Another master is Mehdi Hasan. On June 12, he tweeted: “Entire US political and media class: ‘Israel doesn’t target civilians!’” To that, he attached a screenshot of The Jerusalem Post story that quoted Israel Defense and Security Forum CEO Lt.-Col. (res.) Yaron Buskila discussing Israel’s northern front. Buskila is not a general, nor is he on active or even reserve duty. The forum is an NGO. But Hasan described him as an “Israeli general.”
Moreover, Buskila spoke of “civilian infrastructure,” not humans. But who grasps what Hasan has done? He does this daily, sometimes on multiple occasions. Hasan uses a term “Insta-Genocide” because, perhaps, a simple “genocide” is not cool enough.
In another tweet also on June 12, Hasan sought to counter the words of America’s UN Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield that Israel accepted the latest Biden ceasefire agreement, and wrote, “There is zero public evidence that Israel has accepted this deal. The gaslighting continues. Insane to watch in real time, but it is relentless.” I checked, but he did not seem to correct himself.
Hasan has piled up a good few entries at the CAMERA website. It notes that he employs three main tactics. The first is the straw man fallacy. The second is to make outlandish claims and then use false appeals to authority to obfuscate. And the last is to lie by omission. If one is propagandizing on behalf of the idea of an Arab Palestine, those tactics would seem to be the best methodology.
If challenged that the last thing an Arab state of Palestine would turn out to be is a heaven for progressives, for LGBT persons, atheists, and other staples of their normative radical liberal vision for society, that will be shrugged off. Palestine is permitted all consideration for its sins, as long as Zionism’s settler “colonialism” is defeated.
Their preferred terminology is that taken for the experience of the Jews during their history. Terms like genocide; concentration camp; starvation; ghetto. Jewish identity is removed, only to be awarded to a population element that, for over 100 years, has systematically sought to kill and rape and plunder as many Jews as possible; a populace whose leaders flocked to Berlin during World War II, seeking Hitler’s protection and seeking to assist, yes, the Holocaust.
The tools are false misleading comparisons; inverted narratives; ignoring uncomfortable issues; false data. IfNotNow has been running a campaign against AIPAC under the theme “the pro-war lobby” as if Hamas didn’t initiate the hostilities. It will loudly proclaim the struggle for Palestine must be “by any means possible,” echoing Frantz Fanon, but if questioned why cannot Israel then defend itself similarly, the questioner is denounced and dismissed.
They have taken away a freedom of which Orwell wrote: “The freedom to say that two plus two make four.”
The writer is a researcher, analyst, and opinion commentator on political, cultural, and media issues.