A song for our times

This is a guest post by Mitnaged
YouTube is a splendid invention.  It brings people in the world closer together, it makes the world smaller.  Hopelessly inept musicians can torture famous and beautiful music and post videos of themselves doing that to YouTube.  There are glorious scenes from operas which the ordinary person might never be able to afford to see. There are bands, choirs, kazoo players, performing animals, scenes from films, indeed almost anything you might think of.

It is difficult to believe that within such a rich variety, theoretically free to all and for all, there is nevertheless a malign political twist which actively supports the distortion of news accounts and current events.  This led to the withdrawal from YouTube of Latma’s production of “We con the World” (although it has now been reinstated) as well as some of the IDF footage of the flotilla incident.   Still available throughout that time, however, were videos of antisemitic Muslim preachers (see also here) as well as other YouTube videos peddling antisemitism to name but a few.

The IDF filmed the flotilla incident, including the polite invitation from the Israeli navy to the Marmara to allow itself to be escorted into Ashdod.  Also on record is the inveterate antisemitic rejoinder from these “peace” activists for the officer issuing the invitation to “go back to Auschwitz.” We are left in no doubt as to what motivates them.

Also included in the IDF’s final dossier were films from the Marmara’s own CCTV cameras, which showed these brave fighters tooling up beforehand and yet still the terminally cognitively dissonant refuse to believe the evidence of their own eyes and ears.  Why is this?

Perhaps one clue lies in the chorus of the song to which the Israel/Jew-haters (we must call those supporters of this “peaceful” flotilla “Jew-haters” since they have not yet distanced themselves from or apologised for the egregious “Go back to Auschwitz” rejoinder) took such great exception:

“We’ll make the world
Abandon reason
We’ll make them all believe that the Hamas
Is Momma Theresa
We are peaceful travellers
With guns and our own knives
The truth will never find its way to your TV”


“We’ll make the world abandon reason….”

“Reason” means, among other things, believing the evidence of your own eyes and ears.  It means reality checking that evidence by reference to other trusted sources, but wait a minute ….  What happens to a person’s capability to reality check if those trusted sources are themselves biased?  How can the average person with no particular axe to grind get to the truth of what is really going on?   We live in a super-fast age and even the most liberal-minded people often do not have the time to check out a variety of sources for information so as to be able to come to their own reasoned conclusions.  Therefore they are at the mercy of the drip, drip, drip of propaganda which spreads in all directions like sour dough and takes on its own scurrilous and specious “truth” like Goebbels’ Big Lie.

Before and during WWII, the German people (except for a brave few) abandoned the “reason” of being able to make up their own minds about Jews and other perceived enemies of the state, and relied instead upon the version of “truth” peddled in the demonisation tactics employed by Goebbels’ Ministry of Propaganda.
Nowadays, the Guardian and CiF and the Observer, the BBC and other news outlets are similarly instrumental in the undermining of Joe and Jane Public’s capability to reality-test.   Their focus is once again on Jews although they would have us believe that they are condemning the actions of the only Jewish country in the world.  They, too, deliberately doctor what Joe and Jane Public are told, and not only about the Middle East, to coincide with their own filtered version of “reality.”   They offer the 21st century version of Goebbels’ Big Lie and the longer this persists the less capable become Joe and Jane of reality testing it, and ultimately Joe and Jane cease to be aware that there is any real need to do so.  We see evidence of this last stage often below the line on CiF, when the same idiocies are regurgitated time and time again.
“… We’ll make them all believe that the Hamas is Momma Theresa…”
The Islamist leaders know full well what they are doing.  They are what Prof Richard Landes calls demopaths –

“…. people who use democratic language and invoke human rights only when it serves their interests, and not when it calls for self-criticism or self-restraint. Demopaths demand stringent levels of human “rights” but do not apply these basic standards for the “other” to their own behavior. The most lethal demopaths use democratic rights to destroy democracy… ”

Hamas’ behaviour and that of Islamists in general fit this definition to a “T”
Worryingly for those of us who value the capability to reality test, however painful may be the consequences, and harbour the increasingly vain hope that we will convince the useful idiots of the Left at least to recognise that there is another point of view, the latter have finally slipped their moorings and have lost their capability to reality test what they are told by Islamist demopaths.
For, like Richard Landes, I believe that these useful idiots (Landes has elsewhere called them “useful infidels”) are the dupes of their Islamist demopath masters.  They exist only to serve their Islamist demopath masters by continuing to bed in and promulgate the formers’ distortion of objective reality.  Landes defines and describes them as follows:

“There are several attitudes that predispose individuals to becoming dupes of demopathic discourse.

1. Liberal cognitive egocentrism – most everyone wants positive-sum solutions – prohibits people from imagining such malevolence.

2. Masochistic omnipotence syndrome – it’s our fault and if we can change, things will work out – makes people particularly susceptible to the wide-ranging accusations that demopaths level at western society.

3. Human Rights Complex– human rights violations are particularly reprehensible when they come from Western cultures – opens access to demopaths to participate in public moral discussion.

4. Fear of Ridicule: When “human rights” discourse trumps all other values, demopaths can establish their positions so powerfully, that people who begin to suspect foul play are afraid to discuss the issue for fear of being ostracized as a racist.”

We should never underestimate the havoc wreaked by demopaths (Islamist or otherwise) upon vulnerable people’s capability to reality test.  The result of Islamist demopaths’ successes with their useful infidel dupes may be summed up in the inherent and blatant contradiction in the following, again from the chorus of  “We Con the World” and attributed to the Islamists on board the Marmara:
“… We are peaceful travellers with guns and our own knives…”

Millions took up the chorus.  However, these useful infidels may well have been ignorant of the extent to which this contradiction actually applied to their conduct, so successful and complete was their binding to their demopath masters and their belief in the rectitude of their cause, until the video went viral and the evidence from other videos added to the message put out by “We Con the World”, and undermined demopaths’ and dupes’ version of events.
Their reaction to the satire once that dawned was, of course, utterly predictable and in proportion to the cognitive dissonance caused – and the useful infidel dupes, no doubt primed and egged on by their Islamist demopath masters, moved to try to obliterate the cause of their discomfort. Islamism, being authoritarian, is stuck in concrete thinking.  One characteristic of the authoritarian personality is an inclination towards literalness, the corresponding inability to understand sub-texts and double meanings and, consequently, towards paranoia whenever it feels that its world view being challenged by being laughed at, or perceives its control to be threatened.
Since the success of satire and jokes depend upon being able to “get” sub-texts and double meanings, and to help oneself to be included by laughing along with them without becoming paranoid or taking the words too literally, the Islamist demopaths and their dupes aboard the flotilla and their hordes of supporters around the world were doomed to be left out of the joke and to fantasise about what was “really” going on.  The important word here is “fantasy” – remember these people cannot reality test sufficiently  and often not at all.
And of course their fantasy led to fury and outrage and consequently to YouTube’s initial cowardly conduct as described above.

“…The truth will never find its way to your TV.”

This is, of course, what Islamist demopaths and their useful infidel dupes would wish, and often radio and television are no better than the press in their wilful distortion of reality where Israel and the Middle East are concerned.  However, the vital point is that, because the IDF took videos of the encounter on the Marmara, and published them on the web regardless of whether they ultimately made the news or not, the truth was there to see.
The Islamist demopaths, however, took issue not only with the fact that their operatives were caught, so to speak, with their fingers in the cookie jar but also with the fact that the footage was capable of being broadcast on television around the world.
My own belief is that the Islamist demopaths’ and dupes’ fury about “We Con the World” is because, at some level, they themselves recognise the truth inherent in it:

They want to make us abandon reason;

They have succeeded, insofar as the Guardian and CiF are concerned, in portraying Hamas as blameless victims in their conflict with Israel and in painting them almost as candidates for sainthood;

They have also succeeded in convincing their CiF dupes and others lacking in critical thinking capability that black is white and white black, and all is “hot ice and wondrous strange snow” (to quote Shakespeare);

However, they have overlooked one crucial factor in all of this, which is why “We Con the World” is and will continue to be so successful in containing them:

WE KNOW WHAT THEY ARE UP TO!  They are not intelligent enough to put themselves in our shoes and to allow for the fact that not everyone can be fooled!
Most importantly, we also know humour and satire are immensely threatening to such people’s view of themselves and their sense of their own omnipotence and efficacy.  This is why we should use them to combat anti-Israel/anti-Jewish venom whenever we can.  The perpetrators will be unable to undermine its effectiveness by using it back at us because their over-inclination towards literalness will cripple all their attempts to do so, and their attempts will fall like the proverbial lead balloon.

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