Response to Moshe Ben-Chaim's article:
"Facing Reality"
by Dr. Alan Keyes - Email
- Rabbi Moshe Ben-Chaim has been kind enough to send me his essay reflecting upon the reality of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. I think there is much merit in the good Rabbi's central thesis that - particularly in dealing with the terror threat - denial can kill.
- I am well on the record, for twenty years and more, with my refusal to deny Arafat's terrorist credentials. Unfortunately, the Bush Administration cannot yet make this refusal free of confusion and compromise.
- The Rabbi's analysis raises some provocative and disturbing questions. I agree that many such questions must be raised and answered, if we are to see our way clearly to what must be done for Israel's survival as a Jewish state. I would like to share with the Rabbi and his readers some reflections of my own about denial - and I place my comments in the immediate context of rapidly unfolding events in Israel this week.
- After weeks of hyperbolic rhetoric about what had happened in Jenin, and a determined propaganda effort to lend credibility to the charges of Israeli massacre and massive atrocity, the United Nations has decided that an investigation isn't necessary after all.
- Why is the putatively "unbiased" United Nations losing its fervor and interest for going into Jenin to get at the facts? Perhaps it is because emerging evidence is giving the lie to Palestinian and European charges of hundreds of deaths and massive outrages. For friends of Israel, it's not hard to see that the UN was never after facts in the first place. The UN has been a hotbed of anti-Israeli bigotry for decades, and has spent much of its energy in the past few weeks adding to the slanderous furor that was being generated against Israel. This is a fact that must not be denied.
- I wish I could say that it stopped with the United Nations. But it didn't. Most European countries, and elements in our own State Department, including the Secretary of State, were stampeded by a campaign of propaganda and disinformation aimed at portraying the Israelis as massive brutalizers. That campaign contributed substantially to the heavy pressure that was then placed on Israel - pressure that directly led to Yasser Arafat's liberation in the deal that was struck over the last weekend. I believe the salient truth of this analysis cannot be denied.
- Palestinian claims that Jenin represented a "victory" for their side are actually correct, but not because of the battle itself. Rather, the way in which the battle was abused for propaganda purposes to score a major political and diplomatic victory in the resuscitation of Yasser Arafat, despite his continued use of terrorism as a negotiating tactic, indeed has scored a Palestinian victory in Jenin. In that sense, it would seem to me, the time-honored Palestinian tactic of "big lie" propaganda has succeeded very well.
- We should consider the same question about this terrorism of the truth that we do with terrorism in general. The success of such a campaign of disinformation tragically raises two deeply serious questions we must now confront: will we not continue to face the same tactics practiced over and over again - and realizing this, will we act, will we stop denying that we are being duped and manipulated by big lies and wishful thinking? The gullible, feckless, fatuous response that comes from our own U.S. State Department, from Europeans and from others, leaves American policy based on the loudest yelping accusations instead of facts. That's what has happened in the course of the last fortnight, and I think this fact will have momentous results for the entire region.
- The Palestinian propaganda machine is banking on the Goebel's approach, the Communist approach - telling a big lie loud and often enough to make it practically true. It often works. But that approach won't work with fair-minded Americans. We prefer to look at the hard facts, and to make our judgments in a fair way on the basis of those facts. American friends of Israel won't be stampeded by emotional propaganda campaigns that turn out to have been based upon a willingness to play games with the truth in order to achieve unjust political purposes. Let us insist that the Bush Administration learn what we have come to know - that facing facts, resisting denial - these are the pressing requirements before us if Israel is to be secure.
- - Alan Keyes