Middle East propaganda war (2)

Arabs answering back

John Laffin

The Chancellor of Jerusalem's Weizmann Institute, Meyer Weisgal, is calling for $10 million to finance an 'Operation Truth,' to open the eyes of the world to the brazen lies of Arab propagandists and their cohorts inside and outside the UN and put the plain facts in Proper perspective."

Weisgal's exasperation is a powerful Compliment to the Arab propagandists and they will exploit it. The experts in Beirut will soon be mailing to politicians, journalists and academics an analysis of the Weisgal plan, from Which they will infer Israeli lack of confidence. Since April 1974 the Arab makers of paper bullets have been getting all the money they need from the Arab oil countries. With this finance has come a reshaping of the propaganda machine, its policy and efficiency. I used to measure its output by weight — a year ago one

Packet weighed flub but now I judge it by

quality. The Arabs say they are disseminating information but since the booklets, pamphlets, Posters and advertisements are intended to mislead and deceive and to swing opinion towards the Arabs and against the Israelis they stamp themselves 'propaganda'. The Arabs have had three spectacular propaganda successes already: they have turned the once friendly Afro-Asian nations against Israel, they have bulldozed the PLO into the UN Assembly and Israel virtually out of UNESCO. Now they are mounting a drive to prove that the oil ountries are not inconsiderate brutes trying to

inflict economic collapse on the rest of the world.

Under the new set-up the propaganda is more centralised, emanating mainly from the Institute for Palestine Studies (high quality, academic stuff), the PLO Research Centre (repetitive, often inflammatory material largely for the Arab world) and the Lebanese Associalion for Information on Palestine (basically tow-key productions aimed at the West). This 'Lebanese' organisation — really Palestinian is the result of the union during 1974 of Americans for Justice in the Middle East, the Arab Women's Information Committee and the Fifth of June Society. The first two produced amateurish propaganda, even resorting to clumsily superimposed photographs purporting to show Israeli soldiers aiming rifles at Priests and schoolchildren. The Fifth of June .ociety, named for the day on which the slx-day war commenced, was run by Soraya Antonius, who now directs LAIP. Highly Intelligent and intellectually ruthless — and so feminist that she will feel patronised by this escription — Miss Antonius is forging LAIP 1,nto a competent propaganda factory. She has nmediate access to all Fedayeen leaders but LAIP material reflects the 'reasonableness' of Arafat's 'good' terrorists rather than the extremism of Habash's 'bad' ones. Western journalists and designers have been recruited to give the work the right tone for various countries. The results are evident in advertisements LAIP recently placed in the ashington Post and New York Times. Each nalf-page insertion is planned around a Photograph showing, for example, a Palestinthree ian surgeon, an earnest university student, Children in Baqa'a refugee camp, Jordan. the photographer is not credited but the photographs bear the brilliance of George Near who works in Beirut for UNRWA's Near East Office, itself penetrated by Arab ProPagandists. The text is first-person, direct, anecdotal, human — according to the principles of sound propaganda. The surgeon, Dr Hasib Bulos, concludes his story—

Naturally, I feel great anger and bitterness about what has happened . . because I am convinced that both communities [Jewish and Arab] could have lived together in peace, and still can. Only Zionism prevented it in the past and that is the only thing standing in its way now.

Let's live happily together — this is the essential propaganda line, though Arafat, the Syrians, Libyans, Iraqis and Algerians constantly stress that peace is possible only with dead Israelis. The finesse of LAIP's personal stories is in the notion of "Look, meet some Palestinians — real people, just like you." Since these Palestinians are eminently likeable the propaganda conforms to the professional dictum — "Incorporate some truth."

The same material is used as black propaganda — that which conceals its source or origin, and the most effective of all. LAIP reprints the advertisements on sheets so that they look like editorial matter, articles written by journalists of the New York Times and Washington Post. Well separated from the text is an invitation to write to LAIP for more information. These paid advertisements posing as normal journalism are circulated in thousands.

In the 1970s the 'open letter' technique might seem to be a dead letter but LAIP shows that when laced with blackmail on sensitive issues the open letter can cut deep. The one addressed to Americans and published in the Washington Post warns Americans about their involvement in the Middle East:

It is not in your interest to alienate millions of Arabs, Muslims and Afro-Asians ... It is not in your interest to continue to spend billions of dollars in perpetuation of the Zionist dreams of empire. It is not in your interest to re-activate the energy crisis.

The basic LAIP publication is a folded sheet called Facts, a universal propaganda ploy. The only real fact is that Facts is mostly opinion, culled from the world's press. The Times, Guardian, International Herald Tribune, Le Monde are heavily quoted. Neatly excised from their context, quotations give the impression that the world's press is uniformly and unequivocally against Israel. I checked some of the original reports and found them fair and balanced. While LAIP exploits the emotions and self-interest of the Western public and politicians, the Institute for Palestine Studies works on the intellectuals, partly through its quarterly Journal of Palestine Studies. Edited by the Arab-American, Dr Hisham Sharabi, the Journal is pseudo-academic, contains up to 230 pages an issue and costs 0.20. It is sponsored by the University of Kuwait, for the propagandandists know that university backing further establishes the idea that the publication is academically non-partisan. The Journal depends for effect overtly on authoritativeness and covertly on the technique of conceding a minor point to win a major one. An air of authority is achieved in academic circles by a diarrhoea of footnotes. An article by Professor Ibrahim Shihata — eleven pages on 'The Territorial Question and the October War' — has no fewer than fifty-three of them. Ipso facto, the work is honest and accurate. The concession approach is shown, for instance, in a 'Report From Israel'. The contributor admits that "the credibility of

Palestinian guarantees for Jews in any democratic state is decreased by Palestinian attacks of the Maalot type." But this admission contains the assumption, presented as fact, the Israel is not at present democratic. In real fact, it is the only of-the-people-by-the-people-forthe-people state in the Middle East; Lebanon is the only Arab country with a semblance of democratic government.

Perhaps the Journal's most interesting — and most deplorable — propaganda is the way it reviews books of Jewish interest or authorship. By a process of shameless distortion it turns them into anti-Semitic or anti-Israel material. For instance, it takes Lenin on the Jewish Question, edited by Lyman Lumer, and produces a review headed "The Jewish Bourgeois Ghetto." Each word of the heading has the strength of an epithet. The reviewer is Charlotte Knott, a student working on a PhD degree in Middle East History at Georgetown University, Washinton DC. You need to work hard to tie Lenin on the Jewish question to the modern Middle East but Miss Knott manages it. Her review begins:

A composite volume of Lenin's writings on the Jewish question has a special and timely relevance as the Palestinian resistance movement becomes a more viable force in the Middle East.

Despite this spurious, specious prose Miss Knott is a certainty for her PhD. Her professor at Georgetown University is none other than Hisham Sharabi, editor of the Journal publishing her review.

Outside the Arab lands the propaganda machine is only just getting into gear. Through Arab League offices, dupe groups of Arab sympathisers and paid propagandists in nonArab countries we can expect a general propaganda assault. The Times advertisement which angered English Jews was only a beginning. Watch for the campaign to prove that the Arab oil states are not really making a lot of money, that much of what they do make they are giving to the poor nations, that oil money invested in Western countries is a new form of philanthropy and that we are getting oil cheap anyway. We in the West have only one safeguard — an intelligent and sceptical press which cannot be bought.

John Laffin is author of Fedayeen: the Arab-Israeli Dilemma and of the forthcoming The Arab Mind to be published by Cassell in March