Music to Their Ears

"Extraordinary how potent cheap music is," remarks Amanda to Elyot in Noel Coward's Private Lives. By the same token, it's extraordinary how potent fatuous propaganda is. Phyllis Chessler connects two of the most potent fabrications of recent times--the Palestinian narrative and Islamophobia:

For more than 40 years, the Soviet, Arab, and Saudi Lobbies, eventually joined by the Iranian Lobby, have funded the demonization of Israel and the popularization of Palestine. The condemnation of Israel for crimes it has never committed (“ethnic cleansing,” “genocide,” “apartheid”) and the call for a Palestinian one-state solution is echoed, similarly, in films, books, poems, academic papers and lectures; we see and hear this on television, at conferences, at campus demonstrations, in the halls of the United Nations, the European Union, in Parliaments, and, of course, in the Arab and Islamic worlds.

By now, the “Palestinian narrative” has effectively rendered Jews unsafe and unwelcome in Europe. Jews who look “Jewish” or “religious” are not safe on the streets of certain European countries such as England, France, Holland, Belgium, and Scandinavia. European pagan, Christian, and Nazi-era Judeophobia has found a new outlet in the obsessive demonization of Israel, the only Jewish state. This is also the way Europeans hope to appease Muslim immigrants who live in Europe but in parallel universes, who are hostile to the Western enterprise, and who demand the right to be brutally intolerant as a Western civil right.

This same false Palestinian narrative has morphed into a belief that all Muslims—who are, themselves, the largest practitioners of religious apartheid in the world, and who persecute all non-Muslims—are, as Muslims, being persecuted in the West. This may be because Islam is not (yet) dominant in the West.

In my opinion, the success of the “Palestinian” narrative is what has led to the unquestioning acceptance of the false concept of “Islamophobia.”

The question is: what in our makeup makes us so susceptible to such fabrications? I think Coward's "cheap music" line may be instructive here. For, like the melody of a "cheap" piece of music--the ear candy--the propaganda is simple and direct, plays on the emotions, and insinuates itself easily into the brain, where it tends to play on endless loop. And once it's in there, it and the emotions it elicits can be triggered with just a few notes--or a few key words ("occupation," "apartheid," "racism," etc.).

Of course, the propaganda is far likelier to stick if your brain has been pre-conditioned/compromised by inherent Zionhass and leftist mush about victimhood.