A number of my friends’ children have just experienced their first ‘Israel Apartheid’ week on campus (more on this below) and this has raised the question of how best to respond. The response should be the same as if a man who has never met your grandmother tells you that she is an Alien bounty hunter from the Planet Zog and demands to know if you are therefore prepared to help him kill her. You should expose the person who says that as the liar and insane psychopath that they are.
The Nazi propaganda chief Goebbels said: if you repeat a lie often enough people will believe it and the bigger the lie the more they will believe it. The Nazis’ used this observation to devastating effect. Their lie about the Jews being ‘dangerous subhuman specimens’ was propagated over a relatively short period of time (6 years) but was sufficient to enable otherwise cultured, civilised, rational people to gleefully participate in the mass murder of 6 million Jews, including one and a half million children slaughtered like the animals the Nazis said they were. The long-term objective of the ‘Israel is an apartheid state’ lie is similarly nothing less than the destruction of the Jewish state and its 6 million Jewish inhabitants. Just look at the people who are behind the lie.
Any rational person who has ever spent any time in Israel knows, of course, that the Apartheid lie is every bit as ludicrous and offensive as the Nazi lie. To enter into a discussion defending against the Apartheid lie only gives undeserved credibility to the liars. Nevertheless there is a wealth of unimpeachable, easily accessible material that exposes every single facet of the Israel Apartheid lie (see, e.g. here, here, here, here and here). But just as the only rational way of dealing with the Nazi lie should have been to expose the Nazis, the only rational (and honourable) way to deal with the Apartheid lie is to expose those who promote the lie. I am not talking about the thousands of naive, easily influenced (and sometimes well-meaning) university students who have fallen for the lie (just as hundreds of thousands of well-meaning Germans fell for the Nazi lie). I am talking about those who started the lie and those who actively promote it.
For the historical record the Israel apartheid lie was actually invented by the KGB in communist Russia as part of the Cold War – after the total defeat of the Arab armies with their Soviet equipment in 1967. The KGB produced all the propaganda material in the late 1960s and 1970s that was then used by radical leftists throughout the Western world. Since the fall of the Soviet Union the apartheid lie has been driven by a hard core of anti-Semites, leftist revolutionaries and Islamists – the latter of whom come from Arab countries which practice real apartheid (those same Arab countries provide much of the funding now for the propaganda which is still based on the Soviet material). The liars’ agenda is the destruction of the State of Israel. Despite belonging to organisations with names like the ‘Palestine Solidarity Campaign’ or ‘Students for Justice in Palestine they have no interest in the welfare of the Palestinians; this is proven by their total lack of concern for the genuinely appalling plight of Palestinians in Syria (where they are being starved and murdered) and Lebanon (where for over 65 years they have been denied rights of citizenship and are banned from most professions). Read here about the kind of Western student organisations which promote Israel Apartheid week.