September 11, October 7 and the purpose of all propaganda
The purpose of propaganda is to make some people think that other people aren’t human.
Aldous Huxley, the British philosopher, said that. So true were his words, I started my book The Hidden Hand with them.
Propaganda comes with differing names: agitprop, disinformation, fake news, falsehoods, frauds, lies. Whatever it is called, whatever the circumstances, that is always its intent - to denude other humans of their humanity.
Showing indifference towards the suffering of others isn’t propaganda, per se, but it always the ultimate objective of propaganda. Cruelty is the point.
Examples of that abound, on all sides. Just on Friday, there was New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez laughing during the reading of names of the victims of 9/11. After the Twin Towers fell, President Donald Trump bragged that he now owned the tallest building in downtown Manhattan.
Propaganda facilitates cruelty and hate. Two dates in history testify to the efficacy of propaganda in the modern age: September 11, 2001, when Islamic terrorists murdered 3,000 innocent people - and October 7, 2023, when Islamic terrorists murdered 1,200 innocent people.
There have been (too many) other days like those. November 13, 2015 in Paris, when 130 were killed. July 7, 2005 in London, when 52 were killed. Nairobi in 1998, Madrid in 2004, Paris again in 2015. Hundreds, all killed by Islamic terrorists.
But September 11 and October 7 are important not just for the lethality of the terrorism, or the number of people who tragically lost their lives. They are significant because propaganda has sought to invert the reality of those dates: turning the victims into the perpetrators, and the perpetrators into victims.
October 7 saw 1,200 men, women, children and babies slaughtered in Israel by Hamas - along with 250 kidnapped, 200 women and girls sexually violated, and thousands more grievously wounded. While those crimes were still underway in tiny towns along Israel’s border, a global propaganda campaign commenced.
In Arabic, the campaign depicted Israelis as the ones who killed their own people, so as to justify the war that would commence weeks later. It claimed that Jews profited from the atrocities, and that Israelis had desecrated holy Muslim religious sites. Later, in English, that Jews were evil. That Jews were racist and too powerful, and that the Holocaust was a hoax.
The propaganda campaign mostly worked. By the end of October 2023, there had been thousands of protests against Jews and the Jewish state around the world - including one at a major intersection in Mississauga, Ont., on the very next day, celebrating the massacre. And, of course, countries like Canada have now recognized Hamas-ruled Palestine - and repeatedly punished Israel.
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