As Long as the Enemy Propaganda Continues–so Will I

Yes, like you, I have many other interests (films, novels, opera), and the most interesting books to review, beginning with Abigail L. Rosenthal’s utterly charming Confessions of a Young Philosopher.

But as long as the enemy propaganda continues–so will I.

I have more than one thing on my mind today.

First: On August 2, 2025, Sari Bashi published an op-ed piece in the New York Anti-Zionist Times titled “On the Right of Return.” Aiming for maximum sympathy, she writes about her aged, “Palestinian” mother-in-law who, in 1948, was “expelled” by the Israeli military and has, ever since, remained stateless and in exile. She fails to note the reason why, namely, that not one of the 19 Arab Muslim countries allowed her to become a citizen.

Bashi also refers to a “historic Palestine.” If you read Doron Spielman’s extraordinary book, When the Stones Speak: The Remarkable Discovery of the City of David and What Israel’s Enemies Don’t Want You To Know, you will soon understand that there never was an “historic Palestine,’ but there was a 3000+ year-old Jewish history in Jerusalem. Bashi is clear: She wants the “right of return” for every single 1948 refugee and for their many generations of descendants. She envisions that this will eliminate the “ethnonational” and “genocidal” state of Israel in which Jewish demographics now “dominate” Palestinians. Enforcing this right of return will ensure that the state will become a “rights-respecting democracy that protects the equality, freedom, and security of all residents.”

Just as exists in Egypt, Iraq, Yemen, Syria, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia–right?

I suggest that Bashi (and everyone else) read Joan Peters’s excellent and of course controversial 1984 book, From Time Immemorial: The Origins of the Arab-Jewish Conflict Over Palestine. She would then understand that anywhere from 700,000 to one million Jews were expelled from Arab Muslim countries–if they had not already been jailed or massacred. If they had been wealthy, their property, businesses, factories, and homes would have been confiscated. The great scholar Bat Ye-or was thrown out of Egypt with $10.00 in her pocket as was the late great Lucette Lagnado’s father–The Man in the White Sharkskin Suit: My Family’s Exodus from Old Cairo to the New World.

For years, Dr. Heskel Haddad, whom I knew, talked and wrote about his forced flight and exile from Iraq, aka Babylon. He published two books: Flight From Babylon and Born in Baghdad.

Dr. Haddad could never launch a movement for a “right of return” or for reparations for Mizrachi Jews. Why would Jews wish to return to the culture and the country where they had been persecuted by Muslims whose interpretation of Islam required them to exploit, jail, kill, massacre, and exile their Jewish citizens?

Sari Bashi: Why do you think that your so-called “Palestinians” would behave any differently now? Who are their democratic, rights-respecting leaders now? Do they exist among Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, or among the Palestinian Authority?

But there is something else I highly recommend, namely, please watch Pierre Rehov’s film The Silent Exodus. In it, you will meet equally sympathetic Mizrachi Jews, your mother-in-law’s age and older, whose lives were brutally upended by Islamist hatred.

Second: The false allegations of genocide and famine in Gaza are being endlessly repeated; doctored photos of “starving” Gazan children continue to make their carefully curated rounds–but as Melanie Phillips and Eve Barlow have both recently pointed out, the two horrifying photos of Nazi concentration camp-like survivors, namely, the photos and videos of two skeletal Israeli hostages, released by Hamas, are confined only to some conservative print and television media. They have not, as yet, appeared on the front pages of the Times of London, The Guardian, The Washington Post, or The New York Times.

Why did Hamas release them just in time for Tisha B’Av? To add to Jewish mourning? Yes–and No. I think these photos are meant to mock Israel, by pointing out, just as Hitler did when, in May of 1939, he sent 900 Jews on a luxury liner from Hamburg to Cuba, the United States, or Canada. No one wanted them. The ship, the MS St. Louis, was forced to return to Hamburg, where the majority of the Jews on board were killed in concentration camps.

Robert Krakow made an important film about this titled Complicit. I was privileged to lead a discussion afterwards with two of those who survived. In 2015, I published a piece titled: Complicit: FDR’s Refusal to Save the Jews on the MS St. Louis. You may read it here: https://www.israelnationalnews.com/news/345392

Third: I have now concluded that the current and overriding problem is not envy of Jews or the world’s need for a scapegoat. The solution is not more education–although I’d never oppose telling the truth. Let’s face it: We’ve had at least sixty years of Holocaust education and it has made no difference. In fact, it’s now being used to invert the truth by positioning the Jews as “Nazis” and the Palestinian Muslims as “Jews.”

The problem is that of brainwashing on a scale never before seen. I urge psychologists and other experts in this area to share what they know about de-programming. Of course, the relatively successful de-programming of Germany required the Allied military triumph, military occupation, trials, holding perpetrators accountable, and reparations paid. In terms of Japan, it required two horrendous nuclear attacks.

Just sayin.’