No, don't applaud
Prime minister of Zionist Israel, Benjamin Netanyahu, visited and addressed Congress yesterday 07/24/2024 in a speech that I can only describe as: Engineered Subliminal Indoctrination.
The moment that inspired the title of this article, is the moment when Netanyahu was talking ironically about malicious lies about Jewish people and Jewish state, and listeners have mistakenly briefly started to applaud before abruptly stopping on command by the war criminal. It gave me the impression that he is here to indoctrinate.
My passion to write about the contents of this speech is to combat Israeli misinformation, speak up for the voiceless Gazans, and to spread awareness about the carefully implanted tactics of that speech to divert attention from the real issue. I’d like to take you, dear reader, into an analysis of the labels used, the structure of the speech, and the uncommunicated goal of it.
To first comment on the nature of the speech; this was a speech that is psychologically woven to put the horse’s blinders for officials and the American people, and I’ll give it credit for being well engineered to hit emotional chords. I will, however, not embrace the lies that it mentioned nor the falsification of Palestinian history nor the misinterpretation of facts and political agendas.
Netanyahu’s tactics do not affect well informed individuals because the colonizer’s bluff can be called out knowing and living the history of Palestine and the Israeli government’s repeated aggression. But if I am to put myself in an uninformed person’s shoes about the 76-year plight of the Palestinians (reference 1), I can imagine how sympathetic uninformed minds might be inclined to feel with Netanyahu’s diabolically presented cause. No insult meant by mentioning the word “uninformed”; I, like many others will always have a side of me that is uninformed about other causes in our world.
In the upcoming paragraphs, I‘d like to present a breakdown of Netanyahu’s speech and I will leave it to you, dear reader, to choose the interpretation that fits the facts.
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Let’s start with the buzzwords, I counted around 13 locations to highlight:
Those buzzwords have the following goals:
With that, the next section examines the speech from a different angle, one looking at the tactic, emotions, linkages instead of being hypnotized by it. I’ll go through that first, then examine the facts more closely in the section following that.
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Reading between the lines
When Netanyahu started his speech with assertions of legitimacy of his country’s war, he made several analogies to paint Israel as the victim, and Hamas as the oppressor. He was careful not mention Palestine, only “Khamas”. Words were being carefully chosen to show that this is not a war between two countries, but rather one victim nation, its allies and partners of democracy in the entire world from one side versus an extremist proxy militia.
He recalled the 7th of October’s events, making a direct linkage to 9/11, went on to describe in a novelistic style, playing on emotions right from the start of the speech. Once again hitting emotional chords mentioning claims of r*ped women and burnt alive babies.
Went on to mention accounts of rescued hostages and their families, the heroism and sacrifice of the “offence” army – my emphasis, not his. I will acknowledge here what a strong move his next move was: to call the name of a dark-skinned Muslim officer in the Israeli army, first name Ashraf. I have strong comments about this coming later in the next sections.
20 minutes in, he switched into criticizing the anti-Israel protests. His criticism employed two tactics: first one being the delegitimization of people’s voice and attributing their activism to political manipulation by a foreign country; the second, the falsified narrative of “Land of Israel” dating back to Prophet’s Abraham’s time (reference 3).
Further into the speech, he prefaced a segment with talking about Anti-semitism and the Holocaust, playing the victim card, and making a plea not to “demonize the Jewish state”. I say playing the victim card here because it is historically impossible to tie Palestine to Nazis, but this is what Netanyahu and other Israeli officials seems to be deeply invested in spreading (reference 4)
He then made a comment about the accusation by the prosecutor of the international criminal court, and called it unacceptable and filled with lies. Ironic to say the least!
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Majority of the speech after that was centered on making Israel’s interests and American interests one and the same, using several words, statements, pontifications to affirm the need to be supported “to defend ourselves”.
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Examining the facts
On the accounts of assaults on October the 7th, the claims of r*pe? and burnt alive babies were never proven true by any news agency or human right’s organization. Zaka (reference 5), and more specifically Yossi Landau, was the only institution making those claims, and has been confronted several times by interviewers trying to get to the bottom of the claims only to have Yossi Landau abruptly leave the interviews. A 76-year struggle couldn’t be mutilated further with such narrative, and playing on emptions in a novelistic fashion to divert attention from the ongoing massacres in Gaza.
I called the speech “engineered” as the examples and buzzwords used were intentional to polish Israel’s public image in front of America and the world. Showing qualities of sacrifice and heroism, talking about diversity of Muslims in the Israeli army and another officer of Ethiopian descend, and mentioning the death of a soldier near a Mosque. My blood boils at this because the Israel I grew up to know was the one that burned the Aqsa Mosque in August 1969 (reference 6) and has involuntarily sterilized Ethiopian women in the 1980’s (reference 7). It is the Israel that used Gaza’s mosques a station for their soldiers to camp, loot, rob, maim, mock and use as a public toilet. No need to examine journalist accounts for that, as the “moral” army members posted their own doing on social media platforms.
The heavy use of labels by Netanyahu was constantly focused on synthesizing a concoction of a truth narrated by Israeli leaders on a broken record. “Khamas” is the enemy, “Khamas” kills Gazans, “Khamas” steals aid. This trend is not new, Naftali and Ehud Barak used this before, and I witnessed it myself when Ehud Barak came to Texas A&M campus in April 2016. It was a non-televised interview on campus inviting him and Hanan Ashrawi under this title: “An Israeli Palestinian Dialogue”. Ehud’s dialogue employed similar tactics to legitimize Israel and paint them as the innocent party when in fact 1948 was a brutal massacre for Palestinians.
It was the Israeli settlers, by documented video accounts, who looted, sabotaged, interrupted aid trucks from going in on Jordanian and Egyptian borders in the previous months.
The flyers and phone calls was another laughable joke. Israel claims morality by the fact that they distribute flyers telling people to evacuate before they bomb the area. It is true that they do that, like a scene from the movie “Leave the world behind”, but the laughable part is that there is no where to evacuate to. This immoral army committed what is now known as “Rafah tent massacre” when real beheaded babies, captured on video, were the casualty of that bombing along with others. Netanyahu still has the guts to lie to Congress and the World straight to its face bringing up a baseless statistic ratio to show how merciful their kill count should be portrayed. What a rosy picture it paints that Rafah’s blood bath is not as bad as other areas affected in this war, therefore, Good job!
One more: the claim about “Khamas” official Fathi Hammad post about human shields. This was a videotaped public speech in 2008 that mentioned sacrifices of all Gazans in the face of Israeli aggression. For non-Arabic speakers, it would seem he is advertising use of human shields, but the reality is that it was a passionate speech about every Gazan, young or old, male or female, standing up against Israeli oppression with their bodies “LIKE HUMAN SHIELDS”; not “Khamas” using them!
How is this relevant in 2024? This is a perfect use of the Texas sharpshooter fallacy employed in this part of the speech to affirm a bias over and over and over.
We have later seen with our eyes on television a few months ago an injured Palestinian man strapped to the front of an Israeli tank as a real human shield. This goes to show the real oppressor, the real criminal, the real baby killer in this war.
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In conclusion
This war criminal uttered lies and came to beg for more tax money to buy arms. He played on emotions and mutilated facts. This war criminal should not have been invited to speak. The uncommunicated goal is to polish Israel and to demean anyone daring to speak against it planting the unfortunate notion of panic and fear that the US could be under attack. I highly encourage those who seek to be educated on this conflict and the recent event in this war to watch an interview on YouTube with respected historian Ilan Pappe (reference 8).
References and Readings: