The time is now
I was disturbed and frustrated upon reading your report concerning the official adoption of BDS by none other than the Harvard Crimson, the student newspaper of the prestigious Harvard University (“‘Harvard Crimson’ backs BDS, a sign of anti-Israel sentiment on campus,” May 1).
Any politician or indeed businessman will have long ago come to the realistic conclusion that it doesn’t matter what the facts are. What makes the impression is what you say they are. And in business, success depends, not on the quality of the product but on the marketing. It matters not whether you have an amazing item to trade, or a ridiculous useless gadget, if you don’t market it your business will fail. In a nutshell, it is not what it is, but what you say it is.
Nowhere do we see this phenomenon clearer than is reflected in the universities and in the international political and diplomatic world around us. No matter what Israel actually does, that which influences world opinion is what the Arabs are saying that we are doing.
Let us be quite candid about it, the Arabs are far better organized in the sphere of public relations and marketing than is Israel. The message that the Arabs have so successfully inculcated into the popular awareness in most of the countries of the world is quite clear – the Israelis (Jews) are killing Arab children, starving Gazan residents, poisoning their water, storming al-Aqsa, etc. Indeed they are now only a hair’s breadth away from the time-old blood libel, using the blood of Christian children for our Matzot!
Ask any student in the universities of the “enlightened” countries about what goes on in Israel and your hair will stand on end when you hear his answer, replete with Arab propaganda, fed to him relentlessly by the Arab PR network. A lie, if repeated enough times, becomes a fact and a fact repeated enough times becomes a fundamental and basic premise and semantic rubric upon which policies and philosophies are developed.
Thus we have been told that there is a Palestinian national heritage – that Palestinian land is occupied, that there is a West Bank, that al-Aqsa is under attack and, yes, even that there is a third generation of “refugees” in the “refugee camps.”
When will our leaders learn the importance of getting our message across? I believe that the only way this problem may be addressed with the seriousness that it deserves would be to set up a new dedicated ministry of the government, “The Ministry for International Public Relations,” which is totally devoted to getting the Israeli truth across to the policymakers of the world, to the universities and to the ordinary man in the street. And the time to do this is now.
LAURENCE BECKER
Jerusalem