The Pyramid of Lies—Revisited

It grows larger as the months pass

We’re continually told that strife associated with Gaza represents a challenge for Western diplomats who try and repeatedly fail to resolve it. Those diplomats claim that it’s a problem of "complexity." In reality, the problem isn’t really as complex as they claim, unless you embrace a “Pyramid of Lies.” I’ve discussed the Pyramid in an earlier post as well as in this book, but given the lies that now spew from pro-Hamas activists who feed their mendacious accusations and counter-factual history to college protesters (their “useful idiots), it’s worth revisiting and expanding that discussion.

Lies of Projection

The construction of the Pyramid of Lies has evolved over many years. At its base is a collection of lies that appear to emanate from the psychological projections of Islamists and their leftist allies. Both entities want to see Israel eradicated, so they cry "genocide" when calls for actual genocide come directly from the Hamas charter. The Marxists cry "colonialism," as if the indigenous people of the region—the Jews—hadn't occupied the place for millennia. The Islamists who claim "apartheid" seem to forget that most Arab Muslim countries are Judenrein by design.

And that's just the foundation of the pyramid of lies. Still within the base of the Pyramid, both entities use words like “occupation” and “refugees” that suggest a once-Palestinian state existed and its people were forced to flee and are now refugees. Such a Palestinian state never existed. In fact, the Muslim Arabs who live in the region that is now the State of Israel were never called “Palestinians” until the 1960s when the PLO created the name as yet another propaganda wedge to give legitimacy to their goal of making the region Judenrein. This meme summarizes the history of the “Palestinians” rather nicely:

It’s worth noting that all of this is about Israel’s presence in the Arab Muslim crescent. A tiny country of less than 8,630 square miles with only 9 million people (of whom 2 million are Arabs) resides within a region dominated by 22 Arab Muslim countries of about 5,000,000 square miles with over 600 million people. And the pro-Islamist apologists have the unmitigated gall to hurl accusations of “apartheid” against Israel? It’s almost comical in its blatant dishonesty.

Historical Lies

Additional historical lies are encountered one level above the base. For example, the Islamists and Marxists would have us believe that the Arab land was stolen and that the U.N . awarded the stolen land to israel in 1948. That is nonsense. Jews have lived in the region for thousands of years. In the 1800s, they began to develop a barren wasteland that was called Judea at the time. They purchased land from the Arab Muslims in the region (who thought they were selling worthless land to stupid purchasers) and began to transform arid desert and swamps into land the supported farming and livestock. No Western nation helped the Jews during that time and into the second decade of the 1900s. In fact, some (e.g., the U.K. and the U.S.) actively put roadblocks in their way. But the Jews persisted and by the 1930s, had created the start of a modern country that would later benefit both Jews and the Arabs who lived within its borders.

The claim that Arab Muslims are the indigenous people in the region is also nonsense. Jews maintained a presence in the region for well over 3,000 years. In the 16th century, it is estimated that 15,000 Jews lived in Safad, a city in what is now northern Israel. Large populations of Jews lived in other towns in the Galilee when the the Ottoman empire ruled the region. By the late 1800s, Jews were the largest demographic in Jerusalem. The land of Israel is mentioned many times in the Quran, providing clear evidence that it (and the Jews that lived there) existed long before the Muslim religion/ideology was formed in the 7th century.

Moving up one more layer in the pyramid we encounter still more historical lies. The pro-Palestinian movement makes the claim that Israel expelled Arab Muslims (remember, there were no Palestinians at that time, nor was there a Palestinian state) just before the State of Israel was officially sanctioned by the U.N mandate in 1948. That’s yet another lie, but it’s necessary for there to be “Palestinian Refugees.” @Shoshana51728 provides an excellent summary of events for those who want more information, where she writes:

The Secretary of the Arab League Office in London, Edward Atiyah, wrote in his book, The Arabs: "This wholesale exodus [out of Israel] was due partly to the belief of the Arabs, encouraged by the boastings of an unrealistic Arabic press and the irresponsible utterances of some of the Arab leaders that it could be only a matter of weeks before the Jews were defeated by the armies of the Arab States and the Palestinian Arabs enabled to re-enter and retake possession of their country."

and this:

On April 3, 1949, the Near East Broadcasting Station (Cyprus) said: "It must not be forgotten that the Arab Higher Committee encouraged the refugees' flight from their homes in Jaffa, Haifa and Jerusalem."

"The Arab States encouraged the Palestine Arabs to leave their homes temporarily in order to be out of the way of the Arab invasion armies," according to the Jordanian newspaper Filastin (February 19, 1949). One refugee quoted in the Jordan newspaper, Ad Difaa (September 6, 1954), said: "The Arab government told us: Get out so that we can get in. So we got out, but they did not get in."

Israel made every effort at a peaceful settlement with the Arabs in 1948 but Arab leaders were certain of victory and therefore rejected every overture. The Arabs lost a war that they initiated (does this sound at all familiar?) in what is one of many humiliations suffered at the hands of the tiny Jewish state. They created a fantasy version of events, called the Nokba (catastrophe), to rewrite history.

Contemporary Lies

As we move toward the top of the Pyramid, we encounter contemporary lies. There are lies associated with the “occupation of Gaza,” the re-occurring suggestion that a “two-state solution” is a viable approach to peace in the region, and, of course, the dozens of lies connected to the Hamas-Israel war.

Of the many, many lies that can be connected to the Hamas-Israel war, three stand out. The first lie, readily adopted by the current crop of pro-Hamas activists and their followers among leftist college students at dozens of campus protests, is that the Hamas atrocities conducted on Octover 7, 2023 didn’t happen or were Israeli disinformation. According to this lie, the murder of entire families, the rape, murder and mutilation of young Israeli women, the infaniticide, and kidnapping of over 200 people—acts recorded by Hamas members and their Palestinian sympathizers on video and documents by the testimony of hundreds of witnesses—didn’t happen. Or in another telling, were justified by “the occupation.” The moral depravity of this lie is breathtaking, but not really surprising.

The second lie tells us that the “peaceful Palestinian people” hate Hamas and would like nothing better than to live in peace with Israel. This is fantasy thinking and presents a problem when reality intervenes. A recent Palestinian Center for Policy and Research polling (Poll No. 91), dated 20 March 2024, has been nicely summarized by Robert Satloff:

Hmmm.  So much for the suffering Palestinians wanting nothing other than peace and really, really hating Hamas. It worth noting that it was the same Palestinian civilians who danced in the streets (literally) and handed out candy after the 9/11 attacks and did the same and worse after the 10/7/2023 atrocities committed by their elected leadership, Hamas.

The third lie, often repeated and amplified by sympathetic media and many Western politicians, is the 30-plus thousand Palestinian women and children have been wantonly killed in the fighting. In an earlier post on this subject, I wrote:

Norman Fenton has done a detailed analysis of the Hamas' casualty propaganda (read the whole thing) and states: 

ONE of the most bizarre aspects of the Israel-Hamas conflict has been the way the entire mainstream media accepts without question the casualty figures from Hamas (who, of course, run the ‘Palestinian Health Ministry’ in Gaza that provide the figures). This is despite the fact that it is known that Hamas massively fabricated casualty figures in previous conflicts (for example, by classifying most Hamas fighters killed as civilians and including all naturally occurring deaths during the period of the conflict).

The only justification I have seen for using figures provided by a proscribed terrorist organisation is that UNRWA (the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East) have ‘largely corroborated’ them. Yet, as has now been proven conclusively, not only is UNRWA in Gaza essentially controlled by Hamas, but many of its members are Hamas operatives, including several who took part in the October 7 massacre.

A few days ago Hamas assured the world that exactly 30,960 Gazans have been killed since October 7. The mainstream media duly accepted this figure. Yet the same Hamas people who know this precise number of Gazans killed say they have no idea how many of the 134 Israeli hostages whom they have been holding in extremely secure locations for over five months are dead or alive. And not a single mainstream media voice questions the inconsistency in this knowledge about deaths in Gaza.

It is undoubtedly true that warfare results in civilian causalties, but a detailed statistical analysis indicates that Hamas's claims are faked. That hasn't stopped the media and Joe Biden (among many others) from using them as a cudgel to suggest that Israel must stop its effort to destroy the Hamas death cult. 

At the Top of the Pyramid

We now reach the very top of the Pyramid, the place where a cabal of Islamist and Leftist groups promulgate their lies across mainstream and social media, at campus protests worldwide, inside governmental agencies like the U.S. State Department, and within the leadership of both Western states and quasi-governmental entities (e.g., the U.N. and the E.U.). It’s despicable and also quite effective.

Until Western leaders have the courage to call out the lies, nothing will change. That's not “complexity,” it's cowardice.