Within hours of the barbaric slaughter in southern Israel by members of Hamas and ostensible ordinary Gazan Arab camp-followers, a huge public relations machine revved up to lionize the slaughterers, rapists and kidnappers, and blood libel the victims.

And the depressing fact is that this has been in the making for two decades and more.

The brilliant Palestinian plan to capture the pliable minds of American college students was laid out in front of me 25 years ago, during a very sinister business meeting in Israel.

It was around the time of the Oslo Accords. I had been hired by the Ford Foundation to create a marketing institute for their grantees in the country. Ford was funding the operations of both Jewish and Arab organizations within the Israeli green line, in an effort to help build a vibrant liberal civil society.

Ah, yes. Oslo. 1993, where Bill Clinton and Yitzak Rabin honestly thought they could trust the odious Egyptian fraud Yassar Arafat. It would be only 7 years later that West Bank Arabs aka “Palestinians” would launch the Second Intifada with the same claims and goals of the eradication of the state of Israel.

The United Nations and its Arab clients, joined by other anti-Western countries, have always treated Israel as the World’s Jew. The Holocaust and WWII had rubbed the noses of complacent westerners that merely believing a set of liberal values of individual liberty, inherent rights and a free society would be enough to sweep all the world’s ignorant to join in.

They … WE … were profoundly unserious and, thus, unprepared for Nazisim 2.0.

when we interviewed the Arab organizations, the word “peace” never passed their lips. They spoke of independence, dignity, self-rule, a state. One person even told me she would never use the word “du-kiyum” (co-existence). “There is no such thing as co-existence,” she stressed. “We are just the tenants living on the property that the Jews now own. That’s not a balanced co-existence.”

I tried to explain to my fellow Jewish liberals that we — the Jews and the Arabs — were having two very separate conversations. We were talking “peace.” They were talking “independence.” But as the weeks of interviews progressed, I found the Arab organizations were talking about a whole lot more. (snip)

Ameer Makhoul emerged from his office, took a look at me and said, “So this is the Gary Wexler who has been asking all the questions.” And then he ticked off every question I had asked along with the name of each person I had posed the question to. (snip)

I knew this guy was trouble.

“And now, Gary Wexler,” he sat down, “let me give you more direct answers.” He looked me straight in the eye. “Just like you were a Zionist campus activist, we will create, over the next years, Palestinian campus activists in America and all over the world. Bigger and better than any Zionist activists. Just like you spent your summers on the kibbutz, we will bring college students to spend their summers in refugee camps and work with our people. Just like you have been part of creating global pro-Israel organizations, we will create global pro-Palestinian organizations. Just like you today help create PR campaigns and events for Israel, so will we, but we will get more coverage than you ever have.”

He stood again this time, right over me. “You wonder how we will make this happen, how we will pay for this? Not with the money from your liberal Jewish organizations who are now funding us. But from the European Union, Arab and Muslim governments, wealthy Arab people and their organizations. Eventually, we will not take another dollar from the Jews.”

Ameer Makhoul was later arrested as a Syrian spy and Wexler went on with his work. But he started to connect the dots

As the years went on, I began to see what Ameer Makhoul had laid out to me taking shape. The PR coverage was first: The Muhammad al-Durrah incident in Gaza, when a 12-year-old boy was shot to death on the second day of the Second Intifada, capturing global headlines. The Mavi Marmara, the Turkish Flotilla to Gaza that the Israelis stormed, killing several Palestinian activists, grabbing global headlines. I knew the Mavi Marmara was manufactured for the exposure it would gain.

Then the campuses: The creation of Apartheid Week worldwide. The growth of BDS. The student volunteers who began by the thousands to work in the Palestinian territories and its refugee camps. The shocking creation of anti-Zionist Jewish student groups.

As we’ve witnessed over the last decade, the Left’s march through American and European institutions has turned Western values on their head. e.g. The Climate Crisis zealots … patron saint Greta Thunberg … have leaped right on the Marxist Left’s ruling class v proletariat oppressor v oppressed hierarchy of moral sanction.

Now we have ostensible Western colleges and universities remaining silent or actively being complicit with pro-terrorist students and their behavior which is not just disruptive but borders on the criminal when Jewish students are harassed and assaulted. What have the admins done? Well, for one, they’ve told Jews to go into hiding.

How 1934, eh?

Our enemies have had a real success. They have formed a winning international communication army with trained troops everywhere.

We are witnessing in real time the machinations of this pro-terrorist campaign. They support all the carnage done by Hamas as “resistance” while simultaneously claiming 1) it never happened 2) the murdered babies were fake 3) Israel is behind it with helicopters, do ignore the paragliders.

As the daughter of an advertising executive, I grew up learning about messaging and marketing. The old anti-Semitic tropes — stuff that has popped up among the fringy Jewhaters for years — have grown into quasi-acceptable discourse. Apartheid? Jews as colonialists? Jews as money-grubbing world oppressors? Jews having white privilege?

I’m half expecting some keffiyeh-wearing Harvard student from Beverly Hills talking seriously about Jews using the blood of Christian babies to make matzah.

The Left declared war on the West decades ago. Will we just go along thinking the rabid crocodile in a keffiyeh will take us last? Or will we just not stand for the same old Nazi equine excrement wrapped in Diversity/Equity/Inclusion rags?

It’s an open question I, sadly, have no answer to.

featured image original graphic by Darleen Click