Speech assignment

Visiting speaker exposes anti-Semitic Arab propaganda

By Jonathan Graham
Staff Writer

The police officer sitting in the back row created a slight air of tension as the audience waited for the arrival of the speaker, Dr. Eli Avraham. His lecture, “Anti-Semitism and the Arab Media,” took place on Wednesday, March 25 in Wooten Hall 222 and showed how anti-Semitism has thrived in other parts of the world since its rise during the Holocaust.

“We tend to see the media here in the west as a tool to change the situation, the media goes and describes the situation,” said Avraham, “but in the Arab media its a little bit different.”

Dr. Avraham is the UNT Schusterman Visiting Professor of Israeli Studies and Senior Lecturer in the Department of Communications at the University of Haifa, Israel. This marks his fourth and final lecture here at UNT. He was invited as part of a grant from the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, in which he was required to present a lecture each semester.

The program began with an introduction to modern anti-Semitism. Examples of propaganda from Nazi Germany were shown that demonstrated to what extent Jews were persecuted. After the swift introduction, Avraham moved into the central focus of the lecture: how the Muslim Arab media uses similar propaganda to paint Jewish Israelis as their enemies.

“They use the media as a tool to, in a way, to serve and protect the government,” Avraham said in regard to why the media plays such a big role in the condemnation of Jews, “for the government, the goal is to survive, and to do that they need to use their media.”

One example, a talk-show style program, showed a reporter interviewing a very young girl who had been imprinted with strong anti-Semitic beliefs. When asked why she disliked Jews, she responded, “because they are apes and pigs,” which caused quite a few audience members to shake their heads in disbelief.

Anti-Semitism, a term coined in 1879 by German polemicist Wilhelm Marr, has existed throughout history as a conflict of religious beliefs and land control between seventeenth-century Muslims and Jews in the country of Palestine. After 1948, when Britain terminated its control over the country, anti-Semitism increased as a response to the state of Israel declaring its independence. The feelings were intensified by the Arab-Israeli War of 1948-1949, in which Israeli forces pushed out over 700,000 Arab refugees, and the Six-Day War in June 1967, where they gained control of the well-publicized West Bank, Gaza Strip, and all of Jerusalem.

Among the many stereotypes of Jews that Avraham showed, the most controversial was the “blood libel.” In this myth, Jews are accused of sacrificing Christian children to use their blood to prepare Matzoh for Passover. This was used in many of the examples that were displayed, including one soap-opera style television show in which a teenage boy was dragged into a basement and his throat slit.

The very popular show, according to Avraham, is one of many that demonize the Jews as entertainment for Arab viewers. Another television clip he played showed a long table of Jewish men, all dressed in stereotypical ultra-Orthodox clothing, discussing their plans to dominate everything and how they are using the rest of the world to accomplish that. The show portrayed all of this in the style of a western mafia movie.

Avraham’s lecture, which was very focused on the Israeli view of Arab media, was not without its share of controversy. A question from 21-year-old (don’t have info here yet) student Hisham Masri sparked a heated discussion that almost seemed to rise to the level of argument before it was stopped by Richard Golden, director of the Jewish Studies Program at UNT. The issue was raised by Masri after Avraham made a statement about the responsibility of Arabs to take care of Israeli refugees.

“A refugee is moved by force, they're not moved by choice,” said Masri during the discussion, “the Palestinians were evicted from their land and they wish to return, so I don't understand why you would mention that it should be the responsibility of the Arab world to take them in when it was clearly the Israeli world that pushed them out.”

After the lecture had finished, Masri had other concerns about Avraham’s presentation, mainly about the examples that he used.

“He's saying they're popular shows, and usually there are special series’ which show for 30 days and then they end, for like the entire year,” he said in relation to one of the television clips Avraham showed, “and I watch all those shows every year, its like a family thing. And that show is one of the ones that's shown for 30 days and then they never brought it back.”

Despite any confusion over who said what and where the information came from, one thing was made pretty clear: anti-Semitism is still very strong in the the Arab world, and it will take a lot of work to ease the tensions created by it.

"Its been 60 years, everything that's happened has happened, let's move on,” said Dr. Avraham, “let's forget that and try to get some kind of a resolution.”