A poster doing the rounds on America’s vaunted Princeton campus shows a Hamas fighter-like figure with his head and face wrapped in a keffiyeh. His hand holds aloft a slingshot in a revolutionary pose, with the red and green of a giant watermelon looming in the backdrop.
‘Princeton Gaza solidarity encampment’, it says.
With a few deft flourishes of the digital paintbrush, the artist and his handlers have delivered a masterstroke in Left-Islamist propaganda.
- Replacing Hamas’s rocket launchers, machine guns, swords, knives, machetes and other weapons — including mass rape — with a harmless slingshot is meant to airbrush the October 7 massacre.
- The green of the melon is downplayed and the red is cleverly played up for the young western audience, which has been flirting with Marxist and Maoist anarchy but is perhaps not yet ready for a full show of radical Islam.
- The face-covering keffiyeh, the chief accomplice to the anonymity of terror groups like the Hamas and Hezbollah, is being normalised in the West with masterful deceptiveness.
- The raised arm, long a symbol of people’s power and peaceful resistance, is another subtle yet powerful distraction from the depravity of Hamas. Billions of dollars get spent worldwide to advertise Islamic terror as ‘resistance’, whether it is in Tel Aviv, Paris, or New Delhi.
The protests on American campuses are a perfect example of how the Commie-Islamist collective operates, how it subverts the truth and throws a pall of denial over even mass murder, managing to draw both liberal sympathy and intellectual legitimacy while at it.
As global allies, Islam and Communism complement each other, although the two can never coexist in the same physical space. Communism gives Islam the sophistry of propaganda, intellectual defence, sanitising of savagery, and subtle tug of sympathy which it completely lacks. Islam gives unelectable Communism the street power.
Whether it is by using a photo of dead three-year-old Alan Kurdi to make a strong case for immigration to Europe from Syria and Iraq during the peak of ISIS years, or amplifying the image of a head-to-toe burqa-clad Karnataka girl as a rebellious ‘tigress’, the Left has built romanticised pedestals for Islam without caring for the disastrous consequences of violent demographic takeover or bigoted cultural subversion.
Communists have evolved propaganda and messaging to such a fine art that it can make the worst crimes look cool and just. In the OTT series Money Heist, for instance, the main protagonist is a Professor, often the central figure of Leftist fantasy given its ideological grip over campuses. The bearded indoctrinator-in-chief is obsessed about robbing a bank after the police shot his father while he was robbing a bank!
The entire system trying to stop the bank robbery is the villain. The robbers, of course, get laid and are the heroes.
Back home, Rang De Basanti was a wonderfully nuanced piece of Leftist propaganda. Atul Kulkarni’s character is the regressive and uncouth Hindutva activist, supposed to be the representative of the entire Right/non-Left in India.
He finally redeems himself by jettisoning his cultural values and ‘surrendering’ to his westernised, liberal mates.
A question arises: what will India do if it ever faces the kind of blinding propaganda war that has been unleashed against Israel?
Is Bharat ready?
No, it is not.
It may excel in funny memes, parodies, and blunt-force truth bombs, but in the department of eliciting global sympathy, even if through brazen lies wrapped in the most sophisticated weave of words and images, India will be blown out of the water.
India needs to learn from the Commie-jihadi collective. It is sometimes good to learn from the bad.
Abhijit Majumder is a senior journalist. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.
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