In the previous post, I spoke about how Paulo Freire uses his made-up problem of banking education as a deceitful Motte and Bailey argument in favor of turning education into ideological indoctrination. In the following video, we see a similar use of Freire’s tactic on behalf of Palestinian propaganda.
The basic story we have here is about a little Palestinian girl named Samidah who
goes to school and is faced with the fact that the class map only shows Israel so she does not know which country to mark as her country of origin.
When Samidah tries to explain the problem to her teacher, she simply responds
that Samidah must be from Israel. When she goes home, her father explains to
her that they really are from this wonderful place called Palestine and that
one day they will return. Samidah imagines herself in this special place
called Palestine, buying food in a marketplace, and seeing the sunset over the
Golden Dome. The next day, the girl goes back to class with additional
Palestinian gear than just the necklace she wore at the beginning and unfurls a
map that has Palestine instead of Israel.
What struck me about this video was that I have been in many
American public school classrooms, and I have never seen them use a map that
did not differentiate the West Bank and Gaza from Israel. Furthermore, I have a
hard time imagining a teacher so ignorant as to not know the difference between
Israel and Palestine. This is not Azerbaijan versus Armenia.
Why would the filmmakers make a film about a made-up
problem? The purpose is to distract us from the solution. Contrary to appearances, the film's solution is not that we should acknowledge Palestinian identity and
even that they have a legitimate claim to part of the land. When the girl goes
back to class, she does not bring a map that shows the West Bank and Gaza and
explain how these places are not part of Israel. Instead, her map eliminates
Israel and replaces it with Palestine.
This raises the question of what the girl and by extension
the filmmakers imagine is supposed to happen to all the Jews in Israel when it
is replaced by Palestine. It is interesting to note that the imagination
montage does not include any obviously Jewish people. One gets the impression that
they have mysteriously disappeared. As with most Palestinian activism, its real
purpose is not that Palestinians should be able to live in peace, dignity, or
even independently but that the State of Israel should be eliminated. Ever
since October 7th, there should be no illusions that this means
anything but mass murder.
What if this movie was about a cute blond-haired German girl who imagined
living happily on her Lebensraum farm in Ukraine with other Germans, whose
ancestors had been “unjustly” forced to flee their homes after World War II? It would be obvious that this was Nazi propaganda and that the film, even though
it never says so explicitly, is calling for millions of Ukrainians to be
murdered. Ukrainians presently living on the land are not going to simply leave
to rectify a historical injustice and will have to be killed. As such, there is
no moral difference between such a film and one that explicitly glorifies mass
murder beyond the fact that the latter has the virtue of being
intellectually honest.
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