Why are they lying?

Perhaps, deep down, Israel’s enemies know they are defending the indefensible.

I recently received yet another email from a group called DAWN, a Red-Green Alliance organization masquerading as a pro-democracy NGO. I have no idea how they got my contact information or why on earth they keep me on their mailing list, given that DAWN loathes Israel with every fiber of its fetid little being. Perhaps they simply aren’t all that bright.

Nonetheless, this email was quite a revealing little screed and prompted me to ask a fairly important question.

It dealt mainly with the assassination of Hezbollah fiend Fuad Shukr in Beirut, which rather pleasingly avenged the deaths of over 200 US Marines along with the murders of numerous Israelis. One would think that a pro-democracy NGO might have at least something nice to say about the execution of an avowed enemy of democracy, but DAWN was having none of it.

Instead, DAWN’s minions spun a rather remarkable conspiracy theory in which the execution of Shukr was part of a secret Israeli plot to launch a regional war.

DAWN’s “director of research for Israel-Palestine,” Michael Schaeffer Omer-Man, who judging by his name is the organization’s Useful Jew, pronounced, “Having failed to stop Israel’s slow-motion genocide in Gaza, the US and the rest of the world cannot allow Israel to exploit the killing of a dozen children to launch another war against the entire country of Lebanon. The best way to ensure a regional war does not erupt is for the UN Security Council to pass a binding ceasefire directive in Gaza immediately.”

DAWN’s “advocacy director”—read: officer in charge of antisemitic incitement—Raed Jarrar, went even further, declaring from on high: “The Israeli attack on Beirut is exactly what we’ve warned for months: Israel’s strategy is to escape forward by expanding the war to the entire region. The US should end its shameful blank check policy in supporting Israel’s genocide and aggression around the region.”

I won’t go into copious detail as to why this missive is quite obviously insane. I will say only that there is no mention of Iran, which is the party that is actually trying to spark a regional war and commit genocide. Iran has also subverted governments, killed thousands of people, and sown terrorism across the Middle East and the world. By omitting these elementary facts, DAWN makes clear that its purpose is not to prevent war, but to foment one by protecting Iran and its axis of terror groups, thus enabling the Islamic republic’s genocidal war against basically everybody.

This, however, is somewhat incidental. When I describe DAWN’s conspiracy theory as “insane,” I am referring only to the claims themselves. In terms of those who make these claims, I do not think the term applies.

Like the rest of the Red-Green Alliance’s leaders, DAWN’s propagandists are certainly overeducated and under-gifted. Nonetheless, their strategic deployment of conspiracy theories indicates they are not entirely stupid. Moreover, DAWN’s simple existence proves that its leaders are well-versed in the court politics of the NGO industry and the “international community.” In other words, they are at least nominally sane. 

So, DAWN’s leaders are lying and they know they’re lying. Nor are they alone. In many ways, the Red-Green Alliance bases everything it says and does on lies.

However, I do not think these people are entirely aware of this. Lies are a paradoxical phenomenon. Quite often, someone can know on some level that they are lying but simultaneously believe the lie itself.

For example, I was once in a Tel Aviv bar in which smoking was prohibited. A drunk man lit a cigarette anyway and was quickly reprimanded by a waiter. The man immediately denied that he was smoking even though the cigarette was literally burning down in his own fingers. A long argument ensued, at the end of which the man extinguished the cigarette and walked away muttering that he hadn’t been smoking. I think that, by that point, he genuinely believed it.

Something similar can happen on a much larger scale. In much of the Muslim world, for example, Holocaust denial has essentially been normalized. Yet at the same time, Muslims think the Holocaust was a good thing and Hitler should have finished the job. In other words, they believe the Holocaust didn’t happen and it did happen. Those who make these claims appear to see no contradiction between them and will sometimes assert both of them in the same sentence.

One sees this in the Red-Green Alliance’s accusation that Israel is committing genocide. It very much reminds me of Noam Chomsky’s claim in the early 2000s that the US was committing a “silent genocide” in Afghanistan. Needless to say, this “silent genocide” never happened and Chomsky eventually abandoned the claim. Yet when he was explicitly criticized for it, he invariably doubled down and unleashed a blizzard of sources that supposedly proved his point, none of which were relevant to his critics’ arguments. In other words, Chomsky believed it and didn’t believe it simultaneously.

I think something like this is happening with the Red-Green Alliance. There is a strange logic to such things. First, the accusation was simply “genocide”; now it is a “slow-motion genocide.” I do not think it will be long until it is “partial genocide, then “virtual genocide,” then “attempted genocide,” then “intended genocide,” and finally, “We never accused Israel of genocide in the first place and how dare you accuse us of accusing Israel of genocide.” The accusers will believe every one of these claims with absolute sincerity and never in a million years admit that their previous claim was, by their own tacit admission, a lie.

It seems clear, then, that we are not only dealing with a conscious strategy. We are dealing with a psychological phenomenon. It is defined by a simple question: Why are they lying?

II.

The question of lies and why people tell lies is a much-studied topic among psychologists. A brief Google search turned up two interesting, albeit non-scholarly takes on the issue.

The articles posit numerous reasons why people lie, but they appear to fall into a few general categories:

Fear: A major reason people lie is simply practical. People do things that may have negative and even dire consequences. To escape such consequences, these people simply lie about what they did. This does not necessarily involve the desire to escape punishment. At times, the lie serves to avoid disappointment from parents, peers, or others.

In almost all cases, the ultimate motivation is fear. One wishes to avoid being punished or hurt as a result of one’s actions. One may also wish to protect one’s social standing and even feed one’s ego by appearing strong and formidable.